Like mothers, fathers come in all different shapes, sizes, and personalities. The most basic and universal understanding of father is one of begetting children. A father is much more than a begetter. Father is not a name but a relation and a presence. Steve is a person before becoming Paul’s father. Fatherhood is added on to his personhood.
Recall some father-roles in movies and in television. Take for example the role of Stanley Banks (“Pops”) in “Father of the Bride.” Just thought of ‘losing’ his daughter in marriage evokes comically neurotic tendencies on the eve of the wedding. In “Life with Father,” Clarence Day (Clare) is a financier whose thriftiness and dislike of surprises make for fun when, time and again, his wife Vinnie and his four boys outwit him. In “Mr. Skeffington,” Job Skeffington is the tender, loving father to an only daughter, spurned by her vain mother.
In “The Bill Cosby Show,” Cliff Huxtable, the father and obstetrician, is thoroughly engaged in the lives of his five children. He protects, disciplines, and loves them. As a moral guide, he teaches them values by example. A devoted husband, he stands firmly with his wife, especially in front of the children. The Huxtable family loves their Dad – flexible, funny, and fun – as we do.
The mature television series, “Blue Bloods” captures a similar image of father in different circumstances. Henry Reagan, the super-patriarch of an Irish Catholic family and once the police commissioner of the NYPD, is always the pre-eminent father-figure, first to his son Francis (Frank), a widower and the current police commissioner. Henry lives with Frank, the father of a daughter and two sons, also part of the NYPD. Danny, one of Frank’s sons, is the father of two young boys. The three fathers are present to the various family members providing them with stability and guidance – moral and spiritual. With the Reagans, fatherhood and family unite to claim center stage in this weekly drama about the New York police department.
Today, though speaking about God invites criticism, silence is no answer. A word then about God-language. God, who is beyond all human language, reveals the Divine I-AM-Who-Am as masculine in the Hebrew scriptures. God is Adonai (Lord), Melech (King), Avinu (Our Father). These are figurative and not a literal ways of speaking about the ineffable source and creator of the universe. Nevertheless, God as father, is revealed in the Judeo-Christian tradition.
To some, the name father ascribes gender to God. Such language, they say, confirms a patriarchal system that keeps women subservient and prevents them from gender equality.
Extreme feminism faults a patriarchal culture for developing the doctrine of the Father’s eternal relationship to the Son. Accordingly, “the Christian tradition has made the image of God’s fatherhood literal. “. . . This tendency favors dominance of male over female onto God’s being, thereby eclipsing women as equal carriers of the divine image” (Catherine Mowry-Lacugna, “Fatherhood of God,” Encyclopedia of Catholicism, 520). Lacugna admits that Jesus did not refer to God as Amma (mother). However, within this view, ample doubt remains – a doubt that Jesus’ words about his Father addressed to his Father, are insufficient to justify, let alone prove, God’s eternal fatherhood. Why? Because they were written, interpreted, and developed in and by a patriarchal culture.
In the Johannine gospel alone, reference to the Father occurs more than 110 times. In chapter seventeen, Jesus’ prayer to his Father reveals what the Father means to Jesus. It gives us an intimate sense of the relationship between Father and Son. As revealed dogma, the procession of Son from the Father, according to their one nature, is literally true. Did Jesus not know better?
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