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Rebecca Florence Miller

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Bill Cosby and Father Figures: What Do We Do with Our Shock and Dismay When Our Heroes Fail Us?

Bill Cosby and Father Figures: What Do We Do with Our Shock and Dismay When Our Heroes Fail Us?

Last updated on: November 21, 2014 at 2:03 pm by Rebecca Florence Miller

Bill Cosby and Father Figures: What Do We Do with Our Shock and Dismay When Our Heroes Fail Us? 2014-11-21T14:03:08-06:00 Rebecca Florence Miller

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I was several months pregnant with my first child, a daughter–and scared out of my mind. I’d always struggled with whether I would make a good parent. Growing up, I had a broken family, with all of the complication and pain that goes along with such an experience. I was struggling to visualize what family health looked like. I was wondering if I would go on to repeat the mistakes of my family of origin. I was wondering what “another way” looked like.

It was at this time that I started to watch The Cosby Show regularly. Just at the moment when I needed a visual representation of a happy, healthy, real family, I found the Huxtables. I learned how to delight in your children and your spouse, that it was ok to get frustrated with your kids sometimes, how to teach life lessons, how to ride the ups and downs of normal family life. I learned family can be a vibrant, beautiful thing. It doesn’t have to be the locus of pain as it often had been for me growing up. This visual representation gave me tremendous courage as I looked ahead to becoming a mother. I could do this. I could imitate the pattern I was seeing. I thought of it as a classroom for healthy family life.

Now, I understand TV isn’t life, but, even so, The Cosby Show was special. Its warmth and authenticity and good humor set it apart in a truly unique way.

I assumed that its main character, Cliff Huxtable, was the same person as Bill Cosby. Cosby certainly tried to give that impression, building his brand around family-friendly comedy, disdaining the “easy” use of swearing in stand-up, and encouraging young people to live lives of character. There’s no question that Cosby did a lot of good in this world.

I had heard whisperings about rape allegations, but because I believed the image, I gave them very little attention. Everybody knew Bill Cosby was a good guy. Right?

I think this reaction was common to a lot of people. We couldn’t bear to have the image of a beloved father figure dissolved before our eyes. So we wouldn’t listen to the voices of women crying out that he was not the man he appeared to be. We wanted to believe. We needed to believe.

Until we couldn’t anymore. I will be honest. When the cries of Cosby’s accusers began to get louder and more insistent, I investigated the story with an eye to holding on to Cosby’s image. I would find evidence that these women were making it up!

Except I couldn’t find this evidence. What I found instead were credible, brave accounts by separate women who shared common themes between their stories. Young, vulnerable, beautiful women said they were taken under Cosby’s wing, drugged, and then sexually assaulted. Particularly persuasive was Barbara Bowman’s The Washington Post first person testimonial about rape at Cosby’s hands. Also very credible was Tamara Green’s interview with Newsweek. I didn’t want it to be true, but it was becoming increasingly likely that it probably was.

It was monstrous. My heart went out to the women who appeared to have been so dreadfully attacked. Just because this was Bill Cosby did not mean we should keep pushing this under the rug. This was wrong, dreadfully wrong.

Not only was I grieved for the women caught up in this terrible story, but I was also nauseated by the implications for my own life. The father figure who I had looked up to and who had helped me approach parenting with confidence and hope was likely not real.

What do we do with our shock and dismay when our heroes fail us?

1. Original sin is real.

Bill Cosby reminds us that even our most cherished heroes are bound by original sin. As a former pastor and now a pastor’s wife, I used to be absolutely shocked when some hidden sin in a congregation or community member was revealed. But as time has gone by, such revelations have become less and less shocking to me. People have clay feet. They just do. Experience teaches us this. In the words of the lead character on the Fox show, House, “Everybody lies.”

I’ve come to realize how many of us walk around with masks on, never revealing the aches and sins and brokenness deep inside us, in our families, in our relationships. Granted, most people don’t rape somebody! That’s a whole ‘nother level of hideous (although, I can say with certainty that many, many more people you know have committed sexual crimes against others than you would ever guess). But most of us have things in other lives that are broken, things we don’t discuss in polite conversation, things that we feel shame or regret about. We all have times when our attempts at self-reformation fall flat to the ground. We all have times when we grievously hurt those around us. We are broken. We need fixing. We need restoration.

Heck, we need resurrection!

