Some More Thoughts on the Language for God
In a previous post, I mentioned that inclusive (or rather, in what is apparently the preferred form, "expansive") language was in the hopper at the Episcopal Church's General Convention, as part of the proposal for beginning the process of revising the Book of Common Prayer. The proposal to revise the BCP, with explicit instructions to include expansive language, passed the House of Delegates, and was awaiting consideration by the House of Bishops. This has provoked great discussion online, much of it good and some of it less so.
To that end, a memorial was offered, with an impressive number of signatories. I agree with most of what is stated in the memorial. But I stop short at this paragraph, which is likely seen by the authors as the lynchpin of the whole project:
We affirm that the Trinitarian language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not simply metaphorical but is an important part of the inheritance of the catholic faith grounded in the revelation of Jesus, who himself referred to God as “Father” and taught us to pray in that manner. We come to know God the Father as the specific and particular Father of the Son. Therefore the Fatherhood of God is not a platonic form for human fatherhood, nor is it an extrapolation from human fatherhood. It instead grows from the identity of Jesus as the Son who prayed to the Father, and commanded that his disciples baptize in his Father’s name, his own name, and in the name of The Holy Spirit. Retaining the Trinitarian language revealed by scripture and tradition is essential for us as part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, for our ecumenical commitments, and for our faithfulness to the Apostles’ teaching.
As I see it, there are two assertions being made here. The first is that the language of "Father" is actually revelatory of the nature of God, and is not thus a product of linguistic or culturally determined forces ("We affirm that the Trinitarian language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not simply metaphorical but is an important part of the inheritance of the catholic faith grounded in the revelation of Jesus, who himself referred to God as 'Father' and taught us to pray in that manner"). Second, that we cannot, and should not, analogize the Fatherhood of God to human fatherhood--when we call the First Person of the Trinity "Father," we should not take that to be any sort of statement about human men and their relationship to their children, or with women ("Therefore the Fatherhood of God is not a platonic form for human fatherhood, nor is it an extrapolation from human fatherhood.")
Taking these two assertions together, what exactly is being revealed in calling the First Person of the Trinity "Father"? The word "father," in a human context (at least in modern English), means "the male parent of a child." The "male" part is essential to the definition of the word "father," because it is the thing that differentiates it from the gender-neutral word "parent." So the most natural reading of what is being asserted in saying that the First Person of the Trinity is our "Father" is that the First Person of the Trinity is our divine male parent, with the male part being an essential component.
But the authors of this memorial seem to reject this understanding, because such a reading would be an "extrapolation from human fatherhood," at least linguistically. Likewise, in saying that the Fatherhood of the First Person of the Trinity is not "a platonic form of human fatherhood," the authors appear to be distinguishing their understanding of the relationship between "father" and "Father" from the approach of folks like Thomas Aquinas to divine transcendentals, who argued that a word like "goodness" could be applied to divine qualities because true "goodness" exists in God in a full measure and in humans in a derivative or analogous measure.
So, if the use of "Father" has nothing to do with the human fathers, and thus is not making a statement about human gender, then wouldn't "Parent" be a perfect substitute for "Father"? After all, "Parent" preserves entirely the relationship to the Son, and also preserves the idea that we are "Children of God." It also emphasizes the personal nature of the relationships within the Trinity and to us on Earth. Again, the only difference between "father" and "parent" is the gendered component of "father," and if you disclaim the gender component, the two collapse into one. "Our Parent, who art in heaven . . ." or "Parent, Son, and Holy Spirit" may seem awkward to say, and poetic considerations are important in liturgy, but is there any theological problem with that construction?
Otherwise, it seems to me that the approach reflected in the memorial results in language failure--"we call the First Person 'Father' because Jesus did, but 'Father' doesn't have any relationship to any other use of the word 'father' in any other context." On that reading, nothing is actually being communicated by calling the First Person "Father." You are left with a kind of linguistic formalism--we have to use a particular form because that is the form we get from the original texts, without any deeper meaning or analysis. This, to me, drifts toward a sort of literalist or fundamentalist reading of Scripture--we must parrot the forms found in the text, even if they have no intrinsic or comprehensible meaning.
Backstopping all of this, of course, is the fact that for the vast majority of the history of the Christian church the use of "Father" was absolutely used to make a theological point about human gender, prioritizing the masculine over the feminine in the divine order. Again, this is wholly consistent with a "plain reading" of the fact that God is expressed as our Father and not our Mother. If, contrary to the disclaimers of the memorial writers, "father" and "Father" are analogous, then men are by definition more like the First Person of the Trinity than women are, because the First Person is on some level masculine (or, to borrow a modern construction, the First Person's "preferred pronouns" are masculine and not feminine). That's a perfectly logical conclusion from the insistence on "Father" as the form of address for the First Person.
It is for this reason that I think it is disingenuous to frame the objections to use of exclusively masculine language in the liturgy as purely left-over trauma from human sin perpetrated by human men (as is done here, and in the explanatory commentary below the memorial). Certainly, bad behavior of various sorts from human men is very much at the heart of the visceral reaction of some women to this language. But it is not only projection from the human to the divine (as the proponents tacitly suggest), as there is a genuine conflict between "God is the Father and not the Mother" and "men are not superior to women." Saying there is not a connection between the two doesn't magically make the issue go away. These concerns need to be taken seriously.
