Women and the Creed: "For us humans and for our salvation"

rusmeister said:

A thought-out article by Fr John Whiteford.

/ Orthochristian.Com

Now that I see that "Public Orthodoxy" is involved, it is even clearer to me than it was that such proposed changes are generally supported by the same people that want to introduce other changes to practice and even doctrine. Fr John's point about the Chinese people and language is pretty good, too.

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One thing that can be seen clearly in Fr. John's article as elsewhere in these discussions is the tension left over from culturally dealing with a thousand such suggestions, improvements, and demands.

I dunno. This is old and boring hat that has come up in a million places. While I still think that the question itself is legitimate, I don't think that the Public Orthodoxy article did a good job arguing for this.

gzt said:

Whiteford's essay doesn't really add anything new to the discussion except show that he didn't open Liddell and Scott.

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Well, jeepers, I could just as easily say that your comment doesn't add anything to the discussion except show that you didn't open Chesterton. You think that just appealing to a dictionary dismisses what Fr John is saying. I think just appealing to a dictionary is a kind of Sola Dictionaria, worse than Sola Scriptura, for it is a blind faith in the scholarship of a man or few men over centuries of Tradition. You have nothing good to say in response to the effort to replace "man" in the sense it is used with "human" and the example he provided ("Son of Human", etc).

I hesitated to respond to this thread. Woman never seem to respond to these topics here or in OBOB. Why is that?
When I pray the Divine Office each morning or read the bible, I change the words such as "sons" to children, "men" to "us", "we", "people", "fathers" to "parents", etc. I feel more connected to Christ and his teachings and to God's word in the Psalms etc. that God is speaking directly to me when I do. I feel included, loved, accepted.

I also notice that that when topics such as this come up, it is always men who take the lead in these discussions. Rarely does a woman ever respond. It is the same on OBOB. I could challenge you all to read the scripture substituting the feminine for the masculine, but it won't work. Culture is too ingrained in you and me for millenniums.

So personally, I have no problem with all inclusive language, while remaining true to the Traditional teachings of the Orthodox Catholic church.

I admit, in my personal prayers, I do say woman instead of man in certain prayers, such as the evening prayer to the Holy Spirit:

O Lord, Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, show compassion and have mercy on me Thy sinful servant, and loose me from mine unworthiness, and forgive all wherein I have sinned against Thee today as a man (woman), and not only as a man, but even worse than a beast, my sins voluntary and involuntary, known and unknown, whether from youth, and from evil suggestion, or whether from brazenness and despondency.

Of course, that is in personal prayer.

I think it dangerous to elevate my feelings to a position of authority. If God cared that much about my feelings, I'd be living like Solomon rather than like a hermit. Yet the modern push is to make everything about personal feelings. Feelings trump revelation and the foundation becomes sand.

All4Christ said:

I admit, in my personal prayers, I do say woman instead of man in certain prayers, such as the evening prayer to the Holy Spirit:

O Lord, Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, show compassion and have mercy on me Thy sinful servant, and loose me from mine unworthiness, and forgive all wherein I have sinned against Thee today as a man (woman), and not only as a man, but even worse than a beast, my sins voluntary and involuntary, known and unknown, whether from youth, and from evil suggestion, or whether from brazenness and despondency.

Of course, that is in personal prayer.

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That's interesting!

Of course, that is personal prayer and the usage is a bit different - singular and with an article. I would never expect even churchy English to permit "Martha, as a man..."

Someone correct me if I'm wrong!

Simon Peter said to them, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Gospel of Thomas 114)

HoleyHermit said:

Simon Peter said to them, “Let Mary leave us, for women are not worthy of life.” Jesus said, “I myself shall lead her in order to make her male, so that she too may become a living spirit resembling you males. For every woman who will make herself male will enter the kingdom of heaven.” (Gospel of Thomas 114)

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There's a reason why that book didn't make it into the canon of scriptures.

GregConstantine said:

There's a reason why that book didn't make it into the canon of scriptures.

