Does every child need a father? Increasingly, our society's answer to this question is no, or at least, not necessarily.
The most important absence our society must confront is not the absence of fathers, but the absence of our belief in fathers.* Few idea shifts in this century have had such enormous implications. At stake is who we are as male and female, what type of society we will become, and, even more importantly, the way we understand and relate to God.
God is our Father. Why do we call him that? God is not male. He is a spirit. And does not the Bible use a number of maternal metaphors to speak of how God relates to his people. Did he not give birth to the Jewish nation (Deuteronomy 32.18)? Does he not have compassion on us like a mother has compassion on the baby at her breast (Isaiah 49.13)? Does he not nurse, nurture, and comfort us like a mother does (Psalm 131.2; Isaiah 66.13)? Because so many women, particularly those who come into Christianity from non-religious backgrounds, wrestle with the idea of addressing God with masculine pronouns, shouldn't we refer to God as Mother, or at least as Mother and Father? Why do we address God as Father?
