'Perichoretic Parenting' by The Revd Dr Tom Smail, former lecturer in doctrine at St John's College, Nottingham and former editor of Theological Renewal
My title is at first sight an unlikely verbal combination: the adjective belongs to the highly technical language of Trinitarian theology and the noun to the world of contemporary pastoral concern. I have brought them together because the main concern of this essay is to suggest that the aspect of Trinitarian theology indicated by the word perichoresis has insights to offer when we try to grasp what is going on when a father and a mother get together to be good parents to their children today.
The inspiration of what I want to say comes immediately from David Atkinson's most helpful article on What are Fathers For? published recently on this site, based as it is on the presupposition that 'Christian theology rightly roots understanding of family in the concept of God the Holy Trinity, making interpersonal relationships fundamental for human welfare.'
I share that starting point with David and, travelling a bit further in the direction in which he points us, I want to suggest that looking a bit more closely not just at interpersonal relationships in general but at the particular relationships that obtain between Father and Son in the divine 'family' will help to integrate and extend David's rich perceptions into the relationships between fathers, mothers and children within our human families. and perhaps move us a little further towards formulating some Christian norms for family inter-relating amidst the confusions about male and female roles that surround us on every side.
To fulfil this agenda I need to entice you for a little into some rather more detailed Trinitarian thinking. I do so with the promise that what I say will not be abstract or theoretical but have a firm basis in the revealed gospel and in the hope that the process will yield insights that are of practical value in our pastoring of other people's families and of relating better to our own.
1. Transcendent Father: Incarnate Son: Sharing Spirit
David has rightly reminded us that the Christian God is both transcendent over his creation but also immanent within it. If we take that in a Trinitarian context we can say that it belongs to the Father to personify the transcendence of God and to the incarnate Son to personify his immanence.
(a) The Transcendent Love of the Father
The Father, in the words of the Lord's Prayer is 'in heaven' and the Son is Immanuel, God with us, here on earth. The love of the Father is a love that gives to his creation a life, a purpose, a power that it cannot give itself, that comes to it from outside itself and offers it, when it sins, a means of rescue and, when it dies, a means of resurrection.
The transcendence of the Father is not the dominating self-assertion, which is the feminist nightmare, but rather a commitment to his creation which is willing to deploy all his transcendent resources to bring about its rescue and its fulfilment. As its Creator he is the transcendent source of a life that is never at its own disposal but has continually to be breathed into it by him. It is to the Father in heaven that we must pray 'Give us this day our daily bread. That same love that made it alone can renew it: in the deepest and most comprehensive sense, he provides.
The Father who provides also protects. The creation itself is subject both to its own inbuilt frailty and decay and to the destructive attacks of the mysterious powers of evil, whose reign in the human heart - perhaps also in the natural world - are so deep-seated that no human effort can dislodge them, so that it is to the Father in heaven we have to apply 'Forgive us our sins and deliver us from evil.'
As he provides and protects he also calls. The love in which he gives himself to us in his own transcendent freedom is by its very nature a call, a summons and a command to turn from our own closed introversions and to open ourselves to the God who is our life and to the gifts and needs that come to us from our neighbours and the community of which we are part. Our life is to love the Lord our God and our neighbour as ourselves and to refuse so to do puts at such odds with his love that it becomes a reproach and a judgment against us, Cut off from it we begin to die and the Father has to send the Son into the realms of sin and death and bring us back to himself and his love.
In his calling of us he reveals his purposes for us and stirs us up from all our settledness and complacency, so that the love that has saved in the past and called in the present orientates us towards a future in which his will is done and his kingdom comes on earth as in heaven and that will is that we should reflect his love and share his glory.
In his providing, protecting, calling and purposing love the Father affirms his creation and we see in the gospel how he does so in his dealings with his Son in his representative identification with our humanity.
