​The 79th General Convention of The Episcopal Church was host to a number of important issues, but one that has generated some of the most conversation has to do with the proposed revision of the Book of Common Prayer, particularly the notion of “inclusive and expansive language” for God. The rector’s forum of The Chapel of Saint Andrew is going to discuss this topic and this series is being posted online for the benefit of God’s people everywhere.


This is part SIX, and we are tracing a trajectory of linguistic development throughout the twentieth-century, exploring how we got to “contemporary language.”


Part ONE of the series, which will served as an overview and introduction to the ideological issues at hand, can be found HERE.


Part TWO, where we talk about the concept of liturgy itself, can be found HERE.


Part THREE of our series, which will trace the development of our Prayer Book, can be found HERE.


We also have a part 3.5, found HERE, which summarizes the third part and talks a bit about the ethos of Prayer Book revision in The Episcopal Church.


Part FOUR, where we look at the notion of “inclusive and expansive language” as it pertains to the doctrine of the Trinity, can be found HERE.


Part FIVE, where look, at brief, at a few Biblical terms for God, is found HERE.


—Fr. Charles

A strange thing happened in our culture during the middle of the twentieth century: people demanded that the Bible be translated into conversational English.


I say that this is a strange thing because, prior to the 1950s at least, no one seemed all that concerned that the Bible spoke of “thee” and “thou” and tended to add “-th” to past-tense words (like “believeth”). So, what changed? What inspired people to push for “contemporary language” in our scriptures and in our liturgies? When did we decide that we no longer needed “formal” English and could do with only “conversational” or “colloquial” English?


These are the kinds of questions that plague my mind at times.


Language is shaped by its literature. English scholars note that (Early) Modern English is largely indebted to The King James Bible, the 1662 Book of Common Prayer, and the works of William Shakespeare. This makes sense because the Prayer Book liturgy and the public reading of the Bible were so common to people that it had to shape people’s words and thoughts. And Shakespeare was so wildly popular that his plays added phrases and grammar to popular English.
​

But languages are not frozen in time and as a body of literature grows, the language changes. And so, for our discussion, we owe a great debt to Mark Twain.

​Twain’s (in)famous The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is among the first novels written in what is called “colloquial” English. In some ways, Twain was responding to the philosophical trend known as “Realism,” which sought to convey things in terms equivalent to how they are actually presented—as opposed to “Idealism,” which seeks to convey things as they “ought” to be. So, in his book, Tom and Huck and Jim, etc. all speak like people from Missouri spoke. Twain did not attempt to render their phrasing and grammar or cadence into a more “formal” voice. Instead, he tried to replicate on the page how their words might’ve sounded to a listening ear.


Twain was hardly the first person to do this. In fact, such a convention was fairly common going back to the 1700s, but was often reserved for black and first-people’s dialogue, likely as a way to demonstrate their lack of intelligence or “savagery.” Twain, instead, allowed white people and black people to have the same kind of voice, which was characteristically that of rural Missouri.


That Twain’s book was so popular helped pave the way for a general acceptance of colloquial English in literature, especially in America.


At the beginning of the twentieth century there also arose an important artistic movement known as “the Harlem Renaissance.” Key figures of this movement include the poet Langston Hughes and the Florida novelist Zora Neale Hurston, among others. This has been described as a “blossoming of Black culture.” In terms of literature, this work not only helped introduce white America to the thoughts and emotions of black America, but it also introduced white America to the cadences and phrases of black America.


Zora Neale Hurston was an important figure in this regard, though she was often dismissed by her Harlem Renaissance peers for her use of black colloquial English in her work. It wasn’t until the 1980s that her work began to receive more widespread attention.


Alongside the literary advancements of the Harlem Renaissance was the advent of a centrally important American musical tradition: jazz.


