The prayer Jesus taught his disciples opens with the word some people find hardest to say: “Our Father which art in heaven” (Matthew 6:9). If your own father failed you or hurt you, that word can carry his face. It can tint how you picture God, sometimes for years. It does not have to settle who God is. Scripture never asks you to build your idea of God out of the man who raised you, or the man who left. It asks the reverse: let God, as he actually shows himself, correct what the word Father means.
Dr. Esau McCaulley, a New Testament scholar at Wheaton College, knows this from the inside. His father struggled with drug addiction and could turn violent. Some people with that history find God impossible to trust. For McCaulley it went the other way, and his summary states the hope of this whole question: “our traumas can shape us, but they don’t have to define us.”
Why the word gets bruised
A child learns what a father is by watching one. Long before anyone explains a doctrine, the picture is forming: whether a man’s footsteps mean safety or danger, whether love stays or leaves. Then the church hands that child a faith that addresses God as Father, and the old picture is already sitting there.
Lisa Fields raised this with McCaulley directly. She recalled a psychologist who studied major atheists, including Freud, and argued that the failures of their fathers kept them from seeing God clearly. They read God through the lens of an absent or broken father. McCaulley took the claim seriously. He said many people in his kind of situation end up unable to trust God.
He also described what the wound feels like. His father was sometimes generous and kind, and sometimes abusive, and the child never knew which man would walk in. “I want a dad who’s gonna love me and care for me, but the reality of what you experience is really damaging.” That gap between longing and reality is what makes the word ache. It names the thing you wanted and did not get.
So the honest starting point is that the bending is real. The question is what Scripture does with it.
What Jesus does with the word
The same sermon that gives the Lord’s Prayer returns to fathers a chapter later. Jesus is teaching about asking God for what you need, and he argues this way: “If ye then, being evil, know how to give good gifts unto your children, how much more shall your Father which is in heaven give good things to them that ask him?” (Matthew 7:11).
Look at how that sentence is built. It reasons from the lesser to the greater. Jesus does not say God resembles your father. He says God exceeds your father by a wide margin. He also describes his hearers as “being evil” (Matthew 7:11), which in context means that even the parents listening that day were flawed people. Human fathers at their best sit at the small end of the comparison, and Jesus openly admits they fall short.
That matters for a reader whose father did not even give the bread. Jesus’ argument assumes ordinary human decency as the low bar. When your father fell below that bar, the argument still stands. Your father was simply never the measure. The measure is the Father in heaven, and the sermon locates him above every earthly parent.
What the Psalms do with a missing father
The Psalms come at the same truth from the side of the hurt child. Psalm 27 is a prayer of trust spoken under threat, with enemies and false witnesses pressing in. In the middle of it the psalmist says: “When my father and my mother forsake me, then the LORD will take me up” (Psalm 27:10). As poetry it reads best as a confession of trust. It speaks for the one praying, and readers should hold it that way rather than as a guarantee about how every family story ends. But notice what the line assumes. Parental abandonment is treated as something that happens. The psalm names it, then places God on the far side of it.
Psalm 68 is a hymn celebrating God marching out ahead of his people, and in the middle of all that power it pauses on the vulnerable: “A father of the fatherless, and a judge of the widows, is God in his holy habitation” (Psalm 68:5). The verse defines God’s fatherhood by the people who lack a father. The God who rides over the heavens turns his attention to the household with an empty chair.
Together these two psalms show a pattern. Scripture does use parenthood to speak of God. It never hands your particular parent the right to define him. Where human fathers fail, the text puts God in the gap they left.
Where the true picture comes from
If the definition does not come from your father, where does it come from? John’s Gospel answers through a conversation at the Last Supper. Philip asks Jesus to show the disciples the Father. Jesus replies, “he that hath seen me hath seen the Father” (John 14:9).
That reply relocates the whole question. Christians learn what God the Father is like by looking at Jesus: the one who touched people others avoided, who wept at a friend’s tomb, who used his power to lift the weak. Whatever your father taught you about the word, the New Testament invites you to let Jesus teach it to you again.
McCaulley’s story fits here. He says that as a boy, in a house where violence could break out, “when I prayed, God was the only person who was there.” His father was the source of the crisis, and God met him inside it: “my father created the crisis, but in some sense, God was the solution to the crisis.”
He names that experience with a biblical word. “I experienced the Immanuel even though my father was often absent.” Matthew gives the meaning of that name: “they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us” (Matthew 1:23). McCaulley is describing presence in the exact place a father should have stood. He ties it to the heart of the faith: “the central claim of Christianity is that in the midst of that suffering, God is with us.”
