The God Who Likes His Name: Holy Trinity, Feminism, and the Language of Faith

How to name God? This question has been acutely put to the American churches in the past decade by feminist theologians, and with profound effect. Substantive changes in the language of faith are now taking place: the triune name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is routinely ignored; baptisms are occurring in the names of inclusive substitutes; liturgies are composed that omit references to God as Father or Jesus as the Son, some of which directly address God as Mother and other feminine titles; the masculine pronoun for the deity is said to be inappropriate usage. Important reasons and theologies are advanced to justify these changes. The thesis of this essay is that these changes must result in an alienation from the gospel. The particularities of the biblical revelation that are now so offensive to contemporary sensibility are at the very heart of profession of faith in the Holy Trinity. The triune God has named himself, and he likes his name.

The Grammar of the Triune Name

For we are bound to be baptized in the terms we have received and to profess belief in the terms in which we are baptized, and as we have professed belief in, so to give glory to Father, Son and Holy Ghost.1

In the course of defending the divinity of the Holy Spirit, Basil the Great enunciated the above grammatical rule for Christian faith and worship. His argument is that our common baptism into the name of the Holy Trinity functions to shape the public life of the people of God. As we have been baptized, so must we formulate and confess our creedal belief; as we profess our faith, so must we pray, composing our worship and doxology accordingly. Baptism, creed, liturgy—all together form an interlocking whole, a language of faith; yet within this network of communication the sacrament of baptism plays a formative role. It structures both our profession of faith and our offering of praise. The God who is acclaimed in the ecumenical symbol of the church and the God who is invoked in the communal liturgy is to be the selfsame God into whom we are first baptized.

Holy baptism thus governs and shapes the language of faith, and it does so with divine authority: “Go therefore and make disciples of all nations,” Christ Jesus enjoins his followers, “baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit” (Matt. 28:19). Explicitly written as a command of the exalted Lord enthroned in the fullness of eschatological power and presented in the canonical apostolic tradition, the baptismal mandate exercises a normative authority in the life of the Body of Christ.2 There is no other more authoritative tradition over against which to appeal. By the decree of Christ, the church is sent into the world and instructed to initiate believers into the triune name of God. Either we obey this command or we simply cease to be the church. Holy baptism, therefore, is the primal embodiment of the gospel and is properly construed as foundational and constitutive of ecclesial life. From baptism flows our discourse and prayer, ordered by that verbally identified reality into which we are sacramentally incorporated.

Given this morphotic and configurative function of the baptismal naming, Basil insists on the traditional wording, rejecting all alterations and substitutions. “It is enough for us,” he states, “to confess those names which we have received from Holy Scripture, and to shun all innovations about them.”3 The canonical mandate, in other words, is received as dogma, binding on the community as a whole. The significance of the dogma goes far beyond the establishment of a common rite of initiation. It is grammatical instruction stipulating the speech and practice of the church: God is to be named as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.4

Trinitarian speech pervades the corporate life of Christians. We begin the liturgy with the invocation of the triune God. We join our voices in threefold creedal acclamation in the confession of the catholic faith. The Eucharistic prayer is classically given distinct trinitarian form: the Father is praised and thanked for the blessings of creation and salvation, the crucified and resurrected Jesus is remembered and extolled, and the outpouring of the Spirit is besought upon both the community and the oblations of bread and wine. Whenever the church acts in the ministry of Christ, whether to bless, absolve, anoint for healing, or ordain to office, the triune God is explicitly proclaimed, entreated, glorified, named. Even our shortest prayers and collects are concluded in trinitarian doxology: “through Jesus Christ our Lord, who lives and reigns with you [the Father] and the Holy Spirit, one God, now and for ever.”