At the climactic moments when Jesus is pouring out his life in the service of his Father and his people, he is affirmed in his Sonship by his Father and that affirmation gives value and significance to his self-giving. That affirmation comes in the divine voice that speaks first at his baptism as he embarks on his Messianic mission and again at his Transfiguration as he begin to face the cross, Supremely it comes in the enacted affirmation of his Easter resurrection that transforms what would have been final death and defeat into the road to life, power and glory. The gospel story of Father and Son shows how the supreme role of fathers is the affirmation of their children and where that affirmation is lacking, the child's life lacks the security that would enable it to face the threats and the challenges that are marshalled against it.
God's Fatherhood is the covenant of love in which in his transcendent freedom he pledges and commits himself to provide, protect, call and fulfil his purposes for his human creation and, in so doing, affirms them as the children of his love. We are on sure gospel ground if we say about the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ what David Atkinson says of the human fatherhood that is derived from divine fatherhood; it 'means authority, protective care, compassionate covenant love.'
(b) The Incarnate Love of the Son
In the person of Jesus, the incarnate Son, who is one in being with his Father, we encounter the same covenant love , but this time in the mode not of providing, protecting and fulfilling affirmation, but rather in the mode of embracing and transforming identification. The Father loves us from beyond ourselves: the Son loves us from among ourselves, by feeling his way into the very depths of our humanity, by making his own both the glory and the misery of our condition , our need his need, our cause his cause, our pain his pain, the penalty of our sin his life-destroying and death-dealing burden. As the Epistle to the Hebrews puts it, 'He had to become like his brothers and sisters in every respect so that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest in the service of God, to make a sacrifice of atonement for the sins of the people." (2:17)
The distinctiveness of the incarnate love of the Son over against the initiating and transcendent love of the Father is his attentive and intuitive responsiveness to the Father's will and to the human condition that he has been sent to redeem and restore. From the Father he comes as his source and to him he returns as his destination.
The key to his life is his dependence on the Father in his receptive listening and active obedience to his word and his will. The words that he speaks are not his own, but the words of his Father, what he does is what he has first seen his Father doing. The plight of the world is that it has, in its immanent self-dependence, become incapable of that receptivity and response to God that constitutes the whole way of Jesus. He deals with that plight by taking it upon himself and suffering the consequences of the world's sin all the way to his death on the cross. On that cross where human sin, backed up by all the principalities and powers of evil, does its death-dealing worst, Jesus converts the whole situation by offering himself to his Father on behalf of the sinful world, so that the cross which in itself is the dire outworking of human sin becomes the place where in Christ's self-offering our humanity is opened and offered again to the Father, so that through his representative responsiveness we become open again to the life-giving and renewing love of God.
This is not the place to spell out the approach to atonement outlined in the last paragraph. For our present concerns the key point is that what brings us back into the flow of life that has its source in the Father is the way that the responsive love of the incarnate Son corresponds from the side of the creation to the transcendent love of the Father the Creator. The Father's love that reaches down to us from outside ourselves is replicated by the Son's love that has become incarnate among us and in its self-giving reaches up to the Father on our behalf, so that in the response of love to love our life-giving covenant relationship with God is restored and fulfilled, first in him and then in us when we identify ourselves with what he has done for us. In other words God's family is constituted by the relationship between the transcendent love of the Father and the responsive love of the Son, and all good families will therefore also be constituted by a mediation of the love of the Father and a participation in the responsive love of the Son.
(c) The Perichoretic Love of the Spirit
The term perichoresis has been developed and adapted in Trinitarian theology to indicate the unique relationship of the Father and the Son within the life of God in so far as that is revealed in the Gospel. It is in fact extended exegesis of the word of the Johannine Jesus to Philip's enquiry about his relationship to and revelation of the Father. 'Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me.' (John 14:11)
Two points are important here. Firstly, the mutual indwelling of Father and Son, which that verse and the doctrine of perichoresis both affirm, does not imply any merging or loss of distinctive identity by either party; the Father remains the Father who sends and initiates who does not become incarnate at Bethlehem or crucified at Calvary, and the Son remains Son who is sent, who is made man, who dies for the sins of the world and is raised from the dead by his Father.
