The Father

It is Father's Day. It is a wonder we are still allowed to celebrate it. Feminism long ago identified the enemy it wished to destroy as patriarchy - "father authority". Today, feminism is triumphant, and patriarchy, despite Steven Goldberg's thesis, (1) is all but dead. Perhaps the iconoclasts presently engaged in tearing down history have not gotten around to Father's Day yet. Or perhaps the feminists are satisfied with having stripped fatherhood of its essential meaning by destroying its authority and are content to let the vestigial honour remain. The latter suggestion is unlikely. It is not in the nature of feminism or any other leftist movement to refrain from utterly humiliating and debasing its defeated foes.

The feminist assault on the authority of earthly fathers is and always has been ultimately aimed at the highest fatherly authority of all, that of God. Feminism, like the anti-racism (actually "anti-white" racism) that has recently exploded into a tsunami that threatens to sweep away all of Western Civilization, has historically come in both "liberal" and "radical" (far Left or Marxist) forms, of which the radical, in both cases, is now in the ascendancy, but liberal and radical alike are descended from the Puritan rebels of the seventeenth century, the Whigs, and as Samuel Johnson famously put it "the first Whig was the devil." There is much in the way of witty and wise comebacks to feminism which can be gleaned from the words of Dr. Johnson, by the way, despite the fact of it not yet having been in its infancy when he walked the streets of London. His conversation with the bluestocking Mrs. Knowles as recorded by Boswell is one example. His words to Dr. Taylor "Nature has given women so much power that the law has very wisely given them little" are another. A paraphrase of the latter is the conclusion to which Stephen Leacock argued in "The Woman Question", written in 1915 on the eve of women's suffrage - and Prohibition - but still, in my opinion, the best commentary on the women's movement ever written. Feminism is not actually the subject of my essay, however, so lest it be permanently sidetracked I shall give one more quotation, this time from Fran Lebowitz who said "Women who insist upon having the same options as men would do well to consider the option of being the strong silent type" and move on to the Fatherhood of God.

In the early stages of liberalism's "long march" through the Churches, it looked like the Fatherhood of God was all that they intended to leave intact of orthodox Christian doctrine. In reality, this was misleading, not because the Modernists were more orthodox than they seemed, but because they had reduced the Fatherhood of God to a single facet, that which corresponds to the "universal brotherhood of man." This is a Scriptural aspect of the Fatherhood of God, to be sure, but it is not the whole of it. Indeed, the most unequivocal statement that all people are the children of God in all of Scripture is to be found in St. Paul's address to the Stoics and Epicureans at Mars Hill in Acts 17. In the twenty-eighth verse of the chapter he quotes first from Epimenides of Crete, then from either Aratus of Soli or Cleanthes of Assos. It is the second quotation, which, ironically, regardless of which of the two Stoic philosophers who both said it that the Apostle had in mind, was originally addressed to Zeus, that asserts that we are all God's offspring. Ordinarily, the Scriptures speak in terms of "Creator" and "creation" - or "creature" in the older English - to refer to this aspect of God's Fatherhood, and it is not what was highlighted in the teachings of Jesus Christ. Ironically, the same liberals who seemed bent on reducing the Christian kerygma to the Fatherhood of God, and the Fatherhood of God to this one aspect of it, also embraced the theories by which Darwin and others sought to explain the existence of man without God, thus undermining the fragment of Christian faith to which they still clung. Today, the "Fatherhood of God" is no longer in vogue among liberal theologians due to its gender specificity. It has become far too common to hear gender neutral re-formulations of the Trinitarian benediction such as Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer, although this is not as bad as the "Father/Mother" stuff that pops up in certain circles.

In Christian dogmatics and systematic theology (2) the subcategory of Theology Proper that pertains to God the Father is called Patriology or sometimes Paterology, never Patrology which is a less common synonym for Patristics, that is, the study of the writings of the Fathers of the Church. It is the counterpart of Christology and Pneumatology. Often dogmaticians and theologians willl omit Patriology, not because they regard the Father as being of less importance than the Son and Holy Ghost but because they find it much harder to distinguish this part of Theology Proper from the whole. The very first thing the Apostles' Creed affirms is "I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth." Similarly, the Nicene Creed begins with "I believe in one God the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth, And of all things visible and invisible." It is the full deity of the Son and the Holy Ghost that the Church Fathers had to defend against the heretics, not the deity of the Father. The closest thing to a heretical attack on the deity of the Father was the Gnostic, especially Marcionite, attempt to distinguish the Father from the Old Testament Jehovah and equate the latter with their concept of an evil demiurge. The expansion of the opening affirmation of the Apostles' Creed into that of the Nicene was the Nicene Fathers' answer.

