The Faces of God: God as Father

"God is not an object," screams my Theology and Ethics Professor during our first day in Seminary.  "Huh," I thought, "what a way to begin three years of spiritual formation!"  I realized his point in time--and he effectively made his point, over, and over, and over again--is that we tend to turn God into an object, a convenient and handy object.  There's a human tendency to do this and it can be spiritually dangerous.

The image of God as the grand old man in the sky works as a child, it is less helpful to me as an adult.  Yes, I grew up with that image, a God who lives high up in the heavens surveying creation and keeping count on our sins and offenses.  This idea is even less helpful as a sinning adult!  The problem with the grand old man image is that some faithful refuse to let go of it--God is father and that's that.  Pastorally speaking, this is also less helpful.  If we maintain that image or face of God, we lose sight of the creative God who created humankind in "our image" (NRSV translation).  God created us to be in relationship with us, not to leave us to our devices and demise.  We need God just as God needs us--a dynamic ongoing salvation history from God establishing the covenant with Abraham all the way to the Word made flesh in the Incarnation.  This relationship is repeatedly given credit throughout scripture.  

The God on high who sits in judgement does not help a young rape victim who is faced with the difficult decision over abortion, or the elderly man who keeps begging God to let him die.  We seek, above anything else, a God of Compassion.  "I AM the I AM," to me means that God is the God who remembers, the God who saves, the God who listens, the God who can change God's mind.  I think of God saying, "I AM the compassionate one."  Some remote God does not intervene in the course of human history.  A remote God does not enter into covenants with humanity, much less seek to fulfill them. Ours is a God of relationship.

I think it is extremely important to see that our ideas of God, and the many faces of God, change as our understanding--based on experience--changes.  The grand old man works for a small child, but as that child grows, so too does the image.  If God has been limited to an object, then the object remains static and unable to grow into a deep relationship with creation.  

In Book One of Saint Augustine's Confessions (Oxford, Penguin Ed.), Augustine writes, "how shall I call upon my God, my God and Lord?  Surely when I call on him, I am calling on him to come to me.  But what place is there in me where my God can enter into. . . Lord my God, is there any room in me which can contain you?  Can heaven and earth, which you have made in which you have made me, 

contain you?"

"We need God just as God needs us."

Augustine goes on to ask, "who then are you, my God. . . most high, utterly good. . . deeply hidden yet most intimately present, perfection of both beauty and strength, stable and incomprehensible, immutable and yet changing all things, never new, never old. . .In your mercies, Lord God, tell me what you are to me. 'Say to my soul, I am your salvation (Ps. 34:3). Speak to me so that I may hear.  See the ears of my hearts are before you, Lord.  Open them and 'say to my soul, I am your salvation.'  After that utterance I will run and lay hold on you. Do not hide your face from me.  Lest I die, let me die so that I may see it."

Even after the centuries when Augustine wrote this, we still wrestle with the many faces of God.  Wrestling is part of the journey of faith.  Take to heart one Augustine's most famous quotation from Confessions, "our heart is restless until it rests in you" (Oxford Penguin Ed.).We should wrestle with seeing God as a black woman, a Chinese teenager, or an Inuit man. Otherwise, I think we reduce God in size--we reduce the believer's capacity for the need of a certain face of God that speaks to them.  God is not an object!  And please, this is not reducing God to relativism either!  I think this idea is deeply embedded in the tradition of Byzantine iconography, where one is not allowed to write or paint a human image of God.  

It has taken me many years to grow in my relationship with God and how I see God.  I've stopped referring to God as just "Father" or any masculine reference for that matter.  God indeed has many faces, many voices (spoken and silent), and above all, God longs for us as we long to be in relationship with God.  We also need feminine imagery for God--God is also "Mother," but more on that subject later.