Essays in Unitarian Theology by Kenneth Twinn Lindsey - General ...

IMAGES OF GOD
by Leonard Mason
DURING the development of religious thought many
concepts, expressed either as visual imagery or as
verbal symbols, have arisen to give focus and body to
man's intimation of the supreme reality he calls God.
For Christian devotion the expression " Our Father
in Heaven " has remained central partly because it
was the imagery used by Jesus himself, partly because
the very hieratic transmission of the symbol by the
church through twenty centuries gives it added devotional
effect, and partly because it is a symbolism open
to all. Within the family circle a human father represents
both the providential and the restrictive factors
in life, and these characteristics are directly attributed
to God, Father of all. Unitarians have inherited this
Christian symbol and have attached special value to
it because it seems most theologically apt to express
their non-trinitarian point of view. They hold that
there is One Father of all, whose personality is not
enhanced by being divided into several aspects.
But imagery fades, symbols become worn smooth
by constant use, and expressions fail to hold the emotional
and intellectual content they once had. We
need to enquire whether the symbolic concept of
Divine Fatherhood is still adequate to evoke a deep and
intelligent response in contemporary man. Obviously
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the symbol, even in traditional language, has not stood
*ninterpreted, for God is not Father in the same sense
and to the same degree that man is father. He is
quantitatively greater, being the ultimate parent of
two or three thousand million living childten instead
of the two or three average in Western families; he is
also in an extended sense Father of myriads of other
living creatures who are dependent on his creative,
P rovident and sustaining power. He is also qualitatively
more perfect than man. He embbdies the
P erfection of each father-like characteris tic. Man
P rocreates by biological means, God by a putting forth
of spiritual grace; man provides for his offspring by
limited power and resource, God puts the available
resources of the whole universe at the disposal of his
creatures ; man instructs and disciplines his children
by the light of his own experience and inherited cus-
toms, God instructs by the very grandeur of natural
processes and by the sweep of history itself; man guides
by his example of good manners and moral behaviour,
God guides, in Christianity at any rate, by giving of
himself in sacrifice for the whole of unregenerate man-
kind; man forgives his own children their immature
faults, God offers forgiveness unto eternal life to all
who are truly repentant. Man is partial, God is
universal. Summing these characteristics of good
fatherhood and carrying each of them to the limit of
perfection, we arrive conceptually at the Divine
Fatherhood. Obviously no man exemplifies all of
these qualities, nor any single one of them to perfec-
tion, but the symbol " Father ", with its emotional
overtones, can evoke both the sum and the perfection
of Fatherhood, and that men call God.