This Year’s ‘Pride’ is Not So Proud
Christine Sneeringer
One of the most transforming truths we can know about God has perhaps best been expressed—believe it or not—by a talking beaver.
In C. S. Lewis’ magnificent The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, we find the Pevensie children, who have stumbled into Narnia, asking Mr. Beaver about Aslan, the great Lion of the land, who is Lewis’s awe-inspiring Christ figure. Lucy Pevensie asks if Aslan is a man. Mr. Beaver’s answer is stern: “Certainly not…he is the son of the great Emperor-Beyond-the-Sea.” Both Susan and her sister, Lucy, want to know if Aslan is safe. The answer is one of the most brilliantly concise statements of the nature of God in all Christian literature. “Course he isn’t safe,” Mr. Beaver says, a bit of wonder in his voice. “But he’s good. He’s the King, I tell you.”
He’s not safe, but he’s good. In these simple words, Lewis gives us a renewed vision of the nature of God. Our Creator is loving, so much so that he sent his Son to die for our sins and raise us to new life. Yet this same God is fierce and awesome, even terrible in his majesty. He is a God of war who destroys his enemies. His judgments are without challenge, his decrees without change. People are like grass to him, the nations like a drop in a bucket. He does as he wills with the kings of the earth and makes of nothing the plans of men when he chooses. This is our great God.
We should know that Christian psychologists lay the job of revealing this understanding of God uniquely into the hands of men, and of fathers in particular. When a child skins a knee on the playground, he or she beats a tearful path to mom. She is the warm center. She is always there. She will comfort and heal. It is mothers who reveal that God is present and that he loves.
Fathers normally play a different role. They, too, can comfort and repair, but they are more Aslan-like in their scary strength, in their seemingly unsafe ways, in their fierce and unruly manner. It is a father who spins a child wildly, inspiring both screaming delight and wild-eyed terror at the same time. It is the father who wrestles the children, destroying all order and breaking all rules, much to the thrill of the scrambling young. Dad can do what he wants, though. He’s dad. The children learn that their father is strong and terrifying when he wants to be, but he can also be trusted. He’s not completely safe, perhaps, but he’s completely good. Just like Aslan.
We need men who understand a God who made all things and chose the end from the beginning. Men such as this—fathers such as this—summon destinies from their young.
How very much we need this vision of God in our time. The understanding of the Christian God in most of the world and in far too many churches is a weak, hemmed-in, unsure being. He is one god among many, proclaiming one uncertain truth among many more. He lacks the power to break into our times, the will to deal with his enemies, and the “otherness” to lift us from ourselves. He is man written large—but only slightly larger. He is, in short, a god of the human imagination, not the breathtaking, frightening, glorious being of scripture.
This is why we need a movement of wild, righteous fathering in our time. We need men who understand a God who made all things and chose the end from the beginning. Men such as this—fathers such as this—summon destinies from their young. They model and instill righteous conduct because it is the way things ought to be, the way of Aslan, the King. They do not shrink from biblical truth or apologize for it. They revel in it, with a confidence and boldness that sets the meager and the false fleeing. They love fiercely, worship fiercely, discipline fiercely, and storm into life with an infectious, rowdy joy. It is all contagious. It is what, along with mom, the church, and the presence of Jesus, builds a family culture of bold, heroic souls.
What a healing for our times this would be. What an answer wild, righteous fathering could be for our age.
So, on the Father’s Day that is just ahead, do celebrate the father who mows the yard and earns the wage and comes home for dinner on time. But celebrate, too, the Aslan nature of dad—the warrior soul, the joyous roar, the rule-breaking rowdiness, the man of strength and fire.
And let us also make that day a day of prayer—a day on which we ask our Heavenly Father to give us a revolution in fathering that brings the wonder of God through Aslan men to our sick and empty age.
Of course, he’s not safe. But he’s good. May we know him in the fathers of our time.
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