Fatherhood of God

JOHN A. MCGUCKIN

The Orthodox Church has a profound doctrine and understanding of the Father­hood of God, but it is predominantly one that is approached through the mediating priesthood of the Divine Logos, since the Holy Word of God, as St. Irenaeus informs us, is the “visible of the Father’s invisible” (Adv. Haer. 4.4.2; 4.6.5; Clement of Alexandria, Stromata 4.25). Orthodoxy understands, therefore, that who and what the Father is, is only given to the church through the revelation of the Divine Logos to the Creation, and thus the Father is approached by his world inextricably as the heart of the mystery of the Divine Trinity. For Orthodoxy (and in this it differs considerably from later western Christian traditions), the face of God manifested in the Creation is above all the face of the Logos of the Father. The epiphanies of God in the Old Testament, for example, are also taken, by and large, in the Orthodox tradition to be the manifestations of the Divine Word. The Word is the approach- ability of the Unapproachable and Utterly Transcendent God. He is the Revealer, and (with the Spirit) the Revealing of the Unseen Father. All apprehension of God, therefore, is understood in Orthodoxy to have been initiated by God himself. God is never truly an object of human discovery; always a self-revealing gift of his own graciousness.

The Father is, before ever the Creation was, the source of the outreach of the being of the Holy Trinity: the principle (Arche) of the Son and the Spirit, who share the Father’s own single being; not as if they have a common participation in some generic “divine substance,” but prop­erly and precisely as the Son and Spirit receiving the Father’s own very being as their own very being; a mystical doctrine which is the very heart of the ineffable Mystery of the Divine Trinity: that absolute oneness of God which is triune. This out­reach of the divine Father demonstrates the quintessential character of the God Who Is as a communion, and who ever reaches out to the Creation too as source of life and communion. The Father who is Unapproachable to his Creation in his divine essence is at one and the same moment intimately near to it as its sustain­ing Father and Lord and has so structured the existence of all things that he can be made known to noetic vision therein. God’s inner life, as an outreach that lies outside all created knowledge and is known only to the Trinity itself, is therefore imaged through the Son to the created order. This he patterns into being as that mode of existence which comes to life by the outreach of God beyond himself: God’s beneficence to creation. Communion with God is life. For the noetic creation, commu­nion with God is meant to be life eternal: the deification of humankind, and the angelic order’s permeation by the bliss of the divine vision.

The Unapproachability of the Father, as far as humans are concerned, is a question of the divine nature that cannot be fully apprehended by limited creaturehood. St. Gregory Palamas expressed this gulf between the creature and the Uncreated One in the clearest terms: “Nothing what­soever of all that is created has, or ever will have, the very slightest communion with the supreme nature, or nearness to it” (The 150 Chapters, ch. 78. PG 150. 1176).

Orthodox theology customarily describes this gulf between God and Creation (bridged by the condescension ofthe Divine Logos) in terms of the distinction between the essence (ousia) of God (utterly unknow­able to all outside the persons ofthe Trinity) and the energies (energeia) of God. The latter describe the impact the divine nature and trinitarian persons have upon the cosmos: both in its making and in its regen­eration. The nature is unapproachable, the energies reach out to all corners of the cos­mos and penetrate all being; but as these energies are uncreated, they are nevertheless the true and direct presence of God at work in his creation. God is thus known accu­rately in both his immanent and transcen­dent dimensions. It follows then that the Father, as the most supremely distant being by virtue of his incomprehensible transcendence, is also the most intimately near reality. He is the paradox of the ground of our being, remaining uncontained yet containing us (Eph. 4.6). It is also the case, for the Orthodox, that only Jesus can make known this God to the world, as Father. For what is at stake is not simply the reve­lation of deity as a “fatherly being” (which many religious systems might presume to deduce), but precisely the coming to know God as “The Father” of Our Lord Jesus Christ; the Father who is the Arche of the Holy Trinity. As the Lord himself taught: “All things have been delivered to me by my Father; and no one knows the Son except the Father; just as no one knows the Father except the Son and any one to whom the Son chooses to reveal him” (Mt. 11.27). Without this voice of the Logos telling us that the Supreme God is our Father, theo­logy would have remained locked in the sterility of ancient Greek thought about the “Uncaused Cause,” or would have remained infantile, using only anthropo­morphisms to speak of God.

The semantic terms of this revelation of the Word, regarding this known and yet unknown God, this stranger who is more familiar to us than ourselves, is at once the most sublime and the most homely, the most exalted and most humble: “Our Father.” In these two words lie the com­plete mystery of the Lord’s revelation to his church of the nature of God. It is a theological revelation which is an instruc­tion in prayer, not metaphysics. “Hallowed be your name” is the only fitting response if the message has been received and under­stood. “Our Father”: two words which are at once completely understandable by the most simple of minds (Mt. 11.25) and yet which remain transcendent in their depth and ramification. “May your Kingdom come; your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” Who can begin to imagine this fully, other than the Lord himself? When this eschatological mystery is complete, the revelation will correspond to “common sense.” Until then it remains an insight reserved fully for the beloved of God only (who alone are able to enter into that rela­tion of complete trust of the Father wherein life changes its aspect eschatologically), but “for all others on the outside it is given in riddles” (Mk. 4.11).

