Desexing God language to worship God as “eagle, baker, hen”

Desexing God language to worship God as "eagle, baker, hen"

8/6/2020

(The following article is from Rev. Tom Brock of pastorsstudy.org. You can follow Pastor Brock on Facebook - here and Twitter - here.)

He is risen! (Yes, I said “He”).

Pilgrim Lutheran Church in Saint Paul, Minnesota is a congregation of the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. This past summer the ELCA in convention voted to use more expansive language for God. This means, among other things, the ELCA desires to include more female imagery for God (God as “Mother”, etc).

But back in 2015, Pilgrim Lutheran was already doing this. See the below from their website on how strange things get when a congregation wants to abandon using exclusively “Father, Son, Holy Spirit“ language for God.

In Jesus our Savior,

Pastor Tom

From Pilgrim Lutheran’s website:

“Use language that is expansive in communicating the nature and activity of God. Consider using one or more of the following strategies:

Choose non-anthropomorphic language for God (examples: Eagle, baker, hen,bread), being careful not to limit these by following them with male or female pronouns.

Choose titles that suggest the activity of God but do not imply gender. (Examples: Advocate, Healer, Refuge, Sustainer, Creator)

Use second person language to speak to, instead of about, God.

Use similes

Replace pronouns with articles (for example, “God sent His Son” could be changed to “God sent The Son”)

Keep in mind that although Jesus was male, his humanity is more significant to our faith than his gender. Consider using terms like Christ, Teacher, Emmanuel, Savior, Redeemer, Word in addition to or as substitute for Lord or other exclusively male descriptors." (See here)

5 Comments

Didaskalos

8/6/2020 12:41:06 pm

ELCAspeak translated: "Anyone with a nanogram of Bible knowledge can see that we've concocted our own god, so of course we'll call our god fabrication whatever we like...as long as the world approves, you understand."

The ELCA's God-renaming and masculine pronoun-expunging campaigns are by no means of recent vintage. This blog post by Pastor Eric ("Is God still Father?") is at least 7 years old.

"I received an Advent devotional booklet published jointly by Luther Seminary and Pacific Lutheran Seminary. Not once, in 28 days' worth of readings, is God ever referred to as Father. I guess I don't have to tell you that the personal pronouns He and His are never used to refer to God either. Similarly, the Advent Prayers published by the Gettysburg Seminary also never call God Father. We are, however reminded that God loves us like a mother.

"You would think that at least once in Advent, while we are praying to the Cleansing God and the Spirit of Swirling Darkness (that's what it says, I am not making this up - sounds more like Darth Vader to me than God), we might occasionally call God Father. Jesus is every now and then called Son, but whose Son? Why the God who "tip-toed into our world on holy feet..." of course! (Again, I am not making this up!)

"Has anyone ever read Matthew 28:16-20?

"The prize for not using a pronoun for God has to go to [then] Bishop Mark Hanson, who recently said in a statement to the ELCA News Service, "You can bet your life that God will be faithful to God's promise, because God bet the life of Jesus on God's faithfulness..." It seem to me that Bishop Hanson should use a pronoun when Bishop Hanson speaks about God or Bishop Hanson might confuse Bishop Hanson's listeners."

Interested Reader

8/6/2020 02:05:41 pm

Their mission statements says they are divesting of their endowment of fossil fuels. Certainly they would not think of using natural gas or electric heating of the building! All staff members must be using bicycles or walking where ever they go as certainly could not use those "evil" cars or buses for transportation. All congregation members must be encouraged to do the same in their own households to follow the example of Caring for Creation!

Born again

8/6/2020 08:59:25 pm

Can you imagine one of these wackos living in Jesus day? Standing there wagging their finger at Jesus saying, you are not going to see the “Father,” cmon now.... you’re going to see the androgynous life force. Jesus said there will be deceivers in the last days.

Steve

8/7/2020 12:18:44 am

At least they said that Jesus was a male, and it may be true that his becoming one of us, a human being, is more important than his sex. (They, like all contemporary writers, use the term "gender" when they mean "sex," but I just can't go there.)

However, his sex was male. One can't (aside from the contemporary "trans" phenomenon-- something that was probably furthered by substituting the term "gender" for "sex") define any personality without identifying its sex. The only attributes of personality that even come close are age and race: old, white man; young oriental girl;etc. Just read any police blotter or hospital admission paperwork. One simply can't imagine any person without ascribing to that personality a sex, an age and an ethnicity. After that you can get into tall or short, blue-eyed or brown, handsome or not so, etc. We can even identify personalities by their voice,and there are differences between the masculine voices of males and the feminine voices of females. One's voice, itself, will identify one as being of one sex or the other.

When these people try to deny or downplay Jesus' sex, they are not only de-sexing him, they are de-personalizing and de-humanizing him. They are expecting us to imagine a person, a human being, who is neither a male nor a female. That is simply beyond any human being's ken. Jesus should be allowed to be the thirty-something middle eastern Jewish man who came among us, and his father should be allowed to be the fatherly personality Jesus described for us and whom he loved. Nothing else has been revealed. Anything else can only be the product of the imagination-- if that.

8/7/2020 03:30:48 pm

This picking and choosing what they believe & don’t believe or what to name things from the Bible is a lot like a sports team say baseball. So there is a team that calls themselves a baseball team, but they make up the rules as they go. No, our team gets 10 strikes per player and 12 outs per inning. We can’t be tagged out. Outrageous stuff. It ceases to be baseball and is some other whacked out game. They cease to be a baseball team and become some rogue team in a made up sport of their own making. That is the ELCA, they have ceased to be Christian. They are some rogue New Age thing.

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Desexing God language to worship God as "eagle, baker, hen"

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Dan Skogen

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