Jesus explicitly identified His Father as the Old Testament Jehovah in John 8:54 "it is my Father that honoureth me; of whom ye say, that he is your God." In the Old Testament, Fatherhood is frequently used to denote the relationship between Jehovah and national Israel. The most striking example of this is in the fourth chapter of Exodus. Here, after He has finally persuaded Moses to go to Pharaoh and speak for Him, and Moses has taken leave of his father-in-law and gotten ready to return to Egypt, God tells him that after he has performed all the signs and Pharoah has still refused to let Israel go, he, Moses, is to say "Thus saith the Lord, Israel is my son, even my firstborn: And I say unto thee, Let my son go, that he may serve me: and if thou refuse to let him go, behold, I will slay thy son, even thy firstborn." (vv. 22-23) Here the contest between Jehovah and Pharaoh is set up as the King of Kings, demanding the release of the son whom a lesser king holds hostage, and obtaining that release only through taking the firstborn of the lesser, rebellious, king. In the New Testament, of course, we find that all of this foreshadowed what would take place on the last Passover of the old age. Again, the King of Kings would demand that a lesser, rebellious, king, in this case Satan, would release his captives, in this case the entire world held in bondage through sin. Here, however, God does not obtain the release through the death of the rebel's son, but through the sacrifice of His Own, His Only-Begotten Son, whereby all those who are so set free - redeemed, in the literal sense of the term - are elevated to sonship through adoption.

In all of this, multiple facets of God's Fatherhood can be seen. It means one thing when we say that God is Father of all and that we are "all his offspring." This means basically that God is our Creator Who continues to care for us as His creation. It means another thing when the Scriptures say that God is the Father of Israel and that Israel is His "first-born son", to which image from Exodus, the rest of the Old Testament, especially the prophets Jeremiah and Isaiah, makes frequent reference. This is a metaphorical way of denoting the more intimate relationship that existed between God and Israel than between God and the general world, It possibly also, although this is not explicitly spelled out, includes an allusion to the circumstances by which Israel came into being (that Abraham had physical descendants at all was due to the direct miraculous intervention of God). It means yet another thing for God to be the Father of Jesus Christ. In the previous senses, the "Fatherhood" of God applies to all Three Persons of the Holy Trinity, with special reference to the First Person only through appropriation in the theological sense of the term. When we speak of God as the Father of Jesus Christ, however, we are referring to an internal relationship within the Trinity. It is paradoxically the most literal and the most metaphorical sense in which God is Father. Jesus is the "Only-Begotten Son" of the Father, meaning the Only Person of Whom it can be said that He is God's Son in the most literal sense of a Son Who comes from the Father naturally and so shares His own nature. (3) Yet this is metaphorical because the "begetting" or "siring" referred to is not the physical act, requiring a mother, and taking place within time so as to have a before and after. The Son comes from the Father and shares the Father's nature, but to share the Father's nature is to be eternal, with neither beginning nor end, and so the begetting of the Son is also eternal. It means yet another thing for God to be the Father of those who have been redeemed by Christ. The Scriptures speak of this in terms both of regeneration and adoption. God is the Father of the redeemed by regeneration in that through the working of the Holy Spirit He imparts new spiritual life to people who had been born spiritually dead through Original Sin. He is the Father of the redeemed through adoption because He joins the redeemed to His Son in the mystical Body of His Church in which they share in the privileges of the Sonship of the Head.

Taken together, these facets show the many ways in which God is Father, a truth about God so basic that it is the first and most fundamental affirmation of the Creeds.

The enemy of God, through his earthly feminist agents may attack the authority of earthly fathers, aiming through them at that of God the Father, but the latter he can never overthrow. This is how we know that feminism, seemingly triumphant in our own day, is ultimately a defeated foe.

Thanks be to God.

Happy Father's Day


(1) Steven Goldberg was chair of the Department of Sociology at City College of New York until he retired about twelve years ago. He was one of the very few in his discipline to be a true scientist rather than an agent of Marxist indoctrination. In his The inevitability of Patriarchy (1973), later expanded into Why Men Rule (1993), he argued that human nature made the abolition of patriarchy impossible. Note, however, that he was not using "patriarchy" in the root sense of "father authority" but in the sense of males being on average higher up the heirarchy of power and status than females.


(2) Dogmatics is the exposition of the articles of faith contained in the ecumenical Creeds and, for the Churches of the Magisterial Reformation, their particular Confessions. Systematic theology is the complement to Biblical theology, the latter examining doctrine in its Scriptural context, the former organizing it according to theme or topic. In practice, dogmatics and systematic theology are virtually identical. Francis Pieper's Christian Dogmatics (Lutheran) is the same type of work as Charles Hodge's Systematic Theology (Presbyterian/Reformed). The categories into which both assign doctrines are indistinguishable.

(3) The Holy Ghost also shares The Father's nature but not as a Son. Spirit, in Hebrew and Greek, is the same word as breathe. Jesus is the Son of God through His eternal begetting, the Holy Ghost is the breathe of God.