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There are probably many reasons to exclude it.

seekingfreedom said:

I hesitated to respond to this thread. Woman never seem to respond to these topics here or in OBOB. Why is that?
When I pray the Divine Office each morning or read the bible, I change the words such as "sons" to children, "men" to "us", "we", "people", "fathers" to "parents", etc. I feel more connected to Christ and his teachings and to God's word in the Psalms etc. that God is speaking directly to me when I do. I feel included, loved, accepted.

I also notice that that when topics such as this come up, it is always men who take the lead in these discussions. Rarely does a woman ever respond. It is the same on OBOB. I could challenge you all to read the scripture substituting the feminine for the masculine, but it won't work. Culture is too ingrained in you and me for millenniums.

So personally, I have no problem with all inclusive language, while remaining true to the Traditional teachings of the Orthodox Catholic church.

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Notice what All4Christ said - she modeled correctly where change is appropriate. What's not appropriate is to see all of the traditional language as somehow excluding you.

You have to choose between trying to change yourself to suit the Truth, or changing the Truth to suit yourself. If the culture is ingrained, then maybe the culture is right. If God has told us to refer to Him in masculine terms, who are we to try to say we can correct Him? If our ancestors (which includes an awful lot of women) tell us certain things in certain terms, who are we to say that we know better than they?

All4Christ said:

I admit, in my personal prayers, I do say woman instead of man in certain prayers, such as the evening prayer to the Holy Spirit:

O Lord, Heavenly King, Comforter, Spirit of Truth, show compassion and have mercy on me Thy sinful servant, and loose me from mine unworthiness, and forgive all wherein I have sinned against Thee today as a man (woman), and not only as a man, but even worse than a beast, my sins voluntary and involuntary, known and unknown, whether from youth, and from evil suggestion, or whether from brazenness and despondency.

Of course, that is in personal prayer.

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My prayerbook has "both in my humanity and my inhumanity" there. Hm.

hengesthorsa said:

My prayerbook has "both in my humanity and my inhumanity" there. Hm.

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Interesting...which version? Mine is the Jordanville Prayerbook.

Is the inhumanity portion replacing the section about as a beast?

All4Christ said:

Interesting...which version? Mine is the Jordanville Prayerbook.

Is the inhumanity portion replacing the section about as a beast?

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No, it also has the "behaving worse than beasts" bit. It's Orthodox Daily Prayers by St. Tikhon's Seminary Press.

rusmeister said:

Notice what All4Christ said - she modeled correctly where change is appropriate. What's not appropriate is to see all of the traditional language as somehow excluding you.

You have to choose between trying to change yourself to suit the Truth, or changing the Truth to suit yourself. If the culture is ingrained, then maybe the culture is right. If God has told us to refer to Him in masculine terms, who are we to try to say we can correct Him? If our ancestors (which includes an awful lot of women) tell us certain things in certain terms, who are we to say that we know better than they?

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I have no argument with that. I agree completely. I am sorry you misunderstood my intentions and motives. Hopefully you didn't interpret my post based on the position of my gender or horror yet my being a Catholic. LOL

I don't really understand the objection here. Nobody actually thinks Christ to have come only for the salvation of anatomically male people, and grammatical gender does not have to match with anatomical gender, even when we are talking about human beings, which are the 'most gendered' of all referents, being highest on the animacy hierarchy (see regarding this the works of linguist William Croft). In Spanish, for instance, if you are going to talk about martyrs, you are going to use a grammatically masculine noun regardless of the anatomical sex of the referent, martir. In that case, it is the accompanying pronoun which wil vary (el martir, la martir). In all my life as a speaker of this language, I have never heard anyone, male or female, point to this as an example of discriminatory or exclusionary language. Nobody ever says "What about women?!", because you know if you're talking about women by virtue of the fact that you're referring to women/a woman. It doesn't need to be expressed explicitly via the form of the noun, even in a language like Spanish which usually does things this way.

How much more, then, should we expect these kinds of 'mismatches' in a language like English, which generally does not mark gender via nouns? Yes, in the case of this particular word there is a distinction which can be made, but it is much more reasonable to argue that the distinction to be made in the context of the Creed in particular is one of collective vs. singular, rather than male vs. female, as (as Rusmeister has pointed out) nobody actually believes that Jesus Christ came only for the salvation of anatomically male people.

