This includes fatherhood as well as motherhood, because these roles are intrinsically good. God is a shepherd, a warrior, a king, a servant, a midwife, an artist, rock, light, fire, etc. Anything that is good can be used to communicate God’s goodness to us. God uses many images, not just gendered ones. God allows himself to be imaged in order to have relationship. Yet he reveals himself to us using the good things around us. God is beyond creation and therefore beyond gender and sexuality. 3:14) indicating freedom of existence, but God is not an “it.” So the use of the personal pronoun, “he,” is not to insist God is male so much as to prevent God from being abstracted. Why does God get communicated as a father in the Bible?įirst off, God in beyond gender, but God communicates with us personally, so he takes on gender. If you are calling God “Father” because you think these things, your notion of God has been reduced to something idolatrous. The abuse does not necessarily invalidate the use, but it does reiterate that to call God “Father” is not so much correct as why you are saying it. However, this is not why God refers to himself as a father. 11) or that women are less human then men (which followed the Greek philosophical traditions of Plato and Aristotle that saw women as “defective” males). Some Christians have argued on theological grounds that women were not in the image of God (based on a misreading of 1 Cor. And so, church history has seen the Bible has been used to value men more than women under the notion that men are closer to God than women because God is male and not female. One feminist objector to the faith, Mary Daly said, “If God is male the male becomes God,” and sadly, a lot of Christians think that. Nevertheless, many conservative Christians don’t understand why God is portayed this way. Changing, for instance, the prayer, “Our Father” to “Our Mother” misses why it is the way it is. I think that misunderstands why male references are used. Some Christians have advocated modifying liturgical documents, editing out male references on that basis. God in the Bible is always referred to as “he.” Jesus teaches us to pray to God as “Our Father.” Some people get offended at that. Why in the Bible does God refer to himself as a “father,” or at least as a “he” rather than a “she” or both? I have often wondered that. Understanding God as Father to understand God as Motherįirst, we need to understand what God as Father means. We are going to reflect on the significance of the gift of our mothers, and how the love of our mothers remind us of God’s love.įirst I’ll tackle the tough stuff of metaphors we used to understand God: Is God a he or a she, a father or a mother? Or neither and both? Second, with that ground work laid, we will survey the rich images of motherly love in the Bible. Today we are going to reflect on mothers. That sounds a lot like the love of God, don’t it? That one day she won’t be around, so she wanted me to remember how much she loved me and how I should pass on that love. She read it to me to remind me that she loved me no matter what. It is very dear to me because my mom would read it to me. A mother held her new baby and very slowly rocked him back and forth, back and forth, back and forth.
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