Why do people reject the father concept of God? Of the various reasons, I consider two here. First, some fathers are terrible parents. Second, generations of sensitive, well-informed, and ethically committed persons have been persuaded that the father concept of God (at least without mention of the motherhood of God) is sexist. To this second concern, I respond with selections from chapters on scientific, philosophical, and spiritual living in my book, Living in Truth, Beauty, and Goodness.
On the psychological level, we participate in evolution by personal growth. As we grow spiritually, we mature our concept of God and increasingly relate to others as family. Psychology in the person of Sigmund Freud put up roadblocks to the concept of God as our Father and the teaching that we should love our neighbor as ourselves. Freud found that a child’s first image of God tends to come from the child’s father. Since the child’s relation with the mother is so close biologically, the father is typically the first prominent, genuinely other person that the child comes to recognize as such.[1] The young child tends to idealize this other and to project this image in the earliest stage of religious development. But this fact is part of the story, not the heart of it.
If we replace Freud’s science-centered account with a spiritually centered one, we may interpret the child’s early image of God as Father as a divinely designed, evolutionary scaffolding to be gradually outshone by an increasingly spiritual realization of God’s parental love.[2] In this interpretation, the fatherhood of God can be both an evolutionary image arising in the natural mind and also a spiritual truth. In other words, early in life, the Father-concept of God is a metaphor based on the child’s experience of the earthly father. However, in a spiritually maturing person who continues to relate with God as Father, images from childhood may be left behind.[3] The image of the Creator as an old man with flowing white hair and beard is portrayed in a stunning painting by William Blake, The Ancient of Days. Spiritual maturity may be moved by such art; but it can also freely relate without such images.
From chapter 2 on philosophical living. Culture warrs are, in a way, struggles over meaning; and when they generate intolerance for people because of the diverse usage of terms, meaning suffers. Language must change over time, and intelligent criticism helps us to make those changes thoughtfully and responsibly; thus high-quality thinking seeks humane expression in a public arena rent by the claims of opposing groups. Culture wars involving religion obscure divine meaning: everything is pulled down to the level of the social-political struggle.
If we were to jettison every word whose history reveals associated abuses, we would disconnect ourselves from the deeper concepts and experiences that some of these words symbolize, and our ability to think, understand, and communicate would be hampered. It is often wiser to keep terms that refer to something real and important.
The language of conceptual clarity differs from the language of proclamation. A central truth set forth in this new philosophy of living is expressed in the phrase “the universal family”; but in my view the conceptual core of this phrase is more clearly expressed in terms of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. In many circles, we have been taught that this terminology is sexist, a legacy of religion’s complicity with a patriarchal social order. Should we therefore withdraw all use of such terminology? After all, a great truth can be expressed in other ways; much of the meaning in the concept of the family of God can be communicated by speaking of the parental love of God and the siblinghood or solidarity of humankind. And people have other reasons for naming God in language that expresses various concepts. But those who have rejected or are doubtful about the Father-concept of God deserve some clarification to remove barriers and open the way to a new understanding. Here is one woman’s perspective on the matter:
Many women have problems with the religious use of Father language, and the men who love and support them often share their concern. But one of the deeper problems underlying the reaction to so-called sexist terminology often remains hidden or untended to. Speaking from my own experience—which I believe is common among women—for most of my life I wanted nothing to do with the idea of God as Father because my relationship with my own father was so troubled. Of what use would a “male god” be to me? That would be the last place I would look to find nurture, understanding, unconditional love.
Decades of psychological and meditative therapies and processes to try to “heal the father wound” resulted in almost no change. It took a radical inner revelation in my early fifties of God as Father for the real healing to begin. And we’re not talking here about the Old Man in the Sky with a Long Beard, a punitive and scary God that so many little girls have grown up being told they must obey . . . or else! Even though my father was no longer on this earth when I had that revelation, I became aware from a succession of dreams after that a profound healing had taken place between us. And I could see the results in my relationships with men, which became much healthier and more stable after that.
For many seekers of truth—both women and men—the necessary rejection of immature and often damaging notions of God accumulated in childhood has unfortunately slammed the door on a true inquiry into the nature of God as Father. But it’s never too late to open that door again. As someone who spent thirty years an Eastern spiritual path that is not God-centered, I can say that there is no contradiction between the realization of the Absolute and the recognition that one is a son or daughter of a personal God. To me, this is the true vision of East meeting West.
From the chapter on spiritual living. Today, the recognition of the universal family is expanding. In addition to experiencing divinely Fatherly love, with its greater emphasis on purpose, creative design, and will, we experience divinely Motherly love, with its greater emphasis on personal, responsive, expressive, merciful, encompassing, hands-on nurturing qualities. These varieties in the expression of divine love should not lead back to the polytheism transcended by Jews, Muslims, and others. The more we live the truths of the universal family, the more the truth of the unity of God becomes a reality in our experience. In my view, that unity is expanded, not broken, by this testimony from nineteenth-century preacher Rebecca Jackson. “I saw that night, for the first time, a Mother in the Deity. This indeed was a new scene, a new doctrine to me. But I knowed when I got it, and I was obedient to the heavenly vision. . . . And was I not glad when I found that I had a Mother! And that night She gave me a tongue to tell it! The spirit of weeping was upon me, and it fell on all the assembly. And though they never heard it before, I was made able by Her Holy Spirit of Wisdom to make it so plain that a child could understand it.”[4]
[1] I am indebted to Claire Thurston for this step in the reasoning.
[2] De Luca, Freud and Religious Experience. See also Rizzuto, Birth of God. A more reductionistic view is implied in Fowler, Stages of Faith.
[3] A spiritually mature concept of God as our Father is not a gendered metaphor projecting a social image of a biological male. The spiritually mature concept is not a metaphor or image at all but rather a realization of relationship. To be sure, any concept will always be short of the mystery of God’s infinite and eternal nature. The vast literature on this topic generally affirms the equality of women with men and shows growing recognition of motherly love in God.
[4] Johnson, She Who Is, 170. Some thinkers have proposed that women should develop a concept of a female deity to worship, as men worship a male deity. Although I can empathize with the idea, I regard male and female as biological categories that may be misleading if projected into the spiritual realm. The larger truth is that both men and women can express divinely Fatherly love and divinely Motherly mercy. The one God has been portrayed as having both kinds of quality. “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you” (Isa. 66.13). Moreover, Jesus compared himself to a mother hen, and one of his kingdom parables features a woman searching for a lost coin (Luke 13:34 and 15:8-10). When we know the God of mercy and love as an undivided spirit presence, these problems lose their sharp edge. Linear thinking and static concepts block progress in the experience of mystery.