Jazz is a musical tradition born out of traditional West African music, the spirituals, and the blues. Jazz is a black American musical form that, in my opinion, captures the essence of American culture. It is the product of black people—stolen from their homelands in West Africa—using European musical instruments, but reinterpreting them along ancestral conventions. The result is a form of music that is largely interpretive and improvisational. Jazz takes the rigid formality of classical European music and gives it a flow and feeling that is as much about the heart as it is the mind.


By the time of the 1940s and 1950s, jazz had had a significant impact on American youths and began to spawn a white counter-culture from within the universities. Figures like William S. Burroughs and Gary Snyder, along with individuals like Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac, form the core of what became known as “the Beat Generation.” Kerouac, with books like On The Road and The Dharma Bums, helped popularize the narrative of this group of writers and poets. Influenced by jazz, the Beats concocted a style of poetry heavily reliant on rhythm and improvisation, rather than strict meter and rhyme.


As part of their overall iconoclastic package, the Beats challenged much of the (white) status-quo and helped give rise to the American counter-culture that blossomed throughout the 1960s and into the early 1970s.


The 50s and 60s also saw the rise of youth culture, giving birth to the modern concept of the “teenager.”


All of this had an impact on language in America. And as with other aspects of the status quo, formality in language was dismissed as lacking reality.


In the midst of these cultural changes, in the 1950s, a man was quietly working for the American Bible Society and he came up with a fairly radical new linguistic theory. Eugene Nida was a linguist who gave us the concept of “Functional (or, Dynamic) Equivalence.”


The work of translation involves finding word equivalents between languages. An example of this would be the translation of the Hebrew word “‘adon” into the English word “lord.” Both are terms used of a male leader figure in a household or tribe. And so, in formal equivalence, “lord” is seen to have an equal meaning as “‘adon.” Another good example might be the Aramaic word “abba,” which we translate as “father.” Both are words used for the male parent of a child and so are seen as (formally) equivalent.


Nida presents us with another way of thinking about this. He essentially invites us to ask the question: ‘did the people in the Bible think the same thing of, say, “‘adon,” that we think of “lord?” And, if not, is there a better word for translation purposes?’


Dynamic equivalence made major shockwaves in the world of literary translation. For churches, dynamic equivalence and the discovery of the Dead Sea Scrolls* inspired a number of new translations of the Bible. As already mentioned, the King James Version had, since the 1600s, served as the standard English Bible. Given that advancements had been made in biblical scholarship and, as seen above, linguistic conventions had begun to shift, there was an increased desire to offer a Bible that was easy to read for the average person.


Various Protestant groups began offering their own translations. Kenneth Taylor paraphrased the KJV into contemporary English for his kids and published it as The Living Bible. The American Bible Society, following Eugene Nida’s work, developed Today’s English Version (popularly known as The Good News Bible) in order to offer a readable Bible that could also be easily translated into different languages for missionary work. And an international and interdenominational group sought to unseat the KJV with a more accurate English Bible, giving us the New International Version (NIV) in 1978.


Concurrent to this, the Roman Catholic Church was involved in their own work of English Bible translation—giving us The Jerusalem Bible. This was published in 1966 and uses Dynamic Equivalence. It is also notable in that JRR Tolkien (yes, the author of The Lord of the Rings) was involved in the translation work, giving the work a degree of rich literary quality.

​And this is all happening in the midst of The Second Vatican Council, which famously shifted the Catholic Church away from the Latin Mass and into culturally-reflective and vernacular liturgies. Vatican II had a huge effect on The Episcopal Church and our work of liturgical reform, leading us to make the 1979 BCP into a mostly “contemporary” language book.


This is evidence of The Church at large responding to changes in the culture, and beginning to reflect those changes.


Which brings us to today. We sit at the cusp of a new way of thinking about the language we use and how that language shapes the ways in which we think and act. Language, after all, is reflective of what happens in our minds. It is expressive of what we value and what we perceive. And this is something that we will discuss more in our next part.


But in closing this part of our discussion, it is perhaps worthwhile to note something about The Church in regards to its approach to language: Protestants tend to be the drivers behind translation.


