A new prayer is being formulated by the Episcopal Church. An early copy was leaked. That copy found its way into my hands. I put it here for your judgement.
Our entity which art, in our judgment, a presence in the universe, why did you assign the gender of male to Jesus at birth, when you must have known this would have caused angst and turmoil to early Twenty-First Century progressives?
Did you not know he—we are forced to use the masculine pronoun, for which we apologize to our listeners—would tell his (again, sorry) followers to pray “Father, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come.”
Father! How could he (again, sorry) know such a thing! When it is clear to us, situated as we are in 2018—-2018!—that you cannot be any gender at all. We know this because we now know, since it is the Current Year, that we can be any gender we like. Even genders never heard of before.
Help us, glorious entity, which may be a projection of our own enlightened selves, to fix this abominable situation. Teach the world of the infinity of gender!
Strong words. Maybe they’ll tone it down a bit in the end. We’ll have to wait and see.
Work is ongoing. Reports are that
The Episcopal Church formed a committee Wednesday to “provide a pathway” toward revising the Book of Common Prayer to include gender-neutral language.
Church leaders called for immediate revisions to correct the “overwhelming use of masculine language” throughout the book, arguing that the language is now a hindrance to spiritual inclusion, according to the Episcopal Church website.
“As long as ‘men’ and ‘God’ are in the same category, our work toward equity will not just be incomplete. I honestly think it won’t matter in some ways,” Wil Gafney, a professor of the Hebrew Bible and strong advocate for the edit, told the Washington Post
The Episcopal News Service shared further concerns from church leaders that the current language has created a “barrier to evangelizing young people.”
Interesting strategy. If young people are turned off by Truth, bend it, or adapt it, or paint over it a bit. That’ll turn them on, and surely bring them, and their donations, surging into the pews. Right?
And what’s more important to the young than pretending to be genders other than those assigned at birth?
The Episcopal Church has hard labor ahead. Because the leaked prayer is right. Jesus was a masculine man. The manliest man. It would, as it was, be impossible to write about this manly man without using masculine language. And it was, as the prayer says, Jesus himself—which is the only pronoun that makes any sense, given Jesus’s obvious blatant and even in-your-face masculinity—that taught us to say “Our father“. Indeed, he often spoke of God as father. Which is a masculine position. It’s in the job description, for crying out loud.
Therefore the only way to avoid hurtful masculine non-inclusive, and therefore exclusive, language, is to change it. Sure, any changes will shift Jesus’s words and meanings. But this is, again as the prayer says, 2018. If Jesus were here now, he’d probably watch his (again, sorry) words more carefully.
Well, you just can’t argue with that kind of logic.
The changes to scripture, which haven’t been leaked as far as I know, will likely be in an effeminate direction. Now effeminate is not the opposite of masculine; feminine is. While there is nothing in the world wrong with feminine language, there is everything wrong with effeminate language. It is squishy, sweet, and lawyerly.
But it is necessary—if you want to claim, as the Episcopal Church is now claiming, that two men (or two women, or two peoples of any gender) can be married to one another. Reports say
The Episcopal Church removed restrictions on same-sex marriage, a move that allows all couples to wed where they worship, even if their bishop disapproves…
Same-sex couples are already allowed to marry across most Episcopal Churches in the United States, but a few U.S. dioceses had not permitted religious wedding ceremonies for this type union.
Friday’s decision overrides previous decisions by local dioceses to not allow the liturgies, which currently includes eight of the of the nation’s 101 Episcopal dioceses…
No one spoke against the resolution during a short debate by the House of Deputies, the news service affiliated with the Episcopal Church said.
Well, and why would they speak against it? Once you gift yourself the ability to change scripture so that it conforms to Current Year thinking, why, the boundless pit is the limit.
Leftism is the full-on assault against reality, truth, facts, and goodness. Leftism opposes these things with every fiber of its being, for it shrivels and dies when exposed to the glaring light of truth.
Actually, the Episcopal Church was always a long ways from the scriptures and actual rules. It, like the Unitarians and the Methodists are large money gathering groups that pretend to pious but really are just about money.
“I honestly think it won’t matter in some ways,”—It WILL keep out the nasty right wingers and their dirty money while bringing in Bernie supporters, who think the church should be supporting them. How that’s a winning strategy, I don’t know.
You realize that churches now are not worshipping God at all, right?
If God doesn’t mind whether He’s the Father, or the gender-neutral Parent, He would have said so, one would think.
However, there are lots of Fathers in the Bible, and no Parent at all.
Conclusion: this is a Bad Idea.
