God is my Father.[1] Jesus said to Mary post-resurrection, “I ascend to My Father and your Father, and My God and your God.” God is our Father. Athanasius writes: “Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him Unoriginate.”[2] This is the Christian way for knowing, for thinking God; this is the way those who have the Spirit can call Jesus, Lord; that is, as recognizing their Shepherd, knowing His voice as Son of the Father. As Athanasius rightly noted we don’t think God prior to God thinking us for Himself in Jesus Christ; we don’t attempt to approach God by some sort of two-step into His presence through an abstract creation. As Christians we only know God as Son of the Father by the Spirit; if we don’t, we only know a god of our own imagination and fabrication. Indeed, a notion of godness developed from our fertile imaginations, as if we might see God in the trees, the birds, the fishies, even ourselves. This really is the only alternative to thinking God as our Father. If God is not first the Father, then He is not the Son of the Father, and instead He simply turns out to be a brute creator contingent upon our predication of Him.
Barth writes:
(a) The subject “God” of which it speaks—and in the creed this obviously brackets all three articles—is not synonymous with the concept of a world-cause, rightly or wrongly postulated, disclosed or fulfilled. We may take any view we like of the existence or nature of a world-cause, but it is always posited by man, and therefore even if it is an uncreated, creative and supremely perfect being, it still belongs to the creaturely sphere. It is not God. It is a successful or unsuccessful product of the human mind. It is not identical with the Creator coeli et terrae [Maker of heaven and earth]. Nor can it be subsequently identified with Him and given His titles and predicates. Whenever this happens, belief in the Creator loses its basis and therefore its certainty, its original meaning and therefore its credibility and practical import. The God who created heaven and earth is God “the Father,” i.e., the Father of Jesus Christ, who as such in eternal generation posits Himself in the Son by the Holy Spirit, and is not therefore in any sense posited from without or elsewhere. It is as this Eternal Father, determined in the act of His free expression and therefore not from without but from within, determining Himself in His Son by the Holy Spirit and Himself positing everything else, that He is also the Creator. And it is again as this Eternal Father, and not in any other way, that He reveals Himself as the Creator, i.e., in Jesus Christ His Son by the Holy Ghost, in exact correspondence to the way in which He has inwardly resolved and decided to be the Creator. As He cannot be the Creator except as the Father, He is not known at all unless He is known in this revelation of Himself.[3]
As Barth rightly points out, when we attempt to establish certainty of God on our own, whether that be individually, or collectivistically, we end up circumscribing a notion of God not from God, but from ourselves. When we go this route, abstract from God, and we understand ourselves as the concrete that founds the certainty of God’s existence, He necessarily ceases being our Father, and at best (or worst) becomes a cloned god; a mirrored existence of ourselves who we pump up with superhero powers of the sort that can create worlds populated with the birds and the bees, and thus us. As Barth grasps, and Athanasius prior to him, Jesus’s declaration to Mary wasn’t some type of throwaway statement made in passing. Indeed, what Jesus was once again emphasizing was that in the face of resurrection, indeed the re-creation, the first Word of God is that God is Father. As Father, and Son of the Father by the Holy Spirit, the children of God have an “apocalyptic” basis through which they have gained a capaciousness to think, to know God in real reality. That is to say, to know God not upon a foundation Mary had prefabricated, indeed, her imagination only took her as far as the gardener. But to think and know God the same way that the Son, the One in the bosom of the Father who came to explain Him, knows God, and has known God as His Father, just as sure as He is eternally the Son by the Holy Spirit.
These are deep matters, doxologically sourced by the Father for us in His dearly beloved Son, Jesus Christ. Miss ourselves for the “Father,” and we construct a world in our image, and then attempt to bear its burden. This is the fallen world we inhabit, a world populated by a humanity who can only think God as far as the groundskeeper; a world that would rather they be Father and attempt to manage a world of their own making in the face of the living Father. This, of course, only ends in a world of orphans and destitution. When the person comes to finally recognize that the Father has adopted them into His family through and in the vicarious humanity of Jesus Christ, it is at this point that they can cease from bearing the burden of false-fatherhood they have been attempting to live out since their conception.
“Pray, then, in this way:
‘Our Father who is in heaven,
Hallowed be Your name.
‘Your kingdom come.
Your will be done,
On earth as it is in heaven.
‘Give us this day our daily bread.
‘And forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors.
‘And do not lead us into temptation, but deliver us from evil. For Yours is the kingdom and the power and the glory forever. Amen.’
[1] I have written on this theme previously in my personal chapter for our first volume of Evangelical Calvinism. My chapter is titled, “Analogia Fidei or Analogia Entis: Either Through Christ or Through Nature.” This chapter also, more recently, has served as a basis (among others) for my dissertation and PhD by publication currently under examination.
[2] Athanasius, Contra Arianos 1.9.34.
[3] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/1 §40 [011] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 10.