2. There is a Father we can trust.

Our culture is thick with trauma from the missteps and even abuses of father and mother figures. Our hearts cry out for a father who is good, a father we can trust. When we see the misuse of power by an authority figure, everything in our being cries out, “Dear God! This is evil! This is wrong!”

The problem is, we are constantly disappointed by earthly fathers. These disappointments run the spectrum. Fathers abandon children and fail to provide for them. They abandon their mothers. They choose alcohol and drugs over their children. They molest their children. They beat their children. Sometimes they fail their children in more ordinary ways: not keeping their promises, losing their temper, getting distracted. Whatever end of the spectrum we are talking about, the truth is that earthly fathers will fail us; hopefully, not this drastically, but they will disappoint us at times.

But our heart still beats with longing to find that safe place where we can know we are loved. That safe place we can trust.

Jesus knew that our hearts long for a loving Father. This is why He taught us over and over again that when we pray, we are to pray with immediacy and familial intimacy to the one Father we can trust. He told us the name we are to use for God: Father. By repeating this name for God over and over again, Jesus sought to teach us to be bold enough to call God our Father.

“This, then, is how you should pray:

“‘Our Father in heaven,
hallowed be your name…”

–Matthew 6:9, NIV

“If you, then, though you are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will your Father in heaven give good gifts to those who ask him! “

–Matthew 7:11

“Do not be afraid, little flock, for your Father has been pleased to give you the kingdom.”

–Luke 12:32

“But while he was still a long way off, his father saw him and was filled with compassion for him; he ran to his son, threw his arms around him and kissed him.”

–Luke 15:20

When we want to understand what God the Father is like, we simply need to look into the face of Jesus.

What we see in Jesus is a beautiful picture of a life lived completely for love, poured out for love. In John 5, Jesus says this, “Very truly I tell you, the Son can do nothing by himself; he can do only what he sees his Father doing, because whatever the Father does the Son also does” (vs.19). Similarly, in John 8:28, Jesus says, “I do nothing on my own but speak just what the Father has taught me.” Even more strongly, in John 10:30, Jesus says, “I and the Father are one.” When challenged by a disciple to show His followers God the Father, Jesus replied, “Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:9). I could go on and on. (In fact, if you are struggling with whether God is good, I encourage you to go to Bible Gateway and do a search for the word “father” in the Gospels. When I did so, I was overwhelmed with reminders of just how central God as Father is to Jesus’ teaching.)

If you want to see what God the Father is like, look at what Jesus is like. Jesus reveals the heart of God the Father to us.

When we see Jesus’ entire life lived in love and service, we know that we can trust God the Father.

Our father figures and authority figures will fail us–sometimes in simple ways and sometimes in monstrous ways. This shows us that original sin is real. But their failures also remind us that our longing for a loving, trustworthy father is so central to our lives because there is such a thing as a Loving, Trustworthy Father.

I am reminded of what it was like to be pregnant and of how I would crave One.Specific.Food. It must be that food and no other. Everything else would be sour and metallic and unsatisfying. When I actually got my hands on its wonderfulness, I knew I had found the real thing.

In the same way, when we crave the love of a trustworthy Father, we long for that which is real. We have had hints of a loving Father in this broken world, reminding us that there is such a thing as trustworthy love. What we crave is real and not made up. But all of these hints, of course, fall short of the real thing. When we encounter God the Father in the face of Jesus Christ, we find that for which we crave and the trustworthy love of a good Father.

I am dismayed and broken-hearted by the very likely crimes of one of my heroes. But I am heartened that there is a Father who is good, who loves me, and who I can trust. For both those broken by their own sin and those broken by the sin of others, this is good news.

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Community discussion guidelines:

Because this is a Christian blog, the things I’m talking about will obviously be topics that people feel strongly about in one direction or another. Please keep in mind that this is a place for substantive, respectful conversation. All perspectives are welcome to discuss here as long as all can treat each other with kindness and respect. Please ignore trolls, refuse to engage in personal attacks, and observe the comment policy listed on the right side of the page. Comments that violate these guidelines may be deleted. For those who clearly violate these policies repeatedly, my policy is to issue a warning which, if not regarded, may lead to blacklisting. This is not about censorship, but about creating a healthy, respectful environment for discussion.

P.S. Please also note that I am not a scientist, but a person with expertise in theology and the arts. While I am very interested in the relationship between science and faith, I do not believe I personally will be able to adequately address the many questions that inevitably come up related to science and religion. I encourage you to seek out the writings of theistic or Christian scientists to help with those discussions.

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photo credit: Pensiero via photopin cc

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