There is one pint that you imply, but don't make explicit. Sometimes a measure of violence is not only legitimate, but necessary to protect those who need protection. But that violence should be proportionate to the threat and the minimum that will achieve the aim. As your reference to Just War Theory implies, a threat from a drunkard to pull a woman out of a seat on the subway does NOT legitimise shooting him. Nor is it legitimate to shoulder-charge a cheeky kid who blocks a doorway.
The overall aim is to minimise harm, not satisfy a checklist of conditions. In this regard, the guy who choked an assailant to death was justified in his intervention, but negligent in his failure to assess when the chokehold was no longer necessary. An erroneous judgement, but not a criminal act.
You write, “Faith does not preclude obedience to God’s commands, and one of those commands is to protect the weak. To stand by while others suffer injustice is to betray both God’s law and one’s neighbor.”
Given common themes and contrasts you draw on, do you recognize that some people you place on the other side of your line-drawing might argue something similar for what is happening with Afghani Christians getting deported, ICE’s erroneous deportations, calling others “vermin,” etc.?
I ask this because I question if the Bible is the primary informant of your ethics or if something else is creeping in.
There’s a necessary tension to be wrestled with here and I appreciate your boldness… I’m still learning.. I’m a pacifist intellectually but I’d definitely use violence to defend myself my loved ones or an innocent person.
I’ll prayerfully consider your points brother. I ask you to prayerfully consider Galatians 3:3 and 1 Corinthians 13:12… we’re all students and the Holy Spirit is the teacher. Gods way are above our ways keep doing the work Pastor Michael!!
I recognize that Michael is committed to the Reformed view of salvation, and I have no desire to dishonor him or his convictions. I’m empathetic to that position. For much of my life, I too believed in a penal God and could argue for that framework convincingly from Scripture.
If I may offer an alternative view—especially since you described yourself as an intellectual pacifist—it may resonate with you. Michael calls the crucifixion “the most unjust act of violence in history” and then claims it shows that “violence can be redemptive when wielded by the righteous hand of God.” That, I think, reverses the gospel’s logic. This is penal substitutionary atonement in a nutshell: the idea that God redeems through an act of sanctioned violence.
But there is another reading—one that has existed from the earliest centuries—that sees the Cross not as the justification of redemptive violence but as its end. Christ does not wield violence; He absorbs it. He does not conquer by domination but by the refusal to retaliate. The Resurrection, then, is not divine revenge but divine vindication. To say that the Cross sanctifies violence is to miss its meaning entirely: it unmasks violence as powerless before love.
Michael’s prooftexts—Deuteronomy, Genesis 9, Romans 13, Revelation 19—are interpreted as if God’s judgments and human acts of killing are univocal, as if they share the same moral grammar. The Fathers never read them that way. They consistently insisted that the violent portrayals of God in Scripture are figurative, pedagogical, or accommodated to human weakness, not descriptive of God’s nature.
St. Gregory of Nyssa, often called the Father of Fathers, famously said that reading the conquest of Canaan literally would make God worse than any human tyrant. Gregory helped systematize Nicene theology after the Arian controversies of the fourth century; his Against Eunomius and On Not Three Gods secured the homoousios formula—the confession that the Father and Son share one essence. For Gregory, the mature Christian reading of violent texts is that we are to slay the passions, not people.
Michael’s anthropology, however, is profoundly modern rather than patristic. He imagines the world as a battlefield of “good men” and “evil men,” where order depends on the threat of force. That is Hobbesian, not Christian. In the patristic vision, the world’s order is upheld not by fear but by communion—the shared participation in divine life. Violence can impose control, but it cannot create peace. Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the presence of divine harmony.
Michael also claims that violence “under lawful authority” is righteous. Yet Christ’s crucifixion was lawful under both Roman and Jewish law—and it remains the greatest evil in history. Legality, therefore, is not the same as moral participation in God.
I have no doubt that Michael is a sincere and thoughtful person. Still, his article replaces the Christological ontology of peace with a mechanistic ontology of power. It projects the logic of the fallen world onto God, sanctifies it as “lawful,” and calls it righteous. That is not biblical fidelity; it is metaphysical inversion.
I offer this not as an attack but as a reminder that there is a far older and richer Christian vision of peace—one that sees the Cross as the end of redemptive violence and the revelation of divine love. The theology Michael presents belongs to a particular tradition that is, historically speaking, quite recent. That doesn’t make it automatically wrong, but it does mean that the Church has long preserved other ways of understanding salvation and divine justice—ways that do not require a violent God to save a violent world.
