Peter C. Phan
The Catholic University of America
God the Father and the Jubilee of the Year 2000
Pope John Paul II has made the mystery of the Trinity, which is the central mystery of Christian faith and life, the heart of the church's preparation for the jubilee of the year 2000. Since 1997 the church has been journeying from and through Christ, in the Holy Spirit, to the Father. This spiritual pilgrimage will culminate in a church-wide celebration of the Great Jubilee in praise of the Trinity in the year 2000 with an international Eucharistic congress in Rome.
The third and final preparatory year, 1999, is dedicated by John Paul II to a contemplative study and glorification of God the Father. Although the creed professes the Father first, before the Son and the Spirit, yet from the catechetical perspective, John Paul II's placing him last in the preparatory triennium makes eminent theological sense, since we, both Jews and gentiles, can have access to the Father only in and through the Son and by the power of the Spirit (Eph 2:18). As Jesus reminds us: "No one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him" (Mt 11: 27; Lk 10:22). To know the Father one must know and experience the Spirit and the Son first, either explicitly or implicitly.
As we catechists prepare our lessons on God the Father, we first face the question: What are we to say about the Father? Of God the Father the Apostles' Creed professes: "I believe in God, the Father almighty, creator of heaven and earth," whereas the Nicene Creed says: "We believe in one God, the Father, the Almighty, maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen." Of course, these creedal affirmations about the Father must be complemented by what we learn about God from Scripture, Tradition, and reason. In addition, there is today the problem of how we should speak about deity in general and about God the Father in particular. Obviously, how we speak about God the Father cannot be totally separated from what we know of him; nevertheless, content and language are two distinct issues. Finally, there is the spiritual and pastoral question of where and how people can experience the presence and fatherhood of God in their lives today. In this brief essay I will address these three issues but for pedagogical reasons, in reverse order.
Where Do We Experience God the Father Today?
Not long ago we catechists and theologians expended the greater part of our energies proving the existence of God against atheists, perhaps invoking St. Thomas's "Five Ways," to defend the reasonableness of our faith in God. No doubt, the theoretical question of God's existence may still beset some inquiring minds, and for them metaphysics retains its useful role, even in our post-modern age. But for the majority of people today, the real issue concerning God is not God's non-existence but God's absence or silence. Few Jews who were gassed during the Holocaust; few African Americans who were crushed by slavery; few Cambodians who were massacred in the Killing Fields; few fathers, mothers and their children who were butchered in Rwanda and in Bosnia; few people who starved to a slow death in the so-called Third World were atheists or needed a philosophical demonstration of God's existence. On the contrary, in the midst of their untold and unjust suffering, they continued to pray to God, even in shouts of despair and in raised fists of angry protest; and it is precisely because these people still prayed from the depths of their suffering and cried out to God out of their darkest hopelessness, with the tattered remains of their faith, that we, the undeserving survivors, can and must pray today, lest their prayers be forgotten.
What terrified the victims of evil was not God's non-existence but God's absurd absence and deadly silence. What shattered their faith is precisely the fact that the God who obviously exists did not respond to their desperate cry for help. And even when well-to-do dwellers of American suburbia protest loudly that God does not exist after they have been stricken by financial failures, incurable diseases, or the tragic deaths of their loved ones, the muffled message is that God, who they believe exists, is not there for them. The problem therefore is not that God does not exist but who God is and where and how God can be found.
The challenge for those engaged in catechetical ministry then is to help people of today experience the presence of God. According to the Christian faith, the power that enables us to experience God is the Holy Spirit, and the person who shows us where and how to find God is his Son Jesus. The Holy Spirit is universally present and active, not only among Christians but also among non-Christians and non-believers. Hence, by the power of the Spirit, knowledge of God is made available to all, in one form or another, explicitly and implicitly. As to where and how to encounter God, Jesus has shown us in his words (particularly his parables), deeds (especially his miracles), death, and resurrection. Without pretension to completeness, the following places and manners of our encounter with God can be enumerated from the life of Jesus:
* in the daily, domestic, economic, social, political life: eating and drinking
with friends, cooking and cleaning, a marriage feast, a lost coin, a lost
sheep, a prodigal son, a wealthy host who substitutes his guests with the
poor, blind, and lame.
* in the humblest creatures: the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, the
lilies of the field, a fig tree, a mustard seed, wheat and tares, bread and
wine.