At the center of ecclesial society is the proclamation of the gospel and the recounting of the biblical narrative. We tell the story of the God of Israel, creator of the universe, who gathers a people to himself in holy covenant, binding them to him by name and sacrifice and prophetic word. For hundreds of years, the Lord shapes, breaks, and molds his people, forming them into faithful witnesses and joyful worshipers. Through Abraham, Sarah, Jacob, Moses, Miriam, Aaron, Deborah, David, Isaiah, the Lord executes his salvific will in the history of his Israel. Finally, in the fullness of time, he sends his Son, the promised Messiah, to offer atonement for the sins of the world.… We tell the story of Jesus of Nazareth, the Son of this God, born to and into God’s people. Prophet, teacher, healer, eschatological bearer of the future kingdom—Jesus confronts Israel with the exhilarating message of the incomparable love of the One he calls Father, a love revolutionary in its unconditionality and grace, a love that demands new garments and new wineskins, conversion and discipleship, death and rebirth. This Jesus, however, is intolerable; his message and presence are too threatening. He is betrayed, denounced, humiliated, and executed as a common criminal. But the Father vindicates his Son on Easter morning by raising him from the dead and exalting him to his right hand, establishing him as the destiny and conclusion of the universe…. We tell the story of the Holy Spirit, the divine breath that moved over the waters of chaos at the beginning of creation, who spoke through Moses and the prophets, who anointed Jesus with unconquerable power to heal the sick, exorcize evil, and raise the dead. It is this Spirit the risen Christ promises to pour out on the community of faith, and by this Spirit the church is driven into the world to proclaim the gospel and bring sinners into the new creation of the kingdom. Into him each believer is immersed and born anew, baptized into the love of the Father and the Son.

“The Church,” writes George Lindbeck, “is fundamentally identified and characterized by its story.”5 At any point in history, the church of Jesus may be picked out as that assembly proclaiming the narrative of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit and promising it as good news to its hearers. We speak not of deity-in-general but of the God who is self-revealed in the biblical drama: the three divine actors who together, in essential, ontological unity, accomplish the salvation of humankind. The trinitarian narrative functions as the paradigm through which both deity and creation are interpreted and provides the foundational content and vocabulary for our preaching, liturgy, and theology. By this story the imaginative life of the church is renovated; through it the people of God envision their mission and ministry; in it all believers find forgiveness for their past and hope for their future. It is the story of the triune God that is summarized and encapsulated in the triune name. The threefold appellation may thus be said to identify the church, for it encompasses that story which the church tells and must tell in order to be the church. When we are baptized into this name, we are baptized into a way of life, being, and speaking constituted by the evangelical narrative of the trinitarian God. But if the triune name and the manifold trinitarian namings of the language of faith identify the Christian church, this is so because the appellation first and primarily identifies the God of the church. Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is our deity’s proper name.6

Proper names are distinguished from common nouns in that they signify singular and unique objects rather than classes of objects. A proper name allows us to designate a specific something, separating it from the anonymity of existence for communication, study, use, love. Even deities need proper names. We need to be able to identify which one we are addressing, worshiping, obeying, fleeing.

In the resurrection of Jesus, God declares his name of the new covenant: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit (Matt. 28:19). This name articulates the apostolic experience of God in Christ. It identifies the specific deity we are talking about or praying to as being precisely the God of the New Testament. Each term within the name links us to God’s historic self-disclosure; each is grounded in the salvation narrative; each interprets the other two. “Father” refers specifically to the holy transcendence whom the Nazarene knows as Abba, to whom he bids us pray. “Our Father, who art in heaven.” “Son” designates Jesus in unique filial relationship to the Father: “This is my Son, whom I love; with him I am well pleased” (Matt. 3:17). “Spirit” is the communal love and life and future of the aforementioned Father and Son. Together these mutually coordinated names form one name, a name proper and personal to the Christian God.7 Thus the holy creator introduces himself to the world.

With the name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, our God is clearly identified and our experience of deity linguistically defined. Each believer, by the mandate of the risen Christ, is baptized into this name, initiated into a concrete, verbally determined relationship with the triune God of the Scriptures. From this point on, we meet and experience the deity from within the trinitarian narrative proclaimed in the community of faith. We are the people of the Trinity, shaped and formed by the threefold appellation of our God. “Baptism into the name of the ‘the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit,’” writes Catherine LaCugna, “means incorporation into the power and essence of God, into the history and story of God, into the life and heart and identity of God.”8 The dominical command, therefore, both sanctions the triune name by divine revelation and establishes it as a necessary function in our knowledge of the living God.9 God gives himself to us in his name and by his name defines our experience of him as triune. We know the deity as the Holy Trinity because we speak, pray, hear, believe, and worship his personal name.