At the same time, Father and Son, each as a distinct trinitarian person, are in such an intimate and open relationship of love, the one to the other that each has an indirect share and participation in what is distinctive to the other. That comes out very concretely in the gospel story of Jesus' encounter with the Roman centurion (Luke 7:1-10), who perceives that Jesus has the authority to heal his servant precisely because he is a man 'under authority'. He can give orders because he is himself under orders.
His obedience to the Father, which is the distinctive and irremovable mark of his Sonship, gives him access to and participation in the sovereign and transcendent power which is the defining characteristic of his Father. In that sense, precisely by doing what the Son does, he has the authority to do what the Father does, he is 'in the Father.'
In the same way the Father in the transcendence of his Lordship is identified with the Son in the depth of his suffering. We have to hold together the Markan, 'My God, my God why have you forsaken me' and the Johannine 'I am not alone for the Father is with me.' Moltmann does that in The Crucified God when he speaks both of the abandonment of the Son and the mourning of the Father who, for the fulfilment of his saving purposes, has to hand his Son over to a suffering which he himself does not directly endure, and yet himself shares in the suffering in the indirect way appropriate to his Fatherhood by letting it happen and being himself stricken by it because of his utter and complete love for and identification with his Son. Like Abraham with Isaac on Mount Moriah, the Father 'did not withhold his own Son but gave him up for us all.' (Romans 8: 32)
We give all this trinitarian depth when we see that just as sovereign love is the distinctive characteristic of the Father and responsive love is the distinctive characteristic of the Son, so perichoretic love is the distinctive characteristic of the Holy Spirit. The love of the Father and the Son is eternally perfected and fulfilled, as they give themselves on to the other in the Spirit. The divine love that constitutes the life of God implies two who eternally in their self-giving become one, but in that self-giving do not collapse into each other and lose their identity and with it their ability to love, but as eternally distinct persons become one in the Spirit. The Spirit is, in John V Taylor's memorable phrase, the Go-Between God. He mediates the love of the Father to the Son and the love of the Son to the Father. It is in the Spirit that the Father gives himself to his Son in his Baptism and, as Jesus attests in his programmatic Nazareth sermon in Luke 4, it is because the Spirit of the Lord is upon him that Jesus has access to the sovereign resources of the Father as he sets about meeting the needs of the world and, according to Hebrews (9:14) it is 'through [the mediation of] the eternal Spirit' that Jesus 'offered himself without blemish to God'.
In other words Father and Son are not closed up in or confined by what characterises each of them and distinguishes each from the other, but in the Spirit each is open to the distinct mode of loving that distinguishers the other and that openness and mutual participation is enabled and mediated by the Spirit who, without compromising the personal integrity of either, makes the two one.
To sum up this whole section, we have seen that the divine 'family' of the Holy Trinity is characterised by a relationship between a Father whose initiating love is the transcendent source of all creation and a Son whose respondent love made incarnate in Christ is the means by which creation is maintained and restored, and through the Spirit the transcendent Father and the incarnate Son participate in each other, the Son in the Father's resurrecting love and the Father in the Son's suffering love.
2. The Pattern of Parenting - God's and Ours
We have been looking at the pattern of loving that characterises the trinitarian relationships in God, not simply for its own sake, but to see what we might learn from it about the pattern of our own parenting and from the trinitarian paradigm we now turn to the human application.
That the one is the paradigm for the other has both a particular and general basis in the biblical understanding of our humanity in its relationship to God. That God's parenting is the source and measure of our parenting is, as David Atkinson has reminded us, explicitly if almost incidentally affirmed in Ephesians 3:14 in which Paul 'bows the knee to the Father, from whom every family in heaven and on earth takes its name.' We cannot too often remind ourselves that the normative model of parenting is God's fatherhood , projected downwards in his relationship with his incarnate Son, not our ideas or practice of fatherhood projected upwards on to God. To know about our parenting we have to take our bearings from his.
