Church of England can’t remake God to fit gender fashion

Feb 9, 2023 by Chris Sugden

by Melanie McDonagh, The Times:

The Bishop of Lichfield told the General Synod this week that “a new joint project on gendered language will begin this spring”, run by its faith and order commission plus its liturgical commission.

All the ways we talk about God are analogical, that is, non-literal, but language still matters.

Christ told his followers to pray to Our Father. If gendered language was good enough for God Incarnate, isn’t it good enough for the CofE?

The Church of England on this…. has the difficult job of squaring its amiable anxiety to meet the sensitivities of our age with the intractable realities of what Christ said and did and was on earth (male), in the language of his place and time. As John Barton, the scripture scholar, points out, there isn’t even a gender-neutral pronoun in Hebrew or Aramaic anyway. But Christ did call God Father, including from the cross.

We can of course make the most of the ambiguities in scripture: the description in Genesis of how God created man in his own image — male and female; or the way Christ talked of himself as a mother hen. But what Christians can’t honourably do is make God in our image to make Him more congenial to the preoccupations of our day.

Melanie McDonagh is a columnist for The Tablet

Read The Times (£) here

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