Luminescence, Volume 1. C. K. Barrett
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God is described as a father, but I am a father, one among millions and there is no more human relationship than that of parent and child. Is this essential human relationship to be predicated of God? And our Father—in heaven! “In” is a preposition with a local meaning, where God is said to be—up there? But there is no such place “up there.” We have Mr. Khrushchev’s own word for it, that his cosmonauts have found no angels or other supernatural beings on their journeys, and I think we may well accept his conclusions. Outer space is not inhabited by winged or white-robed creatures.
Can we take this New Testament language seriously? Yes, of course. What I have just been saying (though you took it seriously because so many profoundly serious people say it) is really sheer nonsense. The New Testament writers, though less well instructed about celestial topography than we are, knew quite well that words like “Father in heaven” were parables, only they were wise enough to take these parables as seriously as we take our literalism. It may be, I think, that there are elements in the New Testament language that we cannot easily use today, but our first task is to see what this classical Christian language means. Let us begin with heaven.
HEAVEN
God has his home in heaven, human beings do not. Humans live on earth. This means that God is other than humankind, and that humankind has no way of knowing God unless God himself takes action to make himself known. To put the picture into a modern form, you must think of a house converted into two flats—an upstairs flat and a downstairs flat. The staircase has been taken out or torn up, and the upstairs tenant has his own exit. Now if I live downstairs, I shall probably have a pretty good idea that there is someone upstairs. I shall hear him walking about, moving the furniture, playing the piano and so on. But I shall not, so long as we stay on our own premises, see him and get to know him. Only if he comes down shall I be able to get to know him.
Now this is what the Bible teaches about God, and the use of the term heaven conveys the opposite of what some might think. God is not described as a glorified human being, but as a being existing on a totally different plane, completely remote from humankind, unless he of his own initiative chooses to come into the human orbit. God is in heaven, human beings are on earth. The Bible is forever reminding us of this truth, and in doing so teaches a far more spiritual and far more exalted doctrine of God than do some—I do not say all—of those who are impatient with the Bible’s pictorial imagery. I do not propose this evening to take up the epistemology and metaphysics of all this; I want to preach a plain, simple, and practical sermon. Let me therefore point out how errors arise when we fail to take seriously this absolute distinction between God and human beings.
We fail to understand the time ratio of God’s action. I mean the sort of ratio that the Bible expresses when it says that with God 1,000 years are but as yesterday when it is past, like a watch in the night. God can afford to work slowly. We jump to the conclusion that because God fails to do justice quickly enough for us to see it, that he does not do justice, or care about justice at all. But this is not so; he does not work on our timetable. His ways are not our ways. And it is only when we have learned to look at things with Him, and not simply in terms of our own experience in life, that we shall see them making sense.
Again, as long as we think of God as bound up with ourselves, we are bound to underestimate his love. We may not be able to say in precisely the same sense as the original compilers of the Nicene Creed that “for us humans and for our salvation he came down from heaven,” but if nothing of that “came down” remains, if God is simply a part of my own being and experience and not in any way external to them, then we shall have lost not some easily expendable piece of Christian metaphysic, but the miracle of divine love that makes Christianity go.
Once we have learned the meaning of this “in heaven” we shall not need to be deeply troubled about anthropomorphism—the description of God in terms of human properties. We shall know how they are to be taken. That is why I begin at this point. We must first grasp the meaning of “in heaven,” and then go on to speak of God as Father. This we will do thinking first of fatherhood in relationship to the father.
FATHERHOOD IN RELATIONSHIP TO THE FATHER
Let us start simply and unashamedly with human fatherhood and then see what this means when transformed by the words “in heaven.” What does it mean that I am the father of my son? I think I should answer that in terms of responsibility and that in two senses. I am responsible for my son’s existence in the sense that I am the human cause of it, and share in the human origin of it. Whether his presence in the world means good or evil for him or for the world, I am responsible for it. I am also responsible for his existence in the sense that having brought him into the world, I have a moral responsibility for maintaining him, for preserving the life that I caused to exist.
Thus when I declare that God is our Father in heaven, I mean that God assumes responsibility for human existence. The whole human race is one family, God’s family, and God is responsible for it. He brought it into being and is responsible for maintaining it. As the Sermon on the Mount, a few verses back, proclaims, your Heavenly Father knows what things you need.
There is nothing which so breaks a person than the assuming of a responsibility that is not theirs. It is this primarily, and not the speed of modern life, not the noise of it, and certainly not hard work that causes the breakdowns which are so marked a feature of modern life, and not least of university life. I am not referring to those anxiety states of which there is commonly an epidemic in June. Sometimes the sufferer is responsible for them. When people do not believe in the responsibility of a Heavenly Father, they either cease to care at all, or they feel they must take all the burdens of the universe on their own shoulders. And they are not fit to stand the strain. Let me try to make this point also practical and realistic.
Will it be too egoistic if I venture to recall that last Thursday I was giving a general lecture on the place and role of theology in a university. I argued that theology was not out of place, in a society in which people follow the question wherever it leads, and conduct their inquiries, so far as may be, without prejudice and without presupposition. A Christian theologian can take part in this activity precisely because his own subject matter tells him that he must live by faith, not by sight; and therefore he may and must question everything that he can see, living by faith in the invisible truth of things. This applies not only to the Christian theologian, but to the Christian student of every subject, he should be the first and most confident student of all, because he will ask the strangest questions, and get to do so in the absolute confidence that though he may not find it, there is a satisfying and creative answer to every question. The running of the universe does not depend on the fragmentary knowledge I have of the universe or of its Maker. The running of the universe depends on God, and if as a Christian I know God as my Heavenly Father, I have the freedom of the universe and I can poke and pry into every corner of my Father’s huge mysterious realm, knowing that there are no hidden goblins in the dark corners but only fresh angles and aspects of the Father’s love.
This looks at the matter from the intellectual angle. You can look at it from others, for example moral life. Those who know they are living in a world, a family, for which the Heavenly Father is responsible, can achieve the freedom and spontaneity in which true moral life exists. He is not a good driver who has to stop at every traffic light, take out the Highway Code, and look up what he has to do next. It is the same with morals. He has not learned the secret of the good life, who has to stop at every moral crossroads, and look up the rules.
I am not saying that rules have no use, any more than I am saying that the Highway Code has no use. But what really matters is the spontaneous right reaction to circumstance, and as far as morals are concerned this can only come when I have ceased to think about myself, and have learned to rely on the fact that the Heavenly Father is responsible for his world, for the maintenance of right and wrong, and for me and my neighbor. The same is true of spiritual life. I do not at all underestimate the importance of discipline here, and yet there is no such thing as living a truly spiritual life simply by the book—ask St. Paul. My relations with God do not depend on my having said so many prayers, read so many chapters of the Bible, heard so many sermons, they depend on God, God who assumes responsibility for me, his child.
This is true also of the life of the Church, though the Church often gets it wrong.