Tuesday 16 June 2009

"Let's call the Spirit she for a change": Bishop of Sherborne (elect)

Er, we'll get back to you on this, bishop.

Personally, if he did this in a service while I was there, I'd walk out.

John Richardson
16 June 2009

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34 comments:

  1. Yeeeesssss (Paxman style)... I might too.

    It is only a poem though - a traditional medium through which experimental thought is put to paper - and not liturgy (lex orandi lex credendi etc). This I derive is Graham's intention in the "for a change, let's try She" - this is experiment, not revisionism (and it is certainly not feminism)

    Presumably you're not a fan of "The Shack" then John! (for the uninitiated the Holy Spirit is depicted therein as an oriental woman)

    As Peter Kirk and others have been saying recently (http://www.qaya.org/blog/?p=1157) Gender identity and grammatical gender are not the same thing. The person of the Trinity we refer to as the Spirit does not have a gender identity as Jesus did - and so should not be anthropomorphised as man or woman, as the Spirit is not human, but we have to use a pronoun of some sort.

    The Biblical terminology - ruach and pneuma - is feminine in grammatical gender assignment, but semantically at least this implies nothing about the character of the person. It does however enable us to use the pronoun "she" with a degree of legitimacy, as long as we understand this does not mean the Spirit is a woman.
    What justification do we (or more accurately, do Bible translators) have in insisting on the pronoun "he" - none grammatically. It is all from tradition, reading back into the Spirit the gender identity of the human Jesus and the male-role Father. We might add though that the use of the term "He" doesn't imply a (human) maleness any more than speaking of a table or a sentry in French implies that they are female (or even feminine).

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  2. Tim, I think you are right in saying we cannot settle this decisively by grammatical analysis since, as you say, this implies nothing about an actual 'gender'.

    The first question to ask is, might we not just as easily refer to the Father as Parent, and the Son as Child, as some have been doing already. And might we not then use 'She' instead of 'He' for the whole godhead? And if we are doing so, does it make any difference?

    If the answer, as Graham Kings' usage implies, is no, then this has serious implications for our theology.

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  3. Uh-oh, just remembered/discovered that pneuma is neuter - D'oh. Thus when Jesus promises the Spirit in John 14, verse 17 he uses the Greek pronoun "it", agreeing with the neuter antecedent. For the English translation, Trinitarian tradition and theology demands a personal not an impersonal pronoun though. Otherwise we are not fully trinitarian and lapse into JW territory.

    We might indeed just as easily refer to the Father as Parent, and the Son as Child, but as I'm sure you would expect me to say, Jesus didn't say Parent, he said "Abba" - dad. We are adopted as sons becasue we are in Christ, the Son, not because we are men. Jesus happened to be male (2nd Adam etc I guess)so the whole godhead can't accurately be "she", but divine Wisdom in Proverbs is female ...

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  4. What difference in our theology would it make if we stopped using masculine pronouns for the Holy Spirit or if we understood that calling God Father does not make God male? Father is a metaphor, IMV, and where it is unhelpful, perhaps we should use other metaphors.

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  5. My biggest problem with his grace's words is that they are damn bad poetry. He might as well sing Billy Joel's "She's only a woman to me."

    I can forgive a heretic sooner than a poetaster.

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  6. Dominic Stockford16 June 2009 at 16:05

    How about calling the Holy Spirit by 'his' name, the Holy Spirit? That would avoid such unhelpful gender debates, which lead to all sorts of tosh (see TEC!).

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  7. It's a crap poem, in terms of literature, but I now think it should be compulsory for it to be read at every service in the C of E.

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  8. Tim, thanks for linking to my post and saying more or less what I wanted to say here.

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  9. Not sure, John, if I am following you on the gravity of the situation (i.e. the need to walk out).

    50%, perhaps even 51% of the human race is female, generating in English the pronoun 'she'. But of the genderless Godhead, in whose image humanity was created, we never use the pronoun 'she'? Either God is genderless in the sense of being beyond gender or being inclusive of both male and female genders or both, even as revealed as Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The only occasions in English on which one might use 'she' without mangling the language in reference to God as Father, Son or Holy Spirit is with respect to the Holy Spirit, or to God as (hen and chickens and all that) Mother. Is that an occasion to walk out on? It could be an occasion to quietly rejoice on a creative yet respectful-of-our-language way to include 50 or 51% of humanity in our talk of God.

