Unchanging Truth - "Father of the Fatherless"

Gender Blog continues with the latest installment of our "Unchanging Truth" series. These articles, while not as current, are still beneficial, and they demonstrate the consistent application of biblical truth by complementarian scholars, authors, and pastors through the years.

The following is an excerpt from an article by Mary Kassian, entitled, "Father of the Fatherless: Women Approaching God as Father." It was first published in 2000.

Does every child need a father? Increasingly, our society's answer to this question is no, or at least not necessarily. Each night, about forty percent of American children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live.And not only have we as a society lost the presence of fathers, we have lost something more fundamental: We have lost our idea of fatherhood. We are living in a culture of fatherlessness.

Unlike earlier periods of father absence caused by war, our cultural loss is more than physical and it affects every home. The most important absence our society must confront is not the absence of fathers but the absence of our belief in fathers. Few idea shifts in this century have had such enormous implications. At stake is who we are as male and female, what type of society we will become, and even more importantly, the way we understand and relate to God.

God is our Father. Why do we call Him that? God is not male. He is a spirit. And does not the Bible use a number of maternal metaphors to speak of how God relates to His people? Did He not give birth to the Jewish nation (Deut. 32:18)? Does He not have compassion on us like a mother has compassion on the baby at her breast (Isa. 49:13)? Does He not nurse, nurture, and comfort us like a mother does (Ps. 131:2; Isa. 66:13)? Because so many women, particularly those who come into Christianity from non-religious backgrounds, wrestle with the idea of addressing God with masculine pronouns, shouldn't we refer to God as Mother, or at least as Mother and Father? Why do we address God as Father?

You can read the rest of this article here.