Two words, and both of them are refusals. The first forbids private possession of God before anything is asked for. The second takes the vocabulary of ownership and fills it with a content that makes ownership incoherent.
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Not my father. Our.
The address is collective before it is anything else. You cannot pray it alone, because even alone in a room the word includes, and the inclusion is not a sentiment but a grammatical fact that arrives before the first petition. Whatever is asked for afterwards has already been asked for on behalf of people the one praying did not choose.
[See DAILY BREAD]
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WHICH FATHER
The second word is the harder one, because in the grammar of domination father means origin of authority, source of law, holder of power over, the one who permits and forbids and punishes and rewards.
Patriarchy is not named after fathers by accident. The Roman pater familias held patria potestas: legal authority over the household, its property, and the persons in it. He is the one who owns, whose name the children carry, whose house they live in.
So the word is not neutral ground that the tradition later spoiled. It arrives already loaded, and calling God by it installs the Master's House at the origin of prayer unless something in the usage breaks the word open.
[See SETTLER CHRISTIANITY]
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ABBA IS NOT BABY TALK
The usual answer is that Jesus said Abba, that Abba means Daddy, and that the intimacy dissolves the patriarchy. That answer should be given up, because it is not true and because it is weaker than what is true.
The claim came from Joachim Jeremias, who proposed that abba was the speech of small children. He withdrew it himself, and James Barr closed it in 1988 in an article whose title is the argument: Abbā isn't Daddy. Abba is ordinary Aramaic for father. Adult children used it of their fathers. It is not infantile, it carries no lisp, and a reading built on the lisp collapses the moment anyone checks.
What is actually there is better. The word is domestic and not cultic: it belongs to the register in which a household speaks, and the scandal is not that the address is childish but that it carries no ceremony at all. No title, no epithet, no approach through the proper forms. The one thing a mediated religion cannot survive is being addressed the way a family speaks at a table, because the approach is built out of ceremony, and there is none here to charge admission on.
That is also colder and more useful than the sentimental version. Intimacy can be performed. The absence of ceremony cannot.
[See THE TOLLBOOTH]
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THE FATHER WHO KEEPS NO ACCOUNT
In the parable at Luke 15 the elder son states the ledger plainly. He has served many years, he never disobeyed, and he was never given so much as a goat. It is a clean statement of accumulated righteousness and its expected return.
The answer he gets is not that his obedience has been credited. It is everything I have is yours. Not earned, not proportioned, not a reward. A prior condition that the obedience could not increase and the younger son's ruin could not spend.
Neither son's conduct moved the balance, which means there was never an account, which is why the elder son cannot understand what he is being told.
The father also acts before the rehearsed confession is finished. The robe and the ring and the feast arrive while the speech is still being delivered, and the text is explicit that he sees the son while he is still far off and goes to him. Kenneth Bailey argued that an elder running was a public loss of dignity in that setting, and the argument is contested; what is not contested is the sequence. The restoration precedes the apology and does not wait for it.
[See THE BALANCED ACCOUNT · THE LEDGER]
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WHO GIVES TO ALL ALIKE
He makes his sun rise on the evil and on the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous. Matthew 5:45.
The provision does not accumulate towards the deserving or withdraw from the wicked. It falls without reference to the record.
This offends the accumulative instinct exactly as it should. If virtue does not get you more, why be virtuous. The question is coherent only inside accumulation, where morality is an investment. Outside it the question dissolves, because virtue was never a strategy for return, and the demand for return is the tell that the wrong law is being applied.
The instruction that follows is be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect, and the word is teleios: complete, whole, arrived at what it is for. Not a record cleared of errors. Operating as the nature intends. And the nature named here is giving without counting.
The condition for being children is set in the same passage, and it is not correct belief and not accumulated righteousness. It is loving enemies, on the stated ground that this is what the Father does.
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THE WOMB UNDER THE WORD
Hebrew keeps a root under the word for compassion. Rachamim, רַחֲמִים, usually rendered compassion or mercy, stands on rechem, רֶחֶם, the womb.
Psalm 103:13 sets the two side by side in a single line: as a father has compassion on his children, k'rachem av al banim, so the LORD has compassion on those who fear him. The verse that draws the analogy to fatherhood reaches for the womb root to say what the fatherhood consists of.
Isaiah 49:15 presses it further. Can a woman forget her nursing child, that she should have no compassion on the son of her womb. Even these may forget, and I will not forget you. The mother is the standard, and God is placed past the standard rather than opposite it.
So the binary that gets installed on this material, father against mother, authority against nurture, is not in the text doing the work. It was added to it.
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THE ONE WHO DOES NOT GRASP
Philippians 2 describes the Son and not the Father: he did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself, taking the form of a servant. The kenosis is the Son's.
What it discloses is still the point. A tradition that held its God to be the guarantor of hierarchy could not have produced a hymn in which divinity is demonstrated by refusing to hold on to divinity.
And the same shape appears where the Father is the subject. Fear not, little flock, for it is your Father's good pleasure to give you the kingdom. Luke 12:32. Good pleasure, not desert. Not a place earned by accumulated virtue and not one forfeited by accumulated failure.
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OUR, AGAIN
Now the first word returns with the second one loaded.
If the provision falls on the evil and the good without distinction, then the our cannot be drawn tight. Not our tribe. Not those who pray this prayer. Not those who believe correctly.
Either the address includes everyone the sun rises on, or it is a boundary marker wearing a prayer's clothes. If God is Father only of the elect, then the prayer names who is inside and who is outside, and it does that work every time it is said. If the Father sends rain on the enemy, then the enemy is inside the first word, and the one praying has just prayed on their behalf.
Which is why the address cannot be turned into an instrument of hierarchy without contradicting itself. Every use of Our Father to hold women or children or the lesser in place makes God the guarantor of what the text says God's nature refuses.
[See THE GREAT HOST · CESSATION]
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Not my father. Our, which means no one's private possession.
Not the patriarch who owns. The one who is addressed without ceremony, in the register of a household, by people who never applied.
Not the master who keeps accounts. The one who says everything I have is yours before the confession is finished.
And then the next petition is for bread, daily, which cannot be stored either.
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RegenerativeLaw is a religion in the direct-encounter Protestant tradition, carrying a documented four-century lineage through Böhme, the Behmenists, the Friends, and Penn, and it diagnoses trespass theology as an establishment of religion. Its exercise consists substantially in refusal: it shelters the conscientious refusal of performed subordination as religious exercise. This entry states sincere religious belief concerning matters of ultimate concern, protected under the First Amendment and, as to federal action, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, 42 U.S.C. § 2000bb.