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  10. I know, I know: fancy having a website on which to publish your own poetry. Most of us have a top draw for that, to protect us from the vain thought that any might actually like to read it.

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  11. I am old-fashioned about the use of "sex" and "gender" maintaining that the former deals with biology and the latter, being a term from grammar, may also be used to refer to roles within society. This "same-sex marriage." Thinking or speaking about God in either sex or gender categories is, except in reference to Jesus, a problem. We have the metaphor of Father, but that is a metaphor, a pointing towards a reality that is far beyond our comprehension. That said, I would agree that the Father metaphor, imperfect as it may be, cannot be replaced with impersonal metaphors. We need to face the reality that God is personal - although more than personal.

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  12. Fr Weir wrote

    "We have the metaphor of Father, but that is a metaphor, a pointing towards a reality that is far beyond our comprehension. That said, I would agree that the Father metaphor, imperfect as it may be, cannot be replaced with impersonal metaphors. We need to face the reality that God is personal - although more than personal."

    I would agree with that statement, but is not the issue here how Jesus *chose* to reveal God as a Father and as masculine, and how we should relate to God as a person?

    Is it in what is *revealed*, that we should attach the gender imperative? The Jews knew about 'God' but then Jesus introduced the radical idea of God being a 'Father' with masculine overtones and not feminine ones. He certainly did not refer to God as some kind of androgynous 'thingy'.

    Feminists might argue that Jesus was only anthromorphising the dominant patriarchal culture and if for example, theses existed a matriarchy in Israel at that time. then Jesus would have refereed to God as 'Mother' but I am far from convinced of that argument.

    One gets the feeling that the Bishop Elect is pandering to egalitarianism than any real theological truth.

    Chris Bishop
    Devon

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  13. Chris,

    I think you are wrong in asserting that the idea of God as Father was not part of the tradition of Israel, e.g., "Father of orphans and protector of widows is God in his holy habitation." (Psalm 68:5) Clearly Jesus used this in a radical new way, but he was using an idea that was already part of the tradition. He also used a feminine metaphor for himself. I think we need to be careful in interpreting biblical language lest we fall into what I see as the greatest danger, i.e., of thinking that we understand God because we understand what a father is. I have suggested that "God is love" in 1 John 4 says more about how little we understand love than how well we understand God.

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  14. I am still a long way from being ready to comment fully on this issue. However, regarding the use of ‘metaphorical’ language for God, I note the following from Karl Barth:

    “When used in Christian thought and speech as a term for God, the word ‘Father’ is always to be employed and understood in precisely the same sense that it has ... in the introit to the Lord’s Prayer, namely as a vocative.” (The Christian Life, Church Dogmatics IV, 4)

    That is to say, we call on God as Father, just as we call on Jesus as ‘Lord’, whereas we do not call on Jesus as ‘Mother Hen’, despite the metaphor of Matt 28:37. And this ‘calling on’ is not the mere use of a convenient label —‘Father’, rather than ‘Uncle’ —but something fundamental to our relationship with God, given to us by God himself, which ‘constructs’ our relationship with God in a specific, divinely intended, way.

    By contrast, it seems to me that if we call on God as ‘Mother’, or if we speak about the Holy Spirit as She, it establishes a fundamentally different relationship. Furthermore, it is based on our own selection of the terms. In that case, we are in precisely the situation against which Calvin cautioned: “Man’s mind, full as it is of pride and boldness, dares to imagine a god according to its own capacity ...”

    These are not, therefore, small problems when they concern a prospective bishop of the Church of England!

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  15. Someone has informed me that Revd Tom Wright (in his pre-Bishop of Durham days) once used the expression 'She' in relation to the Holy Spirit in a Bible reading given to the General Synod and that despite an objection this was ruled 'permissible' on the grounds that ruach is a feminine in Hebrew.

    Can anyone elaborate?

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  16. Fr Daniel,

    I agree with you that the concept of Father was known in Israel's tradition. Yet rather than detract from the metaphor, Jesus reiterated the masculine image of God in a more intimate and comprehensive way and did so repeatedly. God as a person is revealed by Jesus as that of a Father and this is how Jesus Himself viewed God. It also seems to me that this is how Jesus wanted us to undestand God relationally.

