I chat with a lot of missionaries, and have heard this question repeatedly recently. I also heard a lesson from a recent RM who expressed puzzlement as a sidebar to his lesson. So, let’s talk about Jesus-as-the-Father.

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In the Bible, kinship terms like father, brother, sister, etc are primarily non-literal and non-biological. That might surprise us, but it’s not that unusual for kinship terms to take on non-literal meanings. Think how often some people say “bro” in American English. In (some?) Indian cultures, “uncle” and “auntie” are respectful terms for adults you know older than you.  Or take the 2012 K-Pop hit, Oppa Gangnam Style; Oppa literally means “older brother” but is often applied as a more formal “you” or in particular non-literal ways with non-relatives. In the song, Psy uses “oppa” as a flirty way to  refer to himself, i.e. “your man has Gangnam style!”

None of these quite match Israelite usage of kinship terms, but they do illustrate how often languages and cultures extend kinship terms  outside mere biology. Of course, they have  primarily biological meaning, and this is what you find in the dictionaries.  But the connotations, the unwritten usages and meanings, are not apparent even to undergrad Hebrew students, like I was. Here I quote from an article of mine where I talked about kinship and covenant, and its relationship to ideas of atonement.

When I first started studying Hebrew, I learned that many Hebrew proper names had Hebrew meaning, often with some significance.  Naomi originally meant “pleasant” and Mara “bitter,” for example; and the meaning of names often can have some significance for the narrative in which they are found.

While still an undergraduate, I came across the name “God is (my) father,” Abijah/Joab/Eliab. A recently returned missionary, I naturally characterized this as a doctrinal reflection of the fatherhood of God. Sometime later, I encountered Ahijah/Joah, “God is (my) brother.”
Although a little surprised, I decided this name represented an allusion to the premortal Jesus’s status as our elder brother. One last name really threw me for a loop and broke my simplistic paradigm: “God is (my) uncle,” Ammiel/Eliam. I could not easily integrate this expression of Israelite worldview into my own LDS conception. In what possible sense could God be one’s uncle?

My story is one of learning to read through ancient lenses; I knew the lexical meanings of these words, but tried to fit it neatly into my modern LDS paradigm. I did not know the cultural usages and connotations. (Which is another argument that translation of words is not enough for meaning; you also need contexts  and connotations that went unstated.)

For Israelites, a covenant relationship meant you were  kin-by-covenant with the responsibilities entailed by kinship. So logically, you addressed the other party by kinship terms; this is what is expressed in Israelite names like god-is-my-father, god-is-my-brother, and god-is-my-uncle.1The word for “uncle” at an earlier stage actually meant “kinsman.” And indeed, God was seen as a divine kinsman, who would carry out all the duties of kinship with divine power, like buying back (or redeeming) you out of slavery. (Again, see my article for details.)

Note how Mosiah 5:7 explicitly reflects this concept of kinship through covenant.

because of the covenant which ye have made ye shall be called the children of Christ, his sons, and his daughters; for behold, this day he hath spiritually begotten you; for ye say that your hearts are changed through faith on his name; therefore, ye are born of him and have become his sons and his daughters.

That’s pretty explicit! If Jesus begets us as sons and daughters through covenant, it’s only logical to apply the term father to him. This concept may be what’s doing work behind the scenes in John 1:12, “to all who received him, who believed in his name, he gave power to become children of God.”

(As an aside, how long this concept remained among the Book of Mormon cultures after splitting off from Israel is a different question.  It may well have been lost or mutated.)

We see this also with kingship in the Old Testament. As with Israelite’s neighbors, kingship was divine; the king was a god, or god’s son, or in the image of god. (For Israelites, every human was in the image of God, a way of democratizing and humanizing what in other cultures was reserved for royalty.)

These two passages are both addressed to Israelite kings.

Psa 2:7 “The LORD said to me, “You are my Son; today I have begotten you.”

2Sa 7:13-14 “I will establish the throne of his kingdom forever.  I will become his father, and he shall become my son.”2My translation. The possessive pronouns aren’t there in Hebrew, but I think they’re required.

As one scholar summarizes,

the root metaphors of covenant and kinship underwrite the father-son relationship between Yahweh and Israel throughout the various Old Testament traditions

-Hahn, Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God’s Saving Promises, 42.

As for other terms, “brother” seems to refer to “covenant/treaty partners” in Amos 1:11, 1Ki 9:13, and elsewhere. Amos 1:9 refers to the “covenant of brothers.” “Brother” and presumably “sister” would refer to someone within the covenant community.

There are frequent laws scattered throughout Deuteronomy that detail how one should treat one’s brother. In most cases brother does not refer to a blood brother, but to a brother who is a member of the covenant family, and as such, means fellow Israelite or fellow citizen.

–NIDOTTE, 348.

In conclusion, after all of this, it should be easy to see that there are legitimate and logical ways for ancient scripture to call Jesus “Father,” and that it has VERY little to do with 4th-century trinitarian debates about homioousia vs homioousia or “being”/”essence.” Rather, it has everything to do with ancient ideas of covenant. The best LDS explainer of the classical trinitarianism I’ve seen is in this recent book.

Don’t read ancient scripture through modern lenses; it sends you wrong almost every time.

Further reading

  • Ben Spackman, “The Israelite Roots of Atonement Terminology,” BYU Studies.
  • Hershel Shanks, “God as Divine Kinsman: What Covenant Meant in Ancient Israel” Biblical
Archaeology
 Review
 25:4
 (July/Aug
1999)
 PDF
    • Shanks draws heavily on Cross, below.
  • Frank Moore Cross, “Kinship and Covenant in Ancient Israel,” in From Epic to Canon: History and Literature in Ancient Israel
    • Cross was a magisterial Hebrew Bible professor at Harvard, and figures prominently in this LDS video about temples. (Link to the short version.)
  • Scott Hahn, Kinship by Covenant: A Canonical Approach to the Fulfillment of God’s Saving Promises
  • And for those who wonder if the Book of Mormon Jesus-as-Father might just represent Joseph Smith’s supposed “modalistic” view,3Most LDS wrongly thing of the trinity as modalism, which says there is one divine being who manifests himself in three different ways. Modalism is a Christian heresy. see Bruening and Paulsen, “The Development of the Mormon Understanding of God: Early Mormon Modalism and Other Myths,” Review of Books on the Book of Mormon pdf

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