Toward a Radical Inclusiveness

[graceandpeace]

In light of some recent threads that have popped up elsewhere on this site, I thought I'd share this here:

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unfundamentalistchristians/2016/07/toward-a-radical-inclusiveness/

I'm not comfortable with the idea of altering the doxology, & I'm not enthusiastic about "they." Father, Son, & Spirit is the language of Scripture, so I'm fine with it; however, I do think it's important to acknowledge that God does transcend gender & that all human beings, regardless of gender, reflect God's image.

So, a few questions.

1) Why is there no good gender-neutral pronoun in English?

2) What changes in liturgical or service prayers, hymns (if any) are appropriate or comfortable to you, & which changes would be going too far?

Any other thoughts?

 

[hedrick]

Apparently there is some historical precedent for using "they" as neutral. However it would be hard to use neutral language for Father and Son. My preference, which sounds like yours, is to use the Biblical terminology, but use female as well as male imagery for God.

The interesting part of the discussions that have been going on recently is the a number of people seem to think the God is literally male, not just that using male pronouns and imagery fit his nature better.

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

God does transcend gender & that all human beings, regardless of gender, reflect God's image.

Where did you, or someone , get these ideas?
It is directly contrary to what I read in Scripture.
Most human beings on earth, are called in Scripture "sons of disobedience" ,
and most human beings on earth die apart from God, without ever repenting or being forgiven.
Few, if any (as Jesus said - When He returns will He find faith on earth?)
reflect God's image and those who do don't usually know it nor even think about it.
Mankind is shown throughout Scripture to be perniciously wicked, trying to drag everyone else around them down too (not will to be desperately evil by themselves).

 

[FireDragon76]

Yeah, I'm not OK with non-biblical terminology.

Any theology of inclusiveness must have limits, at least inasmuch as it impacts the practice of the Church, otherwise we will cease to be Christian.

 

[yeshuaslavejeff]

Yeah, I'm not OK with non-biblical terminology.

Any theology of inclusiveness must have limits, at least inasmuch as it impacts the practice of the Church, otherwise we will cease to be Christian.

?
What does this relate to ?

 

[Jack of Spades]

I'm not comfortable with the idea of altering the doxology, & I'm not enthusiastic about "they." Father, Son, & Spirit is the language of Scripture, so I'm fine with it; however, I do think it's important to acknowledge that God does transcend gender & that all human beings, regardless of gender, reflect God's image.

If I had to take a position, I'd say I campaign for use of "him" for the next 50 years, and when the political hot questions are done with, we can start using "she/they". Then there is a chance it's a decision with actual religious motives, not just a political statement.

I'm all for explaining God in terms which do not limit him to a human male, and I'm not offended if an image of a woman would be used of God. But the apparent motive is everything. If the image is done as an attempt to make a political statement, I find it tasteless, even offensive.

1) Why is there no good gender-neutral pronoun in English?

I asked this in CF and multiple people advised me to use "they", I've done it ever since and nobody's ever complained about it.

But I don't think why he/she should be a problem, countries and ships are referred to as "she" and that doesn't make me, as a male, feel excluded.

I think English should adopt the Finnish gender-neutral pronoun "Hän", not because it's useful, but because it would boost our economy when billion people had to order the Scandic keyboards to be able to type the new pronoun

 

[graceandpeace]

Apparently there is some historical precedent for using "they" as neutral. However it would be hard to use neutral language for Father and Son. My preference, which sounds like yours, is to use the Biblical terminology, but use female as well as male imagery for God.

I think that's about right.

The interesting part of the discussions that have been going on recently is the a number of people seem to think the God is literally male, not just that using male pronouns and imagery fit his nature better.

I've been disturbed but not entirely surprised by those conversations.

 

[LloydK]

To me a radical inclusiveness means admitting that all will be saved, as Jesus mentioned in the parable of the Lost Sheep and elsewhere.

 

[Cappadocious]

I've been disturbed but not entirely surprised by those conversations.

Well the Word of God is male in the most real sense you can get.

 

[FireDragon76]

Well the Word of God is male in the most real sense you can get.

Good point. Some people that don't come from the Orthodox or Lutheran traditions are prone to starting first with a doctrine of God in an abstract philosophical sense, rather than starting first with the reality of Jesus Christ. Saying "God is male" is definitely true in that context. Speaking of God beyond that - we have the hidden God that we only can know and speak about definitively through the revelation of his son.