An excellent response! I oppose nothing in what you have said but would add a caveat; that all our theologising, Reformed or Catholic or whatever, is best understood as metaphorical. We can't describe God with 100% accuracy (I would suggest that we struggle to get 1% accuracy!), so we can speak only by analogy. And we have to keep in mind that no analogy, however accurate from one perspective, will preclude a fundamentally different analogy from being equally accurate from another perspective.
I agree to an extent; it seems that you view analogy as a comparison that’s useful but not ontologically binding, as though theology were poetry about something ultimately unknowable. But analogy is ontological participation.
If every analogy can be “equally accurate,” then none can tell us anything true.
They become linguistic ornaments floating over an unknowable void. If “God as Father” is only metaphorical, then: It is not grounded in any real relation between God and us. It simply expresses a feeling of dependence, care, or moral ideal. And it could be replaced by “Mother,” “Energy,” “Architect,” or “Quantum Field” with equal legitimacy.
Once that happens, the name “Father” tells us nothing about God, only about our projection onto the divine. God becomes a mirror for human imagination, not the living source of revelation.
The name “Father” is not a human invention but a divinely given analogy — a participation of creaturely life in divine reality. We call God “Father” because fatherhood exists in God first; creaturely fatherhood is its image and echo. Every finite form is an embodiment, though imperfect, of the infinite content. So when Christ teaches us to pray “Our Father,” He is not indulging a metaphor; He is revealing an ontological truth — that God’s relation to us is personal, generative, and loving. Human fatherhood is the shadow; divine Fatherhood is the archetype.
If all divine names are but metaphors, then God remains forever silent, and we speak only to ourselves. But if the world proceeds from God, then our words about Him, though imperfect, are not inventions but echoes of His own self-disclosure. The name ‘Father’ does not bind God to our likeness; it binds us to His.
To say that all names are equally true is to say that none are true; to say that a name participates in truth is to confess revelation.
And thanks for the care and though you have put into your comment.
Unfortunately I might not have been clear enough in my meaning. For example, I did NOT say "every analogy can be equally accurate"; I said A DIFFERENT analogy can be equally accurate FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE.
I fail to grasp why you think 'God as Father is ONLY metaphorical' lacks a connection between us and God. I suggest it is a good metaphor precisely because it reveals that relationship to be (in your words late) 'personal, generative and loving'. Do you mean that 'God is Father' is intended to be taken literally?
To press your point, that 'it could be replaced by "Mother", I ask why not? God is not a sexual Being, and 'Mother' is no less personal, generative and loving than 'Father'.
I also see no firm ground under your statement "If all divine names are but metaphors, then God remains silent".
Firstly, you inserted the word 'but' before metaphor; that is a belittling term that poisons the well. It implies the very concept of metaphor is empty even before we start. Secondly, metaphors are not silent. Jesus' parables are full of metaphors and analogies, call them what you will; I don't see the parables as 'silent'.
Your point about the ontology of which is the shadow and which is the archetype is well taken. I agree fully. But that wasn't the issue. The issue is "How can we meaningfully discuss the archetype in human language?" The words 'Father', 'Pater', 'Vater', 'Pere', etc. are all human words, and derive their meaning from human experience; therefore their use in discussing God is unavoidably metaphorical. It is just that we are so accustomed to that metaphorical use that we unconsciously elide into the theological meaning.
Finally "To say that all names are equally true is to say that none are true." Perhaps that's why I didn't say "All names are equally true." Why do you imply that I did?
You say "human words, and derive their meaning from human experience" which I interpret you to mean that metaphors, analogies, and language in general should be seen as a human construct, a projection upward from human experience to gesture toward something transcendent.
If I understand you correctly that definition assumes that human language begins with us. That we invent metaphors to point toward realities beyond our grasp and therefore "we struggle to get 1% accuracy." This creates a dialectic between the finite and the infinite.
But in the classical and patristic view this gets the direction of revelation backwards. In the classical and patristic view human words about God are not human inventions about the divine. They are participations in the divine Logos who makes Himself known through creation and revelation.
To say, “God is Father,” then, is not a metaphor we made up to describe divine love; it is a symbolic disclosure of who God eternally is, reflected imperfectly in human fatherhood.
I agree God is not "sexed". I wasn't saying that the language of "Father" implies He is sexed though. I'm not thinking in those terms. I was saying that Christ’s own revelation of God gives divine names a specific theological content that is not interchangeable. When Jesus teaches us to pray “Our Father,” he is not using an arbitrary metaphor or giving us a 1% reliable picture of God. He is revealing an eternal relation within the divine life: the Son eternally begotten of the Father. “Father” here is not a social construct or gendered role it names the source and principle of divine life.