The proper-name function of the trinitarian formula has recently been criticized by Ted Peters. He argues that proper names refer arbitrarily and ostensively and are consequently transliterated from language to language, whereas the triune formula is universally translated. According to Peters, this indicates that “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” are metaphorical titles.10 Peter’s argument can be met by acknowledging that within the triune name, “Father,” “Son,” and “Spirit” are relational, denominating titles of address, each of which signifies one of the three persons of the Trinity, and each of which are analogically correlated to human realities. They are therefore rightly and necessarily translated into equivalent terminology as the gospel moves into new cultures. However, when brought together—as they are, for example, in holy baptism or the Gloria Patri—they function as one personal name identifying the one Christian God and separating that God from all other deities. This means that the trinitarian formula enjoys a special status as a proper name. As Robert Jenson notes, “A proper name is proper just insofar as it is used independently of aptness to the one named, but it need not therefore lack such aptness.”11 Of decisive importance here is the fact that the baptismal institution stipulates initiation into the name (singular) of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.12 As we have been baptized, so must we confess and pray our faith. We are incorporated into a distinctive language and grammar. The great Anglican divine Richard Hooker saw this quite clearly in the sixteenth century. In defending the Anglican form of the Gloria Patri against Puritan objections, he wrote,

Baptizing we use the name of the Father, of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost; confessing the Christian faith we declare our belief in the Father, and in the Son, and in the Holy Ghost; ascribing glory unto God we give it to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Ghost. It is “the token of a true and sound understanding” for matter[s] of doctrine about the Trinity, when in ministering baptism, and making confession, and giving glory, there is a conjunction of all three, and no one of the three severed from the other two.13

By our baptism we are charged and authorized to name God by his revealed name: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This triune name forms the identity of the Christian church and structures the grammar of catholic belief and practice. Christians cannot be Christian if they refrain from speaking the trinitarian language. To replace or alter the triune formula is to repudiate the creed, church, God of our baptism.

We may examine two recent proposals. First, “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.” This formula does not and cannot function as a proper name: it does not identify; it does not specify which God we are talking about. All putative deities presumably create, redeem, and sanctify, as well as do numerous other things.14 Furthermore, within classical trinitarian theory these ad extra activities are understood as contingent cooperative works of the Godhead. The Father creates, redeems, and sanctifies through the Son by the Spirit. Each person of the Trinity is fully involved in the functional activities of deity. Or, to put it slightly differently, God was not always creator, redeemer, sanctifier; he has become such by his free decision.15 Within the divine life of the Godhead, however, the deity is eternally Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. This is his name before time and forever.

Second, there is “Mother, Lover, Friend.” This truly feminist alternative raises serious difficulties of another sort. Perhaps what is most objectionable is that it so clearly seeks to evade the biblical narrative; it is so clearly our own invention. Speak “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” and immediately we know we are speaking of the God of the New Testament. But to what deity does “Mother, Lover, Friend” refer? What story are we telling when we name divinity thus? And if we are telling a different story, are we not creating a new religion? This and all similar formulas sunder the church from the evangelical narrative by which we identify our God as well as ourselves. They “disrupt the faith’s self-identity at the level of its primal and least-reflected historicity.”16 Furthermore, this formula is open to the same criticism as that given “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier.” Are the terms to be interpreted only in relationship to us, in which case we are presented not with a proper name but with ad extra descriptions, or are they to be interpreted within the name? It is difficult indeed to reconcile the latter with the biblical story, not to mention Christian sensibility!

The God Who is Known

Therefore it is more pious and more accurate to signify God from the Son and call Him Father, than to name Him from His works only and call Him unoriginate. For the latter title does nothing more than signify all the works, individually and collectively, which have come to be at the will of God through the Word; but the title Father has its significance and its bearing only from the Son.17

