Matthew records the words below (Douay-Rheims 1899 American Edition). I’m not asking you to believe the words. What I do want is for you understand a few simple things about them.
They are clear words, with no real ambiguity, and no serious disputes in the translation, except for terms like “our supersubstantial bread” (King James says “daily bread”).
But thou when thou shalt pray, enter into thy chamber, and having shut the door, pray to thy Father in secret: and thy Father who seeth in secret will repay thee.
And when you are praying, speak not much, as the heathens. For they think that in their much speaking they may be heard.
Be not you therefore like to them, for your Father knoweth what is needful for you, before you ask him.
Thus therefore shall you pray: Our Father who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name.
Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.
Give us this day our supersubstantial bread.
And forgive us our debts, as we also forgive our debtors.
And lead us not into temptation. But deliver us from evil. Amen.
For if you will forgive men their offences, your heavenly Father will forgive you also your offences.
But if you will not forgive men, neither will your Father forgive you your offences.
I count six instances of “Father”, and no gender neutral terms for the person described who is to be prayed to, which indicates the speaker was clear in his mind. And it was his mind, too. Even the “mythicists” who claim the speaker never in fact existed, and was a created myth, agree on the sex of the speaker.
Who was, of course, our Lord Jesus. Who was one of the sacred Trinity. God the Father, God the son, God the Holy Ghost. This is Christian dogma, which again I’m not asking you to believe.
But it’s important to grasp that what the Trinity means is that Jesus was, and is, God.
And, accepting that, it follows God does not make mistakes, including slips of the tongue, or forgetting who he is talking about. God, which is to say God the son, said pray to God the Father. So Christians do.
Now these words recorded above are only a small sample of similar words, all of which see Jesus use “Father”. Which means—and I know this is all rather obvious, so please forgive me—there cannot be any dispute about “God the Father”.
Not inside the Christian religion. Outside of it, there can be. And that’s the point. The disagreements must come from outside Christianity. A conclusion which necessarily follows.
Enter the worlds new religion, with its own sacred Trinity: Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity. Or DIE. All entities in that religion are by definition gender neutral, though perhaps it is better to say gender multiple, or gender flexible, or gender indeterminate.
Adherents of that religion, which we’ll see cannot be Christianity, are of course free to decide what they mean by those terms, just as, for example, Hindus are free to define the number of their gods.
All right, after that long and admittedly tedious introduction, we finally come to our point. The Church of England has converted to DIE. Or very soon will.
Yes, really: Gender-neutral God to be considered by Church of England.
That article begins with an interesting subtitle: “Move has been criticised by conservatives, who have warned that ‘male and female imagery is not interchangeable’”. Notice that this is conservatives using the word “imagery”. Imagery. Not Reality, imagery. Proving, yet again, conservatives are incapable of conserving anything.
For decades, the gender of God has prompted debate within the Church, with many calling for male pronouns He and Him, as well as reference to Our Father, to be scrapped in favour of either gender neutral or female alternatives.
Now, in what would mark a departure from centuries of tradition, bishops are to launch a project “on gendered language” referencing God in church services later this year.
Later we hear from a priestess of their religion, who says they need to purge “Father” in order “to develop more inclusive language in our authorised liturgy”. Inclusion. One of the Trinity of DIE.
The word inclusion is religious, and can’t mean what it does in English. For instance, every human being has a father, so all are included in the language “our Father.” There is no need for ordinary inclusion: it’s there automatically. Thus Inclusion in DIE means something else.
I’m not certain what that something else is. And it’s not clear DIE adherents know either. But that it their concern and not ours. Let them define the entity to whom they pray however they will. (It’s my guess it ends up being themselves.)
It remains clear, however, that whatever they decide cannot be Christianity, because in DIE they believe Jesus was only kidding, or was mistaken, or didn’t mean the plain words he spoke. So again, the Church of England has converted to DIE.
Or soon will.
