God the Father

This post appeared two days ago and can now be found in the extended entry.  Some sort of formatting glitch is causing this type to be all bold.  Sorry.

In any case, this post represents the beginning of Part Two of "Moving Forward, Looking Backward: the Ancient Faith for the 21st Century." 

“I Believe in God the
Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth”

That the eternal Father of our Lord
Jesus Christ (who of nothing made heaven and earth, with all that is in them;
who likewise upholds and governs the same by his eternal counsel and
providence) is for the sake of Christ his Son, my God and my Father; on whom I
rely so entirely, that I have no doubt, but he will provide me with all things
necessary for soul and body and further, that he will make whatever evils he
sends upon me, in this valley of tears turn out to my advantage; for he is able
to do it, being Almighty God, and willing, being a faithful Father.[1]

So answers
the Heidelberg Catechism to the question, “What believest thou when thou
sayest, ‘I believe in God the Father, Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth’?”[2] In further exposition of God the Father’s
creative and sustaining powers and providence throughout His creation, the
Catechism confesses trust and comfort in God’s “almighty and everywhere present
power” and in His “fatherly hand.”[3] As this Reformed catechism declares, the
first statement of the Apostles’ Creed draws our attention to God’s fatherhood,
His creation, and His might.

The Fatherhood of God

In a
postmodern context, proclaiming the fatherhood of God seems at the outset a
fruitless endeavor. To elucidate God in
such blatantly male terminology is to evoke notions of the male-dominated
metanarratives so eschewed by postmoderns. While Jesus’ unmistakable yet almost scandalous concern for women will
provide a more than acceptable answer to this charge, we must indeed be
sensitive, though not embarrassed, when we proclaim God as father.

Rightly
done, however, there is much that the fatherhood of God has to offer a
postmodern thinker. Perhaps more than in
any of the other attributes of God, His loving care for His creation, as well
as particularly for His own people, is evinced from Fatherhood imagery. Both ways of speaking are evident in the New
Testament.

God as Father, pertaining to His
being Creator and Sustainer over all creation, is perceptible in the teaching
of both Jesus and Paul. Jesus, for
example, in explicating the Father in the Sermon on the Mount, reminds His
hearers that the Father “makes His sun rise on the evil and on the good, and
sends rain on the just and on the unjust.”[4] Later in the same teaching, our Lord proves
God’s fatherly care over His people by pointing to His unfailing attention to even the birds
of the air and the lilies of the field.[5] Paul also expounds the fatherhood of God in
terms of His being “the ultimate ground of the cosmos…the one who generates all
things” in 1 Corinthians 8:6.[6]

Even more prevalent in the
teachings of Jesus and Paul, however, is God’s special adoption and fatherhood
of His own people.[7] The understanding of God as father “is firmly
rooted in the prayer life and prophecy of Israel, in the prayer life and
perceptions of Jesus, and in the experience and prayer of the first
Christians.”[8] In other words, the fatherhood of God is most
clearly seen in His people’s admitted need for His care.

The announcement of a God who cares
is of dire need in our day. Gone is the
type of proclamation of God that sounds like a dry doctrinal dissertation;
returned is the call to a God who created people to be His children and to live
at the mercy of His “fatherly hand.” As
Michael Horton has said,

God is personal. He is not a force, a principle, a mere ground
of being or first cause, but is “God the Father Almighty, Creator of Heaven and
Earth”….Therefore, we address him as, “Father,” as our Lord taught us to pray.[9]

As Horton
admits, it is undoubtedly a great difficulty for many, particularly in our days of a
“crisis of fatherhood,” to properly understand or even be able to accept a God
who describes Himself as “father.”[10] It is not as simple as saying, “Your father
was abusive, neglectful, and he abandoned you; let God be your Father
instead.” This does not mean, however,
that God the Father neither understands this nor cares about it. On the contrary, it is at the heart of
Reformed theology that conversion is the work
of God. The task before us, then, is
humbly, gently, and with the greatest care and love possible, to share the good
news of the unending love and compassion of God the Father, and to let Him, in
His time, do the transforming work in the hearts of those who are deeply
hurt.

A critical
aspect in understanding the fatherhood of God and communicating it to
postmodern people is contextualizing God’s fatherhood in the biblical
story. “God as Father” is not an
abstract philosophical or theological construct to be swallowed by everyone of
all time. It is rooted in “the way
humans experience God as creator, protector, and redeemer in the story of Israel,
in the way Jesus bore witness to God as his Father, and in the way in
which…Christians have also come to know God as their Father.”[11] In other words, God’s fatherhood is defined
by explication of the Christian narrative (or by Christian storytelling, if you like), and “is not simply a projection from
the human experience of fatherhood” or “the patriarchal structures of society.”[12] The proclamation of God’s fatherhood, then,
is not dependent on the mere statement
that God is Father, but on telling the story of how God has been Father to Israel, to Jesus, and to His
people.