Can we stop calling God 'Father'?

Reflection on recent debates in the C of E to adopt more inclusive language in our prayers.

A traditional depiction of the Trinity, with Father and Son as male. From the Venerable English College Chapel.

Should the words of the Lord’s Prayer be changed? Can they? These questions are now apparently up for debate in the Church of England. Gender-inclusivity is becoming more and more important to the society around us, and using words like Father and Son can, allegedly, perpetuate patriarchal structures and exclusionary beliefs in the Church. Predictably, this discussion has provoked controversy, and widened the gulf between progressives and conservatives in the Anglican communion. Can the prayers be changed? Can we call God Mother just as easily as we call God our Father? Could we adapt the Lord’s Prayer? The answer is more complicated than you would think.

The first point of note is that the Lord’s Prayer which Jesus taught his disciples (as recorded in both Matthew and Luke’s Gospels) is not so much a ‘fixed’ prayer as a pattern of prayer; each part of it represents an attitude of prayer and its sequence teaches us the correct order of prayer. It begins by an invocation of God, ‘Our Father, who art in heaven,’ an acknowledgement of God’s holiness ‘hallowed be thy name’ and a submission of will ‘thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.’ Having rightly acknowledged God, offered praise, and submitted our will to God’s will, we move to the petitions; a petition for sustenance, ‘give us this day our daily bread’ then for forgiveness ‘forgive us our trespasses’ according to the quality of our own mercy ‘as we forgive those…’, and to be protected from sin and death ‘lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.’ This pattern of prayer does not need to follow the exact wording given by Jesus. In my own prayer life, I have used the Lord’s prayer as a starting point, meditating slowly over each line and using it as the pattern for my own prayers.

The second point worthy of note was made by a C of E spokesperson “Christians have recognized since ancient times that God is neither male nor female.” Indeed, God is a transcendent God, God cannot be limited by gender or any other physical or phenomenological dimensions. God exists, bodiless, outside of time and space and so the categories of time and space do not express the depth of the reality of God. Every description of God in the bible, which describes him as light, a just judge, a mighty king, valiant in war, a consuming fire, a sun and a shield, is a metaphor. It explains something of the nature of God without fully encompassing God. There are feminine descriptions applied to God (notably, the book of Wisdom which refers to God’s Wisdom in explicitly female terms, despite the later revelation of the Logos, the wisdom of God, in the form of the man Jesus Christ).

These things being the case, it would perhaps not be too much of a problem to use neutral language in private prayer. In fact, in pondering over this question I found great enjoyment in using the pattern of prayer given by Jesus in different words;

Creator God, who dwells among us,

You are great and worthy of all praise.

Reign here on earth, as you reign in heaven,

Give us what we need this day,

Forgive us just as we forgive others,

Let us not fall into temptation,

Nor into the snares of evil.

At this point, my Catholic brothers and sisters might be thinking I’ve lost my mind, that something has addled me since ordination. But, as I said at the start, the question is more complicated than you might think.

Although there is no problem with using neutral language to describe a transcendent God, God’s transcendence is not the limit of our understanding. To a Christian, God is not merely transcendent but is radically present to us through the incarnation; God in fact took on human flesh and became a man. He, at least in relation to the second person of the Trinity, is not negotiable because His incarnation in time has eternal consequences. The second person of the Trinity is fully a human man and fully God hypostatically united in the person of Jesus Christ; He has a physical body, and that body is male. This isn’t a metaphor but a reality.

What is also a reality is the means by which Jesus revealed God to us. Jesus didn’t use the language of distance which marked the Old Testament, he didn’t generally use titles like Lord, he didn’t refer to God as I AM, instead he called God ‘Father’ – in fact He called Him Abba, a colloquial and familiar term more like 'Dad' than 'Father'. Jesus, the second person of the Trinity, is in the privileged position to know the nature and desires of the first person. The completion of God’s self-revelation, the Son, revealed God to be His Father, not His Mother. The Lord’s prayer is a pattern of prayer, but it is also a revelation of a specific relationship; the relationship between the Son and His Father. It is an intimate prayer, a dialogue between a father and a son, which can’t be made into something neutral (or gender-flipped) without robbing it of its intimacy and authenticity.

This is important, because as Christians we are also invited into the intimacy of that conversation; to participate in Jesus’ prayer to the Father as members of Jesus’ body. A mother is not a father, paternity and maternity are different things, and the Spirit given to us cries out from the depths of our being “Abba! Father!” (Gal 4:6) It expresses a longing for a particular relationship with a father, not a mother.

Equally important is the way our public prayer (lex orandi) both expresses and forms our beliefs (lex credendi) and our way of living (lex vivendi). If we change the words of the Lord’s prayer, or remove references to the Father from our public prayer, we risk losing our sense of God’s paternity altogether. This is problematic for two reasons. First, we lose God’s authentic self-revelation; He willed us to know Him as Father and communicated his will through the Son who alone knows Him. Losing this is to move back from the intimacy of the New Covenant to the many and varied metaphors of the Old.

Second, we risk unravelling the foundations of the Church in Baptism. Jesus commanded us to Baptise “in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit” – neutralising this language (often to “creator, redeemer, and sanctifier”) is not inclusive but reductive. The Baptismal formula baptises us in the name of the three distinct Persons of the Trinity by using their names, but a revised formula reduces them from name to function. It is especially problematic because the names differentiate the Trinity but the functions do not; every person of the Trinity is equally the creator, the redeemer, and the sanctifier. This hollowing out is not only a theoretical problem but a concrete one – it invalidates the Baptism. A person baptised with any other words than those given by Jesus is not actually Baptised and does not therefore belong to the Church.

While God’s transcendence is an article of faith, so too is the Father’s Paternity and the Son’s Filiality. These cannot be abandoned without undermining the intimacy and full authenticity of our Faith, and without unravelling the Church itself. We should, in this matter, defer to the "better theologian" we have in Jesus Christ and revel in the true inclusivity of the Good News; that every human being, regardless of race or sex, is invited to call God their Father, and be adopted as members of His Son's body, and to relate to Him not in the cold distance of titles but in the warmth and intimacy of family.