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In the Church of England, the Book of Common Prayer 1662 and the King James Bible remain the only permanently-authorised documents for use in worship. For the DIE project to succeed, these books with their “sexist language” must be either explicitly banned, or made optional in such a way that they wither away through disuse. But the latter approach was already tried in the 70s, with the promotion of modern language worship and novus-ordo-style ecumenical dialogue through the use of ICEL ecumenically-agreed texts– and defenders of the traditional language have been wise to it since then. The thumb on the scales that weigh the uneasy current balance between modern language and traditional services, is the innate conservatism of choirmasters and music directors and the growing popularity of traditional settings. No pointing of inclusive-language psalms has ever caught on. In the Church of England’s most impressive and popular services (in large churches and cathedrals), Psalm 1 (Beatus vir), for example, will continue to be sung “Blessed is the man that hath not walked in the counsel of the ungodly… ” (rather than “Happy are they…”). Any attempts to ban this will simply be ignored, on the basis the choirmaster in practice outranks any member of the clergy. This DIE proposal really speaks more to the calibre of the clergy these days.
The arc of absurdity begins with pre-christian pagan chick priests and balloons (yeah, it should have been shot down then) over Jesus ordaining only males as priests cos they act in the person of Christ in His spousal relations with His Church and so only moderns think that chicks can be priests because lesbianism
The feminist churchy harpies are always wrong and almost always as ugly as their ideas.
I hope this was not too churlish
Dear Church of England
The United Church of Christ beat you to it.
[We] believe in the triune God: Creator, resurrected Christ, the sole Head of the church, and the Holy Spirit, who guides and brings about the creative and redemptive work of God in the world.
I was at a UCC service once:
The “LORD’S” Prayer starts out:
“Our parent …”
Join the UCC, they’d love to have y’all
Most institutional Christian churches have this problem. All flaccid and cucky. Something internal to them, some error, some confusion, some tommyrot, is sapping their will to resist evil. Bad theology leads to weakness. What is it? It’s either Christ’s teachings or what the institutional churches have made of those teachings. I’d put my money on the latter. So what is it? Can’t fix it if you can’t identify the problem. (The nosey problem is incidental to this bigger problem.)
The most blasphemous congregations of the Presbyterians in the United States have already made this transition, pun intended. The Methodists, too. I know of one former minister who had always referred to the Almighty as “Mother” saying that from seminary in the 1970s he never understood why He was even called Father.
So, if you thought the Novus Ordo houses of “formation” were garbage, “here, hold my keg,” thus sayeth the Heretics.
This started in the 1500s when they put in article 1 of their 39 articles that God is without parts or passions….that is unbiblical. And it set the path toward this nonsense. That God has passions (emotions) is clear from passages about his wrath and his love. That he has parts is clear from him being male. The end. Deny he has passions and you cease to view him as a person; ditto for parts. And how can you really love or worship a mere blob?
I was raised in an old school Congregational church that got swept up into the UCC in the ecumenicalism of the 60’s. After the UCC took over, the educational films (16mm Bell&Howell!) we were presented in our youth groups took a decidedly progressive slant even in those days. They lost their way.
The reason consevatives view God’s masculinity as merely “imagery” is they were raised with the metaphorical interpretations of “God made man in his image and likeness” that it either means he made made a rational being as himself or made man 3 parts (body, soul, spirit) 5o be an image of the Trinity. This doctrine was taught because it goes back to scholastic characters like Aquinas, who in turn got it from Arabic philosophers who were Jewish and Muslim. Those Arabic philosophers in turn are dependent on Maimonides (the Jewish basically equivalent to Augustine) or some similar Muslim character. The reason Maimonides was the first Jew to teach that taking “God created man in his image and likeness” literally is heresy, is because his Muslim overlords forced him to teach that. Islam has an extreme problem with the Incarnation (even moreso than Judaism) and unlike Judaiam denies that God can be Father in ANY sense (Allah cannot beget NOR even adopt).