 

[graceandpeace]

Well the Word of God is male in the most real sense you can get.

Good point. Some people that don't come from the Orthodox or Lutheran traditions are prone to starting first with a doctrine of God in an abstract philosophical sense, rather than starting first with the reality of Jesus Christ. Saying "God is male" is definitely true in that context. Speaking of God beyond that - we have the hidden God that we only can know and speak about definitively through the revelation of his son.

True.

Jesus is the God-man, I accept that. I just don't accept the notion that what was most important about the Incarnation is that Jesus was male. That's how it happened, but I don't think God the Creator is inherently male in the way some seem to believe.
Does that make sense?

 

[FireDragon76]

When you say God the Creator, you are talking about Jesus Christ, BTW.

 

[redblue22]

1) Why is there no good gender-neutral pronoun in English?

2) What changes in liturgical or service prayers, hymns (if any) are appropriate or comfortable to you, & which changes would be going too far?

Any other thoughts?

I'm not sure why there is no gender-neutral pronoun in English.

God is not strictly described as male; female descriptions are ignored. Maybe there is no gender-neutral pronoun for the same reason that womanly descriptions are ignored.

Women are equal persons with men. If one comfortably accepts that, I do not see how it is an insult to describe God as woman and man. There are no need for replacements or changes in the male described literature, but there is room for the addition of creative neutral or woman descriptions.

 

[Cappadocious]

True.
Jesus is the God-man, I accept that. I just don't accept the notion that what was most important about the Incarnation is that Jesus was male. That's how it happened, but I don't think God the Creator is inherently male in the way some seem to believe.
Does that make sense?

A few points, setting aside the issue of pronouns for now:

As FireDragon said, Jesus is God the Creator. Everything was created by, for, toward Him.

As for "That's how it happened," one of the points of the Incarnation is that contingent things and events (God didn't *have* to become man, or a male, or a Nazarene, or a first century man, etc.) are given real eternal substance (but God actually *did* become those things). So for Christians contingency does not weaken something or make it less real, in fact in a sense it makes something more real.

But to get to the crux of the matter: You hear Christians typically say that God is referred to as Father because God is, in some vague way, like a human father. A human father has some traits or characteristics that God vaguely resembles or has analogically. Some of the responsibility for this may be laid at the feet of Pseudo-Dionysius but I think that this way of thinking had gained some speed before then.

I contend, and others have contended before me, that this way of thinking is backward. Those within the Judeo-Christian tradition should not call God "Father" because he vaguely resembles a human father. The extreme claim is just the opposite, in fact. We call human fathers "fathers" because they vaguely, analogically, distantly, obscurely, are like God. That's because we do not use anthropomorphic language (at least not usually, there are some caveats) to describe God. Rather God uses theomorphic language to describe us. We are the vague metaphors, the shadowy analogies. Not God.

Then we can ask, okay, so what does it mean to say that a human is like God when they are a father? Is it because they have male genitalia? That doesn't seem right.

It seems that what we mean in a Judeo-Christian context is that a father is one who generates (and remember in the old days the male alone was seen to generate offspring, the woman was sort of like inert soil, so that is how it was thought of) and creates. He is one who has and passes on an inheritance to his firstborn son. He is one who provides the fruit to eat. He is the one who assigns the places of honor. He is the one who can be ultimately appealed to in kinship. He is the one who has a tent, a mansion. He is the one of whom you seek approval in what you do.

Okay, so that is how a human father is archetypally like God within a Judeo-Christian context. Now we get to the interesting questions: Can women be firstborn sons of God? Yes. That is according to the Scriptures, that is the exact status and being they receive in the adoption of baptism. Okay, can women be fathers in the Judeo-Christian sense? Well, that seems very possible we could say something like that.

Then you might say but isn't motherhood getting the short shrift here? Well, it depends on what you mean by motherhood. If you mean by motherhood something opposed to fatherhood then sure. But if you treat father as a sort of theological term that means everything we spoke of above, fatherhood involves a lot of motherhood. Motherhood involves a lot of fatherhood. Why not say that God is mother, then? Well, one reason would be that contingency we spoke of earlier. God is characterized in a certain way, and for contingent reasons that way became more associated with male parents than female parents. We can't change the former but we can change the latter. We can say that fathers can be motherly and mothers can be fatherly. When we can call a human father motherly we are saying that God can be motherly, too. So God is Father, father being theological, applies obscurely to us and can be had by all those who are fatherly, including women; and it turns out that being Father involves perhaps necessarily being motherly as well.