“Mother” could describe aspects of divine nurture or compassion (and Scripture sometimes uses maternal imagery: “as a mother comforts her child…” Isa. 66:13), but it does not describe the eternal relation of persons in the Godhead.
Father names a hypostatic reality. The First Person of the Trinity, from whom the Son is begotten. Mother does not. God speaks to us in the language of creation, not because He is limited by it, but because He makes it transparent to Himself.
So, when God reveals Himself as Father, I don't understand Him to be revealing male biology. He is revealing source, authority, relational generation, and love — the ontological fountainhead of being.
To call God “Father” is to affirm that all being proceeds from a personal source of love. Thus, saying “God is Father” is not a gender claim but an ontological confession.
Forgive me if I have misunderstood you. I hope this provides clarity as to what I'm saying and to what I heard in your previous comment.
I think I understand your point, Christian. But I think you have in mind something that I was NOT saying.
Excuse me if this sounds blunt, but I am striving for transparency here.
When you say "But in the classical and patristic view this gets the direction of revelation backwards. In the classical and patristic view human words about God are not human inventions about the divine.", you are seemingly self-contradictory in your attempt to reverse the flow of the metaphor. You say "HUMAN words about God are NOT HUMAN inventions..."
Then what are they? Words handed down on Siaia, which had never before been heard by human ears? The word 'Father" is the same word, whether I apply it to God or to Bob Springett senior! The MEANING is different, because one is used biologically, the other is used metaphorically (or ontologically, if you prefer that expression). But it is the same word. It was 'invented' by humans to describe a specific biological/social relationship. It was then applied analogically to God.
Our classic theology is crammed with such usage. Take 'saved' as an example. The word itself literally means to rescue for peril or death. It's use in Soteriology is analogical. The list of all such anological terms would fill books.
I am not denying the value of these words in theological use; they are very informative. But they inform by analogy, not because we first spoke them in theological discussions and only later applied them to worldly situations.
Both him and you are out of my league: when I say intellectual pacifist I mean pacifist in principle not practice 😅. Both of you gentlemen are clearly more informed than myself I respectfully bow out.. my only lingering concern was when he said if we don’t fight evil wins…… uuummmm.. that sounds more like out of a marvel comic than the gospels. We are the ones keeping evil at bay?
I’m hardly out of anyone’s league. But your intuition is spot on. As I’ve noted in other comments he is giving evil a positive existence which practically no christian writer has done prior to the reformation. That’s not to say that universal agreement means it’s true, but the fact that both saints in the east and the west have all understood evil as privation, parasitic, or non-being should give one pause.
As I mentioned in my previous article he is committed to the reformed tradition which also states quite clearly God predestines people to hell.
His god’s essence contains violence. Thankfully that view is one of ignorance.
Also, I would argue that any government power that weds itself to a religious tradition would have to use the theological argument that you propose in your essay. Hindu, Judaism, Islam, Institutional Christianity etc etc .. they would all have to subscribe to principles similar to yours to justify violence.. not saying it isn’t reasonable, just saying it’s not endemic to the Christian faith…
Yes they would. That doesn't make it wrong for Christians, because Christianity is the true religion, is it not? Misuse doesn't negate proper use. If Islamists will commit violence believing they have the divine right to do so, are Christians wrong to defend themselves with similar means, authorized by God's word? As I said in the essay, evil won't stop itself. Good men with righteous power must wield the sword to stop them.
I don't think so. Using a word like 'must' can be dangerous! Did the disciples try to rescue Jesus? Peter was specifically told to NOT protect the innocent Jesus! Sometimes accepting that evil people can't be stopped will result in less harm than trying to oppose them. So if Christians are threatened by Islamists, why escalate the confrontation to a Holy War? Why not just get as many people as possible to safety?
There's something remarkably 'modern American fantasy' about thinking that any problem can be solved by application of overwhelming violence.
I suspect Islamic extremist use similar theological premises as yours. I agree with you intellectually, but it’s a slippery slope. Thanks for the food for thought. Question, not as an objection, but just for theological exercise. From your position above; why didn’t the apostles defend themselves?
(1) Some slopes are truly slippery. That's a good caution, not a logical fallacy.
(2) The apostles didn't defend themselves with force because the Christian faith was just taking root and they had not yet acquired cultural influence or political power. That would come later. The apostles' ministry was the preaching of the kingdom in seed form, but as Jesus' many parables demonstrate, the seed of the kingdom would grow and develop over time. The NT bears scant testimony about 2nd generation Christians (and beyond). So there are principles latent within the biblical witness that later Christians would faithfully apply over time and in different circumstances. In other words, the apostles were 1st Gen Christians preaching the gospel and the full flowering and application of their message would develop over many years and centuries and millenia.