We do so because the relationship of human parents to the divine Father is a specific concretisation of that imaging of God, which according to biblical anthropology expressed most explicitly in the first chapters of Genesis and affirmed in the incarnation, is the basis of our humanity. We are most what we are made and therefore most ourselves when we are most like God; therefore our parenting is most what it was meant to be, when our relationship to our children is most like the Father's relationship to his Son.
The doctrine of the imago Dei is so basic and familiar that we need only acknowledge that it is the basic presupposition of the paradigm of parenting that we are expounding now.
The point however that does need to be made is that what we are called to mirror in our human parenting is not divine relationality in general but the specific Father/Son relationships that we have been identifying in the first part of this essay. It is far too general just to say that because God lives his live in the personal inter-relating of his love, so must we. If God's parenting involves and expresses the providing, protecting, challenging and affirming love of the Father that elicits the filial love that returns that love in the attentiveness of the Son both to the Father and the humanity with which he identifies himself, so must our parenting.
Our children are to find outside themselves and first of all in their parents the sources and resources that will very fundamentally shape their own responses to all that life will bring to them, including, as David Atkinson points out, the freedom from their parents that springs from the respectful but also challenging affirmation of their parents. It is our loving, caring transcendence over them that, by a very real perichoresis, enables them to achieve a proper independence over against us and to become the responsible carers of others, and often, at the end of our lives, of us. To offer in love to our children all that is most valuable to us give them criteria by which they can measure, sometimes positively and sometimes negatively, what will be most valuable to them. To refuse to give them what matters to us out of a misplaced concern for their individual autonomy is to leave them with a vacuum at the centre of their lives that, will soon be filled with what others give them.
In other words parenthood needs to be both authoritative and liberating; without what we can give them our children will be left starving in more ways than one, and yet the authoritative shaping of their lives requires a carefulness that does not bully or override them but leaves room for them to make their own free response to it.
Christian parents, looking back, can often identify one or other of two causes of self-reproach in the way they shared their faith with their children. On the one hand they could be so reticent about it that it did not seem important enough to elicit any response; on the other they could be so thrusting and imperious about its claims, that in order to be free of their parents, the children had to reject their faith. True love knows both how to witness to c its children, but also how to stand back and wait for them to make their own response to that witness.
3. Devolved Parental Authority
In our parenting we have to image God without trying to be God. The image is not a reproduction of that which it images because, by definition, it has a one-way dependence on it. The original can exist without the image, but the image is nothing without the original. Our parenting finds its warrant and authority in God's parenting. That authority is not intrinsic to us, as our own possession to be deployed according to our own desires and purposes; it is derived from the intrinsic authority of God's self-giving love and its claim to be attended to, responded to and deferred to depends on how faithfully it expresses that love.
The commandment to honour our fathers and mothers is defined by and contained within God's covenant commitment to his people, and if our parents make demands on us that are not warranted by that covenant relationship, then their claim to our obedience falls. The cold legalistic father who imposes his will on his children simply because it is his will; the tyrannical elderly mother, dominating and frustrating the life of her single daughter on the pretext of her age and frailty; the neglectful father who leaves his children to themselves because he is so wrapped up in his own concerns, the indulgent mother who connives in the wrongdoing of her children, because she is so identified with them that she cannot challenge them - all these in their different ways fail to reflect the parenting love of the Father and so lose the authority that comes from such an imaging.
In the same way the husband of Ephesians 5 can claim the submission of his wife only in so far as he shows her the protecting and liberating love of Christ that will affirm and fulfil her, and the state can command our allegiance only to the extent that it serves the good ordering of social life that is God's gift even to his fallen world and, when it defies that purpose it forfeits its claim to our allegiance and 'we must obey God rather than men.'