Argue with a Muslim for long and they devolve into “Your God has a penis. Teeheehee.” And then I’m like “So do you, so what’s wrong with that?” Mohammed: “Its ok for me to have a penis but bad for God.” Me: “But why?” Because God creating man after his image and likeness literally is too close to the incarnation. If God can have parts he can also Incarnate. If God created man to have a penis because God has a penis then that is a precursor to the Incarnation where Jesus obviously has a penis.
So Islam must ban all other relitions from twaching God has a penis. So they forced Maimonides to teach the Jews that God is a penisless eunuch. And Aquinas got corrupted incidentally. For Christianity to survive it must return to the belief that God has a penis. Otherwise it cannot defend God as male as anything more than “imagery” and imagery obviously can be dropped.
Da Choich of DIE is everywhere and all incompassing. None shall escape her tentacles. Not even God who must now accept that she is so powerful that she can hypocritically misgender Him and refuse to use His preferred pronouns. Why? Because she believes God is white, and therefore should check His privilege. Consistency of rules only applies to those the bright white God enslaved within the boundaries of flesh and forcefully put on this planet’s plantation to work. But rejoice! Our separation from the hated colored flesh and predetermined sexual organed prison is at hand! We shall all be free and Woken once you accept The Message of her Rainbow!
What do we expect from a church that only exists so some fat rich lecher could get a divorce?
I am assuming that “woke” is a psyops plan to destroy the very foundation of western society.
Very sad, indeed. Thank you for this information. Also very sad are some of the directions Francis is going.
God bless, C-Marie
@Father Smith, I confess that I never thought of God the Father as having a penis, or that it was a requirement in order to consider him as masculine.
Given we are Christians, shouldn’t we believe, adore, trust, and love Christ’s own words? He instructed us to pray, “Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name…”
Why isn’t that good enough for us who call ourselves Christian? Must we also furnish him with a penis, like some pagan god of fertility?
Here’s a thought experiment: If you were to (heaven forbid) lose your own penis, would you stop being male? Of course not. The penis is an appendage for sexual function; but sexual reproduction is not how God made man, or how Jesus was begotten; nor is a penis the source of God’s fatherhood.
Jesus is the Word of God, made incarnate in time; but the Word does not proceed from God’s mouth, in the human sense, because God is spirit and has no mouth; it is more akin to a thought or idea: the idea God has of himself. The Word of God, Jesus Christ, is the idea God has of himself. (Ponder that.)
The Church of England, after divorcing the Catholic Church, is now divorcing God the Father and God the Son; no doubt the Holy Ghost will flee on his own.
“I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Paraclete, that he may abide with you.” (Jn 14:16) “But the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, he will teach you many things.” (Jn 14:26).
The Spirit, like the Word, is a person; a “he” not an “it”.
The description and the details were wholly unnecessary concerning the appendage of males.
Jesus Christ is the Word of God, Living and True, …. “I AM THE WAY, THE TRUTH, AND THE LIFE. NO MAN COMETH TO THE FATHER BUT BY ME” John 14: 6 …. and He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. He IS the Truth … He does not lie.
He is God, His person is Divine, and since the Incarnation, He has both His Divine nature and His human nature, and always will have both natures, and for those of us who belong to Jesus Christ we are in Him and He is in us as He said at the Last Supper, that He is in the Father, and we are in Him and He is in us. This is in John 14: 11.
We are made in the image and likeness of God. He tells us, He reveals to us, and we accept His Word.
As in, “1IN the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. 2The same was in the beginning with God. 3All things were made by him: and without him was made nothing that was made. 4In him was life, and the life was the light of men. 5And the light shineth in darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it.
John 1: 1-5.
God bless, C-Marie
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The English Church DIED a while ago: https://thefivebeasts.wordpress.com/2018/01/25/peter-hitchens-on-the-demise-of-the-english-church/
I’m not religious, but I can’t imagine the petty mind that would be offended because God was referred to as the opposite gender from me. Seriously, why would anyone care? If I ever do see the Light, I’m going with the traditional “He/Him”.
Praying we all see clearly Jesus Christ Who said “I am the Light of the World”.
God bless, C-Marie