The God Who Names Himself: Why Do We Call God ‘Father'?

 by   R. Albert Mohler, Jr.                                                                                                                            Vol. VII, No. 1, January 1994

[Al Mohler is the new president of Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, the oldest SBC seminary, in Louisville, KY. This article was published as an editorial in The Christian Index, the Georgia state Baptist paper when Mohler was its editor.]

"A masculine God is an inadequate God." That statement, written by one identified as "an ordained Southern Baptist pastor," sets the stage for what will almost certainly be the most intense theological debate of this generation.

The controversy over language for God is as old as the Christian church – indeed, it has its roots in Moses's plea that God reveal to him His name. Throughout Scripture, God did just that, revealing Himself through His names, and definitively and finally through His Son, Jesus the Christ.

The opening statement came from Jane Aldredge Clanton, a chaplain at Houston Baptist Medical Center in Texas, who argues in her book, In Whose Image?, that masculine God language "enslaves the church to patriarchal culture," thus limiting both men and women.

This debate has seethed within the mainline protestant denominations for several years, and it has now boiled over into the Southern Baptist Convention – and not just through Clanton's book. Baptists hard pressed to recognize a theological issue when it slaps them in the face are going to have a difficult time escaping this assault, and Christians of all denominations had better count the cost of joining the revisionist God-language agenda.

In many quarters of what claims to be the Christian church traditional biblical language for God has been banished – at least any references to God as Father or other masculine terminology. In place of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, some now baptize in the names of "Creator, Sustainer, and Comforter." References to Jesus Christ as the Son of Man (His own name for Himself) have been rejected in favor of "the Human One."

Some churches now use an Inclusive Language Lectionary which inserts feminist God-language in place of biblical terminology. Often, masculine pronouns are purposely rejected and impersonal terminology replaces the intensely personal language God has used to describe and name Himself.

Make no mistake: The battle over God-language is not a trivial matter of interest only to academic theologians. It is a battle over the God who is worshipped and the integrity of the Christian faith.

We do not name God. The Almighty sovereign of the universe has named Himself through Scripture and through the Son. The Bible reveals the richness of God's self-disclosure through divine names which range from Rock to Deliverer, but the primary emphasis is always upon the intensely personal names by which God has named Himself. The names reveal the divine reality, though no human word can fully designate the eternal Word.

Efforts to reject "Lord" and "King" (too masculine and authoritarian) and especially "Father" (ditto) in favor of feminine or "gender-neutral" terms are not mere matters of language – they would change the very character and identity of the God so designated.

Clanton suggests that the church adopt an "androgynous" concept of God, a blending of male and female. But this is precisely the heresy which is precluded by biblical God-language. God is not male – He is Spirit and bears no physical gender. But God is not gender-confused. He has revealed Himself in masculine terms, thus avoiding any confusion with the fertility cults and assorted paganisms of the Canaanites, Romans, and late twentieth-century Americans.

God clearly transcends human categories – even the category of Father. In a few passages God's love is even described in motherly terms. But God never named Himself "Mother," and the church has rightly resisted any move to adopt this language as a designation for the Almighty.

The language we employ reveals the God we seek to worship. True worship is not a matter of human invention, but of our submission to God and His revealed truth. Efforts to replace God's own self-designation with modern inventions such as "Bakerwoman God" are not revisions of language – they are a usurpation of God's own privilege in naming Himself.

We have no right to call God "Father" – other than the fact that He has so named Himself. As a human invention, the naming of God as "Father' 'is nothing less than unspeakable arrogance. But God in His mercy has named Himself our Father. He has done so definitively through His Son, who called God His Father, and taught His disciples to do likewise.

Attempts to revolutionize God-language are an attack upon the doctrine of the Trinity.

God has revealed Himself as one in three persons – not three impersonal functions. The integrity of the Christian faith stands or falls on the doctrine of the Trinity, and in many cases it has fallen.

The words we speak betray the faith we hold. This is not a modern problem; it has been the church's perpetual challenge. We should hear again the centuries-old advice of Hilary of Poitiers: "... Let us assume that God has full knowledge of Himself, and bow with humble reverence to His Words. For He Whom we can know through His utterances is the fitting witness concerning Himself." And He is a God Who takes His name seriously.