God Is Your Father, Not Your Dad

When theologian David H. Kelsey asked in 1993 what happened to the traditional doctrine of sin, his concern was not that it had disappeared. It was rather that it had migrated, moving from a frame of sickness and healing to one of estrangement and restoration. In the first version, we are sin-sick people, fated to die without intervention. In the second, we are far from God and need to be brought near. 

Both views are biblical. But with this shift—from a sin-sick Christian to an estranged one—we’ve adopted a new view of what the human problem is and how to fix it. In the first view, we need a doctor who will prescribe a cure. In the second, we need a therapist—one who will help us modify our behavior. If we need a doctor, the problem is systemic; if we need a therapist, the problem is the ego. It’s also a difference in agency. The sick need a doctor (Mark 2:17), but those far from God might simply move closer. It affects our diagnoses, too: Is our nature truly impaired, or are we simply suffering the consequences of false beliefs about ourselves?

Our age of wellness culture, for example, warns us of the dangers of our built environment—microplastics and carcinogens and dangerous food preservatives—and encourages us to reconnect with the natural world by adjusting our bodies to its “circadian rhythms” and avoiding the evils of blue light emanating from our phones. This guidance, while helpful, reflects the same kind of migration that Kelsey warned about. When we move about in the world, do we find ourselves suffering from a disease inherent in nature? Or are we merely victims of our environments, suffering from poor teaching or bad church structures? We might think a more holistic gospel, or a more healthy way of viewing God, is all the cure that we need. 

As a theologian, I applaud the pursuit of better ways to speak of God and his nature. But I see in our religious speak the same kind of contradiction I see in our pursuit of “Mother Nature.” Instead of seeing ourselves as in need of a holy God who can guide us through a hostile world, we imagine instead that nature intends to nurture, guide, and cure us. But is that the truth about nature, or about God? 

I’m a fan of the homeschool theorist Charlotte Mason, whose educational theory relies on regular, unstructured engagement with the natural world. “ ‘Nature never did betray the heart that loved her,’ ” Mason wrote, quoting William Wordsworth, “and, in return for our discriminating and loving observation, she gives us the joy of a beautiful and delightful intimacy.”

As a young mother, I found Mason’s theories inspiring and set about employing them with my own children as part of our preschool days. I wanted my kids to feel the space between the challenges they could tackle and the ones they needed help with. I wanted them to feel the effects of unpredictable weather and climb mountains that tested their endurance. In poet Rainer Maria Rilke’s words, I wanted them “defeated by ever greater things.”

There were bugs. And heat. And dreadful humidity. We encountered mosquitoes and leeches and a swimming snake. In the winter, there was snow and ice. For every awe-inspiring landscape and swooping bird, there was a sunburn and a sprained ankle to match. We trudged through the forest, sometimes enamored but sometimes praying to be delivered. 

Christians and the spiritually curious talk often about “finding God in nature.” We see him in birdsong or grand vistas or ocean bluffs. The nature we love is filled with well-marked trails and festivals of light, with snowflakes and sledding hills and cardinals at the bird feeder. But it’s hard to ignore platitudes that remain. 

“Nature’s sweetness” is a lovely sentiment but one that is difficult to prove with evidence. A true accounting of nature would need to examine how its exquisite beauty is met with what seems to be an underlying, unpredictable rage. The “red in tooth and claw” that Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote of has been largely written out of our experience of the natural world, with our mulched hiking paths and bug spray.

But we need not look very hard to find in nature signs of virus and disease, of animals designed for violent predation, and of rivers that flood their banks. When hurricanes destroy our livelihoods, the temptation is to ask the perennial question “Did God do this?” instead of “Might God deliver us even from this?” 

By Kelsey’s account, sin was once seen as an actual state that set humans against God. This story started with creation, and the central drama of the human person was the story of being healed from our illness.

But sin’s story migrated from Creation to the account of the human person (what theologians call “theological anthropology”), which meant that it was no longer a universal story about creation but an account of our individual, felt estrangement before God. 

In the second version, the story of sin is less concerned with the story of how God made the world and more concerned with how human creatures experience themselves.  Kelsey writes about the effects of this change: “Fall and sin stories express our consciousness that the concrete ways in which we actually live, the ‘hows’ of our lives, are contradictory to ‘what’ we truly are.” He continues: “Accordingly, a doctrine of sin describes that contradiction and what is needed to avoid it.” The goal of the human person, then, is to better align with the identity of someone made and beloved by God—and to avoid the identity sin introduces of someone who is wicked and separated from God.

