Toward a Neutered Bible: Making God S/He

A nonsexist paraphrase of Bible passages, about to be issued by the National Council of Churches, is a trial balloon for a linguistically intolerant rendering of the whole Bible.

Languages are like we are: they have a past, present, and (we hope) a future. Because the future is as yet undecided from a human perspective, it offers the most possibilities for change. As Christians we should move into the future with the intent of shaping our language so as to include both sexes and as many colors and races of persons as possible.

We will need to remember, however, that language is a human vehicle and, consequently, as limited as our perspectives and only as rich and multifarious as our experiences. We may discover that we have to accustom ourselves to the limitations of our language as we do the limitations of our bodies—they are not cars, much less planes or rockets, and scarcely to be compared with the elaborate and instant world of imagination. But if we try, we usually find they get us from one place to another.

The National Council of Churches says that no issue in its history has raised such a storm of protest as the proposed language changes in Scripture. Little wonder, for our sexuality is intimately wrapped up with who we are as persons. Tampering with gender sends shock waves to our identity. When the challenge involves also our faith, we find ourselves picking our way through a minefield of emotions, beliefs, feelings, misunderstandings, and fears.

Part of the storm over the language changes has been generated because of a misrepresentation by the news media of the original proposal by the NCC. The overtures of the Division of Education and Ministry (DEM) of the NCC, which date back to June 1978, include the following:

1. The development of a nonsexist lectionary for public worship, to be adapted from the RSV;

2. An appeal to the rsv Bible Committee “to move more boldly” in employing inclusive language about persons by avoiding masculine-oriented language with reference to God (e.g., substituting “God” for the masculine pronoun), and by adding scholars with a feminist perspective as vacancies occur on the committee;

3. The development of alternative ways of dealing with racism, sexism, classism, scientism, and anti-Semitism in the Bible.

The third item is being held in abeyance by the DEM until a future date. With regard to item two, the RSV committee, which is editorially independent of the NCC, has indicated that it will use inclusive language only when such usage is consistent with the original texts of the Bible. The committee, which meets at regular intervals to consider improvements in the current translation of the RSV, has been attempting to eliminate masculine-oriented language where it can be accomplished without distorting the historicity of the original texts or resorting to contrived English expressions.

Examples of revisions to date include the elimination of “man” or “men” in Psalm 143:2; Mark 10:18; Luke 17:34; 18:1; Romans 2:6; and Revelation 3:20 where the Hebrew and Greek pronouns are indefinite; or the rendering of the Hebrew ’ish and Greek anthropos by inclusive phraseology (e.g., “those who,” “everyone,” etc.). The committee, however, has adopted the position that a translator of a historical document is obligated to provide as faithful and felicitous a rendering of that document in English as possible.

I think that those who are called to “rightly divide the word of truth” (2 Tim. 2:15) owe a debt of gratitude to the RSV committee for its present stand on this issue. Anyone who has mastered another language well enough to attempt translation work knows that the committee’s responsibility is not easily fulfilled. Such hybrids as “s/he” are unsuitable to the dynamic quality of biblical language. Nor is the matter so simple as substituting “God” for the masculine pronoun; in Romans 3:28–30, for example, this would result in 12 occurrences of “God” in three verses. Again, suggestions to change “Son of Man” to “Child of Humanity,” or “Father” to “Parent,” are not merely “a few nonsubstantive changes,” as one advocate of inclusive language contends. They involve a series of domino-like decisions that few of us, I suspect, will want to live with.

Take as an example the expression “son of God.” Assuming son of God were changed to a nonsexist substitute (e.g., child of God, offspring of God), we would experience the nullification of an important Christological title in the Bible. We all are aware that there is a difference in Scripture between the term “son” and “child.” Because of the right of primogeniture, son of God becomes in the history of Israel increasingly reserved for the one who will follow in the line of David as a Savior, whereas child of God remains a designation for any particular Jew. Son of God, because of its discriminate use in the biblical tradition, designates the unique individual upon whom God’s favor comes for salvific purposes. The term Child of God is simply a paraphrase for the term “Israel[ite].”

If we follow this hypothetical process a step further we discover that the problem begins to compound. In the Old Testament we encounter the term “man of God,” which designates an office above children of God, but below son of God. For example, Moses, Elijah, and Elisha are called “man of God,” but never “son of God,” whereas the king of Israel is called “son of God,” but never “man of God.” How shall these terms be distinguished, not only from themselves (i.e., child of God, man of God, son of God), but from “son of man”? Each of these expressions will need to be reduced to an amorphous equivalent of “person of God,” thus obliterating the unique role of each.

These terms also relate in various ways to a series of other terms—king, high priest, suffering servant, prophet, apostle, and so on, each of which is masculine in the Bible. Thus, the process of reductionism will necessarily lead further. This, of course, is but a brief experiment with one term. What kind of leveling will have to occur to reduce the hundreds of similar expressions in the Bible to a predetermined standard?

Bruce Metzger, who chairs the RSV Bible Committee, says that a literal translation (such as the RSV) intends to reproduce what a passage says, not necessarily what it means. Interpretive insights are the responsibility of commentators, pastors, and teachers. This has been the historic position of Protestantism. Interestingly enough, one of Protestantism’s long-standing criticisms of Catholicism is that the Roman church has presumed to decide what various passages of the Bible mean. How ironic it will be, as Harold Strandness has pointed out, if Protestantism, by producing a nonsexist paraphrase of the Bible, goes beyond the Roman Catholic church by changing what the Bible says.

