Life of the Father

You are my son,
today I have fathered you
--Hebrews 1:5, Psalm 2:7

The Son is the primary object of the Father’s love. In all the creatures to which he addresses his love he loves the Son.
--Wolfhart Pannenberg¹

The Father gives himself in the Son, and the Son in the Father in an everlasting delight, each in the other, and a loving embracing, the one the other. . . Just as the Father ceaselessly contemplates all things anew in the birth of his Son, so all things are loved anew by the Father and by the Son in the flowing-out of the Holy Ghost in eternal love. And this is the operative meeting of the Father and of the Son in which we are lovingly embraced through the Holy Ghost in eternal love.
-- Jan Van Ruysbroeck²

Becoming a father last September occasioned a lot of theology. These paintings explore the relationship between my daily routine of care for my son and the archtypical seasons of the Father’s love for the Son, into which we also have been invited.

Thank you, Loren (especially on Gerard Manley Hopkins), Phil, and Dal, my teachers last semester, for teaching me so many things that have come out in these paintings. And thank you most of all, Betsy, for bearing Beren and bearing with me while I worked on this project.

¹ Systematic Theology 2, p. 21. Quoted in The Triune Creator by Colin Gunton, p. 158.

² Quoted in The Transforming Friendship by James Houston, p. 191.