The Father is made of none; neither created nor begotten.
Athanasian Creed
For a large part of my Christian life, the Father has been a distant figure, hard to approach. I am not alone in this regard. When people talk about the Father they tend to portray Him as distant, removed; an all-powerful sovereign demanding both obeisance and respect. When theologians talk about Him they tend to focus on three attributes: omniscience, omnipresence, and omnipotence. In plain language, the Father is the one who knows all and sees all. He has all the power; He is firmly in control. This view is common among Jews and Muslims as well as Christians
But this view of the father is catastrophically wrong. It is untrue and toxic. It poisons every part of our relationships with God and with one another. It is an expression of our narrow obsession with power and control; an obsession that we inherited from the devil. It is a fascination that God does not share. Modern books, movies, and video games frequently express the idea that if we could know everything or force everything to be the way we wanted it to be, we would be like God. These statements are utter rubbish. If we could accomplish these things, we would not be like God at all. We would be like Satan’s idea of who God is. When we fixate on any of the “power” attributes of God, we are looking at God through the perspective of the devil, who believed that by seizing that which belonged to God, he could make himself divine (Isa 14:12-14).
Consider the following as an alternative view of the Father:
The One is perfect; it has nothing, seeks nothing, needs nothing, but it overflows, and this overflow is creative. The eternal creative action, beyond spirit, sense, and life, involves no self-loss. It is the welling forth of an unquenchable spring, the eternal fountain of life.
These words were written by the Greek philosopher Plotinus in the third century AD. He was elaborating on a tradition begun by Socrates more than 400 years before the Incarnation of Christ. What he is describing is the generous, desiring side of love; the nature of that eternal life that we see expressed by the Father as he begets the Son. God the Father is the perfect manifestation in eternity of the love that is Divine. But love is a verb. It requires a subject and an object. If the Father is the subject, the son is the object. Jesus was begotten so that the Father could empty Himself out in love onto His Son. This divine outpouring is the substance of Jesus’ own life. He is utterly dependent on the generosity of the Father for His continued existence. He declares this to His disciples in John 6:56:
“Just as the living Father sent me and I live because of the Father, so the one who feeds on me will live because of me.”
A more accurate translation of the statement “I live because of the Father” is “I live up out of the Father.” Jesus’ life depends on the Father in the same way that a glowing light bulb depends on of the flow of electrical current, or an ornamental fountain depends on the stream of water through the pipe that supplies it. This dependence is a continuous, relentless devouring of a source without which we will immediately perish. This is, in fact, the death that Adam and Eve experienced when they rejected the upwelling fountain of creative love as the source of their own lives. The consequence of the fall is that human beings are born cut off from that source of life. Now we “live up out of” whatever we can take from the world and from one another. This experience is, as Ecclesiastes assures us, deeply and relentlessly unsatisfying. It leads to the kind of selfish, destructive competition described in Galatians 5:15 and James 4:1-3.
The life that grows up out of God abides in a state of perpetual contentment and perpetual fruition. Plotinus properly speculated that this life is always seeking, and always satisfied. It is endlessly emptying itself out, and yet is always full. It multiplies life forever. This is the life that Jesus participated in, the life that He invites usto participate in. Consider the following scriptures:
“He that believes on me, as the scripture has said, out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.”
John 7:38
“Indeed, the water I give them will become in them a spring of water welling up to eternal life”
John 17:22-23
Scripture is replete with image of God as a stream, a well, an upwelling fountain of life. All of these images take for granted the idea that the fountain never runs dry; the Father never ceases to empty His life out on and through everything. Let me remind you of Lady Julian’s vision of creation:
“I beheld a little thing, the size of a hazel-nut, in the palm of my hand, and it was as round as a ball. I looked at it with my mind’s eye and thought, “What can this be?” and the answer came to me, “It is all [I have] made.” I wondered how it could last, for it was so [frail] I thought it might suddenly have disappeared. And the answer in my mind was, “it lasts and will last for ever because God loves it; and everything exists in the same way [up out of] the love of God.”
First Showing, Revelations of Divine Love, Lady Julian of Norwich
God did not create the world the way an engineer “creates” a bridge, or the way a sculptor “creates” a work of art. He is not a disinterested clockmaker who built everything and then sat back to watch it run. He creates and sustains everything moment by moment the way that soil and sunlight and rain create and sustain an exotic flower. What is created by God grows up out of the life He gives it, nourished by the sun of His love. This is the point of Lady Julian’s vision of creation. If the upwelling fountain of creative love stops, everything immediately dissolves. God is intimately involved in everything, upholding and sustaining it by the force of His love.
Contrast this image with theologians’ insistence on defining the Father as the one who is omniscient and omnipotent; as knowledge and power. In truth the Father is neither of these things. Omnipotence, omniscience, and are not attributes that God possesses. They do not define His nature. They are artifacts that exist within time and space because of what creation is: a single word of love spoken between the Father and the Son. The Universe was created by love, sustained by love, and love is what it means. Because every atom and sub-atomic particle is held together by the love of God, we see Him as present in all things [omnipresent], knowing all things [omniscient], and exercising power over all things [omnipotent]. But these are not attributes of the divine. They are artifacts of the limited perspective from which human beings interact with the universe. Once the universe ends, these three artifacts will pass away and the upwelling fountain of creative love will remain entirely unchanged.
The Father is the eternal generosity from which everything else receives its life. That is the Father’s perfect participation in the love that is in God and that is God.