In his debate with Arianism, Athanasius was compelled to address the question of how we name God. In their philosophical understanding of deity, his opponents were fond of calling God “the unoriginate,” which they evidently believed spoke clearly and accurately of the divine being. The term emphasizes that divinity is self-sufficient in its transcendent reality, plainly distinguished from the contingent creation. Unlike the misleading anthropomorphic and metaphorical terminology of the Bible, the term “unoriginate” is true and precise. Athanasius responded by noting that such naming is a form of negative theology which speaks of God not as he is in his inner reality, not as he is in his divine nature, but only in his relationship to that which is made by him out of nothing. It thinks of divinity exclusively in terms of creaturely being; it apprehends God solely by his works. We believe the universe to be created, contingent, finite, dependent for its existence upon the deity; thus we call God the unoriginate and creator, thereby contrasting him with that which he is not. We construe him in his absolute difference and distance from us. For Athanasius, while what we say in this regard may be true—but as Gregory Nazianzen commented, if we do not know what something is, how can we specify what it is not?18—it does not yet grasp God in his internal being. It is analogous to inferring the character and personality of Shakespeare by reading only his plays. Such an approach to divinity is inherently anthropocentric, for it conceives the deity from a center in ourselves and the created order, not from a center in God. Ultimately, we end up knowing simply ourselves turned inside out. We are thus no better off, says Athanasius disparagingly, than the Greeks.19

To name God the Father and the Son is to speak of the deity as he is in the immanent reality and relations of his divine essences. It is thus to know him objectively, truly, accurately. When we name God Father, we are naming him neither by abstraction from creation (via negative) nor by infinite extension of creation (via eminentiae) nor by self-projection (mythology); rather, we are identifying him by the eternal Son, who belongs to the divine being and is proper to the Godhead, who has projected himself into creation in the person of Jesus Christ. The playwright has stepped into his play. In Jesus our theological reflection and knowing are ontologically grounded in God. The Father/Son relation, therefore, must have primacy over the creator/creature relation in our apprehension of divinity.

In the Nicene Creed the catholic church confesses the following: “We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ, the only Son of God, eternally begotten of the Father, God from God, Light from Light, true God from true God, begotten not made, of one Being with the Father” (emphasis added). The key phrase, which originates from the creed adopted by the Council of Nicaea in A.D. 325, is the affirmation of the incarnate Christ’s oneness of being (homoousios) with the Father. While this confession was vague enough to permit a plurality of interpretations at the Council, it clearly excluded Arius and his followers and they knew it. It is to Athanasius that we owe the triumph of the homoousion in its evangelical radicality: Athanasius forcefully declared that our Lord’s oneness of being with the Father was to be understood in terms of identity. Jesus of Nazareth—the creed speaks of the incarnate Son and not the logos asarkos (“Word without flesh”)—fully possesses the divine ousia (“essence”). In the divide between creator and creature, Jesus is to be located clearly and categorically on the creator side. The Nazarene is God; the Galilean rabbi is a member of the Holy Trinity. Thus Jesus Christ in the fullness of his incarnate humanity, the man born of Mary and crucified under Pontius Pilate, the friend of tax collectors and sinners, is constitutive of the deity. In the words of Athanasius, “And so, since they are one, and the Godhead itself one, the same things are said of the Son, which are said of the Father, except His being said to be Father.”20

God has incarnated himself in time and space. He has come as Man, as the specific human being Jesus who lived and died in the first century in an obscure Middle Eastern country. The theological consequences of this confession are revolutionary. In Jesus we may now know God directly and personally. The deity has presented himself to us as an object.21 This objectivity is of course mediated—we meet God only in his assumed creaturely form—but it is an objectivity nonetheless in which the triune bestows himself to our human knowing. As with any other object, we may now pick out our God: “There he is. That one, the son of Mary. He is the One I worship.” In the concrete particularity of the crucified Jew, we apprehend the deity, in and by the Spirit, according to this divine nature. We may use the word “revelation” to describe the gift of divine objectivity, but only as long as we understand it to mean more than creaturely modeling or the conveying of information, to mean the communication of God’s very self.

Once the Incarnation has taken place, once the eternal Word has made himself object in Jesus, we may no longer look anywhere else to find divinity. God has chosen the time, the place, and the media by which we may meet him. The humanity of Christ is the trysting grounds of our love affair with the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The faithful man Jesus therefore defines and interprets the reality of God. Identical in being with the Father, our Lord embodies—finally, decisively, conclusively—the character, life, and essence of deity. Karl Barth expresses this powerfully:

The Word of God does not just come to us through the man Jesus of Nazareth, as though we could later have heard it and known it in itself and apart from him. The Word of God is this man as man, and always and inescapably it is spoken to us as the reality of this man and not otherwise. This is God’s mercy, that precisely in the reality, no, as the reality of this man, God is Immanuel, God with us, God among us.22

This is not Christological triumphalism (christo-fascism, as some put it), as though the church is parsimoniously restricting the knowledge of deity to a select few. It is the humble recognition that in Christ we are, by grace, confronted with the fullness of divinity and given access to the immanent triune being. Jesus is the second person of the Trinity, risen into the divine society of the Godhead. Consequently, we may not evade the Nazarene or go behind his back in our quest to find deity, for the holy God has terminated our quest by becoming the object Christ and enacting his trinitarian life among us.

