Should worshipers refer to God using non-gendered terms and pronouns? The Church of England is the latest community to debate the controversial question.
Some clergy have responded with such substitutions as “Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier” for the traditional formula for the Trinity of “Father, Son, Holy Spirit.” For similar reasons, many churches have adopted inclusive language for describing the community, avoiding the generic use of masculine words and pronouns. The United Church of Christ changed the words of a 19th-century hymn, “Dear Lord and Father of Mankind,” to “Dear God, Embracing Humankind.
Translation is less of an issue for Orthodox Jews, who pray in Hebrew, said Rabbi David Rosen, director of interreligious affairs for the American Jewish Committee. But he says a growing minority of the Orthodox have been following the lead of liberal Judaism in making worship more inclusive by adding the names of the four matriarchs Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah to references to the three patriarchs Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.
For Christians, the association of the divine with the masculine is especially strong since they worship a man, Jesus, as the son of God, who taught his followers to pray to “Our Father.” In 2008, the Vatican ruled that baptisms performed in the names of the Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier are invalid. That formula fails to express the relationships among the persons of the Trinity and mistakenly suggests that creation, redemption and sanctification are not the common work of all three, a Vatican theologian wrote at the time.
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