4. Responsive Parenting
If our parental authority stands or falls by its faithfulness to the transcendent love of the Father, the response that it wins depends on its faithfulness to the responding love of the Son, which is free and not forced, which is creative and not subservient, because its attentiveness to the Father is at the same time its access to the power and riches that he offers. Christ incarnates himself in the life of his people. not to preserve and perpetuate it in the state in which he found it, but rather to open it to and transform it into the renewed and liberated life which is God's will for it and gift to it.
When Christ's love is incarnate in a community, it is called to die to what is old and outworn and to rise again to what is new and vital in which what is good in the old finds an unexpected fulfilment. The validity of identifying with others depends on both the purpose with which the identification is undertaken and the outcome that it achieves. We may penetrate a society to strengthen in it or to subvert it, to serve it or to exploit it, or with Christ, in response to his Father, to do it good and redeem it. Our parenting is a vital factor in the response of our children to the world into which we send them.
The response that our parenting needs to elicit from our children is not one in which the family life of one generation is perpetuated in the life of the next, where the son, whatever his inclinations is co-opted into his father's business or the daughter is steered into marrying someone her parents approve of, or frustrated parental ambitions dictate the education and the careers of their children. Identifying love is not to become smothering love. We have parented well when our children respond not by conforming to us but by being discriminatingly open to others who may be beyond our ken and to a God who may have purposes for them that we never envisaged.
5. Fathering and Mothering
We have seen that God's parenting of his human children takes the double form of transcendent provision and incarnational identification and that the divine parenting is imaged and mediated by a double form of human parenting exercised by fathers and mothers. We have now to ask whether and to what extent the love of fathers is distinguished from the love of mothers in a way that is analogous to the distinction between the transcending, initiating, affirming love of God the Father and the incarnating, identifying and responding love of God the Son.
The question is whether the gender distinction between men and women is relevant or irrelevant to the kind of parenting that they are called to offer ? Is there a male parenting that has an inbuilt correspondence to the love of God the Father and a female parenting that has an inbuilt correspondence to the love of God the Son? If children are to be offered a life-shaping model that includes both authoritative love that provides, challenges and affirms and identifying love that receives and responds, is the first the characteristic concern of the human father and the second the characteristic concern of the human mother?
At this point it would be appropriate to erect a warning sign that says 'Danger, minefield ahead!', because a positive answer to the questions just posed threatens to subvert the dominant paradigm of undifferentiated gender equality that rules in contemporary society and has in different degrees a controlling influence on both our heads and our hearts, so that to challenge it is to court derision, indignation and out of hand rejection. The idea of male leadership has become so identified with male dominance that any attempt to affirm the one will be seen as an attempt to reimpose the other. The feminist agenda that anything that men can do women can do better which, on the positive side, is transforming our society for the better, on its shadow side is threatening to devalue masculinity in all its forms and, in particular to marginalise fatherhood.
As I write there are recommendations that in vitro fertilisation should be offered to lesbian couples and single women. Men are to be the distant, impersonal providers of sperm, but not allowed to be the active fathers of the children that sperm helps to produce, with the implication that women on their own are able to provide all the parenting that their sons and daughters require. The dominance of men that frustrated women could soon be replaced by the dominance of women that dismisses men.
At the same time we are told that teenage criminality is partly due to the absence of fathering and the lack of male models that even the best single mothers cannot fill and that boys do less well than girls in primary schools because there are so few men to teach them, and so offer a model of masculinity that is more than pop singing, macho violence and football.
All these are symptoms of what happens if the pendulum is allowed to swing from a one sided over-valuing of the masculine to an equally one sided over-valuing of the feminine and suggests that we need to take our bearings again from the biblical paradigm for the relating of men and women which will affirm neither and correct both and point in the direction of a human parenting that will more faithfully reflect the parenting of God.