* in the preferential love for the poor, the oppressed, the sick, the sinners,
women and children; in the struggle, in solidarity with them, for their
liberation.
* in moments of solitude and prayer on the mountain side or at the seashore;
in acts of kindness to strangers and of forgiveness to enemies.
* in deserved as well as innocent suffering and death, even the most shameful
death on the cross.
* in moments of vindication and triumph beyond all the possibilities of human
expectation, in being brought to another transcendent life beyond the realm
of death.
In his Apostolic Letter Tertio Millennio Adveniente Pope John Paul II invites us to encounter God the Father during 1999 in the act of conversion; in the celebration of the sacrament of penance; in acts of charity; in "the preferential option for the poor and the outcast;" in reducing substantially, if not canceling outright, the international debt; in respecting women's rights; in promoting the family and marriage; in fostering a civilization of love founded on peace, solidarity, justice and liberty; and in dialogue with non-Christian religions (nos. 50-53).
Who is the God whom we encounter in these events of our life? The Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) speaks of God as the living God (no. 205), as the one who reveals himself as "I am who I am" (nos. 206-209), as merciful and gracious (nos. 210-211), as the one who alone is (nos. 212-213), as truth (nos. 214-217), as love (nos. 218-221), as the almighty (nos.268-274), as the creator of the invisible and visible worlds (279-314).
What Language Shall We Use to Speak of God the Father Today?
Jesus not only reveals where and how we can encounter God but also how to speak of God. As a Jew, Jesus used the language of the Hebrew Scripture to speak of God. The Hebrew Scripture uses many different titles to describe God. In particular it uses the word "Father" eleven times to name God. God is the Father of Israel, the Father of the king, and especially "the Father of the poor," of the orphaned and the widowed, who are under his loving protection (2 Sam 7:14; Ps 68:6). Following this tradition Jesus referred to God as "Father" and taught us to pray to God as "Our Father." The New Testament puts the word "Father" on the lips of Jesus some 170 times.
Furthermore, the Gospel of Mark (14:36) records that Jesus, in a strikingly characteristic and perhaps unique way, called God his "Abba," an intimate but reverent Aramaic term which may be translated as "my own dear Father." In later Christian tradition, the word "Father" became the "proper name" reserved exclusively to what is now called "the First Person" of the Trinity, whereas "Son" and "Spirit" are the "proper names" of the Second and Third Persons respectively.
There are therefore two levels at which the word "Father" is used of God. First, with respect to us and the created world, God is "Father" in the sense that, as the CCC explains, "God is the first origin of everything and transcendent authority; and that he is at the same time goodness and loving care for all his children" (no. 239). The second level is the relationship between the Father and the Son. At this level the First Person of the Trinity is said to be "Father" because the Son is eternally generated from him (CCC, no. 240). The two levels are essentially connected with each other: it is the very same eternal sonship of the Son that is shared with us in history through Jesus of Nazareth so that we can now can call his eternal Father truly our Father as well.
On both levels, however, the language we use for God, even if it is revealed and authorized by Jesus himself, is always analogical or symbolic. That is, in affirming that God is our Father, we at the same time deny that God is Father in the ways our earthly fathers are and act as fathers. And, finally, we ascribe to God fatherhood in its infinite perfection, even though we do not know what infinitely perfect fatherhood is like. Indeed, there is more difference than likeness between God's fatherhood and our fatherhood. Thus, in calling God "Father," we do not mean to say that God is male as our fathers are necessarily male. As the CCC says: "God transcends the human distinction between the sexes. He is neither man nor woman: he is God. He also transcends human fatherhood and motherhood, although he is their origin and standard: no one is father as God is Father" (no. 239).
Theologically, we know that God is neither male nor female, that is, God has no sex because God has no body but is pure spirit. However, because we believe that God is personal, in our imagination, we, even those of us who are theologically sophisticated, naturally imagine God as male or female or as both. In other words, even if God has no sex, God has gender, that is, God's way of being experienced by us as masculine or feminine. Of course, the Bible and Christian Tradition most often, though by no means exclusively, depict (not affirm) God, verbally or artistically, as male. But, as the CCC affirms, "God's parental tenderness can also be expressed by the image of motherhood (Isa 66:13; Ps 131:2), which emphasizes God's immanence, the intimacy between Creator and creature" (no. 239).
