“To gender God is to make God in our image, the very definition of idolatry.”
Beth Felker Jones
Reading this piece (If God Has No Gender, Why Speak the Father’s Name?) by Beth Felker Jones reminded me of a passage from Nicholas Lash’s Believing Three Ways in One God, which I’ve come to cherish. A lengthy excerpt, but well worth the effort:
It is often said, these days, that it is not the obsolete character of the imagery of kingly rule which makes the language of God’s “fatherhood” difficult to use so much as, on the one hand, the fact that what many people know of fatherhood is so little, or so unbearable, as to make talk of God’s fatherhood at best questionable and, at worst, obscene and, on the other hand, the reinforcement of “patriarchal” prejudice which is more or less inevitable if the theme of God’s parenthood is never, or hardly ever, worked out in the language of maternity.
Concerning these not unrelated issues, there are at least the following four points to be made. In the first place, while the experience on which we in our attempts to speak of God may be familiar to us, God is not. What we say of God is only appropriately said if said with care, and delicacy, and a sense of the vast silence that surrounds our speech. There is nothing whatsoever that God is “obviously” like, and certainly not us!
Moreover, in the second place, using familiar categories to speak of God is not a matter of saying: You know, of course, what kingship and shepherding, landowning and loving, fatherhood and judgeship are? Well, that is how God is and acts. On the contrary, throughout the Scriptures, and by no means only in the prophetic writings, a deeper current flows, according to which God is declared to be precisely not a king or shepherd, landowner or lover, judge or father, as the others are. The things we say of God are said in criticism of our inhuman, and hence ungodly, practices. Unlike other judges, God judges justly; unlike other shepherds, God brings back the strayed, binds up the crippled, and strengthens the weak; unlike other fathers, God acts like the father in the misnamed parable of the prodigal son (to which we shall return). It is, therefore, only through the redemptive transformation of our human practices that we discover what these images might mean when used as metaphors for our relation to the unknown God.
What the Scriptures say at length, the Creed says briefly. To confess our faith in God as “Father” is therefore to be committed to the reform of all those practices and institutions—economic, political and ecclesial—which prevent us not only from experiencing the manner of God’s “parenting” in our relationships with each other, but also from exhibiting, as creatures made to “image” God, something of God’s style of parenting in turn.
In the third place, neither in Scripture nor in classical trinitarian theology is emphasis laid on God as Father and not, or as distinct from, Mother…
Fourth and finally… Jesus was, as we all are, a product of nature and of history. As such a product, he was destructible and was, indeed, destroyed. We are none of us, however, merely products. We are not only produced; we are also, in different ways, and with most varied efficacy, cherished. There are few human beings of whom someone has not, at some time, even fleetingly, been fond. But, quite apart from the fact that many people are little loved, and loved with little selflessness and effective care, even the purest and most effective human loving cannot prevent the destruction, cannot transcend the mortality, of the products that we are.
To declare Jesus to be Son of God is to declare that he was not only produced, but unswervingly, indestructibly, “absolutely” cherished. If we take “loving production” to be part of what we mean by “parenthood” and if, in declaring Jesus to be Son of God, we declare parenthood to be an attribute of God, we are thereby declaring our conviction, derived from reflection on his fate, that being lovingly produced, being effectively cherished with a love which transcends destruction in mortality, is part of what it means and will be to be human (for he is the ‘first-born of many brethren’). It follows that to confess Jesus to be Son of God declares our confidence in his resurrection and our hope for the resurrection of all humankind. If “parenthood” is an attribute of God, then the destruction of the product is not the last word concerning the condition of the world.
The passage speaks for itself, but let me risk a few comments, suggestions, musings.
We’ve been conditioned to think of God the Father as what Dr Jones calls a “Lord-er-over-er,” the fullest possible expression of fatherness/fatherhood, a reality we’re sure we already know through its more immediate expressions. But that, as she says and as Lash reiterates, is utterly wrong, even treacherous. In truth, God is “Father” only in relation to Jesus, the only-begotten Son, and we can call God Father only because the Spirit gives us a share in Jesus’ relation—not one analogous to it, mind you, but that very same relation.
When we pray the Our Father, when we confess our belief in God the Father Almighty, we are directing our hearts to trust in the mystery that made Jesus’ life purposeful and meaningful. So, growing up into Christ, learning his mind, means that all we have known and think we understand of the nature of fatherliness/fatherhood—like everything else—comes under the shattering Golgothic pressure of the mystery that is the hidden life of the Trinity opening itself to and for us.
Lash reminds us what we too easily forget, that the knowing of God is essentially an unknowing, a passage through sanctifying silence into an awareness of and cooperation with the love of Christ that surpasses knowledge.