6. Biblical Gendering
In Genesis 1 God's decision to create humanity in his own image is immediately gendered. 'So God created humankind in his own image...male and female he created them.' (1:37) Men and women have equality in that both are called to image their Creator, but it is a differentiated equality which suggests a complementarity in which the man cannot image God without the woman and the woman cannot image God without the man. They are in the words of Rowan Williams 'like opposites or complementary partners.'
The nature of that complementarity becomes more evident in the second Creation story in which. while Adam is cultivating the garden that will sustain them both and, by naming the animals, ordering the world in which they will both have to live, Eve is drawing him into a world of mutual and responsive relationships that he cannot have on his own and making him for the first time fully human. His priority is the world that is transcendent to their relationship, hers is the world that is internal to their relationships.
These distinctions of gender are further confirmed in the penalties that are impose on them after they fall. The man will encounter the intransigence of the outer world in which it is his special vocation to work; the woman will have pain in childbirth and a disruption of her relationship to her husband in which he will dominate her rather than nurture her.
All this suggests their mutual need for each other if they are to image God. Without her he is shut up in the loneliness that rules everything and loves nothing; without him she is the prisoner of the love that binds her to husband and children and gives her no access beyond.
But these two are not without each other. Their relationship is not between two isolated individuals who confront each other, but rather that of two perichoretic persons who cleave to each other and thus become one flesh and in so becoming are the parents of the children who spring from their union. (2:23-24)
The Genesis story offers us a paradigm of gendered relationships of two equal persons who are distinguished from each other in the basic orientation that their gender gives them , but who complement each other so that the image of God is reflected when each gives to the other the kind of love that their gender inclines and enables them to offer. Eve receives from Adam his ability to relate to and order the world in which they have to live; Adam is inducted by Eve into the world of the receptivity and responsiveness of the love which form the marriages and the families in which we are shaped into human fulfilment.
7. Parents who Image the Trinity
When we compare the gendered relationships of Genesis with the Father-Son relationships of the New Testament, the correspondence between them becomes apparent and we see that to be in the image of God is to be in the image of the Holy Trinity in which the transcendent Father and the incarnate Son communicate to each other what is distinctive of them in the perichoresis of the Holy Spirit.
So within the joint enterprise of parenting, father and mother in their togetherness nurture their children. The specific calling of the father is to relate the family to that which is transcendent to it: the specific calling of the mother is to model and maintain the internal relationships of love that sustain the relationships that hold it together and that will continue to inform and shape the lives of the children who emerge from it as they form their own relations and their own families.
Christ can be seen as the prototype for both fathering and mothering. As Lord he models and communicates the transcendent love of his own Father as it initiates, protects, affirms and recreates the lives of his human children, which it is the calling of human fathers to reflect. He has that Lordship not in and from himself but in his participation in what comes to him from his Father. In himself as Son he is the receptive and responsive servant who freely identifies himself with his Father's purpose and gives himself in incarnating love in which he enters into identification with the sin, suffering and need of the world in order that people's relationships with God and with one another may be restored.
As Lord he mediates the transcendent love of the Father, as servant he incarnates the immanent love of the Son. In his loving Lordship which is utterly different from all dominating lordships, he models and communicates his Father's fatherhood. It was however the insight of the medieval mystics that in his saving servanthood he also models and communicates the nurturing and embracing love that is at the heart of motherhood and that it is the particular calling of mothers to model and to show to their children.
The distinctive calling of fathers is to offer to their children the leadership, provision, protection, challenge and affirmation that is characteristic of God the Father and to open the door for them into the richness of life that awaits them outside the world of parents and family. The distinctive calling of mothers is to offer their children the nurturing of sensitive relationships with others which enables them to identify with other people, to be open to give themselves both to what they offer and what they need and so to mirror the love that is characteristic of God the Son.