Individuals like Wycliffe, Hus, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli, etc. all felt that the Bible and the liturgies of The Church need to be rendered into the language of the people. The Catholic Church, of course, resisted this.

It’s easy for us on the non-Catholic side of things to quickly dismiss the stance of The Roman Catholic Church on these issues**. But their position was not without merit.


To be a Christian is to subscribe to a certain set of doctrines. These give definition to what makes Christianity “Christian” (as opposed to, say, Buddhist or Mormon). This means that a key part of evangelism involves the difficult dance of getting people onboard with these doctrines, even if they are quite foreign to a person’s way of thinking. In some ways, evangelism is bringing people into the culture and customs of a particular society (The Kingdom of God, i.e., The Church). This notion becomes difficult when translation becomes a factor***.


So, the impetus of The Roman Catholic Church has long been more about brining the world into The Church. Whereas the Protestant impulse has been to bring the Church into the world. Of course, this is one of the reasons that I love being Anglican—because we toe the line between both approaches. Which puts us square in the middle of our current discussions.


The tension of liturgical revision is found in trying to be faithful to the revelations and doctrines of The Church while also responding to the (Spirit-filled) challenges and convictions of the world. Yes, we call people into The Church. But how can we do that calling if the signage is unreadable or unrecognizable?




Click HERE for part SEVEN (Man, this series is getting long, huh?)









NOTES


* The world of biblical scholarship was rocked in 1946 when a shepherd boy, tossing rocks into to amuse himself, accidentally broke a clay jar. The resultant discovery was a collection of scrolls hidden by a sort of doomsday cult from a compound at a desert place known as Qumran. Among those scrolls were extremely old and well-preserved copies of Old Testament books. This gave scholars of the Bible access to resources that allowed for more accurate translations. The King James Bible did not have access to this kind of work, itself being a translation of the Latin Vulgate.




** Growing up, in my Christian school history textbooks, I’d read how wicked the Catholics (and even the Anglicans!) were for keeping the Bible chained up inside the churches, not letting people take it home to read or whatever. This argument completely misses the fact that BOOKS WERE REALLY EXPENSIVE and the process for printing them was tedious and time-consuming.




*** Case in point: the schism between the so-called Oriental Orthodox Churches (Copts, Ethiopians, Armenians, Syrians, etc.) and the Eastern Orthodox Churches (Greeks, Russians, Georgians, etc.). This is the result of the “Miaphysite Heresy.” You can read all about it HERE. The short of it is that two communities of Christians were split due to a mistranslation of a document outlining a controversy involving the Trinity.

​When I was an associate priest in West Palm Beach, I came up with a semi-regular Bible study called That’s Really In The Bible?! where we would look at obscure passages from the Bible—those parts that somehow don’t wind up in the Sunday lectionary, parts that young Baptists know because of our tendency to read through the Bible while bored at church on Sunday.


We’d talk about, say, different passages where animals talk, or whether or not Ezekiel encountered UFOs, or even on passages about ghosts and the undead for Halloween.

​One time, we even explored feminine language for God as found in the Bible.


This particular class marked a sort of turning point for me. See, I had grown up being taught that God was always spoken of in masculine terms. “The Bible couldn’t be more clear,” Sunday School teachers and fellow church-goers might say.


Then I went and became Episcopalian.


Becoming Episcopalian presented me with a number of personal challenges. First, I had grown up being told that Catholicism was a borderline cult that had corrupted Christianity and therefore anything that smacked of Catholicism was evidence of something deeply wrong—which included both the liturgy and sacramental theology. And, second, that liberalism had infiltrated a church like The Episcopal Church and liberalism was an anti-God and anti-American state of mind. Ordaining gay people? Ordaining women? All of it was off-limits. As was anything related to feminism—which was only a form of liberal “perversion” that had twisted women’s minds.*