Over a decade ago I attended a service at a UCC Church
I read then … “Our Parent who art in heaven”
Not certain what’s to be surprised about anymore
Poor Anglophone chauvinists. What to they plan to do in German, where spoons are masculine, forks are feminine, and knives are neuter? The ongoing confusion of gender with sex (and masculine with male) inhibits the ability to think.
“It, like the Unitarians and the Methodists are large money gathering groups that pretend to pious”
Is anyone around here aware of any exception to this among organized religions that call themselves Christian?
The only prayer needed by most people: “Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.”
It’s all about abortion. It’s always all about abortion. They hate God because He doesn’t want them to abort their offspring, and they desperately desire to do so by the tens of millions of dead babies.
It’s not about theology, or fairness, or gender rights, or anything else. It’s all about abortion.
Not surprising, as the Episcopal Church bases their teachings upon what their most recent council deem their faith to be. But, they are not exclusive to this mindset. The Roman Catholic Faith has own it’s inter-gender, emasculating posse, bent upon conforming to new-age thought. A prime example of this is found in a DVD series released by perhaps, the most prominent and influential lay apostolate, Scott Hahn’s St. Paul Center. The series, entitled, “The Bible and the Sacraments”, contains a reading from “The Last Gospel”, the beginning of the Gospel of St. John. Near the end of the reading, which reads, “He came unto His own, and His own received him not. But as many as received Him, He gave them the power to be made the sons of God.” Sadly, in Matthew Leonard, the host of the series, reads, “But as many as received Him, He gave them the power to become the children of God.” I realize that the Episcopal Church is immasculating Almighty God while the St. Paul Center DVD immasculates His followers, but the intent is the same: to appeal to and mollify the feminist movement of the New Age cabal, and shun anything masculine in communicating the Roman Catholic Faith – even to the point of changing, outright, what the Holy Spirit inspired The Apostle John to write in Holy Scripture. Which begs the question, what manner of spirit inspired the change?
You belong to your father, the devil, and you want to carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning, not holding to the truth, for there is no truth in him. When he lies, he speaks his native language, for he is a liar and the father of lies. John 8:44
I read yesterday that a dead fetus had been found, by the clean up crew, on an American Airlines plane at Laguardia Airport. Why was it a “dead fetus”, and not a dead baby?
YOS,
I lived in Germany for three years and I used to suffer from gender confusion because some of those nouns would change gender depending on how they were used. I asked my German teacher how to keep track of those transgender nouns and she said to ignore them. They even confuse the native German speakers.
brian:
It was a miscarriage of an approximately five-month old fetus. I didn’t have a trouble learning this from news reports.
In the original Greek, of verse John 1:12, it reads: “???? ?? ?????? ?????, ?????? ?????? ???????? ????? ???? ????????, ???? ??????????? ??? ?? ????? ?????,” (ósoi dé élavon aftón, édoken aftoís exousían tékna theoú genésthai, toís pistévousin eis tó ónoma aftoú,)
????? (tékna) means “children”
Apparently, St. John intended to mollify the feminist movement of the New Age cabal of 2000 years later. That’s foresight.
Ye Olde Statistician, “Quotquot autumn receprerunt rum, deduct dis postestatem filios Dei fieri…”
Seems St. Jerome didn’t agree, evidenced by his translation into Latin. Latin, of course, also being one of the 3 Holy languages of the Church.
Anyone out there understand Hebrew?
Seems we need a tiebreaker.
Seems St. Jerome didn’t agree
Or else the evangelist was inspired but the translator, less so. The gospel was written in Greek, but it is reasonable to ask what the Peshita says, or the Italia.
Another possibility is that words were used in sundry colloquial ways. When we say, “The White House announced today…”, we don’t mean that a building spoke. Remember Augustine’s warning against obsessive literalness. And remember too that in English, “men” referred first of all to humans in general and only secondarily to males. Until the feminists got hold of it. The sensible thing to do was revive the older term for males: wereman or wera and not insist the the term for thinking being (cf. men-tal) somehow applied only to wera. [The female term was wifman or wifa, a quo “wife” and the odd pronunciation of “women.”]
Besides, in Greek, the term for the Holy Spirit is feminine, but I never heard a literalist insist on calling the Hagia Sophia “she”.
OTOH, the reason why the Godhead is called the father, and the masculine pronoun is used in languages possessing gendered pronouns, are deeply theological.
“Or else the evangelist was inspired, but the translator, less so.”
