Death of Father Language: Attacking the Heart of Christian Identity

The Father, from whom al/fatherhood in heaven and earth is named... (Ephesians 3:14-15)

Stories normalizing "goddess religion" now appear almost daily. Venues may vary, but not the theme. A Catholic cathedral in Sacramento celebrates a Mass with diaphonously veiled dancers and a version of Psalm 23 in which the feminine pronoun is used exclusively: "she restores my soul." In the new service book of the United Church of Canada, by far Canada's largest Protestant denomination, baptism is no longer required to be in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One declares now in the name of the "Creator, Liberator, and Healer" or, alternatively, in the name of "God, Source of Love; in the name of Jesus Christ, Love incarnate and in the name of the Holy Spirit, Love's power." In the first 100 pages there is only one reference to God as "Father"; instead, one prays to "Mother and Father God" or more simply "Mother God." As with the Inclusive Language Lectionary on which it is modeled, this new liturgy represents a "systematic attempt to remove sexuality from males and to impose it on God."¹

Meanwhile, 1999 has seen two most improbable recordings appear at the top of the pop music charts in Europe and Britain-the CD "Abba Pater," with Pope John Paul II chanting prayers, and Cliff Richards's phenomenally successful "Millennium Prayer," a version of "Our Father Who Art in Heaven," sung to the tune "Auld Lang Syne." At the turn of the millennium, from out of the vast unchurched proletarian ranks there seems to have come, as it were unbidden, a deep yearning cry for ultimate Fatherhood. Have the makers of the new lectionaries noticed?

Even if they have, we may doubt that it will much alter their altar. There is now a substantial, if aging, vested interest in feminized prayers, deities, and priestly vestments. A tradition of sorts has been established, and with it the anxious jealousies of institutional power. As so often is the case with the middle-aged "hip," an apprehension of belatedness serves only to intensify, rather than diminish, hardening of the categories.

In most North American churches committed to the inclusive lectionary, the feminizing of God and erasure of the actual language of Jesus has after all been consistently and persistently part of a larger disenfranchisement of biblical teaching, first in the seminaries and then in the pulpits, for more than two decades. This ecclesiastical generation, deaf to biblical language, might choose to ignore it even if the very stones should cry our in words that Jesus taught. For however unfashionably, in the language of Jesus, God is Father.

Biblical Doctrine of the Fatherhood of God

In an earlier article on inclusive language I tried to show how the biblical doctrine of the Fatherhood of God is even more central to Christian identity than it was to faithful Jewish identity.² It had seemed to me that attacks upon it-including those which reduce this central plank of biblical theology to a prejudiced cultural metaphor which supposedly "excludes" women-are in fact undisguisable attacks on the two indispensable foundations of Christian identity: Scripture and the traditional teaching of the universal Church. I have been asked to develop this point further.

Let me begin by drawing attention to the obvious. The assignation of "Mother God" or goddess vocabulary to previously Christian liturgies helps to make it apparent to all concerned that what is at stake is not, as often argued, a matter of translation. Something much deeper-and just possibly more violent-is involved. There is a historical analogue for this propaedeutic violence, however, and it also manifested itself initially as merely disagreement about translation.

Rosenzweig and Duber's Translation

During the tense but outwardly civil years of the Weimar Republic in Germany (1918-33), two distinguished scholars were working on a new German translation of the Bible. They were Martin Buber (1878-1965) and Franz Rosenzweig (1886-1929). Among the most respected members of the European Jewish intellectual community, Buber and Rosenzweig were nonetheless acutely aware of their vulnerability to a growing hostility to Jews and their religion. It was becoming harder and harder for religious Jews especially even to get their work published by mainstream publishers and journals.³ In a scattering of articles announcing their new translation they made many favorable comparisons and complimentary references to the German standard version of Martin Luther, at least partly in a sincere effort to be diplomatically positive toward their Christian fellow-Germans.

In the most remarkable of these essays (1926), Franz Rosenzweig, in an evident tip of the hat to Jesus, wrote this provocative first sentence: "Translating means serving two masters. It follows that it cannot be done."⁴ He then promptly admitted the obvious dilemma: translation nevertheless must be done if Scripture is to be served. But (as he went on to suggest) it ought not to be done in such a way as to transfer authority from the text to the reader, to reduce the text merely to a mirror for the reader's own subjective or ego-determined prejudices. For then what we would have would not be, in any responsible sense of the word, a "translation." Instead it would be a new and different book.