 

[hedrick]

I agree with Cappadocious' points. Mostly. But to claim that human parents are called father because they are kinda like God the Father makes excellent theology but lousy etymology. It's reasonably clear that the primary meaning for the word "father" is human fathers, and it was applied to God because of the similarity.

Forgetting the word we use, I agree that God came first. We are in his image, so human parents have a function that at its best will suggest God's function. And I agree with him that this is true of both human male and female parents.

But if we're asking what English word to use for God, it's pretty clear that the human meanings came first. Given that both human male and female parents carry out roles that originated in him, I think it would in principle be appropriate to use either word. We don't, typically, because we're normally following Biblical precedent. And that's just fine. I don't suggest that we change the titles of the Trinity. But to the extent that we use human words, human analogies and human images, I believe it is appropriate to use those taken from both genders, since both genders reflect God. It actually seems heretical to me to say that God is male. It reflects either the idea that God has a biological gender, or that males somehow are more in his image than females.

C S Lewis is fairly well known for saying that while God isn't male in the human sense, there is a spiritual analogy, in which he is even more masculine than any man.

"Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the organic adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity."
[http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=04-01-005-f#ixzz4EJpZIve1]

I would say however that there is a problem with this. Actually, not in this specific quote, but in the fact that he ended up saying that God is specifically masculine in this deeper spiritual sense. God may in fact be masculine in a deeper and stronger sense than human males. But I think we ought to consider that he might be feminine in a deeper and stronger sense than human females. If we don't say that, then we're saying that males are most strongly in God's image than females, and I think that's seriously wrong. This is *not* saying that there is no difference, by the way.

 

[Cappadocious]

I agree with Cappadocious' points. Mostly. But to claim that human parents are called father because they are kinda like God the Father makes excellent theology but lousy etymology.

Of course, it depends on how you take "because." If you take "because" to indicate the historical/temporal causal history of why we call God Father, sure, a lot of it is going to have to do with beginning with humans going back to pre-Jewish times etc. Furthermore, we can only begin with humans even today. However, once we are within a Judeo-Christian theological cosmology we see how God is toward humans, and we reverse the pole. At least that's how it can be for us moderns, back in the day people probably absorbed it less self-consciously.

 

[redblue22]

Jesus described himself as mother.

 

[Cappadocious]

Jesus described himself as mother.

...ok?

 

[FireDragon76]

I think he was speaking metaphorically, using a simile.

 

[graceandpeace]

When you say God the Creator, you are talking about Jesus Christ, BTW.

Fair enough.

I'm just try to understand the notion that seems to have been set forth in other threads - namely, that God is literally male only. And since I don't accept that idea, I'm trying to understand what is within the bounds of Christian practice in how we talk about God.

A few points, setting aside the issue of pronouns for now:

As FireDragon said, Jesus is God the Creator. Everything was created by, for, toward Him.

As for "That's how it happened," one of the points of the Incarnation is that contingent things and events (God didn't *have* to become man, or a male, or a Nazarene, or a first century man, etc.) are given real eternal substance (but God actually *did* become those things). So for Christians contingency does not weaken something or make it less real, in fact in a sense it makes something more real.

But to get to the crux of the matter: You hear Christians typically say that God is referred to as Father because God is, in some vague way, like a human father. A human father has some traits or characteristics that God vaguely resembles or has analogically. Some of the responsibility for this may be laid at the feet of Pseudo-Dionysius but I think that this way of thinking had gained some speed before then.

I contend, and others have contended before me, that this way of thinking is backward. Those within the Judeo-Christian tradition should not call God "Father" because he vaguely resembles a human father. The extreme claim is just the opposite, in fact. We call human fathers "fathers" because they vaguely, analogically, distantly, obscurely, are like God. That's because we do not use anthropomorphic language (at least not usually, there are some caveats) to describe God. Rather God uses theomorphic language to describe us. We are the vague metaphors, the shadowy analogies. Not God.

