Earlier this week I was a guest blogger at Goforth’s Journal, a blog about family, fathering, and following Jesus. The post is about the perfect role model for us fathers. We men are lacking in good role models, and most men in Scripture were not the best fathers. Even Jesus and Paul, whom we would like to emulate, were not married.
Here is an excerpt from the post:
I wish Jesus had been married. I wish he had fathered some children.
I know such a wish is full of theological pitfalls and problems, and would have led to disaster for the church. We probably would have tried to worship his children, and a whole sect of Christianity would have risen which claimed that to be a true child of God, you had to have some Jesus blood in your line. But still, with all the clamoring voices today and multitudes of books on how to be a good father, and how to balance marriage and ministry, I so often wish I had a definitive role model to go by.
At the bare minimum, Jesus could have written a book or two on How to Be a Husband and How to be a Father. But He didn’t.
Go on over and read the rest here.
Isn’t it possible that the ideal father provided the role model for the ideal god? At least until the idea of god evolved into the post-biblical “Holy Trinity,” perhaps to deliberately break the link between the ideal human father and the ideal god.