It’s rare that I post on something I encounter that I have almost nothing to say about, but I was just catching up on Mark Heath’s blog, and this post struck me as brilliant. Mark notices all the slave language and son language in the New Testament for believers and wonders what’s going on with followers of Jesus being adopted into God’s family but then called slaves of Christ. How can believers be both adopted members of the family and slaves to the master?
Mark wonders which is more fundamental or which is the way we should more strongly think of ourselves. But then he notices something that makes such a question seem completely in the wrong direction. He observes that the primary way God is addressed is as Father, and the primary way Jesus is addressed is as Lord. He thus suggests that we should think of ourselves primarily as sons* with respect to the Father and slaves with respect to the Son.
What’s striking to me about this is that I think most Christians think of the Father as sort of a more distant figure to respect and pray more formally to, whereas the Son is more down-to-earth (literally; pun intended) and brotherly. The way the first two persons of the Trinity are addressed in the scriptures, however, is backwards from that. Now of course the very fact that we are told to address the Father as Father is a lot more significant than most of us reflect on. The immense privilege implicit in the first two words of the Lord’s Prayer means we’ve been told outright how we should see God the Father, at least in terms of our praying, and it’s not so much as a master as as a parent*. That tells us something about God and his attitude toward us.
OK, so I didn’t have nothing to say about this. That’s something. But I think Mark’s observation is pretty interesting, and I didn’t intend to have anything to add myself.
[*Note on inclusive language: I deliberately use the masculine here, because "sons" in NT usage would culturally have included far more in terms of inheritance and status than "daughters" or "children". That this term is applied, in my view, suggests that women who are children of the Father are treated fully as sons would have been expected to be treated, and I think something gets lost if it is translated more inclusively, at least for readers who understand this about the ancient Hebrew and Greco-Roman cultures. So I prefer to keep the gender-inclusive "sons" that is jarring in contemporary English if meant inclusively, since pretty much no one talks that way outside uber-traditionalist hyper-formal-equivalence translation circles.]
[Note on apparent typo: Yes, I know there's an extra "as" there, but it's actually correct with it and incorrect without it. I couldn't resist.]
June 13th, 2010 | 6:55 am | #1
Is some of this confusion partly because of the casual relationship between fathers and sons that we experience, where dad is someone to buddy around with, chafe under until we turn 18 and then have an uncomfortable relationship with the rest of our lives? The relationship between fathers and sons in the first century was vastly different and the problem may not be a contradiction between being sons/slaves as much as trying to impose the cultural norms of a society 2000 years later onto what Scripture is saying.
June 13th, 2010 | 8:55 am | #2
[...] Jeremy Pierce suggests that the predominance of son/slave language in the NT can be connected to the Father/Lord – i.e. we relate to the Father as Sons and to the Lord Jesus as slaves. [...]
June 14th, 2010 | 11:04 am | #3
Jesus does say, though, that God is a Father to us in the sense of giving us bread rather than a stone when we ask for it, whereas a slave is there to do the will of the one the slave serves. We serve Christ as his slaves, and yet God serves us, including through Christ’s sacrifice on our behalf. That’s not something we can reduce to cultural differences.
June 16th, 2010 | 11:02 am | #4
Jeremy – do you find anything of value or truth in the notion that even the “Our Fathter” language is royal language. One Old Testament scholar I am aware of affirms our parental relationship with God and the great intimacy we share with Him in a familial sense, but also suggests that the “Our Father” language of the Lord’s Prayer is a more formal, royal form of address. In other words, to use an inadequate analogy the idea of God as Father in the Lord’s Prayer has more in common with our notion of George Washington as a founding “Father” of our nation than with the familial use of the term. Unfortunately, my knowledge of language in general and Greek in particular isn’t sufficient for me to adequately parse all of the nuances of language here. But in context this makes sense – the address of “Our Father” is immediately followed by what we would call national or kingdom type concerns, not family concerns. Thus, even in addressing God as Father, the idea of royalty would take as prominent a place as the idea of family.
June 18th, 2010 | 9:29 pm | #5
David, that sounds contrary to what I’ve ever heard, which is that it’s about halfway between formal and informal, something like Dad (rather than Father or Daddy).
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