IF THE ONION had existed when I was a kid being brought up in the Episcopal Church, this would have been one of its headlines: “U.S. Episcopal Diocese Votes to Stop Using Masculine Pronouns for God.” In seventh-grade confirmation class, I got into countless arguments with the teacher over there having to be a male God (“But how do you know? Has anyone ever seen his thingie?”) and over the savage in the wilderness. (The savage, as those of you not brought up in the mid-20th century Episcopal Church may not know, is the guy in the wilderness who never got a chance to know who this male God and his son Jesus were, so no matter how good a guy he is, he doesn’t get to go to Heaven.) The other students were evermore grateful to me, since confirmation class happened at 8:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, and they needed to sleep.
Things change. Today, the Episcopal Church is in the vanguard when it comes to sex and gender, among other issues. Not everyone is on board with this trend. The New York Times pundit Ross Douthat described the church in 2012 as being “flexible to the point of indifference on dogma, friendly to sexual liberation in almost every form, willing to blend Christianity with other faiths, and eager to downplay theology entirely in favor of secular political causes.” In 2016, the American Episcopal Church was effectively cut off from the world-wide Anglican Communion, “when the Episcopal Church removed doctrinal language defining marriage as between a man and a woman, and authorized marriage rites for same-sex couples.”
Nevertheless, the church persists. I learned about the shift to a non-male God from LifeSite, an antiabortion website, where the news of an ungendered deity was quickly followed by this breaking news:
“Jesus did not call God ‘Imma’ (Mother), but always and exclusively ‘Abba’ (Father),” Dr. Paul Tarazi of St. Vladimir Orthodox Theological Seminary explained. … St. Gregory the Theologian explained the name “Father” is proper to God, not a figurative concession to humanity. St. Athanasius the Great stated that only the specific names “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” belong “to God’s own essence and being.” St. Gregory of Nyssa taught that deviation from the names “Father,” “Son,” and “Holy Spirit” causes deviations from the one true faith. Any other names, St. Gregory wrote, “serve as a starting point for the deflection of sound doctrine.”
Whew! How to argue with all those saints? Well, the language of the 79th General Convention of the Episcopalians is fairly straightforward: “if revision of the Book of Common Prayer is authorized, [the Commission on Liturgy and Music should] utilize expansive language for God from the rich sources of feminine, masculine, and non-binary imagery for God found in Scripture and tradition and, when possible … avoid the use of gendered pronouns for God.” The explanation for the change is worth quoting in its entirety:
No language can adequately contain the complexity of the divine, and yet it is all we have to try to explain God. Over the centuries our language and our understanding of God has continued to change and adapt. While other Christian denominations have embraced more comprehensive language for God, The Episcopal Church has chosen to use masculine pronouns when referring to the first and third person of the Trinity. This choice has had a profound impact on our understanding of God. Our current gender roles shape and limit our understanding of God. By expanding our language for God, we will expand our image of God and the nature of God. Our new Book of Common Prayer needs to reflect the language of the people and our society. This resolution assumes that the authors of our new Book of Common Prayer will continue in the long tradition of beautiful poetic language. However, this beautiful language should not be limited by gendered pronouns when avoidable.
This explanation gets at a truth I think many are loath to admit: that they find changes to gendered language ugly, ungainly, distasteful. The one thing I loved about church, as a kid, was the language of the hymns we sang. It discomfits me, now, to sing “Once to every soul and nation” rather than “Once to every man and nation,” or “For he is our lifelong pattern” rather than “For He is our childhood’s pattern.” These hymns are taken from poems, I might argue, and we insult the authors of those poems by mucking around with their lyrics. But the fact is that I like what I am used to. Today’s children, growing up in today’s Episcopal Church, will come to like what they are used to. They will find it more beautiful than whatever changes come around later, and they will find excuses to defend what amounts, really, to nostalgia.
I have no idea what the Episcopal Church will do with all those Hes, Hises, Hims, and Fathers they encounter when they attempt to revise the Book of Common Prayer. But they are engaged in important work, and I wish them well. If I were the praying sort, I’d say a prayer for their poetic sensibility, that they may find the loveliest, most harmonious inclusive language for the generation to come.