the Father, the Almighty

The Text

The first article’s central name for God. Two predicates, each load-bearing, each historically open to misreading. Father names the first person of the Trinity in his relation to the Son (and through the Son, to the world). Almighty names the sovereign rule of God over all that is. The clause has been read, at different times in the church’s history, as a chiefly metaphorical attribution (God is like a powerful father) or as a chiefly philosophical attribution (the one God possesses all power). Neither reading is quite the creedal one. The creed names a relation — the eternal Father of the eternal Son — and a sovereignty — the Lord of the hosts, the ruler of all. The relation is the framework; the sovereignty is the predicate. The two together speak the God whose power is the power of his fatherhood, and whose fatherhood is the substance of his almighty rule.

Translation Notes

Patēr / pater — Father. The Greek and Latin both name God with the relational title that became, in the New Testament, the distinguishing Christian name for the first person of the Trinity. The decisive New Testament data points: Jesus’ address of God as Abba (Mark 14:36; Rom. 8:15; Gal. 4:6) — the Aramaic intimate paternal address; Jesus’ teaching of his disciples to pray Our Father (Matt. 6:9); the consistent Pauline and Johannine usage in which the Father names the first person specifically and the Son names the second. The creedal Father is therefore not a generic religious-paternal metaphor that the church might (in another generation) replace with a different metaphor; it is the relational name the Son uses for the one who eternally begets him, and the name the church uses by adoption (Rom. 8:15: you have received the spirit of adoption, by which we cry, Abba, Father) when she enters by baptism into the Son’s relation to the Father.

The 20th- and 21st-century discussion of the Father language has rightly raised the question of how the Christian confession of God as Father relates to the broader human experience of fatherhood (including, painfully, abusive or absent human fathers). The pastoral teacher should know two convictions are held together in the catholic tradition. First, the Christian confession of God as Father does not project the broken patterns of human fatherhood onto God; it names God in his eternal relation to the Son and judges every human fatherhood by that relation. Ephesians 3:14–15 puts the order precisely: I bow my knees before the Father, from whom every fatherhood [πατριά] in heaven and on earth is named. Second, the creedal Father is not in competition with maternal or other relational language for God elsewhere in scripture (Isa. 49:15; 66:13; Hos. 11:1–4; Matt. 23:37). The creed names the trinitarian relation; the broader scriptural witness fills out the character of the God so named.

Pantokratōr / omnipotens — Almighty. The Septuagint’s regular use of pantokratōr to translate the Hebrew Sabaoth (hosts) and Shaddai fixes the biblical sense. The God who is pantokratōr is the Lord of the heavenly hosts (the armies of angels), the ruler of the cosmos, the God who can do what he has said he will do. The Latin omnipotens and the English Almighty preserve the substance, but the philosophical Latin tradition (especially in late medieval and early modern discussions) developed omnipotentia as a self-standing concept — the power to do anything not self-contradictory — that floated free of its biblical anchor. The creedal Almighty should be heard against the biblical horizon: not the abstract holding of all possible powers, but the active rule of the one God over all that he has made, including the spiritual hosts named in clause 3 of this article (the things invisible).

Historical Context

The creedal pairing of Father and Almighty has its roots in the New Testament’s consistent linking of the two — see especially Revelation, where the Lord God Almighty (Kyrios ho Theos ho Pantokratōr) appears nine times, with the implicit assumption that this God is the Father of the Lamb who is at the center of the throne. The Old Roman Symbol (c. 200) — the earliest Western baptismal creed — already coupled the two: I believe in God the Father almighty. The Nicene Creed continues this Western and Eastern shared confession.

The 4th-century controversies forced a sharpening of what Father means in the creedal grammar. The Arian challenge — that the Son is a creature, not co-eternal with the Father — depends on a reading of Father in which the Father’s fatherhood is a temporal beginning of relation (there was when the Son was not, in Arius’s slogan). The Nicene response (the homoousios clause; see annotation #8) refused this: the Father is eternally Father, which means the Son is eternally Son. There never was a Father without a Son; the Father’s fatherhood is constitutive of his being, not a relation he acquired by an act in time. This carries the deeper grammatical implication that Father in the creed is not a metaphor for God’s role as creator (as if Father of all that is meant cause of all that is); it is the eternal trinitarian relation, prior to and the source of God’s creative work.

