The Church of England Bishops, we are told, are going to debate whether God should be gender neutral, and thus not referred to as “He” or “father”. Among items on the agenda within the debate is the proposal to remove the word “father” from the Lord’s Prayer, for example.
How much do these CofE bishops have to scrape away before they finally see what is true? How deep into manure must they descend before the “gender-neutral” caregivers house doesn’t look so bad after all? How long will it take for them to realise that there are some things that simply are not up for debate? Even Descartes got there in the end.
They appear to be trying to find language that they believe more accurately describes the mystery that is God, and which will, at the same time, appease all those who don’t identify as “he”. But this fails to understand why we use the language that we do. It’s not so that we can accurately describe who God is, but so that we can understand and describe who God is to us. It’s a relational description and the “He-ness” matters.
God is not “He” to us because of the oppressive patriarchy. His masculinity does not need to be rooted out and eradicated by grievance archaeologists. God’s “he-ness” is not something decided upon and rubber-stamped at a synod, like the horse designed by a committee. It is something revealed.
Something as deliberate, distinctive and all-pervasive in scripture as the “He-ness” of God is no mere accident.
Just as the husband impregnates his wife from without as she receives him within her womb, (together bearing fruit), the God of the Bible creates from without, and we receive within, making us all (male and female alike) feminine before God.
We do not spiritually impregnate ourselves with salvation or divine life, any more than we physically impregnate ourselves. God is and must be masculine to everything from angels to prime matter; and (primary school 101 here) the words He, Father, King and Bridegroom are masculine words that help us to understand ourselves and our creator.
The God of the Bible is bridegroom to Israel who is His bride. The Church is the bride of Christ. God became incarnate as the male person of Jesus, and his maleness is essential because he is the revelation of the father whose masculinity is essential. Jesus resurrected body and soul and still has a male body today.
God is the one calling the theological shots. If He wants to be understood in masculine terms, then that is how we should speak of Him and to Him. “Abba Father”. To do otherwise is tantamount to idolatry, fashioning God in our image, rather than receiving from him.
To say that we are all feminine before God who is masculine is no more insulting than to say that I am mother (not wife) to my child, and daughter (not mother) to my parents, and wife (not child) to my husband, despite being only one person. Who I am in relation to these people in my life has meaning and that meaning is expressed through language.
A radical misunderstanding of masculinity and femininity leads not only to such nonsense as “gender-neutral pronouns for God” but is also at the root of the incoherence to be found in gender ideology more broadly. Rather than further compound the confusion, the Church of England should, at this time, be affirming the masculinity of God and the femininity of the Church so that we may better understand who we are and who God is.
And if that isn’t reason enough, at a time when young men are failing at school and turning to porn and video games for meaning, shouldn’t the Church reveal to them their masculine vocation and point to God the Father and Jesus His son as models? God (literally) knows we need it. “In becoming a man, Jesus (in a sense) transforms men —not into women, and certainly not into wimps – but into men like himself,” explained Peter Kreeft in a talk he gave on sexual symbolism.
“He redefined manliness and power as the courage to suffer instead of the lust to dominate; giving instead of taking.”
The Church of England has to decide whether it wants to risk offending a minority of stroppy activists with too much time on their hands at the expense of worshipping God in the way He showed us, or risk offending God at the expense of those who have yet to go to the cross, unclench the fist and bend the knee before the Hound of Heaven.
We don’t need synods painstakingly trying to find a forensically accurate description of God who we now see only “through a glass, darkly” but instead use the masculine language revealed to us until such time when we “shall know”.
As Peter Kreeft astutely observed: “Once you start monkeying with your data, where do you stop? Why stop, ever, at all? If you can subtract the divine masculinity from Scripture when it offends you, why can’t you subtract the divine compassion when that offends you? If you read your Marxism into Scripture today, why not your fascism tomorrow? If you can change God’s masculinity, why not change his morality? Why not his very being? If you can twist the pronoun, why not the noun? If you revise his “I”, why not his “am”?’
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