Rosenzweig's point applies to contemporary attempts to pass off biblical and liturgical revision as "new translations." In many cases such revision is rather a matter of creating new textual authority, re-writing Scripture so as to give some of those who want power over it new means to assert and establish institutional control. The actual question at issue here, as Humpty Dumpty said to Mice, is about "which is to be master-that's all."

As Buber and Rosenzweig were working on their translation, German Lutherans were likewise occupied. In this instance the most visible bugaboo was not gender but race. A notable reluctance to use the words "Jew" and "Israel" had begun to be evident in the German church in the early years of the Nazi era; it expressed itself in the de-judaizing of biblical language in the liturgy and hymns, in changing of worship references from "Jews" to "People of God," and in eschewing of readings which made the Jewish identity of the "chosen" people too transparent to disguise by "re-translation" alone. This felonious and often fraudulent strategy had, predictably enough, voluminous academic defense. The ploy, as Wolfhart Pannenberg has observed, was already an old one-insistence that religious language was in any case simply a projection of prevalent social experience onto images of divinity. On this view, whether or not anything accountable to the plausible meaning in the original text was left, change in social conditions would require a change in religious language. (Feuerbach, Nietzsche, and Heidegger were often cited as philosophical authorities who justified such a move.)⁵

Contemporary Feminists

What we are now experiencing is essentially the same phenomenon. In Pannenberg's terse summary, "AS the Nazi Germans were bothered by Jesus' Jewishness, so are our contemporary feminists bothered by the contingency of language about God as Father."⁶ In both cases, and for similar reasons, erasure of the offensive name is an act ofpropaedeutic linguistic violence. It portends further degradation of status, legalized opprobrium, and the potential for other kinds of attack.

Of course I do not mean to say that every German professor or pastor saw it that way from the beginning. It is entirely probable that many among those who wished the words "Jew" and "Israel" to disappear from worship and the biblical record would have insisted, in 1933, that nothing in what they were doing was preparing the public for acquiescence in the annihilation of Jews. Their claim, after all, was that the changes simply made the text "more inclusive."

I shall not press the analogy as far as I might. Rather, I would simply ask a plausibly connected question. Why, in our own tremulous time, does the idea of fatherhood, especially of a goodly, godly and finally a divinely modeled exemplar of fatherhood, excite such hostility among would-be revisers of Christianity? Why is it that those made angry, sometimes angry enough to wish annihilation of any vestige of worthy images of fatherhood, imagine that what we need as a replacement exemplar of positive authority is a "mother goddess"-a figure whose religious tradition in every non-biblical culture is that of "fertility worship"? And which has as its typical concomitant, fertility sacrifice-the sacrifice of children?

Our Hideous Record of Human Fatherhood

These, I think, are versions of the same question, and I have not space to attempt a full answer here. Yet I want at least to suggest that the question deserves consideration. The reflex answers most often given, and credibly so, point to the hideous record of human fatherhood in our recent past, even among Christians. That the flight from responsibility and even predatory cruelty on the part of many fathers is a direct cause of the wholesale rejection of the institution of fatherhood few will deny. But I wonder if such "bad" fathers have not presaged our present crisis quite precisely in their rejection of the obvious biblical meaning of fatherhood long before they became fathers.

Let me come at the question, then, in a somewhat more general and tentative way. Might it be that responsible fatherhood constitutes a framework of circumspection, perhaps particularly sexual circumspection? Is it possible that part of the reason that fatherhood is under attack is not just the actual plague of irresponsible fathers, but that fatherhood per se is seen as a species of authority that, in its highest exemplar, the Fatherhood of God, implies a limit, even a contradiction to our culture's most cherished credo-that sexual autonomy is the highest human good? Is it not the case that what rampant sexual appetite wants and what uncircumscribed sexuality, in attempting to legitimate itself, tries to achieve is what Freud reasonably characterized as "the death of the Father"? Death of the Father (Freud), death of the Au- thor (Barthes), death of God (Nietzsche and a great chorus of seminarians)-are they not, in spiritual terms, diverse manifestations of a common impulse?⁷

But this is not a Christian impulse. In none of its manifestations, whatever flimsy garb of institutional propinquity it wears, is it capable of bowing the knee to God the Father or to Jesus Christ His only begotten Son. If it appears to do so, it will be in pretense-at its most unwitting a self-deception, at its most informed and articulate a cynical deception of others. And nowhere, in the Church or out of it, will we be immune to confusion about what is really being worshipped.

