THE FATHERHOOD OF GOD
IN JOHN CALVIN’S THOUGHT
By Karin Spiecker Stetina
Paternoster. 130 pages. £14.99
ISBN 978 1 842 279 687
In the last few decades feminist theologians have been busy reimagining God in female terms. For them, masculine language denotes power, aggression, and oppression of women. So God has been renamed goddess, womb, mother and the like, for to speak of God the Father is hateful and oppressive.
With this as the backdrop, Stetina, Associate Professor of Biblical and Theological Studies at Biola University, argues correctly that Calvin sees the Fatherhood of God on the basis of his selfrevelation in Scripture, not as an extrapolation from human experience. In keeping with the prior tradition, Calvin uses feminine metaphors for God when Scripture does, but in his biblical commentaries, not in his theological treatises. He considers it impermissible to replace God’s self-given personal name of Father.
Sketchy
At times it is unclear whether Stetina is referring to the person of the Father or generically to God as Father. She is rather sketchy in her treatment of the Fatherhood of God in the early church. She fails to consider the Father as the arche of the Trinity in Cappadocian Trinitarianism. She considers Origen has little to offer, but ignores Widdecombe on the Fatherhood of God in Origen (pp.41-42). She refers to ‘Calvin’s teacher, John Major’ (p.48), an argument of T. F. Torrance’s that has not found wide acceptance, since there is no evidence that Calvin ever came into contact with Major in Paris or that he was influenced by him. (No, not that John Major!) Moreover, a book like this is in danger of bordering on anachronism, seeking answers from an author who, living centuries earlier, was not addressing the same question, nor could possibly be aware of it.
While Stetina rightly concludes that it is impermissible to replace the name ‘Father’, nevertheless she appears to share some of the assumptions of the radical feminists she sets out to oppose. She never challenges the feminist claim that maleness as such is to be equated with oppressive power (pp.53, 67) particularly relating to unjust oppression of women (p.93). How does that relate to the incarnation, in which the Son took human nature as a male? No such negative assumptions are evident when Stetina refers to feminine imagery. Allowing for these caveats, overall this is a useful book, accessible to the general reader.
