A good reflection over at Pontifications begins with this observation:
The truth of the matter, then, is that while God was always Father, he was not always Creator or Maker.
Short, but it's a neat point, isn't it?
The writer includes the caution against reading too much time-sense into "while" and "was always" and "was not always" --- because, of course, one of the things Created or Made was time itself.
Instead, read it this way: Creatorhood is not an essential, inherent, or defining characteristic of God. God might have chosen not to create, only to be. But Fatherhood is indeed an essential, inherent, defining characteristic of God. God has always possessed Fatherhood and Sonship and... something... that proceeds from the union of Fatherhood and Sonship. Can we call it Love?
Whatever Fatherhood means within the Godhead, we give it that name because we were told to (cf. the Gospel of John); and what fatherhood means to us on Earth, it must mean because God created it in order to give God's Fatherhood the same name, to tell us something about it.
First Fatherhood; then creation; then fatherhood. Some people fear that the current attack on fatherhood --- the devaluing of men and the celebration of boys, the fatherless children, and the like --- is a recent and depressingly successful diabolical attack, meant ultimately to destroy our concept of God as Father.
But how successful can these "recent" attacks be? Earthly fatherhood, we are told, has never been what God ordained it to be. There never was on earth a father or a son until after the fall, when Adam knew Eve his wife and she brought forth Cain. We have never seen a father of the kind God intended. And yet, by the time 30 A.D. rolled around, after millennia of further decay, God expected us to see and know enough about what fatherhood should be, enough that He still employed that impossibly archaic prelapsarian metaphor.
Can fatherhood today be farther from fatherhood in 30 A.D., than 30 A.D. was from before the Fall? I don't think so. The glass is smeared heavily, but it could not have been crystal clear two thousand years ago. This is not to say that we shouldn't bother keeping it as clear as we can, maybe even rubbing off some of the grime. The point is, fatherhood was a serviceable metaphor then, and it is serviceable now. And it can only be so if God expects us to understand, enough, what fatherhood means to Him. He expects us to comprehend the ideal even though all our examples are woefully imperfect. Yes, they are bad now, but they always have been very, very bad, compared to the father God made Adam to be.
An important point: Although the world has seen no father of the kind God intended, it has seen one son. We have a perfect example of Sonship, if we can only sift from Him the features that are essential, inherent, defining (begottenness, obedience) from the incidental (Middle-easternness, celibacy). It isn't as easy as you would think (male? firstborn?)
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