The Cappadocian theologians of the late 4th century (Basil, Gregory of Nazianzus, Gregory of Nyssa) gave the Eastern articulation that has remained authoritative: the Father is the monarchy (monarchia) of the Trinity — the one source from whom the Son is eternally begotten and the Spirit eternally proceeds. The Father is the unique origin of the divine life that the Son and the Spirit share; but in being so, the Father is not first in time or greater in being than the Son and the Spirit. The order (taxis) is eternal; the equality is full. This Cappadocian framework underlies both the second article (eternally begotten of the Father) and the third article (who proceeds from the Father) of the creed.

The Latin Western articulation — articulated by Augustine in On the Trinity and systematized in the medieval tradition by Aquinas — gave essentially the same doctrine in different vocabulary: the Father is the unbegotten (ingenitus) source of the divine life; the Son is eternally begotten of the Father (Filius a Patre genitus); the Spirit eternally proceeds (Spiritus procedit) — in the Western tradition, from the Father and the Son (filioque; the contested clause 17 of this corpus).

The Almighty / Pantokratōr predicate has its own iconographic and theological history in the Eastern tradition. The image of Christ Pantokratōr — Christ as the cosmic ruler, painted in the dome of the church above the worshipers — is among the great Byzantine theological-iconographic creations. The image makes a quietly powerful point: the Pantokratōr of the Christian confession is the Pantokratōr who has become incarnate and bears the marks of the cross. The almighty God is the crucified-and-risen God; the rule of God is the rule of love that the cross discloses.

Lines of Interpretation

Patristic

Tradition: Tertullian, Against Praxeas; Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians; Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration III (On the Son) and IV; Augustine, On the Trinity esp. Books V–VII; Cyril of Alexandria, On the Unity of Christ

The patristic settlement holds three convictions in tension. First, Father is the eternal relational name of the first person of the Trinity. The Father is Father because the Son is Son; he is not Father because of his creative relation to the world. Athanasius’s Discourses Against the Arians is the foundational defense of this conviction: if the Father is Father only by his creative work, then the Father is dependent on creation to be who he is — a conclusion the gospel does not allow. The Father is Father from all eternity, with the Son. Second, Almighty is the active sovereign rule of God over all that is, not a static philosophical attribute. Third, the Father’s almightiness is exercised through the Son and in the Spirit; the trinitarian persons act inseparably in the world, though each acts in his proper personal way.

Gregory of Nazianzus’s Third Theological Oration (On the Son) is perhaps the single most penetrating patristic discussion of what Father means in the creedal grammar. Gregory’s pastoral move is to insist that Father names a relation, not a being; the Father is not a different thing from the Son, but the same divine being in his eternal relation to the Son.

Strengths

• Holds the eternal-relational accent of Father firmly against every reduction to metaphor
• The patristic anti-Arian polemic produced a permanent gain in dogmatic clarity
• Gregory of Nazianzus’s relation-not-being framing is permanently usable

Weaknesses

• The strong polemical context occasionally produced over-precise articulations that the modern church has had to soften
• The patristic philosophical vocabulary requires careful translation for contemporary use

Scholastic

Tradition: Anselm, On the Procession of the Holy Spirit; Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.33–43 (on the persons of the Trinity); Bonaventure, Disputed Questions on the Mystery of the Trinity

The scholastic tradition systematized the patristic doctrine under the heading of subsistent relations: the persons of the Trinity are the eternal relations of the divine being subsisting as persons. The Father is the paternitas (fatherhood) of God subsisting; the Son is the filiatio (sonship) subsisting; the Spirit is the processio (procession) subsisting. The framework allows the medieval tradition to articulate, with a precision the patristic tradition did not always reach, what it means to say that the persons are one substance and three persons.

Aquinas’s treatment of divine omnipotence in Summa Theologiae I.25 is the classical Western treatment. Aquinas argues that omnipotens names the active power of God to do all that is not self-contradictory (God cannot make a square circle, not because of a limitation in God but because square circle names nothing that can be made). The doctrine has been criticized by some modern theologians as importing a philosophical concept that floats free of the biblical pantokratōr; the better reading is that Aquinas is articulating the biblical sovereignty with the conceptual tools of the medieval period, and that the doctrine of omnipotence as he develops it remains in service of the doctrine of the Father whose rule is exercised in the Son and the Spirit.