I am glad these issues have been raised, because they have clarified my own thinking on this topic. My default is to preserve the theological and liturgical forms we have been given, except where it conflicts with some clear opposing theological principle. But I am still where I started--there is a real theological principle at stake here, one that cannot be disclaimed away (well-intentioned as those disclaimers may be, and I think in large measure they are). Or, perhaps, it's not altogether clear to me what theological principle is implicated by not going forward with these changes.
To that end, a memorial was offered, with an impressive number of signatories. I agree with most of what is stated in the memorial. But I stop short at this paragraph, which is likely seen by the authors as the lynchpin of the whole project:
We affirm that the Trinitarian language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not simply metaphorical but is an important part of the inheritance of the catholic faith grounded in the revelation of Jesus, who himself referred to God as “Father” and taught us to pray in that manner. We come to know God the Father as the specific and particular Father of the Son. Therefore the Fatherhood of God is not a platonic form for human fatherhood, nor is it an extrapolation from human fatherhood. It instead grows from the identity of Jesus as the Son who prayed to the Father, and commanded that his disciples baptize in his Father’s name, his own name, and in the name of The Holy Spirit. Retaining the Trinitarian language revealed by scripture and tradition is essential for us as part of the one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church, for our ecumenical commitments, and for our faithfulness to the Apostles’ teaching.
As I see it, there are two assertions being made here. The first is that the language of "Father" is actually revelatory of the nature of God, and is not thus a product of linguistic or culturally determined forces ("We affirm that the Trinitarian language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit is not simply metaphorical but is an important part of the inheritance of the catholic faith grounded in the revelation of Jesus, who himself referred to God as 'Father' and taught us to pray in that manner"). Second, that we cannot, and should not, analogize the Fatherhood of God to human fatherhood--when we call the First Person of the Trinity "Father," we should not take that to be any sort of statement about human men and their relationship to their children, or with women ("Therefore the Fatherhood of God is not a platonic form for human fatherhood, nor is it an extrapolation from human fatherhood.")
Taking these two assertions together, what exactly is being revealed in calling the First Person of the Trinity "Father"? The word "father," in a human context (at least in modern English), means "the male parent of a child." The "male" part is essential to the definition of the word "father," because it is the thing that differentiates it from the gender-neutral word "parent." So the most natural reading of what is being asserted in saying that the First Person of the Trinity is our "Father" is that the First Person of the Trinity is our divine male parent, with the male part being an essential component.
But the authors of this memorial seem to reject this understanding, because such a reading would be an "extrapolation from human fatherhood," at least linguistically. Likewise, in saying that the Fatherhood of the First Person of the Trinity is not "a platonic form of human fatherhood," the authors appear to be distinguishing their understanding of the relationship between "father" and "Father" from the approach of folks like Thomas Aquinas to divine transcendentals, who argued that a word like "goodness" could be applied to divine qualities because true "goodness" exists in God in a full measure and in humans in a derivative or analogous measure.
So, if the use of "Father" has nothing to do with the human fathers, and thus is not making a statement about human gender, then wouldn't "Parent" be a perfect substitute for "Father"? After all, "Parent" preserves entirely the relationship to the Son, and also preserves the idea that we are "Children of God." It also emphasizes the personal nature of the relationships within the Trinity and to us on Earth. Again, the only difference between "father" and "parent" is the gendered component of "father," and if you disclaim the gender component, the two collapse into one. "Our Parent, who art in heaven . . ." or "Parent, Son, and Holy Spirit" may seem awkward to say, and poetic considerations are important in liturgy, but is there any theological problem with that construction?
Otherwise, it seems to me that the approach reflected in the memorial results in language failure--"we call the First Person 'Father' because Jesus did, but 'Father' doesn't have any relationship to any other use of the word 'father' in any other context." On that reading, nothing is actually being communicated by calling the First Person "Father." You are left with a kind of linguistic formalism--we have to use a particular form because that is the form we get from the original texts, without any deeper meaning or analysis. This, to me, drifts toward a sort of literalist or fundamentalist reading of Scripture--we must parrot the forms found in the text, even if they have no intrinsic or comprehensible meaning.
Backstopping all of this, of course, is the fact that for the vast majority of the history of the Christian church the use of "Father" was absolutely used to make a theological point about human gender, prioritizing the masculine over the feminine in the divine order. Again, this is wholly consistent with a "plain reading" of the fact that God is expressed as our Father and not our Mother. If, contrary to the disclaimers of the memorial writers, "father" and "Father" are analogous, then men are by definition more like the First Person of the Trinity than women are, because the First Person is on some level masculine (or, to borrow a modern construction, the First Person's "preferred pronouns" are masculine and not feminine). That's a perfectly logical conclusion from the insistence on "Father" as the form of address for the First Person.
It is for this reason that I think it is disingenuous to frame the objections to use of exclusively masculine language in the liturgy as purely left-over trauma from human sin perpetrated by human men (as is done here, and in the explanatory commentary below the memorial). Certainly, bad behavior of various sorts from human men is very much at the heart of the visceral reaction of some women to this language. But it is not only projection from the human to the divine (as the proponents tacitly suggest), as there is a genuine conflict between "God is the Father and not the Mother" and "men are not superior to women." Saying there is not a connection between the two doesn't magically make the issue go away. These concerns need to be taken seriously.
I am glad these issues have been raised, because they have clarified my own thinking on this topic. My default is to preserve the theological and liturgical forms we have been given, except where it conflicts with some clear opposing theological principle. But I am still where I started--there is a real theological principle at stake here, one that cannot be disclaimed away (well-intentioned as those disclaimers may be, and I think in large measure they are). Or, perhaps, it's not altogether clear to me what theological principle is implicated by not going forward with these changes.
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