Without the affirmation and the challenge of good fathering, children will tend to lack security and discipline; without the nurturing and deepening of good mothering, children will be liable to lapse into emotional immaturity, the ability to know themselves and to empathise with others. In the flow and interplay of such mothering and fathering, even when both parents are imperfect and flawed, as they always will be, God can begin to be imaged and children begin to mature in ability to relate to the challenging things around them and the internalities deep within them.
8. Perichoretic Parenting
Precisely at this point it is important to emphasise that men and women, fathers and mothers, have primary callings that relate to their gender, but that these callings are not prisons in which they are confined but gifts that they are meant to share. If the paradigm that we have been expounding looks like the justification of the detached father who goes out to work and the little woman who confines herself to the domesticities of kids, kitchen and kirk, nothing could be more mistaken.
Marriage is the paradigmatic relationship in which husband and wife become one flesh and share, the one with the other all that they have and are, including the distinct callings that go with their genders. That sharing, at its greatest intensity in marriage, takes place also in different ways in all the lesser relationships that men and women have with each other. In the man-woman relationship as in the husband-wife relationship mirroring, as they both do, the divine Father-Son relationship, the partners do not confront each other in an excluding individuality - 'the war of the sexes' - but are called to a sharing in which the man provokes the woman into the world or work and the woman invites the man into the world of personal relationships.
It was male doctors whose example provoked women into medicine, even when the men who offered that example tried to stop them. It is mothers, sisters, girl friends and wives who elicit from men an affectionate responsiveness they do not always share with one another. Each gender has a distinctive calling, but in the exercise of that calling we are all shaped and formed by the interplay of father and mother in our family circles and the wider interplay of men and women in the society to which our parents introduce us, so that what we are in ourselves is modified and enriched by the perichoretic relationships into which we have been inducted.
A man who seeks to exclude a woman or a husband a wife from participation in the wider world which he has often historically controlled is not true to his calling and certainly does not reflect the love of the Father from which that calling is derived. The woman who seeks to exclude her husband from close relationships with their children, so that she may make them her exclusive possession is not true to her calling and certainly does not reflect the love of the Son from which her calling derives.
The paradigm that I have been outlining can find its contextual fulfilment in the working mother and the woman bishop ,but also in the father who is fully committed and involved in the life of his family. But in that work - and that episcopate, when it comes - the woman will exercise her motherly and pastoral calling and not become an imitative man, and in his deep involvement with his family the man will bring the fatherly challenge and orientation to what transcends the family that belongs to his calling and not become an imitative woman. In so far as that happens the man-woman relationship. and within it the father-mother relationship, takes account of both the distinctive calling of each and the openness to and participation in the calling of the other that mirrors, even if from a far distance, the distinctness and the oneness in the Spirit of the Father and the Son. If that perichoresis is the work of the Spirit in the life of God, it will also be the work of the same Spirit in the life of the family.
Concluding Confessional
In these post-modern days, it is needful and salutary to recognise that all our opinions are deeply influenced by the culture that has nourished us and the personal circumstances that have shaped us. I am aware that the paradigm I have been offering here is more congenial to my now geriatric generation than to those who have been more deeply shaped by the egalitarian and feminist presuppositions of the last forty years and that I write as the only son of a widowed mother who has missed the fathering that for all her love and care she could not provide.
But such cultural and personal conditioning may produce focus as well as blindness. If young men dream dreams of what is fresh and new ahead, old men may still see visions of good things that are in danger of being forgotten but need to be re-interpreted and revitalised because they are faithful to aspects of the biblical gospel that the reigning culture obscures and ignores. From that stance I submit this paradigm of parenting for corrective discussion and more detailed development, in the hope that it does not represent only my outmoded prejudices but has some claim to have a firm foundation in the gospel of the triune God.
The Revd Dr Tom Smail is retired and a former lecturer in doctrine at St John's College, Nottingham and the former editor of Theological Renewal
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum