“Our parent, who art in heaven.” It has rather lost something, don’t you think? Father has gravitas. It speaks of intimacy, protection, nurture. Parent, on the other hand, is one of those cold, anonymous, bureaucratic words that the school uses when it writes to me about my son. It’s the language of the census, not a warm embrace.
But that is the kind of language the Church of England is considering. No more He for God. The pronouns of the Almighty are going to be They/Them.
First, let me state the obvious: no one thinks the Judeo-Christian God is a man. Father is a metaphor, as is burning bush, fountain, lamb, shepherd, rock, river… Words are inadequate to describe the author of life. But they are all we have.
And language can play tricks. Many languages assign a gender to genderless things. In Hebrew, the word “table” is masculine and “door” is feminine. The same in Russian. In French, both are feminine. But no one believes the door has a gender identity, still less a sex. That’s just how the language works. The fact that, grammatically speaking, God in the Bible mostly takes male pronouns doesn’t mean God is male.
But I do get it: language matters. And gendered nouns do influence the way we think about the reality of the thing to which they refer. And this can easily be extended to how we describe the almighty. Given that people of faith think of God as another way of talking about ultimate reality, the gendered nature of God language could easily be a way of projecting male superiority in the very nature of things. Patriarchal assumptions are reflected and reinforced and then projected onto the stars.
Equally, the gender of certain nouns can often seem to reflect some of the basic dynamics of sexual politics. Take the Hebrew word for both “womb” and “breasts”. They are both male. By making these words masculine, might this reflect a subliminal sense of ownership — that the language is somehow exonerating, justifying even, the perspective of the male gaze?
Should we take this to mean that God reflects the projection of the male perspective upon the universe? In the beginning, perhaps. But, today, children aside, does anyone really imagine God as a man. Judaism and Islam are especially clear on this. God is beyond gender. They/them in reality, even if He/Him grammatically. That’s just the way language works.
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