That is what it means to be baptized into the Triune God. By the Spirit we are immersed into the life of Jesus so that we come to share in his position before God.

We speak to God, and God listens to us, as if we were Jesus. Jesus is God’s child by nature, and we become God’s children by grace. Jesus is born of God; we are adopted. So when we confess that God is “Father,” it is not a theological idea but a confession of the defining relationship of our lives. We call God “Father” because that is what Jesus calls God, and because Jesus has invited us to relate to God in the same way. In other words, we call God “Father” because of revelation.

We use the words “Father” and “Son,” Gregory says, “in a more elevated sense.” We “accept the realities without being put off by the names.” Ordinary family connotations cannot be applied to God, much less connotations of gender. “Do you take it,” Gregory asks his congregation, “that our God is a male because of the masculine nouns ‘God’ and ‘Father’? Is the ‘Godhead’ a female because in Greek the word is feminine?” Such crude biological thinking would be pagan, not Christian.

‘Father’ designates neither the substance nor the activity, but the relationship, the manner of being, which holds good between the Father and the Son.”

“Father makes son, and son makes father.… A father must have a son to be a father, and a son must have a father to be a son.” When we confess that God is eternally Father, we always have in mind as well the eternal reality of the Son.

Marcion, a charismatic teacher of the second century, had said that the material universe was created by a wicked and incompetent god. Marcion was especially disgusted by the human body, “flesh stuffed with dung” as he called it. Like some of the gnostic teachers of the same period, he was horrified by sex. He viewed procreation as a monstrous evil. Marcion’s followers had to adapt their lives to an austere renunciation of sex, marriage, and childrearing. Natural bonds were dissolved; only spiritual bonds were of any value.

Marcion’s doctrine was not the only challenge to the emerging Christian movement. The second century witnessed the proliferation of spiritual sects whose adherents were known as gnostics (literally “knowers”). Gnostic teachers claimed to have secret knowledge about the cosmos and the soul. They taught that the physical world was created by an inferior deity and that salvation consisted in escaping from the material world by means of esoteric wisdom. Such teachings were very diverse, but what they had in common was a dualism that divided the (bad) creator from the (good) redeemer and the (bad) world of flesh from the (good) human spirit.

Though many evil things happen in this world, Christians confess that we are still living in God’s good creation. It is a sick world that needs healing, not an evil world that needs destruction. That is the difference between Christianity and Gnosticism.