Fatherhood 1

Pastor Rolf Preus

Elders’ Retreat at Concordia, St. Paul, Minnesota

February 4, 2017

Part One: The Fatherhood of God and the Christian Father

The mystery of the Holy Trinity and the incarnation of our Lord Jesus Christ are the two

greatest mysteries of our Christian religion. The mystery is beyond human comprehension.

The Father begets the Son from eternity. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father. The

Holy Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father and the Son. We cannot understand how

this can be, but the confession of this mystery is not accidental to our Christian faith. It is

essential. We confess at the conclusion of the Athanasian Creed:

This is the catholic faith; whoever does not believe it faithfully and firmly cannot be

saved.

We use metaphors when we talk about God. He is not literally a shepherd, a rock, or a

fortress. When we call God Father we are not using a metaphor. In Ephesians 3:14-15 St.

Paul writes:

For this reason I bow my knees to the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whom

the whole family in heaven and earth is named.

In the Greek, the word father and family have the same root. Paul is saying that human

fatherhood gets its name from the Fatherhood of God. We don’t understand God the Father

in heaven from an analogy with the fatherhood of fathers here on earth. It is the other way

around. We learn what a human father is and ought to be by listening to what God says

about his Fatherhood. God’s Fatherhood is in the first instance the eternal relationship

between the Father and the Son. Our relationship to God as Father is through the Son. The

Father/Son relationship in the Godhead is eternal. The Son is eternally begotten of the

Father. Our relationship to our Father in heaven is by adoption in time.

There is the story of an argument between the Muslim and the Christian concerning God.

As you know, the Muslim god neither begets nor is begotten. Muslims view the almighty

power of their god as his greatest attribute. Christians view the love of God as his greatest

attribute. The Muslim told the Christian that the Christian’s God was inferior to the

Muslim’s god because love cannot exist without someone to love. If God’s greatest attribute

is love, to exercise his greatest attribute requires someone to love and that makes God

dependent on that someone. That makes God weak. The Christian replied to the Muslim’s

argument by pointing out that the Father loved the Son from eternity. There never was a

time when the Father was not the Father of the Son and there never was a time when the

Son was not the Son of the Father. The love between the persons of the Godhead is as

eternal as God himself.

So the Fatherhood of God, far from being a mere analogy from human fatherhood, is from

everlasting to everlasting. To know God is to know him as the Father of our Lord Jesus

Christ. As Jesus said in his high priestly prayer, “This is eternal life: that they may know

you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent.” (John 17:3)

The Bible speaks of God as he is and as he acts. God is the Father of the Son. God is the Son

of the Father. God is the Holy Spirit who proceeds from the Father and the Son. The

relationship between the persons of the Godhead that is described by the words, beget,

begotten, and proceeding is an eternal relationship.

The Bible also speaks of God as he acts. The Father sends the Son. The Son sends the Spirit.

When the Father sends the Son he reveals himself in the Son. In sending the Son, he did not

send him in his uncovered deity. He sent him to be incarnate by the Holy Spirit of the

Virgin Mary and to be made man. It is in the manhood of Jesus that we see God. It is

specifically at the cross where the God-man suffers and dies for the sin of the world that we

see the true nature of our Father in heaven. Love defines him. Love is why he sent Jesus.

Love is revealed on the cross where our God and brother Jesus turns aside all divine anger

against us sinners and establishes peace.

It is this same Jesus who invited us to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven.” We call it the

Lord’s Prayer because the Lord Jesus taught us to pray it. We call it the Lord’s Prayer

because it is because the Lord Jesus Christ is our Mediator before God and when the Lord

Jesus is our Mediator before God, God is our dear, loving, gracious Father.

There is no Fatherhood of God without Jesus Christ. There is no Christ without the Holy

Spirit. The Fatherhood of God is a uniquely Christian belief. The Muslim god is not the

Father. Any monotheistic so called “god” who is not the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ is

an idol and no Father at all. He cannot answer prayer. He cannot help anyone in any way.

He’s an invention of the human mind.

False doctrine doesn’t stand still. It is constantly mutating, as the devil tries new tricks to

con Christians into thinking he’s an angel of light. There is the “light” of Freemasonry – out

of fashion nowadays, as the younger generation has little time for such things – that

promotes a syncretistic religion whereby all gods are basically the same. They talk about

the fatherhood of god. There was the religious humanism of the folk music of the sixties

that featured Peter, Paul, and Mary singing, “Because All Men Are Brothers,” to the tune of

“O Sacred Head Now Wounded.” With the feminist assault, the syncretistic father-god of

freemasonry and the humanistic father-god of the now generation have given way to the

gender-free god or goddess of the twenty first century.

On Trinity Sunday, 1999, as I was driving north on I-29 between Mayville and Grand Forks,

North Dakota, I heard a sermon on the radio from a pastor of a congregation of the ELCA in

Grand Forks in which he said that, while we may call God Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, it is

fine to refer to him, as a female colleague of his liked to do, as “Mother, Lover, and Friend.”

“Mother, Lover, and Friend” is for some pretty much the same thing as Father, Son, and

Holy Spirit. That’s because they remake God in their own image and fashion him into an

idol.