“The Father has almost nothing to do with human fathers.” That’s how Dr Jones says it. I think she’d agree that we could say it even more sharply: the Father as the Father has nothing to do with human fathers as fathers. How can we say such a thing? Because the Father is not the Father in relation to us but in relation to the Son, the Only-Begotten, and because the triune God acts always only as one and at-one-ing-ly. In St Augustine’s words, “As the Father and Son and Holy Spirit are inseparable, so do they work inseparably.”
We’re tempted to think these finer points of doctrine are finally inconsequential if not outright meaningless. Truth be told, however, to labor at sound doctrine is to do essential, healing work (1 Tim. 4.16). So, difficult as it may be at first, attending carefully to what we mean when we speak about God as Father makes all the difference in the world.
The way we talk sometimes leaves the impression that we think we can single the Father out like a suspect in a lineup, identifying him by a list of characteristics unique to him. But of course we can do no such thing. The only difference between the Father and the Son is that the Father is the Father and not the Son or the Spirit. The first person of the Trinity is not himself in isolation from the Son and Spirit but only in perichoretic oneness with them. He does not have a mind of his own, an individual center of consciousness and peculiar set of purposes. He does not exist apart from them, independent of them, and choose to enter into relationship with them and then also with us. He does not have his own free-standing “personal relationship” with us, one which the Son and Spirit merely support or complement. No, we know the Father as the Father only in and with Jesus Christ by the Spirit.
This should go without saying, but I’m not sure that it does: the knowing of God as the Father does not come easier for men than it does for women. It’s not as if fathers and sons have an advantage over mothers and daughters in their knowing of the Father. And it’s not that a woman’s experience of her father is the way she comes to know the Father most truly. No, our knowing of the Father comes only in and with the knowing of Jesus by the Spirit’s wisdom. One way of getting at this truth is to see how wrong it would be to say the Father favors or finds himself particularly sympathetic toward men, especially those who’ve suffered the loss of a son. God does not, cannot, have more in common with a father than with a daughter or with a male than with a female.
Years back, while I was still on faculty at PTS, Rickie Moore and I were co-lecturing on the Trinity and the Old Testament. I remember I was quite agitated by something I’d read in a certain theologian’s account, which argued—well, asserted, really—that the Trinity had taken to itself the language of father/son because that is the most intimate human relationship possible. Such a claim, I was saying, is not only nonsensical but dangerously nonsensical. I noticed Rickie had tears in his eyes, so I stopped, waited. And after he breath, he said this, quietly: “If there’s any reason for God to take on the language of father/son, it’s because that’s the most broken relationship possible.”
We of course can and should speak the Father’s name. Dr Jones is right: we must not give up on calling the Father the Father. We must do so, however, truthfully. Not in order to secure our social conventions and political arrangements but in order to free ourselves from those binds by entering into the learned ignorance, the revelatory unknowing, the Spirit longs to teach us, the openness to mystery that alone generates and sustains the hope that life, not death, will get the final word. Nothing erases the revelation of the first person of the Trinity more effectively than loose talk about God as a father. To quote Augustine again, “Christ was born both of a Father and of a mother; both without a father and without a mother; of a Father as God, of a mother as man; without a mother as God, without a father as man.” In this formula, the negations matter every bit as much as the affirmations. John Cavidini (“Am I the Mother of Christ?”) has this exactly right: “The humility of the Incarnation is precisely that the Word of God deigned to have a literal human mother, and that the Word who so deigned was truly God, that is, truly and eternally begotten of the Father. That there is no human father, or indeed any father of Jesus in His humanity, is a revelation of God the Father’s love of us. Mary conceived in an act which was totally transparent to this love, an act in which there could have been nothing but freedom, without even the slightest hint that any ulterior motive, of passion or of fear, was involved, but only the Father’s love, the only love by which Mary conceived Jesus, the Word.”
Here’s the bottom line: the Father is not a father at all, not one among many of a kind, and so is no more fatherly (as we understand that term) than he is motherly. His Fatherhood is unlike anything and everything that is created, although, thanks to the Spirit, all creatures are made to share in the love he shares with Jesus. Hence, we do not talk about God as a father, the greatest of a kind, but talk to God who is the Father, listening in on and speaking up in Jesus’ lively, life-giving conversation with the one he alone knows and so alone can name and call. God is not a father. God is the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. It is that name, and that name alone, that gives us hope. And it gives it no more or less to fathers and sons that it does to mothers and daughters. That hope is the hope of everyone and everything, young and old, foolish and wise, sick and well, strong and weak, faithful and faithless.
This is wonderful. Saving this for my class on the doctrine of God next year.
Wow!—all of this (including BFJ’s piece), but “If there’s any reason for God to take on the language of father/son, it’s because that’s the most broken relationship possible,” has fastened itself to my spirit and remains with me. It digs-in to at least a couple spheres of my life. Thanks Bishop!