So if you are going to argue that the version in use does not include women by virtue of its form, that's essentially arguing that the collective noun must be explicitly marked (grammatically) feminine so as to not leave them out, when we have already seen from the above Spanish example that this is not how things work even in a language that expresses gender in its nouns much more regularly and transparently than modern English does.

As both a Christian and a linguist, that does not make a lot of sense to me. I'd like to hear some argument for it that is rooted in the way that the language actually works at a functional level, rather than how it makes us feel.

dzheremi said:

I don't really understand the objection here. Nobody actually thinks Christ to have come only for the salvation of anatomically male people, and grammatical gender does not have to match with anatomical gender, even when we are talking about human beings, which are the 'most gendered' of all referents, being highest on the animacy hierarchy (see regarding this the works of linguist William Croft). In Spanish, for instance, if you are going to talk about martyrs, you are going to use a grammatically masculine noun regardless of the anatomical sex of the referent, martir. In that case, it is the accompanying pronoun which wil vary (el martir, la martir). In all my life as a speaker of this language, I have never heard anyone, male or female, point to this as an example of discriminatory or exclusionary language. Nobody ever says "What about women?!", because you know if you're talking about women by virtue of the fact that you're referring to women/a woman. It doesn't need to be expressed explicitly via the form of the noun, even in a language like Spanish which usually does things this way.

How much more, then, should we expect these kinds of 'mismatches' in a language like English, which generally does not mark gender via nouns? Yes, in the case of this particular word there is a distinction which can be made, but it is much more reasonable to argue that the distinction to be made in the context of the Creed in particular is one of collective vs. singular, rather than male vs. female, as (as Rusmeister has pointed out) nobody actually believes that Jesus Christ came only for the salvation of anatomically male people.

So if you are going to argue that the version in use does not include women by virtue of its form, that's essentially arguing that the collective noun must be explicitly marked (grammatically) feminine so as to not leave them out, when we have already seen from the above Spanish example that this is not how things work even in a language that expresses gender in its nouns much more regularly and transparently than modern English does.

As both a Christian and a linguist, that does not make a lot of sense to me. I'd like to hear some argument for it that is rooted in the way that the language actually works at a functional level, rather than how it makes us feel.

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Amen, Amen, Amen! Why don't more people see this?

Interesting post from @dzheremi above. In the American context, I think a contributing factor in this whole pot of bubbles is lack of linguistic awareness + a smattering of Romance languages widely half-rememnered from high school + an incoherent sense of what "fair" means. Sex, unclear notions about grammatical gender, anxiety - stir.

This post isn't an opinion about ordination of women, the ancient order of deaconesses, or anything else.

Exactly. The problem doesn't arise anywhere else, and mainly with Christians in America.

And another factor is another one I have pointed out (and been largely ignored on) - the fact that, hardly a quarter of a century ago, at the instigation of pseuo-intellectuals who have been pushing the sexual revolution in the West, people began to use the word "gender" instead of the word "sex". It matters. We traded a word rooted in objective understanding for a subjective one. It affects how one thinks. A person who sticks to the older language is less prone to confusion. A person who repeats the terms the media have been teacing us is more prone to confusion, even when they knowvhat's right. Language misuse (however unintentional) subtly undermines clarity.

And like I said, if this were about medicine, or law, or architecture, everyone would admit that a specialist has knowledge that gives them insight that the rest of us have less of. But my experience is that when it comes to education and language, everybody is equally expert, and hardly anyone acknowledges the specialist. It is true that there are a thousand ways to teach and learn things, and everybody, even if only as an amateur, teaches and learns, and everybody speaks a language, and a lot of people learn a second language. But not everybody deals professionally, to earn their bread and butter, with having to understand how language works consciously, in theory as well as practice, and get that across to others or a living. There really are things that the average (even educated) Joe really doesn't know about is own language and how he speaks. He takes it for granted, and hardly knows how to explain it to others who don't know his language.