God

Extract

‘God,’ ‘Theos,’ ‘Deus’ is of course a name borrowed from paganism; we take it out of its proper context, where it is used for talking about the gods, and use it for our own purposes. This is quite a legitimate piece of borrowing and quite safe so long as it does not mislead us into thinking that the God we worship (or don’t) is a god. We always do have to speak of our God with borrowed words; it is one of the special things about our God that there are no peculiar appropriate words that belong to him, as with the language of carpentry or computer-speak. He is always dressed verbally in second-hand clothes that don’t fit him very well. We always have to be on our guard against taking these clothes as revealing who and what he is.

For this reason it is sometimes safer to use clothes that are quite obviously second-hand, words that have been quite scandalously ripped from their proper context and stretched and bent and distorted to suit our purposes. That is one reason for preferring ‘The Father’ to ‘God’ as a name for our God. ‘The Father’ is manifestly being used in a metaphorical or extended sense and so is unlikely to mislead us. It is also the word that Jesus prefers to use.