Motives of Disguisers of Biblical Language

On what authority may we dare to reflect upon the deeper motives of our own revisers and disguisers of biblical language? After all, the most flagrant of these people have already dismissed from their counsel the teaching authority of the historic Church, and that on principles they declare to be non-negotiable. They substantially control, already, much of the present institutional Church, especially in Protestantism. Perhaps, some say, they represent the authority "set over us" in our time, and we must accept that.

Yet one authority remains by which we may ask such questions. It is, of course, Scripture itself, especially when we ask out of a competence in the languages and the earliest as well as most recent textual tradition of Scripture. This perspective has been the basis of a great deal of admirable and, for those who have ears to hear, sufficient refutation; much of it is already well known to readers of a publication such as this. It has already been shown to all who care to consider it that God is called Father more than 250 times in Scripture. We have been reminded that in Scripture God is most jealous of His name, and names Himself, forbidding this prerogative to any other.⁸ It has been shown that in Scripture God is rarely given plausibly feminine characteristics, and that he is never called "Mother."⁹ Masculine metaphors for God are persistent and characteristic,¹⁰ though not in such a manner as would give them sexual content.¹¹ In fact, Yahweh proves to be unique among the deities of the universally patriarchal cultures of the ancient Near East (even those which had goddess worship were culturally patriarchal) in that he is not sexually male.¹² His Fatherhood over us is, notably, by adoption.¹³ Feminist metaphors for God, by contrast, especially when used in the context of "goddess" language, can ironically replace non-sexist metaphors with overtly sexual, thus sexist, ones.¹⁴ It has also been pointed out, and frequently, that for some the real agenda in much of this conflict over interpretation, translation and the language of worship is a repudiation of the Bible as the authority above all authorities of Christian life as for faith and worship.¹⁵ The strength of these arguments is not wanting. Yet their lack of influence upon all but the "converted," so to speak-even within the Church-has been a source of frustration and discouragement.

A Tacit Concession

Why? In my own view, part of the frustration for many involved in this debate occurred because of a tacit concession that the dispute can be engaged as a matter internal to the Church. That is, we have tended to regard it, often out of politeness as well as a commitment to practical charity, as yet another example of conflict in interpretation among faithful believers. But this issue is not now accurately so represented. It is not finally comparable to disagreements over ecclesial practice for ordering the understanding of sacraments, for example, or to differences concerning our sense of the role of human freedom in responding to God's offer of grace in Christ. If the Gospels are to be regarded seriously, acceptance of the Fatherhood of God is a matter of definitive discrimination between those who may in any meaningful sense be called Christian and those who, however religious in their reasoning and practice, are not in the most crucial of matters following Christ. Unambiguous acceptance of the Fatherhood of God is not open to revision at all because it is, unambiguously, the central and persistent teaching of Jesus about God, and the transparent mode of His own relationship to God.

The Gospel of Matthew alone makes it impossible that we should construe resistance to biblical characterization of God as Father to be motivated by a Christian impulse. From the account ofJesus' own baptism, where the words of institution are pronounced by the Father from heaven in such a way as to confirm that Jesus is the Son in whom He is well pleased (Mart. 3:17), to the Great Commission in which Jesus commands His followers to go into the world and to teach all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19), there is utter consistency on this matter in the life and teaching of the Lord.