Thank you for clarifying your position.. you’re probably waaaaaay more learned than I am. I’m a layman. When I read your respons Galatians 3:3 came to mind….
Romans 13:1 highlights governmental powers are ordained by God meant to punish wrong doers..
“Evil has no existence except as the absence of the good, just as darkness has no existence except as the absence of light.” — St. Augustine, Confessions
Ontologically speaking, evil cannot win because it does not exist as a power in competition with good. It is parasitic. It borrows what little appearance of strength it has from the very good it corrupts.
Your subtitle unintentionally grants evil its own positive agency — as if evil were a substance, a rival ontological principle vying for dominance. That is metaphysically incoherent in a Christian framework.
If evil “wins,” it would mean that nonbeing triumphs over being, that the absence of goodness has somehow acquired existence and power. But nonbeing cannot triumph; it can only distort.
Evil may appear to “advance” in the world when good actions are withheld, but that is simply the withdrawal of participation in the good, not the triumph of a real opposite. Ontologically, what has happened is decay, not victory.
In regard to Violence.
“A Christian does not shed blood. If he does, he has ceased to be a disciple.” — Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians (2nd century)
“Do not call God just, for His justice is not as ours. His justice is mercy.” — St. Isaac the Syrian
The number of Christian martyrs who have condemned violence is enormous and it's impossible to reconcile your theology of violence with their witness. You say “Violence is part of God’s providential rule,” but this confuses divine condescension with divine character. Scripture records God’s accommodation to human violence, but Christ fulfills and corrects those accommodations by revealing the Father as one who “causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good.”
Violence may be permitted, but it is never sanctified. It belongs to the aeon of death, which Christ came to end. The idea that some violence can be morally “lawful" emerged not from the Gospel, but from Augustine’s attempt to reconcile Rome’s imperial order with Christianity.
In the Christian east they never developed a formal “just war” theory. At most, eastern Christians speak of war as a tragic necessity, requiring repentance, not celebration. Soldiers who kill, even in defense, are often barred from the Eucharist for a time, not because they are condemned, but because killing—even when “necessary”—is a wound to the soul.
Ironically it is Eastern Christians who have suffered the most violence when compared to the West.
This comment isn't really an argument, but an alternative understanding of violence held by the 2nd largest Christian tradition in the world.
Yes. I’ve preached on it many times. But the philosophical ontology of sin need not be deployed against those who wish to fight evil. To say “sin is only a parasite! It has no existence of its own!” Yes, true enough. But in our day to day experience, evil is very real and it will win if we don’t oppose it. In other words, you are bringing philosophical categories to a practical discussion without acknowledging the validity of both
Ontology, in the patristic and theological sense, isn’t an abstract philosophical category — it’s a theological claim about reality itself. It’s not speculation about being; it’s a confession of what is in light of God’s revelation.
So, when the saints (East & West) say sin is “non-being,” they’re not doing armchair metaphysics. You're treating ontology and experience as competing explanations. Saying sin is ontologically nothing doesn't contradict the fact that we experience it as powerful. They’re not in conflict; they’re different levels of truth.
Evil feels so real precisely because it corrupts something that truly is good — just as rot feels real because the fruit itself is real. The fruit decays and ceases to exist, the same is true of evil. What is parasitic can’t last forever. Thankfully death and evil were defeated in God's infinite act in Christ once and for all.
Calling sin non-being doesn’t minimize its reality in human life; it puts it in perspective. Evil is experienced as powerful, but it’s still rooted in nothing — and that’s why it can be overcome. This is precisely why the Christian martyr's embraced martyrdom. They saw the very reality I'm speaking of. They knew death was now the new mode of life.
"Allow me to be eaten by the beasts, through whom I can attain to God. I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread of Christ.
Now I begin to be a disciple. May nothing visible or invisible envy me, that I may attain to Jesus Christ. Let fire and cross, troops of wild beasts, cuttings, manglings, wrenching of bones, the hacking of limbs, the crushing of the whole body, come upon me — only let me attain to Jesus Christ.
When I suffer, I shall become free in Jesus Christ, and with Him shall rise again in freedom. I am about to be born."
-St. Ignatius of Antioch
“We are born once by the womb of our mother, but again by the blood of martyrdom. What was begun in baptism is perfected in death.”
Yes, but that’s irrelevant. I’m making a theological argument in ordinary language. My argument stands as is. Augustine himself articulated just war theory. Clearly evil was real to him and needed to be opposed.
Godly wisdom!
An excellent presentation!
