This post was updated several times over the past hour, and might be updated again. Hit "refresh" to make sure you're reading the latest version.
Wow-- interesting
new trinitarian language and imagery being touted by my church, the Presbyterian Church, USA ("PCUSA" for short). Behold:
The divine Trinity -- "Father, Son and Holy Spirit" -- could also be known as "Mother, Child and Womb" or "Rock, Redeemer, Friend" at some Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) services under an action Monday by the church's national assembly.
Delegates to the meeting voted to "receive" a policy paper on gender- inclusive language for the Trinity, a step short of approving it. That means church officials can propose experimental liturgies with alternative phrasings for the Trinity, but congregations won't be required to use them.
"This does not alter the church's theological position, but provides an educational resource to enhance the spiritual life of our membership," legislative committee chair Nancy Olthoff, an Iowa laywoman, said during Monday's debate on the Trinity.
The assembly narrowly defeated a conservative bid to refer the paper back for further study.
A panel that worked on the issue since 2000 said the classical language for the Trinity should still be used, but added that Presbyterians also should seek "fresh ways to speak of the mystery of the triune God" to "expand the church's vocabulary of praise and wonder."
One reason is that language limited to the Father and Son "has been used to support the idea that God is male and that men are superior to women," the panel said.
Conservatives responded that the church should stick close to the way God is named in the Bible and noted that Jesus' most famous prayer was addressed to "Our Father."
Besides "Mother, Child and Womb" and "Rock, Redeemer, Friend," proposed Trinity options drawn from biblical material include:
- "Lover, Beloved, Love"
- "Creator, Savior, Sanctifier"
- "King of Glory, Prince of Peace, Spirit of Love."
Early in Monday's business session, the Presbyterian assembly sang a revised version of a familiar doxology, "Praise God from whom all blessings flow" that avoided male nouns and pronouns for God.
Youth delegate Dorothy Hill, a student at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in Massachusetts, was uncomfortable with changing the Trinity wording. She said the paper "suggests viewpoints that seem to be in tension with what our church has always held to be true about our Trinitarian God."
Hill reminded delegates that the Ten Commandments say "the Lord will not hold anyone guiltless who misuses his name."
The Rev. Deborah Funke of Montana warned that the paper would be "theologically confusing and divisive" at a time when the denomination of 2.3 million members faces other troublesome issues.
On Tuesday, the assembly will vote on a proposal to give local congregations and regional "presbyteries" some leeway on ordaining clergy and lay officers living in gay relationships.
Ten conservative Presbyterian groups have warned jointly that approval of what they call "local option" would "promote schism by permitting the disregard of clear standards of Scripture."
Protestants in general don't have anything approaching the Roman magisterium (teaching authority). Individual PCUSA congregations, for example, have a great amount of leeway in how they may interpret pronouncements from the General Assembly. One thing we Protestants are good at, though, is following the Protestant impulse to its logical conclusion-- schism. There's always
somebody in
some church threatening to break away. I see schism as not-good, not-bad; it's simply one of the ways in which human thought and emotion manifest themselves as action. Magneto's question to the mutants is a practical one in such cases: "Who will you stand with?"
PCUSA has had something of a contentious history, to put it mildly. The merger of northern and southern churches under a single umbrella organization didn't occur until 1983, and the old pre-Civil War divisions echo even today in the various (and often conflicting) theological approaches and stances taken by different synods, presbyteries, and congregations. As Kate McCarthy wisely noted in "Reckoning with Religious Difference" (a chapter from the collection
Explorations in Global Ethics, edited by Sumner Twiss and Bruce Grelle*), we need to be as mindful of
intrareligious diversity as we are of
interreligious diversity.
Personally, I couldn't care less about the specific terminology of the liturgy. If our General Assembly decided that all future communion liturgies must include the line, "And let us now munch the body of Jesus," I'd recite the line with nary a twinge of conscience. This sort of claim freaks out some of my conservative papist friends at Catholic University, for whom the liturgy (
"Liturgy!" bellows Zero Mostel) is a sacred jewel. I imagine it also freaks out a large number of Protestant conservatives. (Mainstream Protestantism in the West has taken a decidedly Catholic turn these last few decades, a trend noted by some anthropologists of religion. Greater attention to and care about the liturgy is one example of that Catholic turn. The increasing prevalence of fully robed clergy is another.)
My own congregation in northern Virginia hasn't made much noise about things like the revised hymnal. However, we are, like many Presbyterian churches, still mired in controversies that come to a head during yearly meetings of the PCUSA General Assembly, of which two such controversies are particularly noteworthy: (1) the status of Jesus Christ as one and only savior (i.e., the christo-soteriological question), and (2) homosexuality-- especially as it pertains to ordination and marriage.
Within my own congregation, people skew both liberal and conservative. To our credit, we're a church that appreciates a good dialogue. People get angry during some meetings, true, but anger while at church is neither sinful nor ironic; it's merely natural wherever you find strong differences of opinion. As a congregation, we've had to deal with some tough issues, and we're still dealing with them.
