Celebrating the ‘ultimate father’

Today we celebrate Father’s Day, so it is fitting to celebrate the ultimate Father, the lord of the universe: God. It has taken me decades as a Christian to develop a deeper appreciation of what it means that God calls himself our Father, to understand that it is not just a glib locution.

Christians speak of God as father in several ways, the most important being that he is their creator and redeemer, their protector and guide. The Bible teaches that because of what Jesus Christ accomplished in saving his people, they are adopted as sons and daughters of God.

Thus, the Apostle Paul says in his second letter to the people in Corinth: “For us there is one God, the Father, from whom all things are and for whom we exist”.

He tells the Galatian Christians: “Because you are sons, God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying ‘Abba, Father!’ ” The first letter of John says: “See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are.”

This is hard to comprehend for believers, let alone those who reject the Christian understanding of God.

For many people, once including me, there are a couple of significant impediments to the trusting and loving relationship that Jesus commends.

First is the failure of their biological fathers to provide an adequate model of fatherhood, which muddies the waters. Many have looked at their own fathers and said, “if God is like that, he’s not for me”. But human fathers are flawed and imperfect, while God is not – it can be hard to grasp how he redeems and sustains us in all circumstances.

In an excellent new small book, The End of Men?, colleague Simon Smart points out the oversized influence, for good or ill, that fathers have on their children. Even if your own father is absent, the presence of fathers in your neighbourhood can improve your chances of doing well in life.

The second impediment is that calling God father is clearly a metaphor, an anthropomorphism, because God is ungendered spirit and the Bible uses many maternal metaphors for God as well. But we learn best by putting new knowledge in the context of what we already know, and we know that the ideal father provides tender, loving care and guidance.

The Old Testament did not have quite the same understanding. It is Jesus who calls God Father and, remarkably, he tells his followers to do the same, for example instructing them to pray “Our Father…” Contemporary religious leaders were furious at this familiarity, thinking it blasphemous.

And, if not true, it would be. But in fact it is one of the central and most infinitely precious promises of the Christian message.

Barney Zwartz is a senior fellow of the Centre for Public Christianity. This article first appeared in The Sunday Age.