It is crucial to understand that Jesus reveals God the Father precisely in his identity as the begotten Son.23 Jesus is not the Father but the Son, and it is as the Son that he discloses the Father. The divine Fatherhood and Sonship are correlative: the Father is the Father of Jesus, and Jesus is the Son of the Father. Neither can be conceived or known apart from the other. The two are united in being and agency: Jesus is the place where the Father is encountered. From Christ we learn who the Father is; in him we learn from the Father who the Son is. We meet both simultaneously and coincidentally in mutually defining relationship. Thus our Lord can insist that he is the sole mediator of our knowledge of the Father: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me…. Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father” (John 14:6, 9). This is the theological explanation why “Father” is used infrequently in the Old Testament to refer to God, and used even less frequently as a term of address. Until Jesus arrives on the scene, the God of Israel is known only in his undifferentiated oneness, addressed principally by the ineffable name of Yahweh. Only the Son can introduce us to his Father.

We may now return to the text of Athanasius with which we began this section. When the church names God as the Father and the Son, it is speaking of the creator in his inner reality, referring to relations subsisting in the divine ousia. Unlike the Arians, Athanasius insists that we truly know the deity in Jesus Christ—as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. When challenged why we may and must use this language, he replies that it is sanctioned and authorized by the divine Word himself who knew “whose Son He was.”24

A God with History

From the ancient church on, the root trinitarian assertion is that the history God has with us, as Jesus the Israelite with his “Father” in their Spirit, is not merely a manifestation or revelation of God but is God.25

That God should have a history is nonsense in view of our inherited understandings of deity. God, after all, is that reality which dwells outside time as the creator of time. He is eternal, the pure actualization of being, immune to the changes and movements of temporality. We may speak of God as the Lord of history, but we well understand this to mean his providential guidance of history from the external vantage point of heaven or supernature. We certainly do not mean he is an actor within history, making history, having history, living through history. On the contrary, God in his timelessness is impassible, ultimately unaffected by the events and happenings of the world.

Yet there at the heart of the Christian gospel is the story of God become Man, a God who is born, who is raised in Nazareth, who breathes and eats and cries and laughs and loves, a God who suffers and dies. This is a God who in Christ both affects and is affected by the world, a God who has, in the words of Jonathan Edwards, “really become passionate to his own.”26 This gospel is thus the claim that the deity has a history—the history of Jesus in Israel. The Word has become flesh; the Crucified is homoousios with the Father; the eternal Son lives in and through time. It is the peculiarity of this God that he is identified not by abstract attributes but by narrative —by historical descriptions and biblical stories. We remember what he has done in the past and we anticipate his promise of what he will do in the future: “Christ has died. Christ is risen. Christ will come again.” Our God is eternal in that he is faithful in time to his promises. The divine transcendence is properly described as eschatological futurity or temporal unsurpassability.27

That the eternity of the biblical God is irreconcilable with the eternity of Greek philosophy is increasingly apparent today, but for almost two thousand years Christians have been convinced that the being of God must be defined by its transcendence of temporality. Thus the theological problem: How do we keep together the divine timelessness and the narrative descriptions of God’s history? Well, it’s not easy. Athanasius is a case in point. On the one hand, he is emphatic in this insistence that in Jesus, God has come as Man, a full-blooded human being, with biography and all. On the other hand, all the Hellenistic predicates also obtain: God is incorruptible, immaterial, unchangeable, and so forth. In his fidelity to Scripture, Athanasius did not attempt to resolve the paradox; but later theologians, particularly in the West, did try, and usually at the expense of the biblical understanding.

