Some Thoughts on Gender Neutral Language

This summer, the Episcopal Church will be having its triennial General Convention, in Austin, Texas (a strange choice in my book, as Texas in July might as well be the surface of the sun).  Among the topics to be voted on is the initiation of the process to rewrite or revise the Book of Common Prayer, last done so in 1979.  Revisions to the Book of Common Prayer are truly a "third rail" and an inevitable source of controversy.  In fact, the Standing Committee on Liturgy and Music, the group that would be in charge of the mechanics of a revision, seems to be less than completely enthusiastic about the project, offering an alternative that would delay a revision for a least a decade.  And my sense, based on reading stuff on the Interwebs, is that it is likely that folks will take the out and kick the can down the road.

The rector of my parish, who will be heading to Austin as a delegate, is resolutely against opening up the Prayer Book to wholesale revisions.  He opposes revision, primarily, because those seeking revision want to implement gender-neutral language across-the-board in the liturgy, and he believes that this will strip out of liturgy of its Trinitarian content.  And he is not alone.  Fr. Matthew Olver, an Episcopal priest and professor of liturgy at Nashotah House (an Anglo-Catholic oriented seminary in Wisconsin), put forward a thoughtful and cohesive case against the potential revisions in a series of posts (seen here, here, and here).  Despite this, I find myself more or less on the other side of the issue, so I thought I would work through Fr. Olver's essay and my thoughts in some detail.

Longtime friend of the blog Bill Lindsey had a powerful thread about the goings-on in the Southern Baptist Convention, who are finally, perhaps, facing up to the fact that there is a serious sex abuse crisis in their own ranks.  Lindsey pin-points the engine that drives these sorts of things (and a host of other questions, including the vehement resistance to LGBT rights)--a "complementarian" theology in which men and women are different, by which they mean men are superior (even if that part is not said aloud).  And at the heart of that theology is the notion that God is male, and thus men reflect or image God in a way that women do not.

I have come to the view that we cannot be even-handed or indifferent about complementarian theology.  People, especially women but not exclusively women, are actively being wounded in body and spirit by the idea that God is a dude, and so dudes (especially the "right sort" of dudes) can do whatever they want.  We see this with the Southern Baptists, we saw it in the Catholic sex abuse crisis.  But we are also seeing that this poison is seeping out of the church and into the broader culture, in all the manifold sins that have come to light in recent days.  The church should be medicine against these cultural trends, not mainlining the poison into the culture, but too often that is exactly what has happened.

I think it is worth laying this out, because I think the discussion of gender-neutral language is often framed as weighty theological considerations on one side versus protecting women's feelings or showing people how forwarding-thinking we are on the other.  But there are very critical theological considerations on the other side, considerations that in my view have become more and more critical and relevant in the last couple of years.  Complementarian theology, as well as the predicate theology sustaining it, must be rejected in toto.  And if you are an Episcopalian, the way you express your theology is through liturgy.  If you believe as I do that we need to be unequivocal in our egalitarianism, then our service books need to reflect that.  We must not provide any fuel for the engine that drives much of this toxicity in the Christian world.

In that light, the question becomes whether we can wall off the classical Trinitarian formulations (i.e. Father and Son) from the idea that the divine is inherently masculine, and do so in a way that can be communicated, and is in fact communicated, to the people in the pews who don't have a Ph.D. in theology.  Probably the most promising and profitable attempt at this comes from Sarah Coakley, of whom I have written several times before.  Coakley's project in God, Sexuality, and the Self resists easy characterization, but one way to think about it is that Coakley understands gender (or, perhaps, our understanding of what gender means) to be a fluid concept that can and should be subject to transformation in the life of the believer.  Insofar as a word like "Father" points to some dimension of divine male-ness, it is a reality that can be reflected in both folks that do not have male genitalia and those that do.  So, Coakley would say, using words like Father and Son do not (or, at least, do not necessarily) communicate any particular conclusion about the relationship between men and women.

I am a big, big fan of Professor Coakley, and I can't wait for the sequel to God, Sexuality, and the Self (which is going to be about racism and sin) to come out.  But I don't think Coakley's thesis puts the matter to bed.  Primarily, it is the communications problem--nothing in our current liturgical texts suggest that women do or can participate in the male dimensions of the Father (and the Son, though I think "Father" is where the rubber meets the road).  When people hear "father," the assumption is that whatever that is standing for is a dimension that is inaccessible to women; if you don't mean that, you need to do something to explain yourself and why that is so.  Right now, in our current texts, there is none of that explanatory superstructure.  And I am not sure what sort of liturgical structure could be built to explain what Coakley is getting at.

One way perhaps to address this indirectly is mentioned by Fr. Olver--intersperse "Mother" alongside "Father" (and, I suppose, "Daughter" for "Son," but my sense is that most people are OK with "Son" in light of Jesus's incarnated maleness).  The idea here is that by mixing the two up, we are communicating that whatever we mean by the fatherhood of the First Person of the Trinity equally can be expressed as motherhood, and so we remove any gender essentialism.  But this runs afoul of the claim that Olver points to in part 3 of his essay, which is that the Trinitarian formula is direct product of divine revelation as expressed in the New Testament (as opposed to a theological gloss placed upon that revelation), citing, among others, Coakley and Orthodox theologian Khaled Anatolios.  Under this model, we are not at liberty to interchange Mother for Father, because Father is the term we have been given from God.