The question here becomes, Is the account of sin and humankind one of a true estrangement caused by a real impairment in our nature—or is it merely a perceived estrangement, resulting from us believing the wrong story about ourselves? This state of estrangement before God can also be named “sin.” But practically speaking, it makes sin primarily a psychological reality. Its reality and its cure become largely concerned with how we felt before the face of God and how we imagined God felt about us.

In these views, the theological mirror has been turned from a focus on God to a focus on ourselves. It can leave us searching for cures to our predicament—to wellness and therapy and self-esteem—when what we really need is God. It can leave us feeling that our soul-sickness—our alienation, our grief, our estrangement—is not a result of sin but needs a therapeutic fix. We label it our weakness or the fault of someone else. It can lead us to lash out at our families, parents, and religious institutions for not “fixing” the errors in their midst. We can cut off our families of origin and protect ourselves from the harms of institutional religion, but this leaves us lost, broken, and despairing. 

A soul-sick view—Kelsey’s first—would tell us instead that all of these perceived estrangements are the result of sin that we are in need of a Savior to fix. Wellness and therapy prove to be poor cures for what ails us.

Father,” the form of address Jesus uses in his prayer in Matthew 6, identifies God as the origin of all things. It ascribes to him a role as the generator of life and acknowledges his authority for the world and its creatures. But father brings with it a tremendous amount of cultural and personal baggage. Fathers, after all, can be punishing. They can be abusive and violent and capable of wielding great harm on their offspring. Father is a title that smacks of authority that might be misused. So why wouldn’t dad be better?

Instead of speaking about God as Father, we’ve come to prefer a picture of God as good ol’ Dad. Dads, after all, are expected to be emotionally present. They are able to teach their children important skills and hobbies, and their success in their role is related to the quality of relationship they share with their children. They should control their anger and never make their children afraid. They should gently guide and not shame with their instruction. Friendship with such men is a given. This seems to be closer to the view of God that we should want.

And if dad is good, couldn’t mother be better? Mothers, after all, are associated with emotional warmth and care. Using mother, proponents assert, is especially attractive to those who have suffered the most under patriarchy’s thumb, generating welcome and possibly cutting back some of the weeds of religious practices that have kept women at bay.

But there is nothing inherently good about mother, just as father presents its own challenges. There are suffocating and angry and controlling mothers. There are neglectful ones, too. By prioritizing female language over male language for God, we risk simply matching a first conceptual overreach with a second. 

But the more significant issue is that, by changing terms away from father, we are trying to do public relations for faith. By seeking to make God more accessible and emotionally warm, we have ended up with a picture of God that resembles a great man in the sky more than it does the God of the Bible. 

When God fails our expectations by not being what we perceive as kind, not granting us what we ask for, or failing our standards of equitable treatment, we tend to give up on God instead of on our pictures of him. We expect God to come as a vulnerable baby, to admire and put down in the cradle when we tire of him. But like real infants, God comes to us with a disruptive roar, failing our expectations so that he might, in the end, exceed them.

Especially around Christmas, we are tempted to yearn for “gentle Jesus, meek and mild.” I’ve wondered if the writer of that hymn had any children—or at least children like mine, some of whom came to me as if they were shot out of a cannon. Children, if they do anything, will unseat our expectations about children. God, by coming to us as one, seeks to do the same. 

By calling God “Father,” we might unseat our expectations of fathers, seeing one whose authority serves not to harm but to unseat the evil powers of this world.

This is where nature can teach us of God—but not in the way you might think.

When God comes to Israel, the natural world is often his vehicle. God seems especially well acquainted with water. First, in Noah’s day, we have the great flood, when God wipes out civilization due to its grave unfaithfulness. Water is the shovel with which God digs, uproots, and tosses away the debris of that lost world. Then there’s the Red Sea, where God makes a pillar of the waters so that Israel can pass through it. Then the Egyptians are drowned with their horses and chariots, the water acting again as an agent both of deliverance and of judgment. 

Elijah sustains a widow whose child is close to death due to a lack of rain. God’s prophet appears to address not the child’s illness but the absence of water. When the latter rains fall and fill the wells, it is a sign of God’s provision (1 Kings 18). Jeremiah and Joel both suffer under droughts and call their people to repentance so that God will send the desired rain. 

Appropriate amounts of water demonstrate God’s presence with his people; its absence reflects God’s own. When the disciples remark, “Even the winds and the waves obey him!” (Matt. 8:27), they are speaking of the one who delivered Israel through the waters by holding its destructive power at bay.