When a Greek comprehension of deity is joined to the biblical narrative of God’s history with us in Christ, dualism appears at two closely connected points. One, the pre-existent Word, the logos asarkos, is posited as the inner-trinitarian ground of creation.28 God creates and saves the world not through Jesus of Nazareth but through his metaphysical discarnate double. Two, the processions of the immanent Trinity are divorced from the historical missions of the economic Trinity.29 The begetting of the Son and the spiration of the Spirit become ineffable events unconnected to salvation history. With the occurrence of these two moves, the way is prepared for the proliferation, beginning in the Middle Ages, of treatises devoted to De Deo Uno, quite independent of De Deo Trino. Thus the divine being of the Godhead is uninterpreted by the historical event of Jesus. We determine through our philosophy, ideology, culture, and religious experience what deity is, and then we assert that his deity is somehow and in some way “revealed” through Jesus. Within modern Protestant reflection this ultimately results in the theological irrelevance of the Nazarene and renders the doctrine of the Holy Trinity disposable.

The contemporary renaissance in trinitarian theology—perhaps best summarized under the dictum “The economic Trinity is the immanent Trinity”—has made possible a fresh appropriation of the trinitarian grammar. Robert W. Jenson is the foremost American representative of this new theological paradigm. Jenson asks us to move from a theology of revelation to a theology of constitution: it is not that the stories of Jesus, the Father, and the Holy Spirit vaguely reveal the divine being; they are constitutive of it. The historic relationship in the Spirit between Christ Jesus and his Father, lived out in the conditions of first-century Palestine and eternally established in the resurrection and ascension of our Lord, is the triune life of the Godhead. The Christian God has a history, and just as the identity of every human being is defined by the life he or she lives, so the identity of our God is defined by his history with us. God is the Father who grieves for the death of his Jesus at Calvary. God is the Son who prefers the company of harlots and tax collectors to that of religious professionals. God is the Spirit poured out on the church on the day of Pentecost who will bring us into the kingdom of the Father and the Son. The Holy Trinity does not lie behind or under these historical events; the Trinity is constituted in and by them. There is no other God but the God who knows himself as this history. “Truly, the Trinity is simply the Father and the man Jesus and their Spirit as the Spirit of the believing community,” writes Jenson. “This ‘economic’ Trinity is eschatologically God ‘himself,’ an ‘immanent Trinity.’”30

The confession of God as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit directly challenges our antecedent construals of divinity. Specifically, it compels us to reconceptualize the doctrines of divine timelessness and impassibility, which have led theology into a disastrous divorce between the immanent reality of God and his historic self-objectification in Jesus Christ. The biblical history of Jesus is the history of God—this is the radical trinitarian claim. The economic relations between the Galilean rabbi crucified under Pontius Pilate and the transcendent reality whom Jesus names his Father and the eschatological power who creates the future from the ashes of death belong to the internal life of the Godhead. Unlike most theological methods that lead us away from history and the temporalities of the created order into the infinite, unknowable, homogeneous abyss of motionless deity, the doctrine of the Trinity fully grounds our knowledge of the living God in history, in that concrete history which God knows as his own, in that dominical history constitutive of the divine ousia. Thus the trinitarian confession will always be offensive to culture and church, for it binds theological reflection to the givens of Scripture and requires us to think divinity through the particularities of the Nazarene. But if we are so bound, so is God. And here is the heart of the offense: the God of the gospel freely establishes his triune identity not in pretemporal hiddenness but in and by specific—and quite visible, audible, and knowable—finite realities and events. We may not, therefore, transcend God’s history with us in Christ, for not only does God not endeavor to transcend it but he incorporates it into his eschatological eternity. The trinitarian narrative is foundational within the Godhead. When the deity seeks to know who he is, he looks at Jesus the Israelite; when he seeks to understand who he has been and will be, he tells himself the biblical story of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

The new nonsexist liturgies of the Episcopal Church (Prayer Book Studies 30) illustrate the direction of moderate feminism today. They aver a trinitarian theology while simultaneously abstracting from the divine historicity: “We are challenged with being faithful to the creedal tradition of the Church, while, at the same time, naming the God who is ‘One in Three and Three in One’ in non-gender specific terms.”31 One specific way this is worked out in the texts is the virtual elimination of the vocative “Father.” With the exception of the Lord’s Prayer, God is addressed only as “God.” When the Trinity is understood eschatologically, however, all such efforts to evade the particularities of the biblical revelation are shown to be both futile and apostate. Apart from the constituting temporal events of the evangelical narrative, the doctrine of the Holy Trinity is meaningless. Expunge the trinitarian namings of the language of faith and the triune God does not come to speech.