Because our religious imagination has been for so long conditioned to picture and relate to God as male, it needs to be healed of its exclusive and hence distorting use of male imageries for God. It needs a "therapy" by means of an inclusive and integrative image of self, world, and God in order to be made whole again, so that in our images, languages, symbols, artistic representations, and worship of God we may avoid creating idols of God and structures oppressive to women. This is precisely what the CCC urges us to do in its commentary on the first word of the Our Father: "Before we make our own this first exclamation of the Lord's Prayer, we must humbly cleanse our hearts of certain false images drawn ‘from this world'.... The purification of our hearts has to do with paternal or maternal images, stemming from our personal and cultural history, and influencing our relationship with God. God our Father transcends the categories of the created world. To impose our own ideas in this area ‘upon him' would be to fabricate idols to adore or pull down" (no. 2779). In this connection it is interesting to note that the Eleventh Council of Toledo (675) used a female image to express the eternal generation of the Son from the Father:"We must believe that the Son is begotten or born (genitus vel natus) from the womb of the Father (de Patris utero), that is, from his very substance and not from nothing or from some other substance."
God, the Holy and Loving Mystery
Because God is utterly incomprehensible and ineffable, all our knowledge and language about God ultimately fail. Indeed, as St. Thomas Aquinas has said, we only know that God is but not what God is. This is true of God the Father as well as God the Son and God the Spirit. In the end, all our speech about God is nothing more than stammer and stutter and must end in worshipful silence and awestruck adoration before the divine Mystery that embraces us in its limitless and beatifying love. But since we cannot keep silent about God as long as we live, we must cast our net far and wide and make use of all the resources that human experience in its manifold richness offers us so that our speech about God may be as least inadequate and distorted as possible. That is exactly what the Bible, Tradition, and theology have done. Perhaps it should be mentioned here that the richest and deepest sources for our knowledge of God are the writings of mystics and poets as well as works of artists, and these should be mined for our catechesis about God the Father.
In speaking of God the Father contemporary theologians have attempted to enrich the traditional language of fatherhood by means of different symbols, metaphors and images. Sometimes impersonal expressions are used (e.g., Principle without principle, Unoriginated Origin, Ground of Being, Wisdom [Sophia], the Source and Origin of the whole Godhead, Absolute Mystery); at other times, different personal terms are pressed into service (e.g., mother, lover, friend). It is important to note that these new ways of designating God the Father should not be used as alternatives of or substitutes for the traditional usage of Father but as its complements to avoid exclusiveness and one-sidedness and to express the various ways in which people experience and relate to God.
To conclude our reflection on God the Father I would like to highlight three insights that may be helpful for people living in an age that has witnessed unspeakable evils such as the Holocaust and has grown skeptical of the human potential for rationality and goodness. The first is that the Christian God is Mystery. By mystery I do not mean some obscure riddle to be solved but the reality of pure light that blinds us not because it is darkness but because it is dazzling light. As dark light or luminous darkness, God is the condition of possibility for our knowing anything whatsoever. It is in the light of this divine Darkness that we know what we know. To know God is therefore not to penetrate into and conceptually master the divine Mystery but to submit ourselves, humbly and lovingly, to the divine Mystery.
The second insight is that God is Holy Mystery. As Mystery, God dwells in inaccessible light. But as Holy Mystery, God has graciously given Godself to us in his Son and Spirit. In this self-gift to us, God reveals Godself to be loving relationship. But God is relationship not only to us but above all in God's inner and eternal life. That is basically what is meant when we confess that the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are "persons." They are "persons" because they are eternally related to one another: "Father," because he generates the Son and originates the Spirit; "Son," because he is born of the Father and originates the Spirit; and "Spirit," because he is originated both from the Father and the Son together. That is what is meant when it is said that God is love (1 Jn 4:8, 16). God is love not only because God loves us, but also and preeminently because there are loving relationships in God's very life.
The third insight is that God is compassionate, not only in the sense of being merciful, but in the sense of suffering for us and with us. Though omnipotent and unchangeable, God freely accepted suffering and death, out of love for and in solidarity with us, especially those who are poor and oppressed. Because of God's "compassion" we can hope that our suffering, however massive and absurd, will be overcome since suffering and even death itself have been taken into the bosom of the Trinitarian God.
Peter C. Phan, Ph.D., S.T.D., is the Warren-Blanding Professor of Religion and Culture in the Department of Religion and Religious Education, The Catholic University of America.