The true measure of any congregation, I think, is its sense of community-- an underlying, indefinable something that holds it together despite the conflicts that burble to the surface now and then. As with any other church, my own church in NoVA has lost members over some conflicts, but on the whole, we've kept together as a family. To that extent, it seems a bit silly to abandon the family as a means of resolving a conflict. The abandonment option is open to Americans and other Westerners, I think, largely because of the pervading ethos of the marketplace: just go find another church if you're not happy with where you're at. While many people still hesitate to adopt such an attitude across the Protestant/Catholic divide (there's something icky about those creepy Catlicks, you see), such border crossings nevertheless do occur quite frequently.
At the same time, schism can be the appropriate response to perceived problems, if it is adjudged that those problems are too severe to be corrected. If we stick to the family analogy, this might be like talking about divorce in the case of irreconcilable differences or transfer of child custody away from an abusive parent.
On an organizational level, you can expect institutions to behave like living organisms. Fission occurs. Sometimes it's healthy; sometimes not. Not-good, not-bad. Me, I've got no intention of abandoning the family. I know my congregation in NoVA will move forward in a spirit of trust and faith no matter what emanates from the General Assembly; that conviction hasn't failed me yet.
A NOTE ABOUT GENDER-INCLUSIVITYThe question of gender-inclusive language brings us close to the heart of the theological process, and calls to light just
who does theology: it's not always the career theologians! Sometimes the proles in the pews are directly involved.
I think that faithful renderings of the scriptures (e.g., English translations of the Bible) should avoid deliberate insertion of gender-neutral pronouns for the sake of gender-inclusivity, and would extend this thinking to all past (not future) creedal formulations. However, tinkering with the
liturgy strikes me as perfectly permissible, especially when it comes to various prayers and responsive readings. In our congregation in NoVA, such prayers and readings are written up "fresh" every week, and I would have no trouble at all seeing something along the lines of:
...this we pray in the name of the Mother, Child, and Womb.Doesn't bother me a bit.
So: as I see it, the Lord's Prayer should still be the "Our
Father" (as Catholics generally call it). But there's plenty of room in the liturgy for gender-inclusivity. Along with this, I think Christian educators-- i.e., the folks running the Bible classes and reading groups and so on-- can be of service in unplugging the sexism inherent in the ancients' way of looking at the world by talking about the histories of such terms and passages, and explaining why modern believers should avoid certain aspects of ancient thinking.
I stand against the (largely feminist) project of forcibly deconstructing "kyriarchal" or "phallocentric" language in the scriptures mainly because I don't believe that such language
necessarily abets sexism. It doesn't have to: much depends on the temperament and proclivities of the community using the language. If you teach the kids about the meaning behind the words, then the words
don't have to conduce to, say, an overly masculine picture of the divine.
[NB: For Christians, there is a special christological problem, however, that pertains directly to the spatiotemporal Jesus' masculinity, and whether that masculinity has any bearing on the larger question of
who the CHRIST is. I won't be discussing that in this post, but be aware that it's a huge issue in feminist christology.]
Theology is a creative endeavor, of course, and feminist theologians like Elizabeth Johnson (cf.
She Who Is-- a great read) have done much to recover ancient feminine concepts of the divine (e.g. Sophia/Wisdom) and place them at the forefront of modern Christian consciousness. I applaud such efforts. If anything, such efforts should go hand-in-hand with the continued preservation of ancient formulations so as to provide a
balance of gendered imagery instead of trying so hard to
uproot and destroy traces of the masculine in religious worship and conceptualization of the divine.
Hinduism, I think, provides a good example of the sort of paradigm I'm talking about. Divine pairings of masculine and feminine abound in Indian traditions, with both genders occupying (and even alternating) generative and destructive roles. It's the kind of thing a Camille Paglia feminist such as myself can get behind: not merely the notion of an Absolute that utterly transcends gender, but a more integrated notion of an Absolute that
incorporates gender even while going beyond it. True gender-inclusivity isn't about the destruction or erasure of all notion of gender.
[Coda: As someone who doesn't subscribe to an anthropomorphized conception of the Absolute, I'm not sure how much of the above discussion applies to my own religious perspective. "Is God masculine, feminine, or something totally other?" strikes me as requiring Master Joju's terse
"Mu!" in response, not to mention a few well-placed blows to the head with a heavy, splintery stick. However, as an elder who has taken a vow that says, in part, that I should work to uphold the "peace, unity, and purity" of the Church, I hope that other Christians will read the above post and take some time to ruminate on ways that
they might also spread such peace, unity, and purity, working in and through and around the flawed vocabulary of our faith.]
*Crass self-promotion: on Amazon,
Explorations, which weighs in at 350 pages, is shamelessly selling for $36.00-- typical overpricing for college textbooks. Imagine the value you'll be getting when you purchase a copy of the equally hefty
Water from a Skull from yours truly for only $21.95! Eh?
EH?What?? WHERE ARE YOU GOING!? COME BACK!_