Jesus' Faithful Ones

His teaching actually begins with Jesus identifying His faithful ones as children of the Father. Those who will take up His cross so as to love their enemies and do good to those who hate them (5:44) will by this obedience be filiated to God as Father. Obedience is required so "that you may be sons of your Father in Heaven" (5:43), and radical obedience is not less high in its imitative aims than filial resemblance: "Therefore you shall be perfect, even as your Father in heaven is perfect" (5:48). Our heavenly Father is, Jesus assures us on the basis of His own matchless intimacy with Him, so deeply caring that He is aware of the needs of His children before they ask (6:18); if He provides for the creatures of His world (6:26), how much more for His own children (6:32)? What the children of the Heavenly Father are to seek most from Him is not these natural gifts of His providence, however, but "first the kingdom of God and His righteousness." (Would that we always did so.) After all, "not every one who says to me ‘Lord, Lord' shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of my Father in heaven" (7:21).

Much is said in the preambles of the inclusive lectionaries and new worship books about "the movement of the Spirit." What Jesus tells His disciples about the Holy Spirit is that at moments when their own words cannot persuade those who would mislead or condemn them, then it will be the "Spirit of your Father who speaks in you" (10:20). This speaking will clearly be to point to the authority of Jesus as true Son of the Father. Accordingly, "whoever confesses me before men, him will I also confess before my Father who is in heaven" (10:32). By the same token, whoever denies Jesus in so many words, that person Jesus will deny (disclaim) before His "Father which is in heaven" (10:33). When we are told that the Spirit speaking "in our times" requires evident contradiction to the Spirit of the Father who Jesus assured us would speak in His faithful always, we are at a point where application of the apostolic injunction is urgently necessary: "Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits [to see] whether they are of God" (1 John 4:1).

Not Theirs to Control

It can be an irritation, perhaps, to those who construe themselves as more intelligent or, because of certain learning, more wise then others, that recognition of the truth of Scripture and authority of Jesus is not theirs to control. Jesus prayed, "I thank You, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that You have hidden these things from the wise and prudent, and revealed them unto babes" (11:25). No Christian who is thinking straight ought to be bent away from the teaching authority of Jesus or the witness of Scripture at any point merely by the educational credentials, cleverness, or institutional prominence of an evidently contradicting authority. (Nor by an autobiographical assertion of "bad associations" or personal woundedness-women who are abused, for example, as young children by wicked fathers-however these cases may prompt our compassion.) Moreover, we ought to be zealous to protect children in particular from the religious abuse, however "well intended," of those who would usurp Jesus' guidance concerning the trustworthiness of their Heavenly Father. Children may grasp the value of God's Father-hood more truly than anyone. "Take heed," he says to us, "that you do not despise one of these little ones, for I say to you that in heaven their angels always see the face of my Father who is in heaven" (18:10).

If it is true that in this world no one truly knows the Father but the Son, nor truly knows the Son but the Father (11:27), it is nevertheless also the reward of those who are faithful that their righteousness will one day "shine forth as the sun in the kingdom of their Father" (13:43). In the meantime, all in the Church are bound in a reciprocal covenant with the Father through Jesus, a covenant that entitles us to His care in the world but also a covenant by which we will be judged in the next (18:19, 35). It is in the Father's disposition alone to reward the faithful (20:23). When we pray, as Jesus taught us, "Our Father which art in heaven," we pray to be conformed to the will of the Father-so perfectly accommodated to that will that we accept that our own forgiveness is conditional upon our reflecting His forgiveness in our dealings with others (6:9-15; cf. 18:21-35). Jesus is serious about our loving our enemies. Recrimination against our ecclesiastical opponents is a clear violation of this principle.

Resisting the Resisters?

To return then to my main point, which I have posed as a question: Do we have any basis, any authority, for resisting the resisters of Jesus?

Now when He came into the temple, the chief priests and the elders of the people confronted Him as He was teaching, and said, "By what authority are You doing these things? And who gave You this authority?"

But Jesus answered and said to them, "I also will ask you one thing, which if you tell Me, I likewise will tell you by what authority I do these things: "The baptism of John-where was it from? From heaven or from men?" And they reasoned among themselves, saying, "If we say, ‘From heaven' He will say to us, ‘Why then did you not believe him? But if we say, ‘From men,' we fear the multitude, for all count John as a prophet." So they answered Jesus and said, "We do not know." And He said to them, "Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things." (Matt. 21:23-27)

We need most diligently to study what Jesus was doing here. There is always going to be debate (human willfulness being what it is) between those who see religious belief and practice in terms of revelation and those who want to see it in terms of the projection of evolving social consciousness, particularly their own consciousness. There is absolutely nothing novel, historically speaking, in the predicament of this moment in the Western Christian church. Ours is a recurrent symptom of a systemic spiritual decadence or deviance, and it affects us in many more ways than in the issue here under discussion.

