Living
Theology in the Metropolitan Chicago Synod
Volume 12, Number 2
Summer 2007
Hispanic-Latino Theology and Ministry
How
Do We Talk About God?
By Wolf D. Knappe
I
am what you might call “old school.”
When I grew up, we children were taught to pray to God, our Father. In confirmation class I learned Luther’s
explanation of the introduction of the Lord’s Prayer: “Here God encourages us to believe that he is
truly our Father and we are his children.
We therefore are to pray to him with complete confidence just as
children speak to their loving father.”
Because it was natural for us to call him Father, it also was natural to
refer to him with the masculine pronouns: He, his, himself.
Much
later, when I was teaching confirmation class myself, I learned that for some
of my confirmands it was not easy to picture God as a loving father. One boy had an abusive father who would beat
him mercilessly. A girl’s father was an
alcoholic and neglected his family. And
over the years there were more children who grew up in a home without a father.
I
first had to teach these children what a good father was like before I could make
them understand that God was indeed the best father we could imagine.
Still
later I learned that the God of the Scriptures, our Father, has many motherly
qualities. In the wonderful passage in
Isaiah 66:13, God says to us: “ As a mother comforts her child, so I will
comfort you.” Jesus compares himself
with a mother hen gathering her little chicks under her wing (Matt.
23:37). A beautiful image of a caring
and protecting Savior!
But
nowhere in the Scriptures is God called Mother.
For
the last several decades we have heard from feminist theologians that a male
image of God is offensive to women. And
there are other offensive names of God, which must be eliminated. Recently an Episcopal church in Tucson wanted
to eliminate the word “Lord” as a loaded term, conveying hierarchical power
over things “which in what we have recorded in our sacred texts, is not who
Jesus understood himself to be.” I
wonder what those people will do with a passage like Philippians 2:11: “Every tongue should confess that Jesus
Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
In
our new hymn book, Evangelical Lutheran Worship, the masculine pronoun for God
(he, him, himself) has been carefully excised from all the psalms and most of
the hymns. Many say that God is
gender-less. But that makes him some
sort of nebulous figure, neither father nor mother—although some of the
feminists lean more toward the mother title.
When
I pray, I cannot pray to some kind of nebulous being. I have in my mind the image of a father who
loves me and cares for me. I believe
that it is the image which Jesus gave us in the Lord’s Prayer.
Lacking
such an image and trying to rationally explain what God is like we fall back
into the time of the Enlightenment. One
of its chief proponents was the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
(1646-1716). In his attempt to explain
the world and the universe he thought of a system of monads, indestructible
power substances which rise from the lower forms (matter) to souls and spirits
(angels) to the central monad, which is God.
I’m
sorry, but I cannot pray to a monad, not to a gender-less God. Since I am “old school,” I cling to the image
of the Father, the way Jesus taught us.
Wolf D. Knappe
Retired ELCA
pastor, Downers Grove, IL