Strengths

• The subsistent relations framework is one of the great achievements of medieval Latin theology
• Aquinas’s treatment of omnipotence preserves the substance of the biblical confession in conceptually rigorous form
• The medieval tradition’s articulation of the trinitarian persons remains foundational

Weaknesses

• The Aristotelian categories on which the scholastic articulation depends are not native to scripture
• The discussion of omnipotence has occasionally floated free of the trinitarian context and produced a generic concept of omnipotence the creed does not name

Lutheran

Tradition: Luther, Large Catechism on the first article; Luther’s Theology of the Cross (Heidelberg Disputation); Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration I

The Lutheran tradition has held the creedal Father, Almighty in catholic form, with two distinctive accents. First, Luther’s theology of the cross — articulated in the Heidelberg Disputation (1518) — insists that the Almighty God is the God whose almightiness is paradoxically revealed in the weakness of the cross. Crux probat omnia (the cross is the test of everything): the almighty God is not known by direct contemplation of his power but by gazing at the crucified Son. The Father of the creed is the Father of the crucified; the Almighty of the creed is the one who shows his might in the apparent powerlessness of Gethsemane and Calvary. Second, Luther’s Large Catechism on the first article gives the pastoral substance: I believe that God has made me and all creatures; that he has given me my body and soul, eyes, ears, and all my members, my reason and all my senses, and still preserves them. The Almighty is the God whose almightiness is the daily provision of every good thing the creature has.

Strengths

• The theology of the cross corrects every triumphalist or coercive reading of Almighty
• The catechetical pastoral register makes the doctrine concretely usable
• The Lutheran articulation has resisted the philosophical drift of omnipotentia as a self-standing concept

Weaknesses

• The strong cross-centered register has occasionally been heard as dialectical to the point of obscuring the creator’s positive sovereignty
• The Lutheran tradition has not always developed the trinitarian implications of Father with the depth the patristic tradition reached

Reformed

Tradition: Calvin, Institutes I.13 (on the Trinity); Heidelberg Catechism QQ. 26–28; Westminster Confession Ch. 2–3 and 5

The Reformed tradition has held the creedal Father, Almighty with particular emphasis on the doctrine of providence — the Almighty God’s continuing rule over the created order. The Heidelberg Catechism Q. 26 gives the Reformed pastoral form: What do you believe when you say, “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Maker of heaven and earth”? That the eternal Father of our Lord Jesus Christ… for the sake of his Son Christ is my God and my Father, in whom I trust so completely as to have no doubt that he will provide me with all things necessary for body and soul… The Reformed accent is on the for the sake of his Son Christ — the Father of the creed is the believer’s Father only by the believer’s adoption in the Son. The Almighty is the one who will provide me with all things necessary.

Strengths

• The Heidelberg’s adoptive-Christological grammar is among the great pastoral articulations of the doctrine
• The Reformed emphasis on providence keeps Almighty connected to the actual government of the world
• Calvin’s careful trinitarian articulation in Institutes I.13 holds Father and Son rigorously together

Weaknesses

• The strong doctrine of providence has occasionally been heard, in popular Reformed piety, as if God’s almightiness made him the direct cause of every event, including evil — a hearing the Reformers themselves resisted
• The Reformed tradition’s strong emphasis on the divine decrees has sometimes overshadowed the relational-paternal register of Father

Eastern Orthodox

Tradition: Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration III (On the Son); Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua; John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I.8; the iconography of Christ Pantokratōr in the Byzantine dome

The Eastern tradition has been the most consistent defender of the monarchy of the Father — the Father as the unique eternal source of the divine life. The Orthodox articulation insists that the Father’s fatherhood is constitutive of the divine life: God is not first one and then three (as if the trinity were a divisible composite); God is the one Father whose eternal life is shared without remainder with the Son and the Spirit. The framework guards against every form of generic monotheism in which the one God floats free of the persons.

The iconographic tradition of Christ Pantokratōr in the dome of the church is a quiet theological achievement that should not be missed. The Pantokratōr over the gathered congregation is the Son who shares the Father’s almighty rule; the image makes visible what the creed confesses, that the rule of God is the rule of the Father in the Son. Maximus the Confessor’s elaboration of the doctrine (in the Ambigua and elsewhere) integrates the trinitarian confession with the doctrine of cosmic Christology: the Pantokratōr is the Logos through whom all things were made and in whom all things hold together (Col. 1:15–17).