As Geoffrey Wainwright has observed, Jesus’ use of “Father” as an address to God must be distinguished, though not separated, from the figurative use of “father” (or “mother”) as a way of describing the deity’s care for humankind.32 The linguistic reason for this is that kinship terms, when used in direct invocation and discourse, have unique reference and thus “behave like proper nouns.”33 That is to say, they specifically identify their referents and thereby function as personal names. When, for example, my daughter calls out “Daddy,” I simultaneously recognize both her voice and the title, and immediately conclude she is speaking to me and respond accordingly. However, if another little girl calls out “Daddy,” I do not respond, for I know the title does not, in this case, apply to me. Within the circle of my family, the vocative “Daddy” personally identifies me to my children and establishes me in a specific kind of relationship with them and them with me. To the rest of the world I am known as “Al” or “Alvin,” but to my children I am known as “Daddy.” Indeed, if my children were to begin addressing me by some other name—even if they were to name me by my given name—this act would be a virtual denial of our familial relationship.

Within Christian usage “Father” is not just one of many metaphors imported by fallen sinners onto the screen of eternity. It is a filial, denominating title of address revealed in the person of the eternal Son. “On the lips of Jesus,” Wolfhart Pannenberg states, “‘Father’ becomes a proper name for God. It thus ceased to be simply one designation among others. It embraces every feature in the understanding of God which comes to light in the message of Jesus. It names the divine Other in terms of whom Jesus saw himself and to whom he referred his disciples and hearers.”34 Jesus names the holy God of Israel Abba, “Father,” thereby expressing, and indeed effectuating, the intimate inner communion between them, a unique relationship of knowing and love. “No one knows the Son except the Father, and no one knows the Father except the Son” (Mat. 11:27). By this historical address God is acknowledged as the hope, joy, ultimate source, and final authority in our Lord’s life; by this address he is constituted as the Father. The dominical naming occurs within the being of the Godhead. It is an event of the divine biography, an eternal act of self-differentiation occurring in time. When uttered by the incarnate Word, “Father” (defined exclusively by Christ himself in the totality of his filial existence) is a creative, performative word of eschatological power—analogous, on a different level, to God’s speaking forth the universe in Genesis 1—which eternally calls into being the One who loves his Son beyond all imaginings, beyond all conditions and limits. The Father receives from Jesus, through the power of the Spirit, his hypostatic identity as Father.

Here we admittedly move beyond those traditional reflections that protect the impassibility of the Father by constituting his identity solely in his pretemporal begetting of the preincarnate Son: the deity of the Son is conceived purely passively; it is the Father, the fount of all divinity, who is the active, generating agent.35 The Son thus contributes nothing to the personal reality of the Father and therefore his temporal naming of God must be construed as only metaphorical human projection, perhaps illustrative of (or by feminist lights, perhaps not!) but ontologically irrelevant to the unoriginated hypostasis (person). But when we break down the wall between the immanent and economic Trinities—thereby allowing actual traffic between creator and creature—we can begin to think more dynamically and dialectically about the reciprocal relations between the divine persons.36 Jesus is the Son, for he is eternally generated of the Father, sent into the world to accomplish the salvific will of his God, but the Father is the Father in that he is eternally named and glorified as such by Jesus. The Father is personally defined by the filial address, trusting obedience, sacrificial death, and joyful worship of his begotten Son. He submits himself to the embodied judgment of the Nazarene. “What there is to being God the Father is being addressed as ‘Father’ by the Son, Jesus,” Robert Jenson writes. “In that Jesus cries, ‘Father, into your hands…’ and in that he who says this will be the final event, there is the Father.”37 From the man Jesus, God hears the words of filial invocation and receives that love, self-giving, and affirmation evoked by his own love for his only begotten child; from his Son he apprehends who he is in his divine Fatherhood. The Father knows himself only in and from this Son.

