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 PrintableVersion I am your FatherWhat every heart needs to knowWhat’s wrong with the world?I AM YOUR FATHER The Father’s House Trust is a charity offering counselling, teaching and support to people who have lost their fathers through bereavement, divorce or neglect. I Am Your Father is Dr. Stibbe’s thesis which stands behind the work of the trust and his convictions of the importance of its work. The book is quite long and divided into three sections, firstly describing the problem of fatherlessness, then looking at the impacts of that before turning to the cure in the final section. Dr. Stibbe makes a good case for what he calls a ‘pandemic of fatherlessness’, drawing on statistics from both sides of the pond. Shockingly, nearly 50% of US children have no meaningful contact with their fathers and are consequently eight times more likely to go to prison, five times more likely to commit suicide, 32 times more likely to run away, and the list goes on (p.20). The book is warmly written and draws heavily on Dr. Stibbe’s personal experience as an orphan child who was later adopted. The highlight of the book is the gospel overview on page 28 and as the book closes we’re encouraged to put secondary differences aside to get on with the work of getting that message out. It’s hard to disagree with that and at that level the book is useful. However, reading through the book I found myself disagreeing with a number of things, principally in two areas. Firstly, fatherlessness appears to replace sin in his understanding of what’s wrong with the world. So the Devil’s device is to draw us into an orphan state away from our Father God. While that might be true, it’s not the full story and it unhelpfully makes me think that my problem is outside myself and not in a heart that rejects God and is under his judgment. This makes a big difference in the whole book, so, instead of insecurity, anger, superficiality being fruits of my wicked heart (as in Mark 7.21ff) they’re primarily the results of external pressure. Dr. Stibbe does encourage us to repent of our orphan state, but I can’t help thinking that the nature of his argument makes genuine repentance more difficult and less likely. My second area of concern is the proposed solution to our fatherlessness. While Dr. Stibbe helpfully distinguishes between justification and adoption, he suggests that it’s possible to be justified without being adopted. Theologically this section is poorly argued and his concluding recommendation is a secondary experience of the Holy Spirit that will liberate us from a purely cerebral understanding of salvation into a deeply personal understanding of the Fatherhood of God. I’m sure this is the very opposite of Paul’s intention in Romans 8 where there are no second-class cerebral-non-Spirit-filled Christians, as the Spirit is given to all believers (8.9) and that same Spirit enables us all to call God Father (8.15). Without wanting to diminish the pain of fatherlessness or the seriousness of the issue addressed in the book, the reader looking for help here would be better turning to When People are Big and God is Small by E. Welch. It’s better written, more theologically reliable, and shorter! Steve Palframan,
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