Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Top Divinity Schools: Use Gender-Neutral Language to Refer to God

The divinity schools at Duke and Vanderbilt Universities have instructed their professors to start using more “inclusive” language when referring to God because the masculine pronouns “have served as a cornerstone of the patriarchy.”

For example: This year’s divinity course catalogue at Vanderbilt tells professors to give “consistent attention to the use of inclusive language, especially in relation to the Divine,” because the school “commits continuously and explicitly to include gender as an analyzed category and to mitigate sexism.”

“It is up to the individual professor’s interpretation for their classes and is suggestive rather than mandatory,” the associate dean for academic affairs at Vanderbilt’s divinity school, Melissa Snarr, said in an e-mail to Heat Street.

Now, that may sound fair, but in many cases, it’s really not up to the professor. For example, if we are talking about the Christian God, every single reference to Him in the Bible uses a masculine pronoun . . . which kind of gives you the vibe that Christians have decided that their god is a dude. The fact is, teaching anything else would be giving inaccurate information — which is what makes Duke’s particular guidelines even more absurd.

According to Heat Street, Duke’s particular divinity school is “geared toward people already working in the Methodist church, taking supplemental weekend or summer classes.” Yes, “Methodist,” as in the Christian religion that has already completely, officially, 100 percent decided that their God is a man. And yet, Duke’s guidelines suggest avoiding gender specific pronouns when discussing Him and suggest using “God” and “Godself” instead.

Read the rest here.

4 comments:

Clear Waters said...

I consider this to be essentially heresy. It can't really be called anything else, since it deliberately is introducing a satanic religion 'Liberalism' into Christianity to influence its practices. These schools need to be shut down.

rick allen said...

It is undoubtedly correct that the traditional language of the bible uses the masculine pronoun for God, and that that usage is normative in Christian tradition.

However, this writer's inference from that that the Christian's "god is a dude" is rather wide of the mark, and is itself considerably closer to heresy than what I would consider the silly avoidance of gender-specific pronouns.

Sexuality is a characteristic of living bodies. God the Father has no material body. God the Son has become incarnate as a human male, so it is certainly appropriate and necessary to refer to Jesus Christ as "he." God the Holy Spirit, like God the Father, has no body, and hence no proper sex. We in English tend to call the Spirit "he" because the Latin word "Spiritus" is masculine in grammatical gender. But the Greek "Pneuma" is neuter in grammatical gender and the Hebrew "Ruah" is feminine in grammatical gender. The gender varies by language, but there is no question of the Holy Spirit being a "dude."

So, certainly it is not true, apart from the incarnate second person, that "God is a man" in Christianity (though I think God the Father and the Son are literal men in Mormonism).

Ecgbert said...

Praying to a gender-neutral (neuter?) God in churches that people don't go to anymore.

John Coffman said...

I fear the students subject to this will affect Protestant "worship" songs, biblical translations (which are really interpretations) and who knows what else. I fear it will really begin to make this culture shift more noticeable and prevalent.

Speaking of God is a matter of the experience of revelation. God has revealed Himself to the Saints and He has provided a natural order since the Fall of bringing men to God. This includes a "woman's desire [is] for her husband." These iconic aids are to restore us to life in communion with our Creator. So since this totally ignores the reality of revelation and created order then Mark is right, it certainly is heresy.

The Orthodox must respond to this by thoroughly understanding their Tradition. These heresies get to some fundamental assumptions that are not discussed much in our Tradition because mankind never took such absurd thinking to the heights of popularity. The continual leftist infiltration of Christianity should encourage the Orthodox to shine as a safe haven for those seeking a refuge of sanity on the tumultuous oceans of contemporary insanity.