Our Father

I’m now OK with ‘God as father’. God is described in the Bible as all sorts of things: rock, shepherd, king, judge, warrior, nursing mother, potter, birthing woman, mother hen, mother bear, amongst numerous other images.

Now, since God came first, and people came along later, and God is not modelled after man but the other way round, God being father is not exhaustive and is not to be understood first by looking at human males as the model; rather, fatherhood is one aspect of God, and represents a number of different metaphysical roles, for instance particular aspects of care. When physical creatures came along, the two sexes developed, and apparently developed mostly the same but with a few different attributes. Certain things were apparently assigned to one sex, and some, to the other. The roles in procreation differ, for instance. The point is that God is not male: men, and women, and warriors, and potters, and mother bears embody different aspects of God. The physical form they inhabit on this plane is an accident of the nature they find themselves in rather than the defining feature. Fathers and mothers are form plus content: the sex is the form, and the attributes are the content, and the attributes are not the form and are not dependent on the form. As humans, to boot, are modelled on God, they are modelled on all aspects of God, so no person is restricted by accident of biological sex in terms of the metaphysical attributes of God they can develop on this plane.

So, God as father need not trouble me and now does not, although the notion once did. God is not a shadow of my own father. Rather my worldly father was a shadow of the entirely metaphysical God, who lacks sex and gender. The imperfectly embodied principles down here match the perfectly embodied principles up there.