God = Father

I was recently at a party where I met a woman who had left the PCA and was attending an Episcopal church in town. Her reason for doing so was that she liked to see “both sides of God” represented in the liturgy; she specified the presence of both men and women in officiating capacities. Such an idea, that God is both Father and Mother, is hardly a biblical concept. Simply look at a concordance. There is no defining, categorical statement that God = mother. A passage or two may be found where his compassion and mercy are compared to that of a mother, but that does not define him as a mother. His compassion is elsewhere compared to that of a father and even a chicken. These are similies, not definitions.

If you want motherhood identified in the Church, well, it is the Church herself. St. Paul, Gal.4;26: "But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all."

If you look for references to God as Father in the concordance, the contrast with the lack of references to “mother” is very striking. The main source of this understanding of God is from the Son of God Himself, Jesus. He constantly speaks of God as our heavenly Father and tells us plainly to think of Him as such and to call Him such.

Of course, the revelation of God in the Bible is not a matter of concern for our modern-minded neighbours. They consider the Bible a culture-bound book and that we should be smart enough to set it aside in favour of the ideas which have come down to us from the French Enlightenment and those who believe in continuing revelation. However, the Bible describes itself as that which, far from being a culture-bound book, is instead to be a culture-ruling and culture-changing book. The God of the Bible is the Lord of all cultures and He declares therein what is true about the world we live in. Past patriarchical cultures, whether Jewish or Christian or even pagan, have been much more true to Reality than those in the Enlightenment tradition.