Whether the denigration of the office of father in our homes led to the rise of the

androgynous god/goddess, or whether the loss of the right understanding of the

Fatherhood of God led to the decline of the office of father, the Fatherhood of God and office

of Christian father are bound together. That should not surprise us inasmuch as the father

of the home is God’s representative.

God is our Father and the Church is our mother. It was St. Cyprian of Carthage who, in the

third century, famously said: “He can no longer have God for his Father who has not the

Church for his mother.” In the twenty first century we must also say, “He who turns God

the Father into God the mother cannot claim the church as his mother. To teach that God

may be addressed equally as both mother and father is to deny God. He who identifies

himself as I AM does not exist as mother.

There are nouns that use the female gender and are also used to identify God. For example,

wisdom takes the female gender and is used by Solomon in the Proverbs to refer to God,

specifically the second person of the Trinity. Jesus uses the simile of a hen gathering her

chicks under her wings to express his desire to gather Israel together. The use of such

language does not make God female.

But then, neither is God male, if by male we mean everything that pertains to human

maleness. A male human being has a body that, under normal circumstances, has the

capacity to engage in sexual activity with a woman that can result in procreation. God, on

the other hand, has no body. He is a spirit. Thus, speaking of God as a male is confusing.

Maleness and femaleness entail bodily functions and bodily differences.

The Bible uses anthropomorphisms when referring to God as if God were a human being.

He walks in the garden, he has a right hand, and he sits on a throne. These are

anthropomorphisms: God is being depicted as if he is a human being. The Mormon religion

takes biblical anthropomorphisms literally, and teaches that God possesses human form. In

fact, they teach that God used to be a man. Their doctrine of eternal progression says: As

man is, so God once was; as God is, so man may become.

God is not a man. He does not have a body. God is a spirit. When we speak of him as he has

revealed himself in the Holy Scriptures, we speak of him as the Father who begets and as

the Son who is begotten and as the Holy Spirit who proceeds. When speaking of the Son,

who became flesh and blood, we follow the pattern of sound words contained in the

Athanasian Creed, where we confess concerning the oneness of Christ’s person, that he is

one Christ, “not by the conversion of the divinity into flesh, but by the assumption of the

humanity into God.” God did not change into a man. God cannot change. God remained

God when he became a man.

The Fatherhood of God is depicted in Scripture in terms of human fatherhood by the use of

similes. For example, in Psalm 103:13, David writes, “As a father pities his children, so the

LORD pities those who fear him.” These beautiful words have inspired beautiful hymns. It

will be instructive for us to consider how one of these hymns has been rendered in our

hymnals in recent years. Consider the hymn, “My Soul, Now Bless Thy Maker,” hymn #34

in The Lutheran Hymnal, published in 1941. Stanza three begins with these words:

For as a tender Father

Hath pity on his children here,

He in his arms will gather

All who are His in childlike fear. (TLH 34 stanza 3)

In Lutheran Worship, published in 1982, the wording of that verse was changed to:

For as a loving mother

Has pity on her children here,

God in his arms will gather

All those who him like children fear. (LW 453 stanza 3)

The Lutheran Service Book, published in 2006, returned to the former wording:

For as a tender father

Has pity on His children here,

God in His arms will gather

All who are His in childlike fear. (LSB 820 stanza 3)

LSB corrected an error introduced by LW. The error in LW was not that it compared God’s

love and a mother’s love. The error was that it eliminated the comparison of God’s love and

a father’s love. The eternal Son of the Father teaches Christian fathers what fatherhood is

all about when he says, “Be merciful, as your Father is merciful.” (Luke 6:36)

We will examine feminism a bit more closely later on today, but at this point, suffice it to

say, that an underlying assumption of the feminist creed is that patriarchy is bad. It is

inherently abusive, exploitative, and degrading to women. That’s not true. Patriarchy – the

rule of fathers – among us Christians derives from the biblical teaching of the Fatherhood of

God. That is the very opposite of abusive. The love of God the Father for his dear Son is

from everlasting to everlasting. It has never wavered. It has never been withdrawn. Even

when Jesus was bearing the sin of the world and God’s wrath against it, so that he cried out,

in fulfillment of the Psalm, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” at no time was

his communion with the Father broken. When he died his last words were: “Father, into

your hands I commend my spirit.” (Luke 23:46) Our heavenly Father is full of compassion.

For Christ’s sake, because of the Father’s love for his only begotten Son, because of the

merits of Jesus, his obedience, his righteousness, and his suffering, our Father in heaven

receives our prayers. When we pray, “Our Father,” by the invitation of Jesus, we do so with

all boldness and confidence that he hears us as a dear father hears his dear children.

The Christian father prays “Our Father” knowing that the office he holds is sanctified by the

eternal love that exists between God the Father and his only begotten Son. That eternal

love was revealed in space and time on Calvary, where Jesus took away our sins. All our

sins and failures as fathers were washed away. There we were reconciled to God. There,

where the blood of God’s Son is shed for us all, we fathers find the grace to do what God

gives fathers to do.