Strengths

• The monarchy-of-the-Father framework preserves the personal-relational accent of Father against every depersonalizing reduction
• The iconographic tradition has kept the doctrine present in the liturgical-visual life of the church
• Maximus’s cosmic Christology integrates the Almighty and the Father in a single doctrinal vision

Weaknesses

• The strong monarchy language has occasionally been heard, in the West, as veering toward subordinationism
• The Eastern tradition’s distinctive vocabulary requires translation for cultures unfamiliar with the patristic-monastic register

Wesleyan

(See Wesleyan Voice below.)

Modern Ecumenical

Tradition: Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1 §§29–31 (on God’s perfections); Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (1972); Sallie McFague, Models of God (1987); Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God (2008); Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (2010)

The 20th- and 21st-century theological discussion of Father, Almighty has been particularly rich. Barth’s treatment of God’s perfections (the older language: attributes) in Church Dogmatics II/1 §§29–31 is the foundational modern Protestant articulation: the omnipotence of God is the omnipotence of the God who has actually elected to be God for us in Christ, not a generic philosophical property. Moltmann’s The Crucified God (1972) develops the theology-of-the-cross register with reference to the Almighty: the God of the cross is the God who, in the Son, shares the suffering of the world without ceasing to be sovereign over it.

The feminist theological discussion has rightly raised the question of how the creedal Father relates to the experience of women (and of men shaped by abusive paternal patterns). McFague’s Models of God (1987) proposes a more pluralistic set of metaphors; Soskice’s The Kindness of God (2008) gives a more conservative answer that preserves the creedal Father as the irreducible trinitarian relation while developing the maternal and other relational images of God in scripture. Tanner’s Christ the Key (2010) integrates the discussion into a fully Chalcedonian Christology.

Strengths

• The 20th-century discussion has produced one of the great periods in trinitarian theology
• Moltmann’s cross-centered articulation of the Almighty is permanently valuable
• Soskice’s careful preservation of the creedal Father while opening space for the broader scriptural witness is a model of contemporary catholic theology

Weaknesses

• Some modern reconstructions (McFague, more radical feminist proposals) have effectively replaced rather than supplemented the creedal Father; whatever their merits, they cannot count as articulations of the creed itself
• The dialectical accent in some modern theology has occasionally produced articulations in which the Almighty is so qualified as to lose its biblical substance

Wesleyan Voice

Wesley’s confession of God as Father Almighty is unambiguous and is articulated in trinitarian-pastoral form throughout the Standard Sermons, the Notes upon the New Testament, and the Articles of Religion. Article I of the Methodist Articles of Religion (1784) names the maker and preserver of all things both visible and invisible; the trinitarian unfolding follows in the same article. Wesley’s most sustained pastoral statement on the Fatherhood of God is Sermon 9, “The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption,” preached on Romans 8:15 — you have received the spirit of adoption, by which we cry, Abba, Father. The sermon is among Wesley’s most pastorally important: the believer’s confession of God as Father is not the natural intuition of religious feeling but the gift of the Spirit, by which the believer is given to cry Abba with the Son.

The Wesleyan accent on the witness of the Spirit (the doctrine that the Holy Spirit testifies to the believer’s spirit that she is a child of God — Rom. 8:16) is closely tied to this clause. The believer who has received the Spirit of adoption knows God as Father not by speculative theology but by the Spirit’s interior testimony. The Methodist class meeting was the practical site at which the believer learned to receive and confess this testimony. The Father of the creed is therefore not a doctrinal abstraction but the God whose Spirit even now produces the Abba of the believer’s prayer.

Wesley’s treatment of divine omnipotence is integrated into his doctrine of providence. The Almighty God is the God whose providence orders the believer’s life for good (Rom. 8:28); the doctrine produces, in Wesley’s pastoral register, quiet confidence rather than anxious mastery. The believer is not asked to understand how every event of her life serves God’s purposes; the believer is asked to trust the Father whose almightiness is the active love disclosed at Calvary.

The Wesleyan tradition has also been careful with the question of evil and the Almighty. Wesley’s Thoughts upon the Origin of Evil and his preaching on the problem of suffering refuse two equally bad solutions: the deistic reduction of God to a distant first cause who does not interfere, and the fatalistic reduction of God to the direct cause of every event including evil. The Wesleyan articulation insists on real human (and angelic) freedom within the Father’s providential ordering, and on the eschatological resolution in which the Almighty will be all in all.