The Lord tells the church that like the love of a true father, God’s care overflows in restlessly energetic actions for the benefit of his children: “If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your chil­dren, how much more will your Father who is in heaven give good things to those who ask him!” (Mt. 7.11; Lk. 11.11–13). God stands over the world like a father over a family. The very instinct in humans to care derives from the archetype of God’s watchful care of his beloved: something the apostle repeats when he says: “For this reason I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named” (Eph. 3.14–15). This simple truth was given to the church as a profound revelation of the character of the Father, by the Lord himself, in the agony of his suffer­ing in the garden, when he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you; remove this cup from me; yet not my will, but yours be done” (Mk. 14.36). It was not given to the church by the Lord in a careless way or a random moment of optimism, but as a pattern of truth from the heart of the economy of his suffering. In joy, or in sorrow, the Lord taught that all things come to the beloved of the Father, as from the hands of one who gives the gifts of love, for: “Are not two sparrows sold for a penny? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s will” (Mt. 10.29). This teaching is meant to give us courage: “For even the hairs of your head are all numbered. Do not be afraid, therefore; you are of more value than many sparrows” (Mt. 10.30–31). And it does: even though it was spoken with great challenge from the Lord to the disciples, as he invited them to walk with him to Jerusalem, where they (rightfully) suspected he would come to his death, an event which would set them on the road to theirs.

The Lord, especially in his total aban­donment to the Father’s provident will throughout his ministry and in his Passion, modeled for disciples the illumined under­standing of the nature of the Father’s deal­ings with his elect: he challenged them to adopt his own perspectives of faith, that nothing comes by fate or chance, all comes from the invitation of the love of the Father; and it is manifested to them in love, and through love, for their perfection as chil­dren of God. If the disciples rise into this faith, accept it from the Lord’s hands, so it becomes a luminous metaphysical reality for them. God is not merely revealed as their Father, but more than this: they them­selves are now revealed as the children of God, in whom only the Love of God is manifested, and fate is overcome and cast aside, in favor of a God-graced destiny. What it is for those who are not the beloved children, is not said, and is obscure to theology; though God is all-merciful and infinitely generous.

Our God is the Father of Mercies (2Cor. 1.3), the loving Father of the beloved: outside that relationship there is no knowl­edge of the true God; intimations of a self­made God, perhaps, which de facto prove to be false. Those who have glimpsed the light of this most simple of revelations of the inner structure of God’s dealings with his cosmos understand in the same moment that they are lifted out of childish passivity to become “as gods” for others in their turn: “Be children of your Father who is in heaven,” the Lord told his church, “For he makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain upon the just and the unjust alike” (Mt. 5.45). This is why the Lord’s command (otherwise so impossible) can be fulfilled, to “Be as perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect” (Mt. 5.48), which is by loving without thought of cost, as the Father does. The summation of all ethics is this vital knowledge of how loving the Father is: “Be merciful, even as your Father is merciful” (Lk. 6.36), which pre­serves the pun in parallel to the Matthaean version (Mt. 5.8) by removing the initial tau from teleos (perfect) to make it eleos (mer­ciful). Only the Father’s love can make men and women rise to the stature of the beloved children of light (1Thes. 5.5), for this is more than a mere philanthropy, it is a mystically graced lifestyle that begins to embrace all men and women in a power of love that exceeds the ordinary human capacity for affection, and takes on the character of the selfless “willing of the good of others” that marks God’s character vis-a-vis his creation.

Only in this stature, as God’s children of light, acting from the light of the Spirit and in the communion of the Son, can men and women understand the nature of God, as it is at its heart; “in spirit and in truth” (Jn. 4.24). For those who have become the children of God, in Christ and his transfig­uring Spirit, all is changed. The world is utterly changed in that moment: essentially and metaphysically altered. The face of God is shown to be other than it could possibly have been understood to have been from the evidence of the world (so-called “natural theology”). Fate dies on the vine in that instant, and destiny flowers out in a binding together of creature and Creator, a fashioning of a new covenant that grows from the placing of the child’s hand in that of the Father; following the example of the divine Son, who trusted his Father in all things, and made of the dark and bitter cross a source of light for the cosmos; chal­lenging his disciples not to lose faith: “Let not your hearts be troubled; trust in God, trust also in me” (Jn. 14.1). This light falls upon a still troubled and darkened world where humans who resist the Fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of humanity continue to hold others in bitter forms of bondage. But even this fact reveals to the children of God paths to subvert the man­ifold forms of evil, for the enlightenment and liberation of the suffering. So it is that the “children of the day” fulfill the Lord’s own urgent prayer: “Father, May your king­dom come! May your will be done on earth as it is in heaven.”

