Among the more aggressive contemporary Christian reconceptualizations of God is denying His fatherhood. Texas state Rep. James Talarico (and the Democrat nominee for the Senate) has declared that God is “nonbinary” and referred to the divine as “Holy Mystery.” Many self-identifying Christians agree, arguing that “they/them” are the best pronouns for the divine. Denominations, such as the Episcopal Church (USA) and the United Church of Christ, allow entire liturgies to refrain from using masculine words to describe God, or to refer to him by all types of pronouns. Many feminist theologians pray to an exclusively feminine God.
In a strictly religious sense, this trend, if theologically erroneous, is understandable: Theologians through the centuries have said that God is spirit and incorporeal, and thus He is neither a man nor a woman. In a broader political sense, it is less so — when feminists and others seek to describe God as “nonbinary” or as a woman, they are less so making a sophisticated theological argument than a ham-handed one about women’ s rights.
Yet regardless of whether we are talking religion or politics, the impetus behind abandoning masculine descriptions of God is misfounded and self-defeating. This is because the theological reasons for calling God “Father” find support in the natural order we all inhabit, and thus to deny His fatherhood is to implicitly deny fatherhood altogether, with disastrous consequences for us all.
The Biblical Stupidity of Abandoning God’s Fatherhood
We should first note that rejecting God’s fatherhood flies in the face of the biblical narrative. As Peter Kreeft argues in his excellent new book Every Word in the Lord’s Prayer, “Father” was the word Jesus most frequently used to describe God. Across the four Gospels, Jesus calls God “Father” more than 150 times! “And if that was good enough for Jesus, it had better be good enough for you,” writes Kreeft.
Moreover, when considering how Jesus transcended both his culture and the first century’s understanding of women — treating them with dignity and respect, giving them an important role in His ministry — the charge that Jesus using the word “Father” is sexist is demonstrably ignorant and ridiculous. What Jesus’ use of the word “Father” actually means is that human fatherhood is the most important image that we humans have for contemplating the divine. Indeed, calling God “father” is more than a culturally conditioned, contextually limited element of the Christian faith, but something intended to direct us to something eternally relevant.
What a Good Father Looks Like
If Christians are supposed to understand God within the prism of “Father,” it’s worth reflecting on what civilizations for time immemorial have understood as the qualities that constitute a good father. Kreeft offers a long list. Fathers are to be trustworthy, meaning that children are able to believe what their fathers tell them. They are to be admired, meaning they possess attributes their children respect, such as hard work, constancy, and experience from life. “When a father abandons his children, he teaches them that that’s the way life is; that that’s the nature of reality and therefore also the nature of God,” writes Kreeft.
Fathers are more powerful than their children, meaning they can protect them from threats. They are able to gently but firmly push their children to “high ideals and high achievements.” They offer love, approval, and emotional care. They bequeath an identity, built not only around morality, but also around culture and tradition.
They are also providers of “stuff,” not only food, shelter, and toys, but all manner of gifts, because they want their children to enjoy life. And, finally, they are responsible for discipline, meaning laws and commandments to be obeyed, as well as consequences and punishments. Even here, however, the point is not tyranny, but to direct children to the fact that self-possession and obeying laws enable their happiness.
The Relationship Between Fathers’ Failure and God
Sadly, many fathers are not meeting expectations. Approximately 25 percent of American children live without a biological, step, or adoptive father in the home. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, approximately 40 percent of U.S. births occur outside marriage, meaning right from the beginning, many children’s relationship to their biological fathers is tenuous.
When you add to that the fact that 40 percent of marriages end in divorce, we have a recipe for societal chaos. Writes Kreeft: “The disastrous consequences of that lack of good father are so spectacular, so scientifically provable, and so socially destructive in our present culture that only willful ignorance fueled by destructive and dishonest ideology can account for the fact that they are not widely admitted and have become politically incorrect.”
It should then not be any surprise that so many Americans are either repudiating God altogether, or redefining Him in terms that dissociate Him from fatherhood and masculinity. What they know about fatherhood and masculinity is decidedly negative, and thus why would they ever honor or worship a divine being who is described in such terms? Moreover, if fathers so consistently “suck,” do we even need them at all? This is a vicious, destructive cycle.
Rejecting God’s Fatherhood Will Only Compound Our Unhappiness
Nevertheless, humans are hardwired for fathers. Undoubtedly, many dads’ failures to meet the needs and expectations of their children affect how those children will understand religion and God. Yet repudiating God as father doesn’t solve the problem — it only compounds it.
Like lots of things in life, if you have a bad experience with something, it doesn’t mean that thing is inherently bad and you should forever avoid it. Indeed, in many cases — from exercising to vulnerable relationships — avoiding what hurt you will, in the long run, make you more unhappy. To grow and mature is to sometimes recognize that something or someone who hurt us was not representative, but a deviation and distortion from what is good and true.
Denying God’s fatherhood, motivated by a misplaced affinity for diversity and inclusion, or perhaps a deep feeling of pain from our own broken or nonexistent relationship with our fathers, results in the unintended byproduct of further disconnecting us from the fact that we all need fathers. The data is simply overwhelming: Those lacking father figures perform worse academically; they have more behavior problems and have cognitive delays; they cost American taxpayers billions of dollars annually in various support programs.
When we reject God as father, we are not only rejecting who He is, but what we need. That feeling of freedom from authority and “patriarchal norms” soon descends into a deeper sense of alienation and brokenness, because we are rejecting what we were designed for: true communion with both our earthly and heavenly fathers. We should pray to God as “Our Father,” not only because He is, but because doing so reminds us that fathers, in subtle ways often difficult to discern, have a remarkable ability to profoundly and permanently affect who we are.
