"Our Grandfather, Who Art in Heaven": The Theology of Bad Parenting

So, during my time selling TVs at Best Buy, I've noticed a trend in the family groups that come in. It troubling to me, but this trend seems to be so prevalent and so commonplace that no one else seems to notice. Here's what happens: a parent will come in with their kid(s) and start looking around. At some point, the kid (as kids do) will get cranky and start yelling, screaming, running around, generally being a nuisance to everyone in the department. And in response, the parent…. does absolutely  nothing. They calmly push their screaming child around the store, seemingly oblivious to the fact that their child is drowning out the shoplifting alarms that someone set off on the other side of the store.  Now, I admit, I cannnot know why theseparticular parents never seem to want to discipline  their children. It could very be that they are of the (disturbingly common) opinion that being a parent shouldn't actually inconvenience them in any way.  However, I think it's more likely that this trend comes from the feel-good style of parenting that is becoming ever more popular--the philosophy that says you should never say no to your child, never tell them what to wear, never limit their individuality or creativity in any way.  To put it simply, this philosophy says that parents should always be kind to their children, no matter what.

This approach is frankly poppycock. My parents said no to me all the time--seriously, ALL THE TIME. Or at least, that's how I remember it. But they didn't do it to be mean; rather, they did it because they loved me, and because I needed to be told no ALL THE TIME. A family came in about a month ago and bought both of their boys a 46" TV, an XBOX console, and about $500 in other accessories--each. If I had asked my parents for that, they would have laughed at me. Why? Not because they didn't love me enough to spend that much money on me, but because they loved me enough to say no to something I didn't need even though it would have upset me. My point is, being kind to someone and loving them is two different things. My parents were, as a rule, very kind to me. However, whenever kindness conflicted with love, they chose the latter, even when it ticked me off.

Now, I think it's pretty well recognized that people tend to be the parents they wish their own parents had been. I think this trend arose because a generation of kids grew up wishing their parents had indulged them more, and so they in turn are raising a generation of spoiled children.  What I think is less often recognized, or perhaps I'm just making it up, is that we also tend to be the parents we want God to be to us. We hear a lot of talk about what a "loving God" would and wouldn't do--about how a loving God wouldn't expect us to change this about ourselves, or suppress that urge, or abstain from that activity, or deny ourselves that pleasure. This is a very popular type of theology, especially among people who want to reconcile Christianity with modern social ethics. They focus on the verse that says "God is love" and argue that whatever the human standard of love is, that must be what God is . C.S. Lewis talks about this view in his book The Problem of Pain: 

"By Love, in this context, most of us mean kindness--the desire to see others than the self happy; not happy in this way or that, but just happy. What would really satisfy us would be a God who said of anything we happened to like doing, 'What does it matter so long as they are contented?' We want, in fact, not so much a Father in Heaven as a grandfather in heaven--a senile benevolence who, as they say, 'liked to see young people enjoying themselves', and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, 'a good time was had by all.' " 

The problem with this type of theology is that kindness and love are not the same thing. They coincide much of the time, but, as most parents eventually find out, they are sometimes opposites. The reason they conflict is because love is a much deeper feeling than kindness. Lewis writes, 

"Kindness consents very readily to the removal of its object--we have all met people whose kindness to animals is constantly leading them to kill animals lest they should suffer. Kindness, merely as such, cares not whether its object becomes good or bad, provided only that it escapes suffering. As Scripture points out, it is bastards who are spoiled; the legitimate sons , who are to carry on the family traditions, are punished. It is for people whom we care nothing about that we demand happiness on any terms: with our friends, our lovers, our children, we are exacting and would rather see them suffer much than be happy in contemptible and estranging modes. If God is Love, He is, by definition, something more than mere kindness." 

The people who build liberal theologies on the idea that God is love take that principle as something comforting, as something that should put us at ease. "Don't worry," they might say, "God is love. He will take care of you." But if we understand the difference between love and kindness, then the fact that God is love is anything but comforting--in the beginning, at least. A person who realizes what love really means would say something different: "Fear the Lord," they might say, "because He is love. He intends to make you His child, even if He has to destroy you and build you back up again to do it." Of course, God's love is a comfort when we realize that He is making us into new creatures, but that comfort comes only after we realize that all the pain involved is worth it. This is why we should be very careful when we invoke the phrase "God is love," and keep in mind exactly what that means. C.S. Lewis puts it very well (as always): 

“When Christianity says that God loves man, it means that God loves man: not that He has some 'disinterested,' because really indifferent, concern for our welfare, but that, in awful and surprising truth, we are the objects of His love. You asked for a loving God: you have one. The great spirit you so lightly invoked, the 'lord of terrible aspect,' is present: not a senile benevolence that drowsily wishes you to be happy in your own way, not the cold philanthropy of a conscientious magistrate, nor the care of a host who feels responsible for the comfort of his guests, but the consuming fire Himself, the Love that made the worlds, persistent as the artist's love for his work and despotic as a man's love for a dog, provident and venerable as a father's love for a child, jealous, inexorable, exacting as love between the sexes. How this should be, I do not know: it passes reason to explain why any creatures, not to say creatures such as we, should have a value so prodigious in their Creator's eyes. It is certainly a burden of glory not only beyond our deserts but also, except in rare moments of grace, beyond our desiring.”