So, here I was, going to a church with chanting and vestments. People referred to Sunday as “the Mass.” And on top of that, there was quite often a woman preaching and celebrating that Mass!**


My first obstacle was coming to terms with the theology of the Eucharist. In case you don’t know, Baptists are pretty strict memorialists, meaning that they tend to view “the Lord’s Supper” as a thing we do in memory of Jesus. There’s nothing more to it than that. The idea of “transubstantiation” (which comes from Saint Thomas Aquinas and holds that the bread and the wine of the Mass/Eucharist actually becomes the flesh and blood of Jesus) was quite anathema—a doctrine rejected by all good Christians of the Protestant Reformation.***


On top of the celebrant’s stall in Bethesda-by-the-Sea sits a carving of a pelican, wings spread out, two chicks at her sides. When I first saw it, I had mistaken it for a chicken, thinking it a reference to Jesus’ words in Matthew’s gospel (of which I’ll speak in a bit). I later learned that it was a common symbol of medieval Christianity, based in the belief (later proven to be untrue) that in times of scarcity a mother pelican will rip open her own flesh and feed her young with her blood. The Eucharistic parallels of this should be clear.


This image did two things for me. First, it set me on a trail of study that led me to a richer sacramental theology (particularly noting that Jesus quite literally refers to the bread and wine as His flesh and blood in the Bible—I’d grown up a biblical literalist, but here was a passage where biblical literalists suddenly start getting comfortable with metaphor and interpretation…). It also made me realize that, at least going back to the Middle Ages, Christians were okay with feminine depictions of God.


Remember that I mentioned how I confused the pelican-in-her-piety (the name of this kind of image) for the chicken in Matthew? It suddenly dawned on me that Jesus Himself used a feminine image to refer to Himself—and, thus, to God.


In other words, there were references to God as female in the Bible. This stuff wasn’t just made up, or drawing from extra-biblical sources!


I decided to tackle this in a paper for a class in college, citing a few references from the Bible. But I hadn’t done anything in-depth. But I knew there had to be more.


By the time I had graduated seminary, become a priest, I had become comfortable with feminine language for God. I could say “it’s biblical.” But I didn’t know just how biblical. So when That’s Really In The Bible?! came around, I saw an opportunity.


Forgive me for not writing all of this out, but here’s a link to a PDF of my references from that class. As you can see, there are many references. You can also see that they are mostly in the Old Testament (the Hebrew Scriptures).


It seems that Jews of antiquity were largely comfortable with feminine language for God. Not only do we have numerous references for God being described in mothering terms, we also have names for God that are overtly feminine.


Shekhina is a Jewish-rooted concept that is feminine in grammar as well as ideology. The shekhina is the "glory" of God, or God's presence and that presence is understood to be feminine. The shekhina has also been seen as synonymous with the Holy Spirit. As is stated in this article, the shekhina is light (glory). As would be fire, which was poured out on the disciples on the day of Pentecost. Jesus says, in John’s gospel, that He would be sending the Paraclete (translated as Helper or Advocate in some English Bibles)—The Holy Spirit—as an ongoing presence for His disciples.


El Shaddai is another name this is frequently translated as "God Almighty" in English.

​A notable appearance of this is Genesis 49:25-26. Some see this as most accurately meaning "God of the Mountain." But the word shaddayim, a Hebrew word, means "breast." There seems to be a possible mountain/breast connection (which should be obvious). "The Breasted God" is a possible translation. Another, more commonly accepted, one is "God of Sufficiency," or, "God Who Suffices." If the image of nursing from the breast is in the background of the latter, then the feminine meanings are apparent.


Additionally, There’s Eloah, the feminine, singular form of the word Elohim. It is used most often as applying to God, and appears 41 times in the book of Job.


That’s a powerful index of references—again, from the pages of the Bible—that refer to God in feminine terms.


In the New Testament, as you can see from the linked document above, Jesus uses a few references Himself (mother hen, God as a woman looking for a lost coin, etc.). But things also get kinda weird when you start scratching the surface a bit.