The reciprocity and mutuality of this relationship in the Spirit structures the inner communion of the Trinity and demonstrates the infinite love of the Father for Christ Jesus. In that God withholds nothing in autonomous self-possession but in love and risk communicates the fullness of his being and life to Jesus, and in that he remains faithful to Jesus through the agonizing rupture of Calvary, and in resurrection subjects the cosmos to his Son’s absolute Lordship and authority (Matt. 28:18; Phil 2:9-11), and in that he awaits from Jesus the deliverance of the kingdom into his hands (1 Cor 15:20-28), God becomes utterly dependent on his Son for his identity, completely open to Christ’s defining confession of him: “Father, the time has come. Glorify your Son, that your Son may glorify you” (John 17:1). Thus the temporal, historical event of Christ’s relating to God as Father, so abundantly and clearly presented in the Gospels, is simultaneously an eschatological event whereby the deity constitutes and differentiates the divine being. The consubstantial relationship between the Father and the Son is confirmed and established on Easter morning: by the resurrection there forever stands before the first person of the Godhead the One who calls him Abba.

If the Father is constituted by Jesus Christ’s invocation of him, then we can see the impossibility of substituting “Mother” (Or some other variant) as a term of filial address. Perhaps Jesus could have addressed God as his mother (though cogent reasons might be offered in explanation or support of his choice not to do so), in which case the first person of the Godhead would likewise be constituted as Mother. But the decisive fact is that “Father” is Jesus’ chosen term, and the identity of the economic and essential Trinities precludes us from tampering with this language. In trinitarian doctrine, historical contingency may enjoy theological finality.38

The divine Son commands Christians to address his Father as their Father: “Pray then like this: Our Father, who art in heaven, Hallowed be thy Name” (Matt. 6:9). This filial invocation is a privilege of adoption in Christ Jesus. By baptism we are incorporated into the humanity of our Lord and his eternal relationship with the Father in the power of the Spirit (Gal. 3:26-4:6). In Christ we are inserted into the trinitarian conversation of the Godhead. The prayer, praise, and intercession of God the Son are realized in the lives of his adopted brothers and sisters. “For you did not receive a spirit that makes you a slave again to fear,” the Apostle heralds, “but you received the Spirit of sonship. And by him we cry, ‘Abba, Father’” (Rom. 8:15). By the gift of the Spirit the church is drawn into the vicarious worship of its risen Lord: by grace we now share in the eschatological address of the Son. With and through Christ we boldly name God “Father” and enter into intimate fellowship with him. Thus the structure and languaging of our prayer and discourse both manifests the triune society of the Godhead and enacts our participation in it. As Jenson observes,

Christians bespeak God in a triune coordinate system; they speak to the Father, with the Son, in the Spirit, and only so bespeak God. Indeed, they live in a sort of temporal space defined by these coordinates, and just and only so live “in God.”…The decisive gospel-insight is that if we only pray to God, if our relation to God is reducible to the “to” and is not decisively determined also by “with” and “in,” then it is not the true God whom we identify in our address, but rather some distant and timelessly uninvolved divinity whom we have envisaged. We pray indeed to the Father, and so usually address the Father simply as “God.” But we address this Father in that and only in that we pray with Jesus in their Spirit. The particular God of Scripture does not just stand over against us; he envelops us. And only by the full structure of the envelopment do we have this God.39

Where is God? He is in heaven, we say. Where is heaven? It is wherever Christians invoke the Father with their brother Jesus in his Spirit. By our trinitarian naming the triune God is actualized in time.

The God of the gospel identifies himself in and by the particularities of the biblical narrative. Our prayer to God and our speech about him, therefore, will be true only to the extent that they are controlled by the temporal events of the evangelical history. We may find this frustrating, offensive, and scandalous; but the sovereign God nevertheless remains free to be for us whom he has eternally elected to be in the history of Jesus of Nazareth: Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Conclusion

The Holy Trinity is the God who has named himself Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. By this name and by the narrative comprehended within it, the identity of the living God is revealed and constituted. Through it we are given access into the triune life of the Godhead. Current feminist proposals for altering the language of faith therefore have the most profound significance.40 If I am correct in my preceding analysis, these changes touch the substance of the gospel. To abandon or reject the trinitarian naming is to create a new religion, a new God.

Yet this crisis carries within itself a wonderful opportunity: it may and indeed must provoke our theological reflection to a radical appropriation and reformulation of the trinitarian dogma. When this occurs, we will see that the triune God is not a deity of sexism and patriarchy but the God of the gospel who saves men and women from their sin and liberates them for love, discipleship, and joyous fellowship in the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 12, No. 3 (May/Jun 2006).