COMMENTARY: Inclusive speech and right relations

c. 1999 Religion News Service (Rosemary Radford Ruether is a feminist theologian teaching at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. She is one of the”Voices of Women in Religion”columnists for RNS.) UNDATED _ Feminists have insisted on language that explicitly recognizes women as well as men. And although inclusive language is now widely endorsed by […]

c. 1999 Religion News Service

(Rosemary Radford Ruether is a feminist theologian teaching at Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Ill. She is one of the”Voices of Women in Religion”columnists for RNS.)

UNDATED _ Feminists have insisted on language that explicitly recognizes women as well as men. And although inclusive language is now widely endorsed by publishers, there remains a still deeper resistance in the churches to inclusive language for God.


Those who resist a change toward gender-inclusive language tend to insist it is a trivial matter, since, they argue, the male generic is simply a grammatical form that”includes the female.”But if it is so trivial, why the resistance? Clearly there is more here than meets the ear!

The linguistic conventions of male generics did not arrive in a vacuum but in the historical and cultural context in which only males _ and only males of the educated class _ were autonomous public persons with rights to represent themselves.

Women did not have such rights and thus were defined in relation to the male, who was their”head.”Male generics express exactly this pattern of legal rule of men over women.

But this legal situation has been gradually changed over the last 150 years. The call for inclusive language is basically a call to recognize this change in the structure of our language. Women, too, are autonomous persons with the legal right to speak and represent themselves in public in their own name. Resistance to this new situation in society and language expresses a lingering resistance to acknowledge the change.

As the issue arises in the churches, some theologians reflect this resistance in their insistence that male language for God is unchangeable. Why? Surely Christian orthodoxy itself has always recognized that God is not literally a male or indeed a human being; instead God is a”spirit.”Our words for God are metaphors that cannot be taken literally.

Yet it is our gender metaphors that are exactly the issue here.

Dominating power, rationality and rule have been symbolized as maleness, passivity and submission as femaleness. By extension, maleness is appropriate for God while femaleness is appropriate for creatures but not for God. Yet these gender metaphors themselves distort human male and female relations into patterns of unjust power and subjugation.

By extending these human metaphors to God, we make God the origin and agent of distorted relationships.


The call for inclusive language for God is thus basically a call to reimagine power relations. Instead of power as a relation of domination and subjugation, we need to imagine a model of power based on mutual affirmation, drawing the person on both sides of the relationship into wholeness. Another name for this kind of relationship is love.

Christians have long affirmed that God is love. Can we really understand what this means if we keep on using language for God drawn on patterns of dominating power? Far from being”against biblical faith,”it is in the Bible that we find some of the most compelling images of God as one in whom power becomes love, overcoming injustice and making all things whole.

The Bible itself uses both male and female images for this understanding of God. Can the churches do less?

DEA END RUETHER

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