    Now I think you are right that what God is actually like is probably unknowable to us, but I return to my point that the imperative is surely to preach the knowledge of God as to how He has chosen to reveal Himself, both though Jesus and the Bible. The motif, metaphor or however you want to descibe it is strongly revealed as masculine and Father-like perhaps epitomised as much in the Lords' prayer.

    Chris Bishop
    Devon

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  17. I suppose it is the case that grammatical genders do not equate to actual genders; however when we use gendered terms to refer to persons of the trinity, we are communicating something about those persons. Just what is being communicated by using feminine terms ought to be owned and faced by those who persist in the practice.

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  18. In 'The World, the Church, and the Groaning of the Spirit' (in The Crown and the Fire, 1992 -- the published version of the talk you refer to, John?), Tom Wright translates Rom 8:26b as 'we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit herself intercedes on our behalf with inarticulate groanings'. In the context of his discussion of Rom 8:26-27, the justification is evidently the image of the Spirit bringing to birth the new creation, anticipated in the Eucharist, 'where symbols of creation are as it were flooded in advance with the living presence of God'.

    NTW explains that the Church's groaning 'is called forth by God himself and herself, transcendent beyond creation and also living and active deep within creation'. There's a modalistic ring to his discussion, but I could be missing something that he explains better elsewhere.

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  19. Steve, thanks for this. If Tom Wright is already thinking of God as ‘himself and herself’, then things are worse than I imagined!

    From what you have said here, however, Wright’s exegesis is a piece of theological ‘legerdemain’, which smuggles in unwarranted conclusions.

    The background to Romans 8:22-26 is undoubtedly Isaiah 26:17-18, “As a woman with child and about to give birth writhes and cries out in her pain, so were we in your presence, O Lord. We were with child, we writhed in pain, but we gave birth to wind. We have not brought salvation to the earth; we have not given birth to people of the world.” It is a powerful, and doubtless well-known, biblical metaphor, picked up, for example, in Mark 13:8 and elsewhere, but it establishes nothing about the gender of the parties involved, whether Israel in the OT, or creation, ourselves or the Spirit in the NT.

    Thus, in Romans 8:23, the thrice-repeated pronoun is masculine, despite the action being the same ‘groaning in travail’ as that of creation: “And not only so, but ourselves also, who have the first-fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, waiting for our adoption, to wit, the redemption of our body.” (ASV) The action does not ‘feminize’ the one acting.

    In any case, in Romans 8:26b, the action of the Spirit is not ‘groaning’ but interceding: the Spirit intercedes with groans. In the same way, a human intercessor might ‘intercede with groans’ as if in labour to bring forth something, but that does not mean the intercessor becomes feminine at that point.

    The point is not that there is no ‘feminine’ action involved, but that this is simply a metaphor, applicable to a variety of objects, with no significance as to the gender of those involved. If this is Wright's argument, he rests too much on it.

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  20. John, in case anyone misunderstands your argument, the repeated (twice, not thrice) masculine plural pronoun autoi in Romans 8:23 refers to us, i.e. Paul and his readers, not to any person of the Godhead. It is well known that the convention in Greek, indeed in most gender-based languages I think, is to use the masculine plural to refer to mixed gender groups. So all that we can conclude about gender from this pronoun is that the "we" referred to is not an all-female group, something we already know from Paul being one of the "we". We certainly can find nothing here suggesting that the Holy Spirit has any particular gender.

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  21. Thanks, Peter - but I would just point out there are three masculine pronouns (tr Eng 'ourselves'), the last being a reflexive masculine plural: "ou monon de, alla kai autoi tēn aparchēn tou pneumatos echontes, hēmeis kai autoi en heautois stenazomen huiothesian apekdechomenoi, tēn apolytrōsin tou sōmatos hēmōn."

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  22. Yes, John, you are right. heautois could be neuter, but in context must be masculine. But it is still the "we", not the Godhead, which is grammatically masculine here.

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  23. Just for what I hope is a final 'knock on the head' for the 'groaning/travail' analogy to the Spirit's nature (and that of the Godhead), I finally managed to recall Paul's words in Galatians 4:19, "My little children, of whom I am again in travail until Christ be formed in you--" The verb here refers to birth pains (cf Rev 12:2), but the subject is resolutely masculine.

