Episcopal diocese of Washington to drop male pronouns for God

[Anonymous]

This article is not an accurate depiction of what happened. The Diocese did not decide to drop all male pronouns for God from use.
The Book of Common Prayer, which TEC uses in its worship services, has been considered for revision for several years. The diocese of DC passed a resolution to show their support for more expansive language for God IF the Book of Common Prayer is revised.

[Anonymous]

From a rational point of view, they are contracting, not expanding, their image of God. God revealed an aspect of His nature as being masculine. By removing (or obscuring) that piece of revelation, you know less about God. But what would you expect - the whole Espicopal edifice is based on one thing - Henry VIII's loins.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Wow, that's huge. And I didn't know the Church of Sweden had already done this as well.

Glad to hear it, but how will it play out semantically? "They"? "It"?

Anyway, I approve.

When we pray with non-masculine language in my synagogue, we usually just say “God” or “The One” instead of “He,” and “ruler” instead of “king” or “lord.” It’s an easy substitution.

The Lord's prayer might have some issues.

Lord, father, son come up a few times. Quite a few hymns used male gendered words etc.

NP. We (Jews) just changed the translation. In some cases, we changed the Hebrew, adding matriarchs, for example, where only patriarchs had been listed. In other cases the "original" stays the same, and there's no getting away from the patriarchal language if you read Hebrew, but otherwise ... These texts are all in translation. If you're not saying the actual text anyway, you can change it.

Also, most religious authorities will tell you that "God" is not consistently gendered, at least not in the original scriptures. God in the Hebrew scriptures has male and female names and attributes. I'm not sure what happened with the New Testament, Did God suddenly acquire fixed gender?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Next step: Drop God

Yep.

That is wher e the Episcopalian "church" is leading.

They are working towards making the Bible a general suggestion and not the Word of God.

Episcopalians haven't taken the Bible literally for centuries -- because they study the human origins of the Bible

This is the essence of unbelief. If you don't accept Scripture as divinely inspired, you do not believe, and you are not a Christian. I'm not sure why some people insist that they are followers of a faith they don't have.

Divinely inspired, yes. The literal word of god, no. If you take every word in the Bible literally, then I assume you’re following everything in Leviticus about what to wear, etc?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Wow, that's huge. And I didn't know the Church of Sweden had already done this as well.

Glad to hear it, but how will it play out semantically? "They"? "It"?

Anyway, I approve.

When we pray with non-masculine language in my synagogue, we usually just say “God” or “The One” instead of “He,” and “ruler” instead of “king” or “lord.” It’s an easy substitution.

The Lord's prayer might have some issues.

Lord, father, son come up a few times. Quite a few hymns used male gendered words etc.

NP. We (Jews) just changed the translation. In some cases, we changed the Hebrew, adding matriarchs, for example, where only patriarchs had been listed. In other cases the "original" stays the same, and there's no getting away from the patriarchal language if you read Hebrew, but otherwise ... These texts are all in translation. If you're not saying the actual text anyway, you can change it.

Also, most religious authorities will tell you that "God" is not consistently gendered, at least not in the original scriptures. God in the Hebrew scriptures has male and female names and attributes. I'm not sure what happened with the New Testament, Did God suddenly acquire fixed gender?

Yes

Jesus explicitly and exclusively refers to God as the Father.

Christian religion and Christian baptism is based on the trinity, which is specifically God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

You cannot get away from God as being the Father in Christian religion. It is right up there with the Christian (and Jewish) belief that there is only one God.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Wow, that's huge. And I didn't know the Church of Sweden had already done this as well.

Glad to hear it, but how will it play out semantically? "They"? "It"?

Anyway, I approve.

When we pray with non-masculine language in my synagogue, we usually just say “God” or “The One” instead of “He,” and “ruler” instead of “king” or “lord.” It’s an easy substitution.

The Lord's prayer might have some issues.

Lord, father, son come up a few times. Quite a few hymns used male gendered words etc.

