Our Father
Crump on the Lord's Prayer, part 1
This is our fourth post working through material from David Crump’s Knocking on Heaven’s Door on Prayer and the New Testament. Posts 1, 2, and 3.
Having spent some time on the synoptic gospels and those troublesome passages, we (with Crump) turn our attention to the Lord's Prayer, in three movements. Firstly, “our Father who is in heaven”. I offer some observations.
Despite widespread repetition, the idea that abba represents an informal, intimate word typical of ‘daddy’, an idea that goes back to Joachim Jeremias, is not well supported by scholarship and is to be abandoned. This does not mean the opposite though - Jesus’ expression of his relationship with God the Father as Father is indeed intimate and vital. Crump does not say so, but I would turn to John for a robust understanding of Jesus’ unique relation as Son to Father, and how the adoption of believers in the Son as children of the Father grants us to stand in the same relationship to our Father.
Crump follows T.W. Manson in seeing three aspects of God as Father drawn from the OT: Father-Creator, Father-King, Father-Redeemer. I would say the notion of Father as Creator is relatively dim. Nor am I entirely convinced that the Father as King is a very strong motif. The OT does provide a robust picture of Israel as God’s Son, brought into a redemptive relationship with him as Father.
A common mistake in certain strains of contemporary interpretation is the tendency to evaluate Jesus’s teaching about divine fatherhood in light of a modern focus on psychological well-being and a quest for emotional connection between parent and child.1
The unique relationship of Jesus as Son is part of what is new in Jesus’ teaching (and practice) of prayer. And in calling God “our Father”, he invites us into the same pattern of relationship in prayer. Matt 11:25-27 ‘authorises’ that transformation for us.
Studying the Lord’s Prayer does not in itself enhance anyone’s ability to pray;… The Lord’s prayer should be a reflection of Jesus’s prayer life taking up residence in our own lives, sending down its roots and weaving invasive tendrils throughout the fabric of our daily existence.2
Crump, 102-103.
Crump, 106-107.
Does Crump explain the actual implications of divine fatherhood for many people's 'quest for emotional connection between parent and child'? I've definitely seen a tendency to evaluate Jesus' teaching in that way. But is Crump implying that divine fatherhood does not complete this quest at all?