There is one pint that you imply, but don't make explicit. Sometimes a measure of violence is not only legitimate, but necessary to protect those who need protection. But that violence should be proportionate to the threat and the minimum that will achieve the aim. As your reference to Just War Theory implies, a threat from a drunkard to pull a woman out of a seat on the subway does NOT legitimise shooting him. Nor is it legitimate to shoulder-charge a cheeky kid who blocks a doorway.
The overall aim is to minimise harm, not satisfy a checklist of conditions. In this regard, the guy who choked an assailant to death was justified in his intervention, but negligent in his failure to assess when the chokehold was no longer necessary. An erroneous judgement, but not a criminal act.
You write, “Faith does not preclude obedience to God’s commands, and one of those commands is to protect the weak. To stand by while others suffer injustice is to betray both God’s law and one’s neighbor.”
Given common themes and contrasts you draw on, do you recognize that some people you place on the other side of your line-drawing might argue something similar for what is happening with Afghani Christians getting deported, ICE’s erroneous deportations, calling others “vermin,” etc.?
I ask this because I question if the Bible is the primary informant of your ethics or if something else is creeping in.
(Side note: I’m not a pacifist.)
There’s a necessary tension to be wrestled with here and I appreciate your boldness… I’m still learning.. I’m a pacifist intellectually but I’d definitely use violence to defend myself my loved ones or an innocent person.
I’ll prayerfully consider your points brother. I ask you to prayerfully consider Galatians 3:3 and 1 Corinthians 13:12… we’re all students and the Holy Spirit is the teacher. Gods way are above our ways keep doing the work Pastor Michael!!
I recognize that Michael is committed to the Reformed view of salvation, and I have no desire to dishonor him or his convictions. I’m empathetic to that position. For much of my life, I too believed in a penal God and could argue for that framework convincingly from Scripture.
If I may offer an alternative view—especially since you described yourself as an intellectual pacifist—it may resonate with you. Michael calls the crucifixion “the most unjust act of violence in history” and then claims it shows that “violence can be redemptive when wielded by the righteous hand of God.” That, I think, reverses the gospel’s logic. This is penal substitutionary atonement in a nutshell: the idea that God redeems through an act of sanctioned violence.
But there is another reading—one that has existed from the earliest centuries—that sees the Cross not as the justification of redemptive violence but as its end. Christ does not wield violence; He absorbs it. He does not conquer by domination but by the refusal to retaliate. The Resurrection, then, is not divine revenge but divine vindication. To say that the Cross sanctifies violence is to miss its meaning entirely: it unmasks violence as powerless before love.
Michael’s prooftexts—Deuteronomy, Genesis 9, Romans 13, Revelation 19—are interpreted as if God’s judgments and human acts of killing are univocal, as if they share the same moral grammar. The Fathers never read them that way. They consistently insisted that the violent portrayals of God in Scripture are figurative, pedagogical, or accommodated to human weakness, not descriptive of God’s nature.
St. Gregory of Nyssa, often called the Father of Fathers, famously said that reading the conquest of Canaan literally would make God worse than any human tyrant. Gregory helped systematize Nicene theology after the Arian controversies of the fourth century; his Against Eunomius and On Not Three Gods secured the homoousios formula—the confession that the Father and Son share one essence. For Gregory, the mature Christian reading of violent texts is that we are to slay the passions, not people.
Michael’s anthropology, however, is profoundly modern rather than patristic. He imagines the world as a battlefield of “good men” and “evil men,” where order depends on the threat of force. That is Hobbesian, not Christian. In the patristic vision, the world’s order is upheld not by fear but by communion—the shared participation in divine life. Violence can impose control, but it cannot create peace. Peace is not the absence of conflict; it is the presence of divine harmony.
Michael also claims that violence “under lawful authority” is righteous. Yet Christ’s crucifixion was lawful under both Roman and Jewish law—and it remains the greatest evil in history. Legality, therefore, is not the same as moral participation in God.
I have no doubt that Michael is a sincere and thoughtful person. Still, his article replaces the Christological ontology of peace with a mechanistic ontology of power. It projects the logic of the fallen world onto God, sanctifies it as “lawful,” and calls it righteous. That is not biblical fidelity; it is metaphysical inversion.
I offer this not as an attack but as a reminder that there is a far older and richer Christian vision of peace—one that sees the Cross as the end of redemptive violence and the revelation of divine love. The theology Michael presents belongs to a particular tradition that is, historically speaking, quite recent. That doesn’t make it automatically wrong, but it does mean that the Church has long preserved other ways of understanding salvation and divine justice—ways that do not require a violent God to save a violent world.
An excellent response! I oppose nothing in what you have said but would add a caveat; that all our theologising, Reformed or Catholic or whatever, is best understood as metaphorical. We can't describe God with 100% accuracy (I would suggest that we struggle to get 1% accuracy!), so we can speak only by analogy. And we have to keep in mind that no analogy, however accurate from one perspective, will preclude a fundamentally different analogy from being equally accurate from another perspective.
I agree to an extent; it seems that you view analogy as a comparison that’s useful but not ontologically binding, as though theology were poetry about something ultimately unknowable. But analogy is ontological participation.
If every analogy can be “equally accurate,” then none can tell us anything true.
They become linguistic ornaments floating over an unknowable void. If “God as Father” is only metaphorical, then: It is not grounded in any real relation between God and us. It simply expresses a feeling of dependence, care, or moral ideal. And it could be replaced by “Mother,” “Energy,” “Architect,” or “Quantum Field” with equal legitimacy.
Once that happens, the name “Father” tells us nothing about God, only about our projection onto the divine. God becomes a mirror for human imagination, not the living source of revelation.
The name “Father” is not a human invention but a divinely given analogy — a participation of creaturely life in divine reality. We call God “Father” because fatherhood exists in God first; creaturely fatherhood is its image and echo. Every finite form is an embodiment, though imperfect, of the infinite content. So when Christ teaches us to pray “Our Father,” He is not indulging a metaphor; He is revealing an ontological truth — that God’s relation to us is personal, generative, and loving. Human fatherhood is the shadow; divine Fatherhood is the archetype.
If all divine names are but metaphors, then God remains forever silent, and we speak only to ourselves. But if the world proceeds from God, then our words about Him, though imperfect, are not inventions but echoes of His own self-disclosure. The name ‘Father’ does not bind God to our likeness; it binds us to His.
To say that all names are equally true is to say that none are true; to say that a name participates in truth is to confess revelation.
Hi Christian,
And thanks for the care and though you have put into your comment.
Unfortunately I might not have been clear enough in my meaning. For example, I did NOT say "every analogy can be equally accurate"; I said A DIFFERENT analogy can be equally accurate FROM A DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVE.
I fail to grasp why you think 'God as Father is ONLY metaphorical' lacks a connection between us and God. I suggest it is a good metaphor precisely because it reveals that relationship to be (in your words late) 'personal, generative and loving'. Do you mean that 'God is Father' is intended to be taken literally?
To press your point, that 'it could be replaced by "Mother", I ask why not? God is not a sexual Being, and 'Mother' is no less personal, generative and loving than 'Father'.
I also see no firm ground under your statement "If all divine names are but metaphors, then God remains silent".
Firstly, you inserted the word 'but' before metaphor; that is a belittling term that poisons the well. It implies the very concept of metaphor is empty even before we start. Secondly, metaphors are not silent. Jesus' parables are full of metaphors and analogies, call them what you will; I don't see the parables as 'silent'.
Your point about the ontology of which is the shadow and which is the archetype is well taken. I agree fully. But that wasn't the issue. The issue is "How can we meaningfully discuss the archetype in human language?" The words 'Father', 'Pater', 'Vater', 'Pere', etc. are all human words, and derive their meaning from human experience; therefore their use in discussing God is unavoidably metaphorical. It is just that we are so accustomed to that metaphorical use that we unconsciously elide into the theological meaning.
Finally "To say that all names are equally true is to say that none are true." Perhaps that's why I didn't say "All names are equally true." Why do you imply that I did?
You say "human words, and derive their meaning from human experience" which I interpret you to mean that metaphors, analogies, and language in general should be seen as a human construct, a projection upward from human experience to gesture toward something transcendent.
If I understand you correctly that definition assumes that human language begins with us. That we invent metaphors to point toward realities beyond our grasp and therefore "we struggle to get 1% accuracy." This creates a dialectic between the finite and the infinite.
But in the classical and patristic view this gets the direction of revelation backwards. In the classical and patristic view human words about God are not human inventions about the divine. They are participations in the divine Logos who makes Himself known through creation and revelation.
To say, “God is Father,” then, is not a metaphor we made up to describe divine love; it is a symbolic disclosure of who God eternally is, reflected imperfectly in human fatherhood.
I agree God is not "sexed". I wasn't saying that the language of "Father" implies He is sexed though. I'm not thinking in those terms. I was saying that Christ’s own revelation of God gives divine names a specific theological content that is not interchangeable. When Jesus teaches us to pray “Our Father,” he is not using an arbitrary metaphor or giving us a 1% reliable picture of God. He is revealing an eternal relation within the divine life: the Son eternally begotten of the Father. “Father” here is not a social construct or gendered role it names the source and principle of divine life.
“Mother” could describe aspects of divine nurture or compassion (and Scripture sometimes uses maternal imagery: “as a mother comforts her child…” Isa. 66:13), but it does not describe the eternal relation of persons in the Godhead.
Father names a hypostatic reality. The First Person of the Trinity, from whom the Son is begotten. Mother does not. God speaks to us in the language of creation, not because He is limited by it, but because He makes it transparent to Himself.
So, when God reveals Himself as Father, I don't understand Him to be revealing male biology. He is revealing source, authority, relational generation, and love — the ontological fountainhead of being.
To call God “Father” is to affirm that all being proceeds from a personal source of love. Thus, saying “God is Father” is not a gender claim but an ontological confession.
Forgive me if I have misunderstood you. I hope this provides clarity as to what I'm saying and to what I heard in your previous comment.
I think I understand your point, Christian. But I think you have in mind something that I was NOT saying.
Excuse me if this sounds blunt, but I am striving for transparency here.
When you say "But in the classical and patristic view this gets the direction of revelation backwards. In the classical and patristic view human words about God are not human inventions about the divine.", you are seemingly self-contradictory in your attempt to reverse the flow of the metaphor. You say "HUMAN words about God are NOT HUMAN inventions..."
Then what are they? Words handed down on Siaia, which had never before been heard by human ears? The word 'Father" is the same word, whether I apply it to God or to Bob Springett senior! The MEANING is different, because one is used biologically, the other is used metaphorically (or ontologically, if you prefer that expression). But it is the same word. It was 'invented' by humans to describe a specific biological/social relationship. It was then applied analogically to God.
Our classic theology is crammed with such usage. Take 'saved' as an example. The word itself literally means to rescue for peril or death. It's use in Soteriology is analogical. The list of all such anological terms would fill books.
I am not denying the value of these words in theological use; they are very informative. But they inform by analogy, not because we first spoke them in theological discussions and only later applied them to worldly situations.
Both him and you are out of my league: when I say intellectual pacifist I mean pacifist in principle not practice 😅. Both of you gentlemen are clearly more informed than myself I respectfully bow out.. my only lingering concern was when he said if we don’t fight evil wins…… uuummmm.. that sounds more like out of a marvel comic than the gospels. We are the ones keeping evil at bay?
I’m hardly out of anyone’s league. But your intuition is spot on. As I’ve noted in other comments he is giving evil a positive existence which practically no christian writer has done prior to the reformation. That’s not to say that universal agreement means it’s true, but the fact that both saints in the east and the west have all understood evil as privation, parasitic, or non-being should give one pause.
As I mentioned in my previous article he is committed to the reformed tradition which also states quite clearly God predestines people to hell.
His god’s essence contains violence. Thankfully that view is one of ignorance.
Also, I would argue that any government power that weds itself to a religious tradition would have to use the theological argument that you propose in your essay. Hindu, Judaism, Islam, Institutional Christianity etc etc .. they would all have to subscribe to principles similar to yours to justify violence.. not saying it isn’t reasonable, just saying it’s not endemic to the Christian faith…
Yes they would. That doesn't make it wrong for Christians, because Christianity is the true religion, is it not? Misuse doesn't negate proper use. If Islamists will commit violence believing they have the divine right to do so, are Christians wrong to defend themselves with similar means, authorized by God's word? As I said in the essay, evil won't stop itself. Good men with righteous power must wield the sword to stop them.
"MUST wield the sword to stop them"?
I don't think so. Using a word like 'must' can be dangerous! Did the disciples try to rescue Jesus? Peter was specifically told to NOT protect the innocent Jesus! Sometimes accepting that evil people can't be stopped will result in less harm than trying to oppose them. So if Christians are threatened by Islamists, why escalate the confrontation to a Holy War? Why not just get as many people as possible to safety?
There's something remarkably 'modern American fantasy' about thinking that any problem can be solved by application of overwhelming violence.
I suspect Islamic extremist use similar theological premises as yours. I agree with you intellectually, but it’s a slippery slope. Thanks for the food for thought. Question, not as an objection, but just for theological exercise. From your position above; why didn’t the apostles defend themselves?
(1) Some slopes are truly slippery. That's a good caution, not a logical fallacy.
(2) The apostles didn't defend themselves with force because the Christian faith was just taking root and they had not yet acquired cultural influence or political power. That would come later. The apostles' ministry was the preaching of the kingdom in seed form, but as Jesus' many parables demonstrate, the seed of the kingdom would grow and develop over time. The NT bears scant testimony about 2nd generation Christians (and beyond). So there are principles latent within the biblical witness that later Christians would faithfully apply over time and in different circumstances. In other words, the apostles were 1st Gen Christians preaching the gospel and the full flowering and application of their message would develop over many years and centuries and millenia.