He is also frank about what God did and did not do. “was I frustrated that God wasn’t solving the problems? Yes. But did I doubt His goodness because of that? No.” His home stayed hard. What he found was a God who showed up in it. Scripture promises that presence. It makes no promise that every broken home will be repaired.
Isn’t that just wishful thinking?
This is the strongest objection, and it deserves a straight answer. A hurting child needs a father, so the child imagines one in the sky. That is the wish-fulfillment argument McCaulley later met in books at college.
He offers two responses worth weighing. The first is about timing. The voices telling him his faith was a projection, he says, arrived after he had gone through the worst of the trauma. The presence he experienced came first. That does not prove the presence was real. It does mean the critics were interpreting someone else’s experience from outside it.
The second is about who gets to interpret suffering. McCaulley describes watching two white men in Scotland debate whether the suffering of Africans disproved God, and wondering whether the people who suffered got a say. He framed it as a question: “do those who have suffered actually have the power to interpret their own experiences?” He also leaned on the testimony of family members who had suffered before him and told him God had been a help in their time of need. That echoes Hebrews 4:16, which urges believers to “come boldly unto the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy, and find grace to help in time of need.” His conclusion is modest: “I don’t think I’m a fool for concluding that God is with me.”
Here is the limit, stated honestly. Personal experience does not settle whether God exists. A skeptic could read the same childhood differently, and McCaulley grants that two people can suffer and reach different conclusions. Christianity’s case rests on claims about Jesus, above all his bodily resurrection, and no single person’s sense of comfort carries that weight. What McCaulley’s testimony shows is narrower and still important: a father wound does not force a person away from God. It can push someone away, or it can be the place they first meet him.
He adds a warning about how stories like his get heard. “People hear us talk at the conclusion of these stories, not the middle of them.” In the middle, he says, “that doubt is there, and that’s why it’s recorded in the text” of his memoir, How Far to the Promised Land. If you are still in the middle, your doubts are part of the road.
Why reading the right verses is only the start
Lisa Fields told McCaulley about a friend who kept trying to overcome a temptation by learning more about God’s holiness. He kept failing, until therapy uncovered that he had been molested as a boy and had never dealt with it. He was trying to learn his way out of something that needed to be faced. Fields puts it in one line: “It’s easier to tackle a task than to tackle trauma.”
McCaulley agreed, and he gave right doctrine its proper job. It steadies you so you can turn and look. “You can face your trauma because you know that God is greater than your trauma, but you still have to face it.” Matthew 7, Psalm 27 and John 14 can tell you who the Father truly is. The place in you that learned to flinch usually heals through time, safe people, and often a trained counselor. Jude 3 affirms that seeking therapy is not a failure of faith, because God works through counselors and clinicians. That conviction belongs inside this argument: the same God who corrects the word Father also uses human hands to tend what a father broke.
McCaulley finds a picture of that slow work in Joseph. In prison, Joseph tells Pharaoh’s cupbearer only that he “was stolen away out of the land of the Hebrews” (Genesis 40:15), and leaves his brothers out of it. Years later he can say to their faces: “But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive” (Genesis 50:20). McCaulley’s point is that Joseph calls the evil evil. “He doesn’t minimize the trauma.” God’s purpose works through what the brothers did without making it good. And reaching the point of telling the story is a grace, never a test: “if you can’t talk about it, it’s not a spiritual failure.” His image for the process is patient: “piece by piece, the Spirit of God is slowly reclaiming parts of the narrative.”
McCaulley’s father had a spiritual conversion late in life, and McCaulley found he could not simply rejoice. Thinking of the tax collector who prayed “God be merciful to me a sinner” (Luke 18:13), he observed, “It’s easy to root for the conversion of the tax collector in abstract, unless you actually knew him.” He held grace and honesty together: “Doesn’t mean that you normalize the things, but the forgiveness stuff takes time.” Forgiveness leaves restored trust and renewed contact as separate questions. If a father or anyone in your home is still a danger to you, your safety comes first. In the United States, the National Domestic Violence Hotline is available at 1-800-799-7233.
A father who failed taught you a version of the word Father. Scripture leaves that history standing and calls it what it was. Then it offers a different Father, the one seen in Jesus and present in the dark, and lets him slowly become the meaning of the word. The wound tells you what your father was. It was never qualified to tell you who God is.