One can have this conviction without being a complementarian (Coakley certainly isn't complementarian, for example), but this argument is a key component of the complementarian program.  If you hold this view and are not a complementarian, it seems to me that it becomes even more essential to build the firewall between your Trinitarian theology and your anthropology, because otherwise your ideas will be hitched to a social program that you are not going to want.  Simply stating "men and women are equal" and leaving the liturgical language alone is, in my view, not good enough.

So, with all of that out of the way, let's look at the Enriching Our WorshipEnriching Our Worship (at least the part at issue here, volume one which contains the liturgies for Eucharist) is an attempt to produce a set of gender neutral liturgical texts that could be used as "trial liturgies" (i.e., options in addition to the Book of Common Prayer).  The approach taken, as Fr. Olver notes, is to try to cut out as many gendered references to God as possible.  There is also a related, though conceptually separate, effort to remove or reduce the use of "Lord" as a title for any of the Persons of the Trinity.  It is worth noting that Enriching Our Worship appears to have no appetite for the "Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier" formula, which I would agree is modalist to the point of being unworkable.

Fr. Olver provides a comprehensive account of these changes in the Enriching Our Worship texts.  He states in part 3 that "EOW1 speaks a de facto different Trinitarian theology," but it seems to me what he really means is that texts do not affirmatively rule out a different Trinitarian theology.  As he says in several places "it is simply not clear what kind of Trinitarian theology is embedded" in the liturgical prayers.  In particular, Fr. Olver is concerned that the Nicene Creed, the authoritative statement of Trinitarian theology, is not presented as being a central component of the liturgy, and has been raised as something that might be on the proverbial chopping block in a Prayer Book revision.

I am very much on board with the idea that we must articulate Trinitarian theology in our liturgy.  But, as Fr. Olver notes, there is nothing in the Enriching Our Worship texts that are contrary to the classic Trinitarian theology, but rather that they perhaps don't do enough to affirmatively close off other interpretations.  If you want to close off those other doors, it seems to me that the easiest solution would simply be to add back in the Nicene Creed as an interpretive guide to the Trinitarian theology of the rest of the liturgy.  I get that some people want to remove the creeds for other reasons, but, I mean, not everyone gets what they want.  Compromise between people of different theological visions is, after all, what Anglicanism and Episcopalianism is all about, and it seems to me like this is a place where such compromise could occur.  And even Fr. Olver seems to suggest that such a compromise might alleviate many of his concerns, based on how he discusses the 1979 Prayer Book.

One might object that the Nicene Creed (as well as the Our Father) reincorporates the patriarchal language that the rest of  Enriching Our Worship was trying to remove, and in a sense that's true.  But the Our Father and the Nicene Creed are historical texts--one Biblical, the other conciliar.  No one can deny that the church historically expressed its theology in terms that we might now see as patriarchal, but it is what it is.  It is one thing to lift a historical text and insert it into the liturgy as is; it is another to have modern texts (which the liturgy set forth in the Book of Common Prayer is, albeit drawing on historical forms) to reproduce the same patriarchal language.  The modern component of the liturgy strikes me as a much more important statement than something with a clear ancient pedigree.  If the only expressions of gendered language in the liturgy were these clearly old texts, the rest of the liturgy could act as the firewall between gendered language about God and conclusions about gender in the world.  Just as the Nicene Creed provides an interpretative key for understanding the Trinitarian theology in the rest of the liturgy, so the rest of the liturgy could provide an interpretive key for the Nicene Creed, ruling out the complementarian reading that has done so much harm.

In other words, I basically think something like the Enriching Our Worship liturgy that retains the Creed would be not only fine, but a positive development.  It is to me the clearest and most straight-forward way to repudiate complementarian theology without losing the classic Trinitarian formulas.  What I think is not OK, at least in the sense of a final resolution, is Fr. Olver's suggestion that we "find a different way to address [ ] feminist concerns" instead of looking at our liturgical texts.  Again, the idea here is that the liturgical texts need to be an expression of what we believe, and right now that are ambiguous with regard to what we believe about the relationship between God and women.  While there might be sensible reasons to postpone this discussion for a time, ultimately this needs to be addressed, and it needs to be addressed in the direction of an unambiguous rejection of the idea that God is fundamentally male in a way that has relevance for thinking about the relative place of men and women in the world.  This is a real problem that is doing real harm to people in the real world, and it requires a real change to our way of worship, one way or the other.

If people don't like the way that Enriching Our Worship approaches the problem, then let's work to come up with a different approach to accomplish the same objectives.  Let's see some alternative texts.  But we can't sweep this under the rug. 

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Jesus Doesn't Care if You Masturbate, and Other Provocations

Another Theology of the Body, Part VI--A Theological Exploration of the Clitoris

Holy Sex!--Part 3.3 Getting Down to Business, Part II