The images we see in the Hebrew Bible are of a God who works at a grand scale to both rescue and deliver. Israelite theology developed around these great acts; awe, mystery, and even overwhelming dread characterize Israel’s encounters with God. 

“Woe to me!” the prophet Isaiah says upon beholding God. “I am ruined! For I am a man of unclean lips” (6:5). He does not hug him or ask for a favor. He fears his imminent death. 

God is, of course, not only dread and acts of awe. He is also provision and sustaining care. But God cannot be one without the other. That God is present to provide care for the widow and the orphan depends on God’s ability to act and to intervene, at all times and in all places. This is not a merely human power. God cannot be the one who provides for the widow without being the one who made the ocean deep and all that swims in it. The power to separate the land from the waters and to hold back the water in towering force is the same power that brings gentle rain to nourish the land.

You do certain things before such a God. You might kneel in reverence. You might lay prostrate and cover your head in fear. You might raise your hands toward heaven. Sometimes, when angered, you might attempt a wrestling match. But you’d be left changed. You’d forever limp. 

We no longer see God in rushing water. Many of our religious expressions and practices are ordered toward the God of quiet waters, not the one who came in a powerful flood. It’s not just our worship music and preference for reassuring sermons. It is the kind of comfort we have with imagining what this God is like. Many of us want a humble king, the Lamb and never the Lion. We have become so comfortable with “gentle Jesus, meek and mild” that we forget that he is a warrior too. 

Of course, Jesus is the Christian’s answer to how God can be both the one who comes in judgment and the one who comes to heal. But this can easily slide into what feels like an inevitable progression from avenger to friend, and  can make it seem like the triumph is of the therapeutic gospel and not of the holy God who came in history. Christians must hold together conceptually the man who became our friend and the one who controls the mighty waters. It is not always easy to do so.

As our felt needs have increasingly turned inward—higher on Maslow’s scale of belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization—we have adjusted our theological speech in this direction. We emphasize that church is a place of belonging more than a place of shared belief and that earnest commitment to the gospel is about our personal growth rather than our worship of the triune God. We talk about God as the ground of our personhood, someone who reveals our vocations, rather than as Creator and sustainer. 

This was all tried by the mainline churches of the late 20th century. As many of these churches have found, people don’t, in fact, need a God who exists to reinforce their self-esteem.

 All of this language falls flat when it runs up against a natural world that deals not in belonging but in threat and danger. In an age of rising waters and climate disruption, we should be reminded of the perilous mismatch between the God we speak of in our popular religious language and the God we so desperately need—one who judges, rescues, and delivers. 

When it comes to faith formation, Christians think a lot about the how, but I’ve been thinking more about what kind of God we form people to. Our priorities often lean toward reckoning with Christianity’s cultural overreach—its latent patriarchy or its unjust power structures—or with the negative theology that has harmed people’s self-esteem. We’re told that teaching about sin creates self-hatred and talking about divine judgment incites fear. But we think too little about the harm of presenting a God who is only a friend and never a Savior.

When David Kelsey ended his essay about sin’s “migration,” it was with a surprising warning, coming from a mainline theologian. Sin, he says, has not been forgotten by the mainline; it just exists under aliases or in different forms, such as injustice or inequality. Both are ways of speaking about sin, without the religious referent.

Or, he writes, perhaps the reason for its disappearance is different altogether. Perhaps it is “not so much a disuse of the concept of sin as it is an abandonment of the concept of divine wrath,” he writes, “for, if there is no need to talk about the wrath of God, then there is not much need to talk about the sin that incurs the wrath.”

H. Richard Niebhur predicted this when he wrote that “a God without wrath brought men without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.” People are not seeking a Christ without a cross. What they are seeking is a cross that would beckon us to a world without suffering, without failure, without struggle, and without weakness. The kind of saving we seek is not only one without wrath; it is one desiring a world that doesn’t exist—a world without raging waters.

By looking to God to be Dad and not Father, we come to expect of God the things we expect of parents—warmth, attachment, availability, and the prevention of harm. But this does not reflect the God who came in water. We do not need a swimming lesson. We need a God who can save us from the raging rivers—and if he doesn’t, a God who can gather us to himself as we await the Resurrection. Such a thing only God the Father Almighty can do. And we are in need of such a God. 

Kirsten Sanders is a theologian and the founder of Kinisi Theology Collective.