Scottish Episcopal inclusive language liturgy

The Scottish Episcopal Church has approved an optional order of worship which eliminates masculine language for God in liturgical texts. Direct quotations from Scripture are not changed.

Some senior religious figures have objected to the new form of words. “It is political correctness,” said Rev. Stuart Hall of the Scottish Prayer Book Society and Honorary Professor of Divinity at the University of St Andrews.

Rev. Darren McFarland, convener of the church’s liturgy committee, said, “We are not saying God is not masculine. God is also feminine. The problem is trying to use human language to describe the indescribable. The bishops have permitted these changes, people do not have to use this form.”

Full story here.

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Katharine E. Harmon, Ph.D., edits the blog, Pray Tell: Worship, Wit & Wisdom.

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Comments

8 responses to “Scottish Episcopal inclusive language liturgy”

  1. John Drake

    Nice to see such a move in a church where the word “bishop” is inclusive!

    Reply
  2. Cody C. Unterseher

    What an awful headline… “God no longer male, Scottish Episcopal Church rules.” Was God ever male to begin with?

    Leave it to Telegraph to stir the cauldron of controversy.

    Reply
  3. Brad Wilson

    It would be pretty hard to pray the sign of the cross and leave out a masculine reference to God at the same time.

    Reply
  4. Joel Walkley

    This debate comes up in my tradition all the time (we are allowed much liberty in local liturgies). There is no simple answer to how to address God. I appreciate the disconnect felt by women addressing God solely as male; especially since there are many female qualities attributed to God. Christ is self described as a mother hen gathering her brood.

    God with a female noun leaves a disconnect for me, it also works against thousands of years of traditional language. Switching back and forth makes God sound like s/he is confused on his sexuality. Using simply “God” as a pronoun makes him impersonal. Since God choose to incarnate as a male and since Christ addresses God as father, I will follow his example.

    My biggest pet peeve is when others interrupt with “She, She, She!” every time I use “he” for God. Like they have some sort of divine Tourettes.

    From the article: “the blessing at the end of services has been changed by some ministers from “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” to “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier”.” What a twisted Trinitarian view! Don’t all three persons create, redeem, and sustain? And now they no longer invoke person but office, very sad.

    There is still merit to inclusive language when it comes to people however. Language has evolved and “male” does not mean all of humanity like it once did. Certainly in Greek and Latin the collective noun is masculine in grammar only, not what it describes.

    Reply
  5. Bridget O'Brien

    Mr. Walkley —

    I certainly agree that “There is no simple answer to how to address God,” but I must honestly say I don’t believe you’ve accurately represented the full complexity of that matter. Your concluding paragraph implies that there is simply no merit to inclusive language for God — one need not conclude that our liturgical language need be changed to hold the view that vertically-inclusive language is not without “some merit.”

    Certainly, thousands of years of male-dominated language have given us a several-thousand-year tradition of speaking of God in exclusively male terms. I say this in a purely descriptive fashion: this in itself does not constitute a victory for inclusive language, but it is still a reality. Our linguistic traditions are not unaffected by the cultures in which they were formed. I’m not sure if you were intending the irony of following your expression of sympathy for women who feel a disconnect in addressing God exclusively as male with your own “disconnect” in addressing God as female as an argument against inclusive language. Either way, I would note that it is not only women who are affected by the exclusive use of masculine language for God. What limitations of men’s theological and liturgical imaginations result from the insistence that God must be called “he”?

    Finally, we have a very strong tradition of using “confusing” language with regard to God — the apophatic tradition.

    Reply
  6. Bridget O'Brien

    (cntd)

    On this point, see Denys Turner’s excellent The Darkness of God — the simultaneous use of affirmation and negation calls us to the acknowledgment that the God we worship surpasses all language. (Of course, the figure in arguing from the apophatic tradition to masculine and feminine pronouns for the divine is Elizabeth Johnson.)

    All that being said, it surely must be frustrating to interact with rude people who interrupt you to yell out their preferred pronouns — whether they be masculine, feminine, or neuter. And we can agree on the problematic aspects of modalist(-leaning?) trinitarian formulae without concluding from that that “her” or “God’s” is inherently inappropriate. Inclusive language need not abandon the language of “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” — we might instead proceed from the example of the Council of Toledo, which describes the Son as proceeding “de utero Patris.”

    Reply
  7. Chris Owens

    Something I find interesting about “The Creator, Redeemer, and the Sanctifier,” as an inclusive way of expressing the Trinity is that we are no longer talking about a relationship.

    In a typically modern fashion, we have reduced PERSONS to FUNCTIONS.

    Reply
    1. Karl Liam Saur

      Correct. That’s one reason it’s such an impoverished substitution (the other is that it is simply inaccurate from the standpoint of Trinitarian theology, as noted earlier in the comments). It was that reason why many progressive Catholics I know object to it.

      Reply

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