NP. We (Jews) just changed the translation. In some cases, we changed the Hebrew, adding matriarchs, for example, where only patriarchs had been listed. In other cases the "original" stays the same, and there's no getting away from the patriarchal language if you read Hebrew, but otherwise ... These texts are all in translation. If you're not saying the actual text anyway, you can change it.

Also, most religious authorities will tell you that "God" is not consistently gendered, at least not in the original scriptures. God in the Hebrew scriptures has male and female names and attributes. I'm not sure what happened with the New Testament, Did God suddenly acquire fixed gender?

Yes

Jesus explicitly and exclusively refers to God as the Father.

Christian religion and Christian baptism is based on the trinity, which is specifically God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

You cannot get away from God as being the Father in Christian religion. It is right up there with the Christian (and Jewish) belief that there is only one God.

Not all Christians agree with you on the exclusive use of male pronouns. One can believe in a trinitarian God who does not have one gender.

[Anonymous]

The Catholic Church did this years ago.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:The Catholic Church did this years ago.

The Catholic church does not refer to God as a woman.

[Anonymous]

So, even the super conservative focus on the family does not insist on God as exclusively male (though they use God's gender as a support for strict heterosexuality in humans). This would seem to suggest that notwithstanding Jesus saying "God the Father," Christians are not so sure.

"God, of course, is neither male nor female. He transcends all such categories. Indeed, the concept of an "androgynous" God is not only foreign but actually offensive to orthodox Christian theology. It is not God but we who are marked and set apart from one another in terms of sex. And yet, according to Genesis 1:27, it is only as these two distinct halves of humanity come together that the image of God in man is most fully and completely revealed."

https://www.focusonthefamily.com/family-q-and-a/sexuality/god-and-man-as-male-and-female-implications-for-gender-identity

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Wow, that's huge. And I didn't know the Church of Sweden had already done this as well.

Glad to hear it, but how will it play out semantically? "They"? "It"?

Anyway, I approve.

When we pray with non-masculine language in my synagogue, we usually just say “God” or “The One” instead of “He,” and “ruler” instead of “king” or “lord.” It’s an easy substitution.

The Lord's prayer might have some issues.

Lord, father, son come up a few times. Quite a few hymns used male gendered words etc.

NP. We (Jews) just changed the translation. In some cases, we changed the Hebrew, adding matriarchs, for example, where only patriarchs had been listed. In other cases the "original" stays the same, and there's no getting away from the patriarchal language if you read Hebrew, but otherwise ... These texts are all in translation. If you're not saying the actual text anyway, you can change it.

Also, most religious authorities will tell you that "God" is not consistently gendered, at least not in the original scriptures. God in the Hebrew scriptures has male and female names and attributes. I'm not sure what happened with the New Testament, Did God suddenly acquire fixed gender?

NJ here. (Shalom, chaver)

My understanding is that as they converted pagans, they dumped all the mother godess worship stuff onto the cult of Mary (so "The shrine of our Lady of ____ is typically a place where a goddess, esp a mother goddess, was worshiped in pagan times) When the Protestants found that prayer to Mary was not actually in the bible (either ours or "theirs") they simply dropped that side, impoverishing their spirituality in some ways. Thank G-d (so to speak) for the shekinah!

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:
Wow, that's huge. And I didn't know the Church of Sweden had already done this as well.

Glad to hear it, but how will it play out semantically? "They"? "It"?

Anyway, I approve.

When we pray with non-masculine language in my synagogue, we usually just say “God” or “The One” instead of “He,” and “ruler” instead of “king” or “lord.” It’s an easy substitution.

The Lord's prayer might have some issues.

Lord, father, son come up a few times. Quite a few hymns used male gendered words etc.

NP. We (Jews) just changed the translation. In some cases, we changed the Hebrew, adding matriarchs, for example, where only patriarchs had been listed. In other cases the "original" stays the same, and there's no getting away from the patriarchal language if you read Hebrew, but otherwise ... These texts are all in translation. If you're not saying the actual text anyway, you can change it.