Thank you for clarifying your position.. you’re probably waaaaaay more learned than I am. I’m a layman. When I read your respons Galatians 3:3 came to mind….
Romans 13:1 highlights governmental powers are ordained by God meant to punish wrong doers..
“Evil has no existence except as the absence of the good, just as darkness has no existence except as the absence of light.” — St. Augustine, Confessions
Ontologically speaking, evil cannot win because it does not exist as a power in competition with good. It is parasitic. It borrows what little appearance of strength it has from the very good it corrupts.
Your subtitle unintentionally grants evil its own positive agency — as if evil were a substance, a rival ontological principle vying for dominance. That is metaphysically incoherent in a Christian framework.
If evil “wins,” it would mean that nonbeing triumphs over being, that the absence of goodness has somehow acquired existence and power. But nonbeing cannot triumph; it can only distort.
Evil may appear to “advance” in the world when good actions are withheld, but that is simply the withdrawal of participation in the good, not the triumph of a real opposite. Ontologically, what has happened is decay, not victory.
In regard to Violence.
“A Christian does not shed blood. If he does, he has ceased to be a disciple.” — Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians (2nd century)
“Do not call God just, for His justice is not as ours. His justice is mercy.” — St. Isaac the Syrian
The number of Christian martyrs who have condemned violence is enormous and it's impossible to reconcile your theology of violence with their witness. You say “Violence is part of God’s providential rule,” but this confuses divine condescension with divine character. Scripture records God’s accommodation to human violence, but Christ fulfills and corrects those accommodations by revealing the Father as one who “causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good.”
Violence may be permitted, but it is never sanctified. It belongs to the aeon of death, which Christ came to end. The idea that some violence can be morally “lawful" emerged not from the Gospel, but from Augustine’s attempt to reconcile Rome’s imperial order with Christianity.
In the Christian east they never developed a formal “just war” theory. At most, eastern Christians speak of war as a tragic necessity, requiring repentance, not celebration. Soldiers who kill, even in defense, are often barred from the Eucharist for a time, not because they are condemned, but because killing—even when “necessary”—is a wound to the soul.
Ironically it is Eastern Christians who have suffered the most violence when compared to the West.
This comment isn't really an argument, but an alternative understanding of violence held by the 2nd largest Christian tradition in the world.
Yes. I’ve preached on it many times. But the philosophical ontology of sin need not be deployed against those who wish to fight evil. To say “sin is only a parasite! It has no existence of its own!” Yes, true enough. But in our day to day experience, evil is very real and it will win if we don’t oppose it. In other words, you are bringing philosophical categories to a practical discussion without acknowledging the validity of both
Ontology, in the patristic and theological sense, isn’t an abstract philosophical category — it’s a theological claim about reality itself. It’s not speculation about being; it’s a confession of what is in light of God’s revelation.
So, when the saints (East & West) say sin is “non-being,” they’re not doing armchair metaphysics. You're treating ontology and experience as competing explanations. Saying sin is ontologically nothing doesn't contradict the fact that we experience it as powerful. They’re not in conflict; they’re different levels of truth.
Evil feels so real precisely because it corrupts something that truly is good — just as rot feels real because the fruit itself is real. The fruit decays and ceases to exist, the same is true of evil. What is parasitic can’t last forever. Thankfully death and evil were defeated in God's infinite act in Christ once and for all.
Calling sin non-being doesn’t minimize its reality in human life; it puts it in perspective. Evil is experienced as powerful, but it’s still rooted in nothing — and that’s why it can be overcome. This is precisely why the Christian martyr's embraced martyrdom. They saw the very reality I'm speaking of. They knew death was now the new mode of life.
"Allow me to be eaten by the beasts, through whom I can attain to God. I am God’s wheat, and I am ground by the teeth of wild beasts that I may be found pure bread of Christ.
Now I begin to be a disciple. May nothing visible or invisible envy me, that I may attain to Jesus Christ. Let fire and cross, troops of wild beasts, cuttings, manglings, wrenching of bones, the hacking of limbs, the crushing of the whole body, come upon me — only let me attain to Jesus Christ.
When I suffer, I shall become free in Jesus Christ, and with Him shall rise again in freedom. I am about to be born."
-St. Ignatius of Antioch
“We are born once by the womb of our mother, but again by the blood of martyrdom. What was begun in baptism is perfected in death.”
-St. Cyprian of Carthage
Naw, the way I said it is just fine
Have you ever encountered real violence? War? For context I'm a former US Marine.
Yes, but that’s irrelevant. I’m making a theological argument in ordinary language. My argument stands as is. Augustine himself articulated just war theory. Clearly evil was real to him and needed to be opposed.
For clarity. Do you accept Augustine’s ontology of sin?