The pastoral Wesleyan posture: name God as Father in the Spirit-given speech of adoption, not as the application of a human metaphor; trust the Almighty providence of God as the active love of the same Father; refuse both deistic distance and fatalistic determinism; live in the assurance that the Father whose Son was crucified is the God who rules all things.

Hymnody

The Methodist hymnody on the Father, Almighty is concentrated in the trinitarian hymns and in the doxological tradition.

“Come, thou almighty King” (anon., 1757, sometimes attributed to Charles Wesley) opens with the address to the Father as Almighty King — help us thy name to sing, / help us to praise. The hymn’s trinitarian structure (stanzas to the Father, Son, Spirit, and the Triune God) makes it the great hymnic articulation of this clause and the next.

“O worship the King, all glorious above” (Robert Grant, 1833) is the great 19th-century English hymn on the Almighty’s providential rule, set to Haydn’s tune: O tell of his might, O sing of his grace, / whose robe is the light, whose canopy space; / his chariots of wrath the deep thunderclouds form, / and dark is his path on the wings of the storm.

“Immortal, invisible, God only wise” (Walter C. Smith, 1867) is the great Scottish hymn on the divine perfections: Immortal, invisible, God only wise, / in light inaccessible hid from our eyes, / most blessed, most glorious, the Ancient of Days, / almighty, victorious, thy great name we praise. The hymn’s reception in the Methodist canon has been wide; it remains a major pastoral resource on the Almighty.

“A mighty fortress is our God” (Martin Luther, c. 1529, paraphrasing Psalm 46) is the great Lutheran-Reformed hymn on the Almighty’s defense of his people. The hymn has been part of Methodist worship since the 19th century and gives the militant register of the Almighty in pastoral form.

“Father, in whom we live” (Charles Wesley, 1747) is the explicitly trinitarian Wesleyan hymn that opens with the address to the Father: Father, in whom we live, / in whom we are, and move, / the glory, power, and praise receive / for thy creating love.

“This is my Father’s world” (Maltbie D. Babcock, 1901) is the 20th-century Methodist-Presbyterian hymn that has taught two generations of children the pastoral substance of the Father, Almighty: this is my Father’s world… / he shines in all that’s fair; / in the rustling grass I hear him pass, / he speaks to me everywhere.

For the Doxology — Praise God, from whom all blessings flow (Thomas Ken, 1674) — the trinitarian close (praise Father, Son, and Holy Ghost) names the Father in the order of the eternal life.

Pastoral and Liturgical Use

Two pastoral tasks attach to this clause, and the modern Methodist pastor faces both.

The first task is recovering the relational depth of “Father.” In a culture in which father names, for many people, the absent one or the harmful one rather than the present and faithful one, the creedal Father is no longer self-evidently good news. The pastoral correction is not the abandonment of the name (the creed names the eternal trinitarian relation, and that relation is the gospel) but the careful teaching that the Christian confession of God as Father does not project the broken patterns of human fatherhood onto God. The order runs the other way: God’s eternal Fatherhood of the Son is the truth by which every human fatherhood is judged. The man who failed to be a faithful father failed in relation to a Fatherhood he himself did not invent. Every fatherhood in heaven and on earth is named from the Father of the Son (Eph. 3:14–15). The pastor’s task is to help the believer hear Father, in the creed, as the relation she has always been made for — the relation Jesus reveals, the relation the Spirit produces in her Abba, the relation in which the believer is given the safety and the welcome and the home that even the best human fathers can only partially image.

It is also worth recovering, in the same pastoral register, the maternal and other relational images of God in scripture. Isaiah 49:15 — Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb? Even these may forget, yet I will not forget you. Isaiah 66:13 — as a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you. Hosea 11:1–4 — God as the parent who taught Ephraim to walk, who took them up in my arms. Matthew 23:37 — Jesus’ lament over Jerusalem, as a hen gathers her brood under her wings. The creedal Father is the trinitarian relation; the broader scriptural witness fills out the character of the God so named. Both belong to the church’s confession.