@Ye Olde Statistician, you make a fair point about the colloquial nature of word usage, the logic of which could have easily been lost across translations, let alone centuries. I’ll also concede that reasonable people can disagree on it’s degree of significance. Much like a Rohrsach Test, one’s perception can’t help but to be influenced by their impressions (or lack thereof) of the modern-day Church and it’s circumstances and how one’s faith and catchesis, whether Traditional, or not, informs him or her. I’ve also been told that my previous comment was a bit too harsh, that I could be out of my depth, that no one likes a killjoy, and I’ll add to those faults that I’ve rudely veered away from the content of the post that launched this thread.
So, on all of those scores, I can only say…mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Please allow me to explain that my curiousity was directed towards how and why modern apologetists, in this case, a very prominent Catholic apostolate that has a track record of over a decade of effectiveness and reliability in evangelization, contorts its transmission of Holy Scripture semantically, and as you pointed out, likely utilized Greek to do so, thereby opening itself up for this kind of discussion.
After St. Pope Damasus I published the Canon of the Holy Scripture listing the inspired books, he urged St. Jerome to purify the Latin vulgate. St. Jerome took on this task and completed it to such perfection, that it has become, according to the Council of Trent, THE Bible of The Church. 1,200 years passed between completion of that translation and the opening of the council (which accepted the vulgate) confirming that it effectively stood the test of time and the scrutiny of men, but just as impressive was that it was thrust to the forefront at a council for which the primary purpose was to spearhead the Counter-Reformation and to condemn “sola scriptura”, “solo fides” and myriad of declarations that the proponents of Protestantism advanced in an attempt to divide The Faith.
Granted, St. Jerome, unlike John the Evangelist, was not an Apostle of Christ whose contributions are, for all time, codified in the Deposit of Faith as “Public Revelation”. But does that give one ample reason to question his inspiration? If not, what does?
Finally, whenever a DVD series is planned (6-12 months in-the-making), and written and choreographed with the level of detail and investment that St. Paul’s typically commits to, it’s reasonable to suggest that everything that avoids the cutting room floor has thought and purpose behind it. I know that the change to John 1 is only a single word, and that it’s been many centuries since debates were held in forums where a man’s reputation, freedom and very life (and immortal soul?) hinged upon just one word, but can we agree that even in 2018, Holy Scripture is still the inspired, inerrant Word of God?
From the fourth century A.D. even through the institution fo the vernacular in 1969 with the so called “Novus Ordo Missae”, Ecclesiastical Latin has been the language of The Church. As a “dead” language, it insures the words of Holy Scripture remain pure and in tact. So, when a renowned theologian of our time plucks a word out of antiquity or translates an entire passage from Greek (if that’s what he intended to do) which hasn’t been primary to The Church in almost 17 centuries, it begs the question, “Why?” …or more importantly, “for whom?”
One possible reason is a greater accuracy of the text. Keep in mind that the gender obsession on Late Modernity evidenced by both parties in this dispute would have made no sense prior to the last century. Women were regarded as incomplete men, not as a separate kind of being distinct from men. That’s why the term “men” was taken to be inclusive. There had never been much thought to men and women as distinct categories. We know now that the biology was wrong, just as we knew before the Middle Ages that the flat earth with the tent over it was not correct. The irony is that the women were more apt to be devout believers than their menfolk.
Another irony is that there are terms in Greek that have no equivalent in Latin, such as St.Paul’s greetings to “brothers and sisters.” The Greek term was more like “siblings” but did not have the clinical sound. It had the intimacy of “brother” and of “sister,” but referred to both.
I agree with your explanations.
Late Modernity, or as it applies to The Church, “modernism” and in this case Lenin inspired “feminism” is pervasive to such a degree that it’s difficult to find an aspect of today’s culture which lacks it’s undercurrent. In my case, the example that I’ve been writing of took place in a weekly morning Catholic men’s group. For inspirational reasons I’m sure, one of the DVD episodes concluded with John I, what the Tridentine (or Extraordinary) Mass refers to as, The Last Gospel (aptly read in Latin after the Final Blessing). As “children of God” was recited, I unconsciously blurted out “sons!”, and my interjection became the discussion at our table afterwards.
Questioning whether or not the change was made deliberately, and if so, whether or not was it done to mollify half the population, I like to think, is a healthy cynicism. If that was, indeed, the case then it’s disappointing. I would’ve hoped that the producers would’ve trusted our fellow Catholics who are women to have strong enough faith to instinctively know that when John said “sons” he meant mankind, inclusive of women.
Thank you for the context you brought to the discussion. I suppose only St. Paul’s knows the answer to that question.