We now Leave item two and turn to the first one in the NCC proposal. The DEM projects a three-year lectionary cycle (for use in Advent in 1983, 1984, and 1985), which, once the Scripture passages have been tested, could become the basis for a nonsexist rendering of the Old and New Testaments. This paraphrase, should it transpire, would be a separate edition from the RSV, on which the NCC holds the copyright. The lectionary can take the RSV as a point of departure, but the modified text could not legally be called the Revised Standard Version of the Bible. The guiding precept of this paraphrase would be that metaphorical language, especially as it relates to sex and gender (e.g., God as Father) is analogical rather than ontological, and ought not overshadow the theological truth it intends to convey.

This precept seems to me to require further consideration, especially in regard to the question of language and meaning in the Bible.

For example, the DEM desires to find language about Jesus Christ to “overcome the undesired suggestions that the incarnation makes Christ’s maleness crucial in such a way as to overshadow the primary import of the Word having become flesh, and the Divine having become human.”

This statement demands a closer look. In order to become human, God must enter into one of the two sexes of humanity. There seems to be no need nor reason to deny that God became a male in Jesus of Nazareth. Indeed, to do so would deny our own humanity and sexuality in some sense and would simply return us to a docetic view of Christ, namely, that Christ was not truly human. The question then remains whether Jesus’ maleness, or God’s male gender, is “crucial” to his nature. If God’s nature consists in the male gender in some way that it does not consist in the female, then a change in nomenclature is a theological offense. C. S. Lewis maintained, for example, that God is masculine and that the church, which includes both males and females, is feminine in relation to God.

Nevertheless, in the Bible God (e.g., Luke 15:8–10; Matt. 23:37) and the Holy Spirit (John 3:5–6) are sometimes described in feminine imagery. This would seem to deny that metaphor in the Bible is strictly ontological (though it does not prove it, for female metaphors are sometimes applied to males, obviously not thereby changing the male sex).

If, however, as it seems, biblical language about God is more analogical than ontological, one may question why the metaphor ought to be eliminated. Can we learn the unknown apart from associating it with the known? Are not analogies, in a sense, like matches with which we light candles in the dark? A match bums a short enough time as it is; if we quench it we may never have light.

A more promising route, it seems to me, is to educate ourselves that most speech about God is metaphorical, and much of it rooted in sex and gender, like we are. I am arguing here for the appreciation of analogy rather than the abolition of it, since it appears that in the Incarnation especially, God entered fully into our world.

It is Nevertheless Probable that a nonsexist paraphrase of Scripture will be attempted. What its reception will be among the churches is hard to say. Similar ventures have been attempted before. One could point to Origen’s practice of interpreting much of the Bible, and especially the Old Testament, allegorically, thus forsaking the obvious sense of God’s entering into our historical experience in favor of types of higher spirituality or deeper truth.

Let Truth Be Hard

I want to hear the truth,

and hear it hard.

I want to bow beneath the iron hand of right,

let false be jarred.

To walk for once with softened heart and strengthened sight,

let fall the guard.

And wake my mulish will unto its plight,

Let truth be hard.

But what is this I hear?

Is all truth gone?

You keep us babes. The mealy pap you feed,

makes truth a pawn.

You dribble drooling words that flaunt and please,

the right is wronged.

And selfish hearts wax cold with speech of ease;

Let truth be strong,

Let truth spread long,

Let truth be hard.

—Leslie Leyland Fields

But Origen’s endeavors related to interpretation rather than translation. For an example of the latter we could turn to Clarence Jordan, who in our own day has published his Cotton Patch Version of the New Testament in which he modifies the Pauline epistles to fit conditions in Atlanta or Birmingham during the racial movement of the 1960s. Thus, the idea behind a nonsexist paraphrase of Scripture in one sense is not new, and the result may be no more successful than its various predecessors were.

I began by saying that languages have a past, present, and future. The present, of course, is the moment of transition. Linguistically we live between what has been and what could be. It is tough to retain a sense of home when your furniture is in the moving van, and at present our language is in the van.

Here, it seems to me, lies an important challenge for the Christian. It would be very tempting, given our present pitch of awareness about language, to take a snobbish attitude toward the way our ancestors spoke and expressed themselves. An eminent theologian recently spoke at one of our seminaries, and in his lecture he employed masculine-oriented language. The reaction against his style was so fierce that it is doubtful whether students and faculty heard much of his content. Our linguistic intolerances are beginning to parallel our racial intolerances of the past. Instead of discounting persons because of their skin color, are we to discount them because of their use of pronouns? Racism, to be sure, is a strong judgment, but the discounting of persons is a serious offense.

As we move into the future, let us strive to shape our language, especially for the purposes of worship, to be as inclusive as possible. But let us do so without erecting a new wall of legalism: by requiring others to speak in a certain way before we will listen to them. And let us do so without ceasing to be informed by the past.

If Calvin and Jerome and Aquinas and Dostoevski and Tolkien use “men” when they could have used “people,” let us not discount them. We ought to be bigger persons than that. Otherwise we will have strained at gnats and swallowed camels. The goals of human rights will not be promoted by changing historical documents, nor by neglecting them.

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