If God has no gender, why speak the Father's name?
Just some of the many reasons we should not erase the Father
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Today, I’m writing about calling God by God’s proper Triune name, “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.” In some Christian contexts, it has become very rare to hear the Father’s name. Why is that, and is it the best response to the concerns behind the practice?
A few years back, a friend shared this screenshot with me. It came from materials being used in a ministry training resource — I don’t know if this was a published package or if it was written by someone in the local church it came from, but either way, it’s a theological disaster.
“He turns on himself in the person of his Son and crushes his Son in your place.”
Blasphemy! Heresy! A calamity for faith!
These words separate the Father from the Son. They separate the loving will of the Father from the loving will of Jesus Christ. And these words separate God’s character from the revelation of that character in the person of Jesus Christ, who shows us the total truth of the love of the Father in the Spirit.
It’s pagan. It’s used to underwrite control and abuse. It’s a mockery of the God of Scripture. A Father who would crush the Son (or would crush you and me, if the Son hadn’t been there as a handy alternative) is not the Father revealed to us in the Word, in Jesus, in the Spirit.
The true God—Father, Son, and Spirit— loves redeeming people, not crushing us.
(Note: The above nonsense is NOT substitutionary atonement. It’s a sick distortion of substitutionary atonement.)
On this topic I highly recommend Tom McCall's book Forsaken: The Trinity and the Cross, and Why It Matters. Tom helps us see the unity of the Trinity and how that is essential to knowing the loving character of God.
A couple tidbits from the book: it is not that the Father abandons the Son, rather:
“is we who have—as rebellious sinners—abandoned God. But rather than leave us in our state of abandonment, the Son has become human and has identified himself with us.”
“God's love is the source, not the consequence, of the atonement.”
The Father is not a meanie, while Jesus is pretty nice. There’s no good-cop/bad-cop in the Trinity. The Father and the Son are one.
When folks have been fed a patriarchal demon as an evil replacement for God the Father, I understand the impulse to stop talking about God as Father.
But it is God the Father who reveals the patriarchal demon as the demon that he is.
I take it as a given that God does not possess sex or gender. God is not a girl or boy; God is not male or female. (Neither is God trans or nonbinary. God is without gender, which is far more radical a thing to say.) God is other. God is different from creation and different from us. Feel free to disagree with this claim, but it’s the established orthodox consensus of the church of Jesus Christ through the centuries. (How could God be male or female when God doesn’t have a body? I take sex and gender to be fundamentally embodied traits.) The fact that God has no gender is a basic correlate of the biblical prohibition against idolatry. (There were a lot of fertility idols, a lot of “sacred poles” targeted by the prophets. You don’t have to be Freud to get the symbolism.) To gender God is to make God in our image, the very definition of idolatry (see Romans 1).
God the Father is not a boy.
I’ll just say that again.
God the Father is not a boy.
God the Father is not a man. God the Father is the loving Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who, in the Spirit, calls us to union with Jesus so that we can join in the Triune life of love.
If we do not speak the name of the Father, if we leave that Holy name to those who would distort the biblical God into a patriarchal idol, then we concede their assumption that the Father is male.
What if God the Father is God the Father to destroy the patriarchy?
What if God, as Father, reveals the lie of all false fatherhood, which would claim patriarchal power, rather than being identified with the Son,
Who, being in very nature God,
did not consider equality with God something to be used to his own advantage;
rather, he made himself nothing
by taking the very nature of a servant,
being made in human likeness.
And being found in appearance as a man,
he humbled himself
by becoming obedient to death—
even death on a cross! (Philippians 2:6-8, NIV).
There is no Father without this Son. There is no Father who is not one with this Son.
Saint Joseph protecteur de l’enfance de Jésus (1874), Georges Becker, via Artvee.
The loving Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is not a metaphor for human fathers. In fact, Jesus says, “do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven” (Matthew 23:9).
The Father is not there to reinforce the power of human fathers. The Father is love.
When we pray, omitting the Father’s name (for instance, to “One God, together with Jesus and the Spirit”), we’re in danger of more than erasing the Father. What we’re doing—often, at least—is conceding to an idea of fatherhood that says, “the Father is the real God.” (Why else could we replace his name, but not the names of Jesus and the Spirit, with the word “God”?) We seem to say “the Father is really God, and Jesus and the Spirit are underneath him.” What we have done, among other things, is concede to an authoritarian patriarchal theology, which would figure the Father as a power monger and a Lord-er-over-er, instead of as the loving Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. When we pray in the full, Triune name, “Father, Son, and Spirit,” we quietly affirm the co-equality, shared majesty, shared God-ness, of the three. Thus, we confess the Christian faith that the Father is not some patriarchal Lord who tolerates no rivals. The Father is, in his very being and nature, shared love.
The Father has almost nothing to do with human fathers. The Father is not male. The Father is not contingent. The Father does not begin to be a Father only when he begets a son, for the Father is, eternally, the eternal-begetter-of-the-eternal-Son and so is Father, is relationship, is love. The Father is the Father by nature and not by work.
“Which of you, if your son asks for bread, will give him a stone? Or if he asks for a fish, will give him a snake? 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 7:9-11).
Jesus knows the sinful reality of this broken world. He knows that there are human fathers who would give their sons snakes and stones. But here, he denies their very fatherhood, inasmuch as they are unlike the Father Jesus knows, the Father who gives good gifts.
The Father has almost nothing to do with human fathers, but when we treat the Father’s name as though it were “Voldemort,” we do great damage to human fathers, by assuming that fatherhood can only be patriarchy, by denying that fatherhood is love.
The Father is not, first, an analogy we have learned from human fathers. But, once we have that straight, human fathers can be freed to learn something, from the Father, about what it means to be a father, and so about how to love. To work against the patriarchy is to honor human fatherhood.
And, through the healing blood of the savior and the mighty power of the Spirit, that’s one of the ways the Father is destroying the patriarchy.
Equality March 2022 in Kielce - my love will smash patriarchy, via Wikimedia commons.
Let us pray, as our Lord Jesus Christ taught us:
Our Father, who art in heaven,
hallowed be thy Name,
thy kingdom come,
thy will be done,
on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our daily bread.
And forgive us our trespasses,
as we forgive those
who trespass against us.
And lead us not into temptation,
but deliver us from evil.
For thine is the kingdom,
and the power, and the glory,
for ever and ever. Amen.
Grace & peace,
BFJ
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I think you should do the pro-SA take next. This is always quite a difficult one.
This is wonderful. You so often give words to things I think but either haven't figure out how, or haven't found the time, to carefully articulate. Thank you.