The New Testament revelation of the Father is therefore at once a most simple one and an immensely complex one; one that is bound up in the Lord’s own pilgrim­age to his cross, and in the disciples’ unfolding understanding of what the Lord himself meant by “Trust” (Pistis, faith) in God. It remains the case to this day, in the ongoing spiritual life of the church, that the Lord’s faithful make their own progress into the active understanding of God’s Father­hood as they walk alongside their Lord, and learn total abandonment to the will of the Father for their good; the Father who knows what we need before we ask him (Mt. 6.8). The understanding of God as Father is a given revelation. It is also an ongoing mystery of the Spirit which is only accessible to those who walk with the Lord, and thus share in his own Sonship. For it is through his Sonship that we have all become co-heirs (Rom. 8.17); in no other way is this possible.

The church fathers pondered this mys­tery of God the Father most deeply and left their characteristic marks on all subsequent Orthodox theology. For most of them, the two primary truths theology ought to con­fess about the Father are, firstly, the fact that it is he himself who directly wills and blesses the creation of all things as a good and light- filled act of beneficence, through the medium of his Son and Logos; and sec­ondly, the manner in which the human mind falters in the face of describing God truly. The first thesis was designed to stand against all manner of Gnostics who believed that they could only defend the divine transcendence by denying a directly divine volition of creation. The second was comparable to the building of a fence of “reverent diffidence” around those affirma­tions that the feeble human mind could assert about the One who ultimately transcends. The latter amounts to the so- called “Apophatic” tradition of Orthodox thought, deriving its name from the Greek term meaning “to turn away from speech.” It is most clearly exemplified in the theolo­gian Dionysios the Areopagite (especially in his short but dense treatise The Mystical Theology), but it was a tradition within the church’s theologians long before Dionysios. In the apophatic approach, the titles of God (“Lord” connoting his power, “Light” connoting his mercy, “Fire” connoting his restless energy, and so on) always describe the actions of God in the cosmos, rather than the nature of God in himself, which remains beyond the scope of human enquiry, except insofar as some of the revelations of the Logos have “imaged” it to the church in specific revelations. For Orthodoxy, “Father” is not a title, rather the Holy Name itself, which replaces the sacred Tetragrammaton of the Old Testament dispensation.

Most public prayer in the Orthodox Church tends to be addressed to Jesus or to the Trinity. The Father is often the focus, however, of perhaps the greatest and most solemn prayer of the church, namely the Anaphora or Great Eucharistic Prayer. This, too, of course, is set in a trinitarian context, if not explicitly so, then by the terms of the final doxology, but the Great Eucharistic consecratory prayer often lifts its eyes and heart to the Father directly. We may fittingly end with a citation of the invocation of God as Father which begins the Eucharistic Anaphora, and which offers thanks for those particular characteristics of his fatherly love: his irrepressible condescension, his mercy, and his gift of life:

It is fitting and right to hymn you, to bless you, to praise you, to give you thanks, and worship you in every place of your dominion; for you are God, ineffable, incomprehensible, invisible, inconceivable, ever-existing, eter­nally the same, You and your only-begotten Son, and your Holy Spirit. You brought us out from non-existence into being, and when we had fallen, you raised us up again, and left nothing undone until you had brought us up to heaven, and granted us the Kingdom that is to come. For all these things we give thanks to you, and to your only-begotten Son, and to your Holy Spirit; for all the ben­efits that we have received, both known and unknown, manifest and hidden. We thank you also for this liturgy which you have been pleased to accept from our hands, even though there stand around you thousands of archangels and tens of thousands of angels, the Cherubim and the Seraphim, six-winged and many-eyed, soaring aloft upon their wings, singing the triumphant hymn, shouting, proclaiming and saying: Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord of Hosts. Heaven and earth are full of your glory. Hosannah in the highest. Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord. Hosannah in the highest. (Liturgy of St. John Chrysostom)

SEE ALSO: Christ; Contemporary Orthodox Theology; Deification; Holy Spirit; Holy Trinity; Incarnation (of the Logos); Logos Theology; Perichoresis; St. Dionysius the Areopagite; St. Gregory Palamas (1296–1359)

REFERENCES AND SUGGESTED READINGS

Bentley-Hart, D. (2003) The Beauty of the Infinite: The Aesthetics of Christian Faith. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans.

McGuckin, J. A. (1994) “Perceiving Light from Light in Light: The Trinitarian Theology of St. Gregory The Theologian,” Greek Orthodox Theological Review 39: 1–2, 7–32.

McGuckin, J. A. (2008) The Orthodox Church: An Introduction to Its History, Theology and Spiritual Culture. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Russell, N. (2004) The Doctrine of Deification in the Greek Patristic Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Staniloae, D. (1998) The Experience of God: Orthodox Dogmatic Theology Vol. 1: Revelation and the Knowledge of the Triune God. Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press.