Concepts about God

Concepts about God

Is God really a Father? - Use of analogies, symbols and metaphors to call God

The real being of God transcends our minds, and so do our concepts and terms about him. God is beyond any human understanding and comprehension, and he can not be truly expressed in human, meaningful concepts or words.

Our concepts of God

Our concepts and names of God are, per se, meaningless, because God is ineffable, that is, beyond expression, unspeakable; anything we say about him is incomplete, is not real. However, this is the only way that we can refer to, or communicate with God. We figure out names for God based on our knowledge and experiences.

We are so familiar with talking of God in human terms, that we might very easily miss that any human term applied to God is just analogical or metaphorical. Most of the time we take for granted our ability to talk about God, without realizing that he is beyond our reach and beyond our ability to comprehend him. We can not figure out how he really is.

The use of analogies

We need analogies for talking about God; we can talk about God only by comparisons and analogies; there is no other way. Based on our knowledge and experience, we use similarities to talk about him. They help us to elucidate what is hard to understand by other means; and they are based on the assumption that what is true in the physical or created order, is also true in the non-physical or "divine" order. This is a presupposition of faith.

The name of Father for God is an analogy

When we call God, Father, we are using an analogy of something that happens to us, a comparison with our human experience. But God is not really a father. I am not denying the revelation made by Jesus that Yahveh is Abba. Using an analogy Jesus implied that God truly has the "qualities" and characteristics of a good father, the care and love of our parents; but God is not really a father.

There is no problem either to say that God is a Mother, since God has no genders, neither masculine nor feminine.