"Lord teach us how to pray"
If the present tendency in the main stream churches is anything to go by, then the so called lord's prayer would not have been written by Matthew and Luke, nor would the churches have seen fit to adopt and liturgize the St Matthew version of the prayer for the last 1700 or 1800 years.
American feminist theologians have already many years ago stated that 'we must castrate the jewish father-god image and rediscover the true God behind the outdated imagery. The voices have been saying that since 1985 (Mary Daly) already but have now become wholesale actions in the Swedish Lutheran Church. *
Claiming that God is not human and therefore not a sexual being the term Father will be removed and exchanged for something else, possibly "Our parent who is in heaven". However this change over has some very serious ramifications.
First of all: it denies the scriptures as being inspired by and outbreathed by God to say what God wanted to say. How they were written is not unimportant because the views of scripture are said to be of eternal consequence. If we do not hold fast to sound doctrine we cannot live sound lives. If we do not defend the faith that was once and for all given to the saints then there is no longer any firm truth to live by, all we have are the random thoughts and capricious interpretations of men and women whose claim to be the voice of God are at best questionable and in the normal run of things indistinguishable from what the scriptures call lies, and lies have only ever one origin.
Secondly: Jesus Christ claims to be the truth and speaks the truth to those who wrote what he had lived and died for. If Christ taught that we should address God as 'Our Father' we have not been given the option of calling God anything else. Jesus makes a distinction between his relationship to the Father and our relationship. But irrespective of that difference, for both Jesus the Christ, before and after the death and resurrection, and for us, there is one God and Father, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jakob. If we deny that relationship between the Father and the Son then we have no more any reliability for the veracity of anything in the entire gospels. They start out by God the Father declaring "This is my son in whom I am well pleased". They continue right through the gospel texts to repeatedly declare the Father-Son relationship to the extent that anyone who has seen the Son has seen not only God, but God the Father. The primary evidence for false teaching is the denial of the sonship of the Saviour and the total unimportance of and even denial of the Father. "He who does not have the Son does not have the Father" Commensurately: He who denies the Father has no Son. And therefore no saviour. "He will call out to me: 'You are my father, my God, The Rock, my saviour.' (Psa 89:26) "For God so loved the world that he gave us his son" .Therefore to deny the Father is effectively to have another god and therefore to be breaking the first commandment of the law.
Thirdly: It denies and ignores the different responsibilities for earthly fathers over against their own children. It ignores the making of men of God, recreated by the power of Christ's resurrection in men to make them restored men on the pattern of the Son, who in turn is the image, the express outworking of the Father's glory. The very template of male normality is therefore removed from sight. And what is not seen will not be practiced. IT IS CERTAINLY NOT TAUGHT.
But Paul the apostle has made it very plain: "Therefore I bow my knee before Him from whom everything called father on earth has its name, or from whom every family on earth is named." To remove the Father-image of God is part of the denial of Gods created order for marriage and family structures and has nothing to do with the christian faith in any way.
The christian Faith starts with the understanding that the Son knows the Father and makes Him known to us: "All things have been committed to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and no one knows who the Father is except the Son and those to whom the Son chooses to reveal Him."(Luk 10:22) It is doubtlessly obvious that those 'theologians' who now believe it to be their duty to castrate the jewish father image have no such revelation, and therefore have no right to call themselves either christian or theologians.
It can be anticipated that the next step after substituting Our Father for Our Parent is to introduce Mary as part of that Parenthood and sexualizing the very Godhead as has already been prepared by the Roman Catholic Church. The idea that Mary is both Mother of God and Co-redemptrix with her Son has already been in place for a few hundred years. Now the defection from the Bible is running its course in the other churches. The Holy Spirit predicted this falling away and false teaching in the very first church. (2 Tim 3:1-9)
The majestic interference in the normal process of human procreation by the virgin birth is preempted by the equally incomprehensible fact of the Son being born, begotten by the Father. From eternity and before all time there was the event at which the Father said This day have I begotten thee my son. It was a non-female participation in which the Son was brought into his Sonship by an act of non-sexual begetting, followed at the incarnation by the non-sexual begetting of a Son by Mary.
There is therefore no need to castrate God. God is HE not by sexual definition but by Fatherhood without sex. It is rather remarkable that those who constantly complain about sexualisation of the officers of the church, preferring males as pastors and teachers for instance, insist on doing to God what they hate done to men and women.
In our age when the only thing left of fatherhood is the sexual nature both in use and abuse the need is greater than ever to set aside the sexual part of fatherdhood and dive deep into what the fatherhood means apart from sexual activity. Only by laying aside the physical function and laying bare the spiritual calling that is in fatherhood will the church survive. Our God is Father and Spirit and those who want to worship the Father and pray to the Father must worship Him in Spirit and truth. Anything less than that is simply not good enough.
Teddy Donobauer Doncaster Dec 29th
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