The second task is recovering the biblical depth of “Almighty.” In a culture in which divine power is regularly imagined either coercively (the God who imposes by force) or sentimentally (the God whose love is a kind of permissive affection without rule), the creedal Almighty is misheard from both directions. The biblical pantokratōr — the Lord of hosts, the ruler of all that is, the God whose rule has actually established and now sustains the cosmos — is neither a coercive autocrat nor a sentimental affirmer. He is the God whose almightiness was disclosed at the cross.

This is the deepest pastoral substance of the clause. The Almighty of the creed is the Father of Jesus Christ. The Father whose Almighty love sent the Son into the world, who let the Son be crucified rather than seize his people back by force, who raised the Son on the third day and now reigns with him over all things — this God is the Pantokratōr. The pastor’s task is to refuse every other picture of divine power that the culture or the broken family has installed in the congregation’s imagination, and to keep showing the people the actual God: the Father whose almightiness is the cross-shaped rule of love.

The teaching device that has carried this for the Eastern tradition is the icon of Christ Pantokratōr in the dome of the church. The risen and ascended Son, bearing the marks of the cross, gazing down on the worshiping people, his hand raised in blessing, the book of the Gospels in his other hand — this is the picture of the Almighty. Not the disembodied raw power of the philosopher’s omnipotens; not the autocratic ruler of the popular imagination; the crucified-and-risen Lord whose rule is the rule of self-giving love. The Methodist parish does not have a dome to paint, but the pastor has the pulpit and the table and the font; and from all three the same picture can be shown.

For the preacher: when you say the Father, the Almighty, do not let the congregation hear what they have already half-decided those words mean. Name Father by Jesus’ Abba and the Spirit’s witness of adoption; name Almighty by the cross-shaped rule of the Pantokratōr. The creed names the actual God, not the cultural projection. Help the people see and confess him.

Further Reading

• Genesis 17:1 (El Shaddai); Exodus 6:3
• Deuteronomy 32:6 — God as Father of Israel
• Psalm 24:8, 10; Psalm 89:8 (Lord of Hosts)
• Isaiah 49:15; 66:13; Hosea 11:1–4 — maternal and parental images for God
• Matthew 6:9; Mark 14:36; Luke 11:2 — Jesus’ Father-language
• Matthew 23:37 — Jesus as the hen gathering her brood
• John 14:6–11; 17:1–5 — the Father-Son relation
• Romans 8:15–17, 26–27 — the Spirit of adoption, the cry Abba
• Galatians 4:6 — God has sent the Spirit of his Son into our hearts, crying Abba, Father
• Ephesians 3:14–15 — every fatherhood named from the Father
• Colossians 1:15–17 — the Son as the image of the invisible God, in whom all things were created
• Revelation 1:8; 4:8; 11:17; 15:3; 16:7, 14; 19:6, 15; 21:22 — the Lord God Almighty
• Tertullian, Against Praxeas
• Athanasius, Discourses Against the Arians
• Gregory of Nazianzus, Theological Oration III (On the Son); Theological Oration IV
• Augustine, On the Trinity Books V–VII
• John of Damascus, On the Orthodox Faith I.8
• Maximus the Confessor, Ambigua
• Anselm of Canterbury, Proslogion
• Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae I.25 (on the divine power); I.33–43 (on the persons of the Trinity)
• Martin Luther, Large Catechism on the first article; Heidelberg Disputation (1518)
• John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion I.13
• Heidelberg Catechism, QQ. 26–28
• Westminster Confession of Faith, Chapters 2–3 and 5
• Articles of Religion of the Methodist Church (1784), Article I
• John Wesley, Standard Sermons, Sermon 9, “The Spirit of Bondage and of Adoption”; Sermon 17, “The Circumcision of the Heart”
• John Wesley, Explanatory Notes upon the New Testament on Romans 8 and Ephesians 3
• Charles Wesley, “Father, in whom we live” (1747); “Maker, in whom we live” (1747)
• Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics II/1, §§29–31 (on God’s perfections)
• Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God (Fortress, 1974; original German 1972)
• Sallie McFague, Models of God (Fortress, 1987)
• Janet Martin Soskice, The Kindness of God: Metaphor, Gender, and Religious Language (Oxford, 2007)
• Kathryn Tanner, Christ the Key (Cambridge, 2010)
• Hans Urs von Balthasar, Theo-Drama (esp. Vol. III–V on the trinitarian persons)