The decisive point is engaged in the parable, which Jesus tells, immediately following this challenge to His authority. Here is a story of two sons, one of whom is quick (and perhaps glib) to proclaim his allegiance to do the will of his father. The other son is resistant to the point of initial denial of his father's will. Nevertheless, in the end the one who readily proclaims his vocation fails to work in the vineyard of his father (we are not told what he was doing instead). The resistant son surprises us by repenting and fulfilling the call of his father. When Jesus asks, "which of the two did the will of the Father" (21:31), he is asking about actual obedience, not about the verbalization of piety. This word is a sword which cuts two ways.

The Issue of Obedience

Either way, the issue of obedience remains. Jesus is not ambiguous in His claim that His own authority derives from His Father, rather than from His creative imagination or from a projection of some social or political pragmatism. That He is the Son of God, not just a man among men, is the essence of His rebuke to the Pharisees (22:45). We are to call no one but the Father "father" in this religious sense, "for One is your Father, who is in Heaven" (23:9). And in these matters there is a judgment coming that is not a matter of either social consciousness or human politics. On that day (which moment only the Father knows [24:26]), those who have accepted the revealed authority ofJesus concerning the Father's gift of reconciliation through Him-and who persevere in obedience to the will of God-will hear the words, "Come ye blessed of my Father" (25:24). Others will not on that day have such a Father.

At the Last Supper (26:20-29), in Gethsemane (39-42), as in the great prayer of Jesus recorded in John 17, it is His own obedience to the Father which characterizes everything that His atoning sacrifice means. He prays specifically that, on the witness given by the Father, we shall be united to Him and the Father in love and faithfulness. This same Jesus whose prerogative it was to summon from His Father legions of angels to smite His oppressors, chose in obedience rather to be faithful to the Father's will in sacrificing His life. Nowhere do we see that he made that issue, or any language concerning it, either optional or a matter for nuanced and "comfort zone" compromise.

I do not wish to suggest that there is not a great deal more that might be said on this subject. Clearly there is, and I myself would be grateful for it, especially for that which in the spirit of fraternal correction would point my own heart and mind to a more accurate obedience. What I do mean to say is that, so far as I can tell, for a Christian-one who would follow Christ in His teaching and in His example (cf. Luke 9:23)-the authority of Jesus concerning the Fatherhood of God is irrefragible. Opposition to it is not therefore an intramural debate, and we must learn, as graciously and yet as clear-mindedly as possible, to acknowledge that.

The Perennial Problem of Translation

The perennial problem of translation-which is to say, interpretation-is inextricable from the question of authority. Franz Rosenzweig's dictum is helpful in that it declares not against the possibility of translation, but against any imagination that we can avoid in such translation work the choice of "which is to be master. Or rather, Master.

That which rejects the overwhelming teaching of Jesus is clearly anti-Christ, not Christian. It may hurt us to admit it, but not to admit it would be to deceive ourselves and others. Goddess religion is certainly religion. But it is not Christian religion, nor can it be made to cohabit with it without spiritual adultery. The incorporation of mother-god language and the corresponding deletion of the Fatherhood of God from the prayer life and hymnody of any church will make of those who use that language refusers of the teaching authority of Jesus. On His authority, such refusal is a matter of the gravest consequences for those who so choose.

How Can We Help?

How can we best help those who seem prone to be led in this path to consider the consequences? By faithfully pointing them again and again to the words of Jesus. It is His authority which is decisively the basis for our adoption by the Father, and it is on His authority that we have the means to recognize those who would (and those who would not) seek membership in His family in such terms as he has offered. "Whosoever shall do the will of My Father which is in heaven," said Jesus, "the same is my brother and sister and mother" (Matt. 12:50). That makes the conditions of everyone's inclusion, membership, and claim to His Name very clear.