Quotes

God the Father

Published on June 2nd, 2010.

Faced with having to select  between ‘Mother’ or ‘Father’ as the proper name of God–as one must, since ‘parent’ by itself does not individuate–the criterion should be which name is the more easily separated from its function as the name of a role in our bisexual reproduction. Once this criterion is adopted, it becomes clear that only ‘Father’ will do, since ‘Mother’ is too intimately involved with the process of reproduction. In other words, a mother goddess is too continuous with the world, too much like the womb from which we came, to stand for the divine reality revealed in the Old Testament, a reality that is decisively other than the world, different from the world, discontinuous with the world, and with a plan, indeed, for the world’s remaking.

–

Aidan Nichols, Holy Order: Apostolic Priesthood from the New Testament to the Second Vatican Council (Dublin: Veritas Publications, 1990), 149-50.

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