Catechesis · Inquirer
God the Father
Catechesis · Inquirer
God the Father
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he began: "Our Father." This was not a metaphor borrowed from human experience. It was a disclosure of who God actually is. God is Father…
Question
What does it mean to call God "Father"?
When Jesus taught his disciples to pray, he began: "Our Father." This was not a metaphor borrowed from human experience. It was a disclosure of who God actually is. God is Father — not because He resembles a human father, but because human fatherhood, at its best, faintly resembles something in God.
In Trinitarian theology, "Father" has two senses. First, God is Father in relation to the Son — He eternally begets the Son before all ages. Second, God is Father in relation to creation — He is the source and sustainer of all that exists.
The teaching
Father — not a metaphor but the original
Jesus addressed God as *Abba* — an intimate Aramaic word for father, closer to "Papa" than the formal "Father." No Jew in Jesus's time addressed God this way in prayer. Jesus was disclosing a relationship — His own eternal relationship to the first Person of the Trinity — and inviting His disciples to share it.
Through baptism, we are adopted into the Son's relationship with the Father. We do not merely address God as Father out of convention. We address Him as Father because we have been made, by grace, children of God — participants in the Son's own relationship with His Father.
He became what we are so that we might become what He is. The Son of God became Son of Man in order that the sons of men might become sons of God.
The Son took on our nature so that we could take on His. We are not merely forgiven — we are adopted, elevated, drawn into the very life of the Trinity. To call God "Father" is not borrowing a title that doesn't belong to us. It is the language of a child who truly belongs.
St. Athanasius of Alexandria
On the Incarnation §54 · c. 318 AD
Holy Scripture
"See what kind of love the Father has given to us, that we should be called children of God; and so we are."
1 John 3:1
"You did not receive the spirit of slavery to fall back into fear, but you have received the Spirit of adoption as sons, by whom we cry, 'Abba! Father!'"
Romans 8:15
Divine Adoption
What it means to truly become a child of God
Adoption by God is not a polite fiction. It is a real transformation. When we are baptised into Christ, we enter into His relationship with the Father. The same Spirit who rested on Jesus at His baptism rests on us. We are not impostors using a title that does not belong to us.