Orthodox Reading Is Pastoral Reading
“What’s all this ‘Father’ stuff about in the Lord’s Prayer? Why should we call God ‘Father,’ anyway?” she intoned petulantly, fixing me with a stare that clearly thought no reasonable answer was possible. It was my first year in ministry. I had converted to Christ but a year before and now found myself teaching Luther’s Small Catechism as part of my youth minister duties at a largish program-style Lutheran church. From my undergraduate background in the arts and my wife’s current graduate school studies, I was utterly familiar with the post-structuralism that informed her question, but despite the self-consciously progressive, university-dominated atmosphere of the town I served, I was still shocked to hear the sentiment from the mouth of a seventh grader.
I would not be shocked today… not anywhere in the United States, let alone a college town. “How do we know God is ‘Father?’” challenged the former PASTOR of one of my parishioners in an adult Sunday School forum. Such pugnacious personalities litter the Christian landscape of the modern West, pseudo-intellectuals who, because they came across the concept of apophatic theology in seminary, now feel they can use it to undermine Scriptural authority and thence refashion the Christian faith in a manner more congenial to their modern WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic) presuppositions and biases.
In my last article I made the case that a specific, seemingly innocuous use of inclusive language for human beings had unexpected but potentially devastating side effects in the realm of pastoral care and Christian self-understanding. Tinkering with Christ’s chosen address of God may have similar side effects. Progressives like Rosemary Radford Reuther and Sally McFague purport to give us reasons we need not address God as Father. Conservatives like Dennis Prager give us reasons we must. Still, it may well be that the question “Why should we call God ‘Father?’” may be like Job addressing God on the question of suffering, to which God responds in a way that lets Job know that he has no possible idea of full import of what he is asking—that Job lacks the capacity for God to respond in a meaningful way to such a question. “Stop clucking in such a self-important way. You cannot possibly understand what is at play here. Consider yourself blessed to know Me at all,” might be an apt summary of God’s speech in Job 38-41. To address God in any other way than that revealed by God may have ripples that redound to the harm or even damnation of others and should so be avoided.
Which is why I believe that the answer that I gave the young lady mentioned above in my theological naivete is still the correct one; we call God “Father” because we are disciples—followers—of Christ, not His instructors. If we think of Jesus as someone who merely cracked open a door on God that we can now wedge open a little wider by our own enlightened efforts, we misunderstand Him utterly as “the Word become flesh” who “dwelt” (in the Greek, skenoō or “tabernacled”) among us, who in my favorite modern translation “is in the bosom of the Father” and hence alone has the capacity to “make Him known.”
As time went on, I discovered that this young woman had good reason for negative associations with the word “father;” her own dad was an addict who had been emotionally and often physically absent until two years before when he had cleaned up and was endeavoring to “make good” in his role in her life, an effort she perceived as “pushy” and presumptuous. What a privilege it was to teach her—as I hope I have taught my own daughter—that she has a Father in heaven who we earthly fathers can only hope to palely imitate as providers, nurturers, and self-sacrificing protectors. (Ephesians 3:14)
Had I let her indubitably real pain colonize—exercise a controlling influence—over my theology, she could never have found what I would later hear theologian Marva Dawn refer to as “the true liberation of being a woman who can without reservation call God ‘Father.’”
Grappling with Scripture as the revealed Word of God and the Apostolic faith that has informed that encounter has preserved such liberation—true liberation—for us all.