God the Father

The Creed begins where the faith begins: "I believe in one God, the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth and of all things visible and invisible." Before "Father" names anything about us, it names an eternal relationship within God: the Father is Father because He has a Son — not by adoption, not from some point in time, but from all eternity. The title "Almighty" (in Greek Pantokrator, "ruler and sustainer of all") confesses that everything that exists, seen and unseen, hangs on His will and is held in His hands.

We do not deduce the Father; the Son reveals Him. "Neither knoweth any man the Father, save the Son, and he to whomsoever the Son will reveal him" (Matthew 11:27). Everything Jesus does is a portrait of the Father — so much so that He can say, "he that hath seen me hath seen the Father" (John 14:9). When the Church wants to know what the Father is like, she looks at the father in Christ's parable who catches sight of his returning prodigal "a great way off" and runs to him. And because we are joined to the Son, His Father becomes ours: Christians dare to open their prayer with "Our Father which art in heaven" (Matthew 6:9).

Orthodox theology calls the Father the arche — the "beginning" or principle — within the Holy Trinity. The Son is eternally begotten of the Father; the Spirit eternally proceeds from the Father, as Christ Himself says of "the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father" (John 15:26). St. John of Damascus states it plainly: "The Father is one Father, and without beginning, that is, without cause: for He is not derived from anything." The Son and the Spirit are not thereby less than the Father — each is fully God, possessing the whole divine essence — but they are God from the Father, as light is from a lamp, while the Father is God from no one.

This teaching, called the monarchy of the Father, is how Orthodoxy answers the oldest question about the Trinity: if the Father, Son, and Spirit are each fully God, why are there not three gods? Because the unity of God is personal before it is arithmetical — one God because one Father, from whom the Son and Spirit eternally are, sharing His one essence. St. Paul confesses in exactly this shape: "to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things... and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things" (1 Corinthians 8:6). It is also why the Filioque — the later Western addition confessing the Spirit's procession "from the Father and the Son" — matters so much to the Orthodox: it touches the very structure of the Trinity's life.

The Father has no body, no beard, no throne room above the clouds. "No man hath seen God at any time; the only begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him" (John 1:18). For this reason the dominant Orthodox iconographic tradition does not depict the Father: what has never been seen cannot be painted, and images of Him as a white-haired elder, where they crept in, have been repeatedly discouraged. The Father is made known in His Son, who is His true and exact image — and He is approached, beyond every image and concept, in the reverent unknowing the Church calls apophatic.

What may be said without hesitation is that the Father is good, and the giver of every good: "Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights" (James 1:17). The whole economy of salvation begins in His love — He sends the Son, He sends the Spirit, and the end of all things is that His children come home to Him. Orthodox worship never forgets this grammar: the Church's central prayers are addressed to the Father, through the Son, in the Holy Spirit.