He Meant What He Said: ‘Him, His, He’

There are times in the affairs of the Church when it becomes necessary to say, “For God’s sake, stop!” One of those times is upon us now, and silence can only lend the appearance of consent. The cause of concern is the increasing efforts to rewrite Scripture, the creeds, and the hymns of the Church for the purpose of neutralizing and abandoning what is said to be “sexist language.”

Christian psychiatrists should take a close look at the emerging pattern. And certainly from the theological perspective there is more to what is happening than meets the eye.

The media have conveyed to us the news that “ ‘Father’ [when used of God] is a meaningless or ugly image for many people and it continues to carry patriarchal overtones that may indicate a hierarchical system, even systems of oppression.” Some theologians are suggesting that “the masculine imagery of God as ‘father’ and Jesus as ‘son’ should be broadened to include female symbols of ‘mother’ and ‘daughter.’ ”

The Christian doctrine of Scripture has for its central feature the fact that while the Bible was written by human beings, the Holy Spirit was behind all the writing so that nothing was written that the Holy Spirit did not wish to be written. Surely the omniscient God, the Holy Spirit, is no sexist. Surely the Holy Spirit allowed men to write Scripture in such a way that it would be timeless and binding on both men and women for all ages. As far as we know, no book in the Bible was written by a woman. Should the Holy Spirit be indicted for doing it this way? Should we rail against God as though he didn’t know what he was doing?

Human beings have no right to tamper with the Word of God by adding to it, taking away from it, or expunging language that displeases them. If the use of “Father” creates an “ugly image” for unbelieving people, it is not the only biblical word to do so. Unbelievers are likely to find “sin” an ugly word also, and to resent being called “sinners.” Even some Christians gag at the biblical teaching that there is a real “hell” to which the unsaved go. Of course the Bible gives offense. It was intended to do that. People who do not like the fact that God became man and that God is called father cannot change those words without at the same time charging God with a delinquency. He spoke and he did not stutter in his speech.

For centuries, Bible translators have gone back to the Greek and Hebrew manuscripts to try to find out what God actually said. The whole work of lower criticism is based upon the need to discover as clearly as possible what the original Scriptures said. But if the words of the historic creeds, the hymns of the Church, and the Bible itself can be changed to suit the need of the moment, we are left on very unstable ground.

Theological scholars have labored long and hard at exegesis, attempting to determine what the writers of Scripture said and meant. Sonship as it refers to Jesus has specific theological content. To suggest that Jesus might be called “daughter” rather than “son” is to denigrate the revelation of God itself and to refuse to face the fact that God chose to manifest himself as true man. Jesus was not a woman.

All this in no way invalidates the quest of women for their rightful status—for equal rights, equal pay, and full personhood, which is taught in Scripture too. But we can and must make the case for all this from Scripture without destroying Scripture, relativizing it, or demeaning it by altering what God himself has caused to be written. Let God be God—and let man be man, let him recognize the transcendence of the Creator and his right to do as he pleases with or without man’s consent.

Thornton Wilder: Those Things That Repeat

“I am interested in the drives that operate in society and in every man. Pride, avarice, and envy are in every home. I am not interested in the ephemeral—such subjects as the adulteries of dentists. I am interested in those things that repeat and repeat and repeat in the lives of millions,” said Thornton Wilder a few years ago. The statement is good criticism of his themes and an exact explanation of why his plays and novels continue to be produced and read.

Wilder, who died last month at the age of seventy-eight, won three Pulitzer Prizes—for a novel, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, in 1927, and for two plays, Our Town in 1938 and The Skin of Our Teeth in 1942 (on the latter, see our August 29, 1975, issue, page 27). He was born in Madison, Wisconsin, and lived in Shanghai, where his father was stationed as the U. S. consul general. Wilder took a B. A. at Yale and an M. A. at Princeton, and taught at the University of Chicago and at Harvard. His prose was graceful and clear, marked by what one critic called a “harmonious limpidity of style.” And, as he explained, his themes were those sins universally understood and experienced. Clarity of style is needed in dealing with such themes as chance and the providence of God, as Wilder does in The Bridge of San Luis Rey. He was foremost a metaphysical writer.

Comments made by Lady Bird Johnson in 1968 when Wilder received the National Book Award for Literature aptly describe his work: “Unlike some modern writers you respect your fellow man and you respect the American language.… You have written with an understanding, affectionate rapport with your subjects which to me is the hallmark of genuine literature.”

Hannah Arendt 1906–1975

The world lost one of its leading political philosophers when Hannah Arendt died in New York December 4. Like Herbert Marcuse of Jewish background, Dr. Arendt found refuge from Hitler in the United States. But unlike Marcuse she was able to see that totalitarianism is a fundamental evil embracing both Nazism and Communism. The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) is unparalleled for the clarity of its analysis and the unescapability of its conclusions.

Arendt saw in anti-Semitism a common factor in the origin of both modern totalitarian systems. They arise when the self-reliant, self-confident individual has vanished and society has been reduced to an “atomistic mass,” with each atom-human related to and dependent on only the state. European Jewish bourgeois culture was one of the major stumbling-blocks to totalitarianism, for it emphasized the individual, his personal relationships, responsibilities, and possessions. Much of what she says about Jewishness as a social phenomenon also applies to Christianity, especially evangelical Christianity with its distinctive beliefs and life-style and its similar petit-bourgeois tendencies. We may well see, as Arendt did, harbingers of a new totalitarianism in the tendency of modern American life to weaken—among others—Christian beliefs and institutions in the name of “pluralism.” Its effect is the creation not of a unified society but of Arendt’s atomistic mass.

Like the Jewish philosopher Martin Buber, whose inquiry into the nature of the encounter between the individual and God furnishes much stimulation to Christians, Hannah Arendt has provided Christian thinkers with brilliant insights into the political and social limits of the human condition. Her controversial Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963) illustrates the universal consequences of the Fall of Man, a social reality that she clearly saw, even though she never openly expressed a belief in the specificity of biblical revelation, either Christian or Jewish.

Missionaries, Not Mercenaries

To those who followed the human rights issue at the World Council of Churches Assembly in Nairobi last month, Helmut Frenz, a German Lutheran, was a conspicuous figure. But it was neither his German nor his Lutheran background that made him a minor cause celebre in the ecumenical meeting. His claim to fame—and the reason he was put on the program of the assembly section discussing “structures of injustice and struggles for liberation”—is that he is out of favor with the government of Chile.

Frenz is the classic illustration of what happens to the missionary who gets involved in the politics of a nation where he is, in effect, a guest. If the rules of that country do not appreciate his political involvement, they simply kick him out.

The fact that Chile’s current government is anti-Communist and that Frenz has been charged with aiding and abetting its foes is incidental. It makes no difference whether the rulers are right-wingers or left-wingers. Both types are quick to cancel residence permits of foreigners who they think are interfering in their affairs.

What has happened to Frenz, the German in Chile, can happen just as easily to John Doe, the American missionary in Country X. It is quite likely to happen, in fact, as long as President Ford persists in his position that the Central Intelligence Agency should be able to use missionaries in its work. The many thousands of American missionaries who do not meddle in the politics of their host nations are suspect as long as the president of their own country says that the CIA considers them valuable sources of information. Indeed, in some countries, United States citizens have been detained and kept from evangelizing, simply on suspicion of spying.

All American missionaries should be put “off limits” to the CIA, just as Peace Corps workers and Fulbright Scholars are supposed to be. A simple order from the President would accomplish this. Lacking executive action, the Congress could and should do it. Emissaries of Jesus Christ should be free to represent only him, and their only offense should be the offense of his cross.

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