From: cctr114@cantua.canterbury.ac.nz (Bill Rea)
Newsgroups: soc.religion.christian
Subject: Re: Is God male, female or neither?
Date: 27 Jan 93 05:30:58 GMT
Organization: University of Canterbury, Christchurch, New Zealand.

Fiona (I2LY@cornella.cit.cornell.edu) wrote:

>The question of the gender (or non-gender) of God has been coming up
>in a few threads recently, and it is something I have often
>wondered about.  Bill Rea quoted a number of passages to the effect that
>God cannot be thought of as either male or female, which I absolutelyu
>agree with.  We know that God is spirit, that God does not have a physical
>body (although of course Jesus came to earth in the flesh).  The very
>concepts of male and female seem to me to be inaliebly linked to the
>existence of a body (can you tell I'm a biologist?).  Thus it seems
>meaningless to me to say God is male.  OF course, the bible talks
>about God as male, but it would be even more incorrect IMHO to talk about
>God as 'it' than 'He', since this would deny the personal nature of God.
>But i really don't see the problem with She, and it seems to me that Bill
>was contradicting himself when he first pointed out that God does not have
>a gender and then saying 'but you have to use He, not She'.  Of course
>the bible does refer to God as HE, but we are certainly not forbidden from
>saying 'she'.
>   I'd be interested to hear other people's thoughts on this.

If I may be temporarily classified as other people, I would like to
point out that I did not say 'but you have to use He, not She'.
My point is more to do with the continuing place of the Bible within
Christianity. Changing the pronoun that we use to refer to God from
he to she is a very significant departure from the Biblical roots of
over faith, and it changes the imagery by which we understand God.
It seems to me that a lot of the thrust to use she comes from feminists
who have a problem with the traditional usage of he. I've even had one
do a bit of fist thumping and yelling at me saying that calling God 
he was an offense to women. So the question is - should some churches
make this departure from our roots and see what happens? If you had
read my first message correctly, you would see my answer to that 
question is yes.  But in my experience, the trouble and tensions 
caused by the attempt to introduce ``inclusive language'' into 
existing churches are such that it would be better to collect a bunch 
of people who are whole heartedly in favour of this and start 
a new church to give it a fair trial. That would give the people
in favour of such a change the freedom they need to work out the
new forms that are required and would avoid causing problems to
those who don't like it. Probably there are such churches already
in existence, but I don't know of any.  It seems to me that a lot of the 
move to ``inclusive language'' is really just altering existing forms and
has not yet demonstrated the great burst of creativity which one might
expect from a new move of God, like the one we experienced in the Charismatic
movement in the 70's. (More on that in another post.)

Even if such a ``Church of the Feminist Way'' is a sucess, there will
always be people who will not want to worship God using feminine language
and so there will always be a need for churches using the traditional he
to refer to God. Perhaps my quote from Waltke and O`Connor was slightly
misleading as it was from a textbook on Biblical Hebrew Syntax and was
making the point that you can't make a translation that regularly uses
she to refer to God from  the Hebrew. In this case it would be a clear 
distortion of the text. But some feminist theologans (and non-theologans
too) are willing to do this as they view the Bible as part of the
problem for which calling God she, mother, and so on, is supposed to
be a cure. I have heard women preachers add in ``and Sarah'' to 
Biblical passages that only refer to Abraham. This is a clear distortion
of the text. There is no intent to decieve people into thinking that
this is what the Bible actually says, they are just fixing up what they
percieve as its faults. I must ask - do we have the right to do this?
Here my answer is no. To me, we are the guardians of the sacred tradition
but we are not its owners. we are servants not masters. The text has
come down to us at great cost to many saints of the past, some even paying
with their lives, and I do not believe we have a right to change the
text to suit current theological fads. The Bible is there are part of
our tradition for better or worse, if people don`t like it, I`m sorry,
but it can't be changed.
--
                                                                     ___
Bill Rea                                                            (o o)
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