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  24. Just to clarify, Peter, my point is not that the pronoun is masculine and that therefore the object (ourselves, God) must be masculine, but that the actions (groaning, travailing) give no indication of the 'gender' of the subject, and that, therefore, there is no justification for Wright's using a feminine pronoun for the Spirit here -"the Spirit herself intercedes on our behalf with inarticulate groanings"- in place of a neuter pronoun (auto). The gender translation for 'Spirit' must be governed by other considerations than the action of groaning, travailing or, indeed, interceding.

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  25. I think it's safe to say that NTW is thinking only of the Spirit as 'she', since the Father is still 'he', not 'Mother', and clearly the transcendent one. So while he would probably not encourage us to replace 'Father' with 'Father and Mother' (as 'expansivists' do), he regards the Spirit as the immanent one. But this doesn't quite settle it for me because I thought that the the Spirit and the Son were also transcendent (just as the Father and the Son are present to us by the Spirit?), and threfore that to speak of/address any member of the Godhead as 'she' (allowing that God is in many ways like a mother) is to misunderstand the nature of his relationship with creation and his people (as I think John has pointed out above).

    Of course NTW may not have made up his mind. For his readers who are reluctant to speak of God as 'he', his proposal may sound like a nice solution to the problem. But I think his thinking may still be a work in progress because in Surprised by Hope, which I'm reading now, the HS is plain 'it' in one instance ('The Spirit who brooded over the waters of chaos, the Spirit who indwelt Jesus so richly that it became known as the Spirit of Jesus...), and either he or she (take your pick) elsewhere: 'This kind of dualism [the kind that says that 'nothing save a great apocalyptic moment of divine power can . . . change the deep structures of the way things are'] banishes the continuing healing activity of the Father from the world he made, of the Son from the world of which he is already the Lord, and of the Spirit from the world within which he (she?) groans in travail'.

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  26. John, thanks for the clarification. Of course it would be a very weak argument that only females groan and therefore the Spirit is female. I'm quite sure N.T. Wright's argument is much deeper than that.

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  27. Steve, I think this ‘one out of three ain’t bad’ approach which Wright seems to be adopting is the worst of all possible worlds, for instead of attributing the ‘neither masculine nor feminine’ principle to the godhead as a whole, it adopts a position that one member of the Trinity (the Spirit) is more appropriately feminized in our understanding than the other two members (the Father and the Son).

    This undoubtedly supposes that the Spirit is therefore specifically different in this respect from the other members of the Trinity. ‘Gender’ is thus posited in some particular, but undefined way, of the Spirit in a sense that does not apply to the rest of the Trinity, setting up a distinction, comparable to the other distinctions within the Trinity, on the basis of this ‘applicability’ of the language.

    If the members of the Trinity are equally ‘neither masculine nor feminine’, then surely it is, at best, careless to reserve this switching of pronouns to the Spirit, and at worst, heretical.

    I'm really looking for help on this point!

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  28. Thanks, John. This is helpful. Maybe we don't often make it clear enough that when we say that God is Father we don't mean to say he's male. I recall certain churches in Ukraine (not Orthodox ones, but Eastern Catholic I believe) that displayed images of the Father, beard and all. So once we've come to imagine the Spirit as female we'll be able to make images of her. Some might say we've already got some of those.

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  29. I have posted further thoughts on this matter in a post on my own blog. I hope readers here will appreciate my conclusion that we should refer to the Holy Spirit as "they".

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  30. Can we not simply accept that the vocabulary used by Jesus would be that which was going to be most readily understood by His audience in the places and at the times He was addressing them.
    If we think it might be helpful to make changes in the interests of clarity for the audience then we should be open-minded about such a proposal. But if the motive is to be trendy or satisfy the PC brigade then that is a big mistake.

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  31. Peter Kirk, there's no anti-Kirk conspiracy regarding the late posting of your comments. As this blog only allows moderated comments, what is supposed to happen is that I get the comment sent as an e-mail to my personal account, whereafter I publish or reject it.

    Unfortunately, this sometimes goes inexplicably wrong, and I wind up with comments queued up which have not been brought to my attention. Your last two comments went this way, and have now been posted. It happens - to others as well as to you.

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  32. PS to Peter Kirk, actually I think one of your comments - the one about the fallacious reasoning - may have become lost entirely in the (non)post. Can you give it another go if it isn't where you expect it to be?

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  33. The majority of bishops do not think there are two different sorts of religion in this country, one which is pro-gay and another which is traditional and orthodox.

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