Then we can ask, okay, so what does it mean to say that a human is like God when they are a father? Is it because they have male genitalia? That doesn't seem right.

It seems that what we mean in a Judeo-Christian context is that a father is one who generates (and remember in the old days the male alone was seen to generate offspring, the woman was sort of like inert soil, so that is how it was thought of) and creates. He is one who has and passes on an inheritance to his firstborn son. He is one who provides the fruit to eat. He is the one who assigns the places of honor. He is the one who can be ultimately appealed to in kinship. He is the one who has a tent, a mansion. He is the one of whom you seek approval in what you do.

Okay, so that is how a human father is archetypally like God within a Judeo-Christian context. Now we get to the interesting questions: Can women be firstborn sons of God? Yes. That is according to the Scriptures, that is the exact status and being they receive in the adoption of baptism. Okay, can women be fathers in the Judeo-Christian sense? Well, that seems very possible we could say something like that.

Then you might say but isn't motherhood getting the short shrift here? Well, it depends on what you mean by motherhood. If you mean by motherhood something opposed to fatherhood then sure. But if you treat father as a sort of theological term that means everything we spoke of above, fatherhood involves a lot of motherhood. Motherhood involves a lot of fatherhood. Why not say that God is mother, then? Well, one reason would be that contingency we spoke of earlier. God is characterized in a certain way, and for contingent reasons that way became more associated with male parents than female parents. We can't change the former but we can change the latter. We can say that fathers can be motherly and mothers can be fatherly. When we can call a human father motherly we are saying that God can be motherly, too. So God is Father, father being theological, applies obscurely to us and can be had by all those who are fatherly, including women; and it turns out that being Father involves perhaps necessarily being motherly as well.

I think these are good points to consider - are you claiming that God as "Father" is not about gender but about a role in a certain context?

From the beginning my issue has been claims elsewhere on this site that God as "Father" means God is actually male. In the OP I acknowledge I'm fine with Scriptural language, but I'm definetly not fine with thinking God is solely male.

I agree with Cappadocious' points. Mostly. But to claim that human parents are called father because they are kinda like God the Father makes excellent theology but lousy etymology. It's reasonably clear that the primary meaning for the word "father" is human fathers, and it was applied to God because of the similarity.

Forgetting the word we use, I agree that God came first. We are in his image, so human parents have a function that at its best will suggest God's function. And I agree with him that this is true of both human male and female parents.

But if we're asking what English word to use for God, it's pretty clear that the human meanings came first. Given that both human male and female parents carry out roles that originated in him, I think it would in principle be appropriate to use either word. We don't, typically, because we're normally following Biblical precedent. And that's just fine. I don't suggest that we change the titles of the Trinity. But to the extent that we use human words, human analogies and human images, I believe it is appropriate to use those taken from both genders, since both genders reflect God. It actually seems heretical to me to say that God is male. It reflects either the idea that God has a biological gender, or that males somehow are more in his image than females.

C S Lewis is fairly well known for saying that while God isn't male in the human sense, there is a spiritual analogy, in which he is even more masculine than any man.

"Gender is a reality, and a more fundamental reality than sex. Sex is, in fact, merely the organic adaptation to organic life of a fundamental polarity which divides all created beings. Female sex is simply one of the things that have feminine gender; there are many others, and Masculine and Feminine meet us on planes of reality where male and female would be simply meaningless. Masculine is not attenuated male, nor feminine attenuated female. On the contrary, the male and female of organic creatures are rather faint and blurred reflections of masculine and feminine. Their reproductive functions, their differences in strength and size, partly exhibit, but partly also confuse and misrepresent, the real polarity."
[http://www.touchstonemag.com/archives/article.php?id=04-01-005-f#ixzz4EJpZIve1]

I would say however that there is a problem with this. Actually, not in this specific quote, but in the fact that he ended up saying that God is specifically masculine in this deeper spiritual sense. God may in fact be masculine in a deeper and stronger sense than human males. But I think we ought to consider that he might be feminine in a deeper and stronger sense than human females. If we don't say that, then we're saying that males are most strongly in God's image than females, and I think that's seriously wrong. This is *not* saying that there is no difference, by the way.

Right, this is my concern. If "male & female" are both made in God's image, then that implies God is not solely one or the other. At least to me.