Father, Son & Holy Spirit?

In a church staff meeting today we ended up discussing the language we use of God. Is God Father, Son and Holy Spirit or is this use of language merely just way of us speaking about God. Here is what Colin Gunton says in a paper dicussing the work of Sallie McFague:

'... First orthodox Christian theology has never held that the word Father pictures God or that it implies that God is of the male gender. Quite the reverse: the apophatic tradition has always insisted that all the connotations of the finite usage must be thought away if we are really to be speaking not of some projection, but of God. Second, the mainstream tradition, beginning with Ephesians 3, has not held talk of the Fatherhood of God involves the projection of patterns of human fatherhood upon God ...

... The fatherhood of God has nothing to do with maleness but has to do with patterns of relationality revealed and realized in Jesus.

... The matter of the Fatherhood of God is a matter not of maleness but of ontological discontinuity: of otherness.'

('Porteus and Procrustes: A Study in the Dialectic of Language in Disagreement with Sallie McFague' in Speaking of the Christian God. The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism, ed. Alvin Kimel, 1992, pp. 65-80)

Elsewhere in a review of David Cunningham's These Three Are One in the Scottish Journal of Theology, Gunton writes,

'Dr. Cunningham's proposal is that the words 'Father', 'Son' and 'Holy Spirit' are to be replaced by 'Source', 'sole Wellspring of God' and 'Living Water'. This turning of what has historically been a vestigium trinitatis into the conceptual heart of the Trinity has a far more dehumanising affect that even the perils of sexism it is meant to avoid. Quite apart from the problem that it makes it impossible to take scripture's way of speaking seriously - one would ever want to pray to a Source, even capitalised; can one grieve Living Water? - we see here again the problem of the economy and its implications. Are we or are we not as Christian people incorporate by the Spirit in the relationship with Jesus had with his Father? Lose that, and you lose gospel.'

Comments

[Chris Walker]

Thanks for this post - but do you have the SJT reference please?

[andy goodliff]

SJT, 1999, pp. 117-119.

[Chris Walker]

please can you double-check this reference for me, it doesn't seem to be right