Also, most religious authorities will tell you that "God" is not consistently gendered, at least not in the original scriptures. God in the Hebrew scriptures has male and female names and attributes. I'm not sure what happened with the New Testament, Did God suddenly acquire fixed gender?

Yes

Jesus explicitly and exclusively refers to God as the Father.

Christian religion and Christian baptism is based on the trinity, which is specifically God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit.

You cannot get away from God as being the Father in Christian religion. It is right up there with the Christian (and Jewish) belief that there is only one God.

Maimonides the medieval Jewish philosopher, said that G-d is radically other than man, and that all terms for G-d that indicate some human attribute are for the benefit of the unlearned, who cannot relate to G-d in any other way - for those who know better to take those terms seriously as descriptors is idolatry.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idolatry_in_Judaism#Maimonides's_view_of_idolatry

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Next step: Drop God

Yep.

That is wher e the Episcopalian "church" is leading.

They are working towards making the Bible a general suggestion and not the Word of God.

Episcopalians haven't taken the Bible literally for centuries -- because they study the human origins of the Bible

This is the essence of unbelief. If you don't accept Scripture as divinely inspired, you do not believe, and you are not a Christian. I'm not sure why some people insist that they are followers of a faith they don't have.

Divinely inspired, yes. The literal word of god, no. If you take every word in the Bible literally, then I assume you’re following everything in Leviticus about what to wear, etc?

This argument shows an extreme lack of knowledge about what the Bible says. It's probably something most people who use it have found quoted on a web site somewhere, and it sounds really smart, but it's not. I'd wager most people who use it haven't even read the actual text. If I take "every" word literally in the Bible, then I have to read beyond Leviticus, because there are a lot of words if you keep going. Try reading the Gospels, Acts, Romans, Galatians and especially Hebrews as well and see how this argument sounds after you do. If nothing else (and there is a LOT else), those were Jewish laws, not Gentile ones. Gentiles, of which I am one, are not bound by the Levitical law. The Bible literally says that (in Romans 2, for example). This is such a tired, worn-out old argument.

[Anonymous]

The Catholic Church I attended many years ago did this. They just replaced "He" with "God" and "His" with "God's" etc.

[Anonymous]

If people need a pronoun to feel loved by and included in Christ, they have much bigger issues with their faith. (By this I mean that I think this change is absolutely ridiculous, not that the change is warranted.)

Left ECUSA years ago and have never looked back. Too much throwing the baby out with the bathwater. And I say this as a woman who supports gay marriage, ordination of women, etc.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Next step: Drop God

Yes because obviously if God can't be masculine then he's not really God and not worth having.

Well, the Bible actually says God is our Father.

I can't speak to Greek, but Hebrew does not have a gender neutral word for "parent" . Its either av, or im. When discussing parents or ancestors generally, we use the masculine ("avot") may be used. Similarly for gendering of plural pronouns, children ("Bnei Israel" which is translated children of Israel, really means "sons of Israel" but the female "bnot" is used when females only are referred to, when its a mixed group of children or descendants, its "bnei")

But I suppose to Episcopalians the bible is really an English document

Well, modern Christians obviously read the Bible in their native translation. Of course Jesus would most likely have spoken Aramaic, which then was translated into Hebrew, and Greek, and on and on. Sadly, not many people take their study of theology far enough to get to the part where the linguistics and source theories are taught. For me that was in a Catholic college, but my siblings had no exposure to it.

This is an interesting article on the translation of the Lord's Prayer: http://aramaicnt.org/articles/the-lords-prayer-in-galilean-aramaic/ The Q writer (ascribed to the Gospels of Matthew and Luke) seemed to use a word for 'father' more than the very different Gospel of John writers, who refer to Jesus as Logos (the word), and emphasizes the divinity much more. In John, Jesus only directly addresses God as "Father" once.