Saint Paul writes to the Church at Corinth: “[Jesus] became wisdom from God for us.” (I Corinthians 1:30, CEB). Now it’s important to know that that word “became” is a form of the Greek word “γίνομαι” (ginomai—where we get the word for “gene,” among other things), which is a word used for the Incarnation (most notably in John 1, where it says that “the Word became flesh”). So, in other words, Paul is saying that Jesus has incarnated God’s wisdom.


Awesome.


Now, here’s where things get interesting.


Paul was, of course, a Jew. He was also a rabbi, a teacher of Jews. Which means that he not only deeply knew the scriptures of his people, but also how to interpret them. When he became a Christian, he applied that Jewish framework to his theological writing.


Paul is the first great theologian of The Church. His writings make up the bulk of the New Testament and are the first articulations of how Christians understand God and the relationship between Jesus and God (namely, that Jesus is God). And he articulated that from a mostly Jewish framework—teaching us how Jesus fits into the Jewish conception of God.


Paul would have known the Wisdom literature: Proverbs, Ecclesiastes, the Wisdom of Ben Sirah (known as either Ecclesiasticus or Sirach), and the Wisdom of Solomon, among others.


In the Jewish religious tradition, Wisdom is spoken of in feminine terms. “Wisdom shouts in the street,” Solomon‡ writes, “in the public square she raises her voice.” (Proverbs 1:20 CEB)


So, Wisdom is feminine. Keep that in mind.


In his letter to the Colossians, Saint Paul includes this masterful hymn about Jesus:


The Son is the image of the invisible God,
        the one who is first over all creation,
Because all things were created by him:
        both in the heavens and on the earth,
        the things that are visible and the things that are invisible.
            Whether they are thrones or powers,
            or rulers or authorities,
        all things were created through him and for him.
He existed before all things,
        and all things are held together in him. (Colossians 1:15-18 CEB)


There is some rich theology in those words.


Now, let’s compare them to these words:


I now know everything, visible and hidden, 
    for Wisdom, the designer of everything that is,
        has taught me.
Wisdom is the warm breath of God’s power.
    She pours forth from the all-powerful one’s pure glory.
        Therefore, nothing impure can enter her. 
    She’s the brightness that shines forth from eternal light.
    She’s a mirror that flawlessly reflects God’s activity.
    She’s the perfect image of God’s goodness.
From my youth, I loved her and sought her out.
    I sought to make her my bride.
    I burned within for her beauty. 
    She honors her dignified birth by sharing her life with God.
The master of all loves her.


These are the words of Wisdom of Solomon 7:21-8:5 (Common English Bible, also somewhat amended here for length—you should really check out the full passage). Do they sound familiar?


“Perfect image of God’s goodness who shares God’s life?”


“The designer of everything that is?”


If we took out the “she” in there, you could almost think that it was a hymn written about Jesus. And that is precisely Saint Paul’s point! When he writes that Jesus incarnates God’s wisdom, he’s making a pretty shocking claim that Jesus is an incarnation of a feminine aspect of God.


All of this goes to show that we’re missing some pretty important language—language and images used by the biblical writers themselves—if we only stick to talking about God in masculine terms.


Again, the Bible is not shy about this. We’ve had this tendency in the West to think of God as an old white guy up in the sky somewhere. But that is not really all that biblical (let’s be honest, how many white guys have you ever met that have skin like burnished bronze or hair like wool? Because that’s how God is described in many of the prophetic writings).


Yes, God is Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. God is Lord. God is Jesus.


The Bible is also quick to tell us that God is a rock (the Psalms are rife with this and take a look at Paul in I Corinthians 10:1-4); God is a refreshing water-brook (Psalm 42:1); God is a lion (Revelation 5:5); God is a lamb (John 1:29, among many others); God is a mother bear and a mother hen; God is spirit and God is love.


The biblical language for God is rich, quick to talk about God in terms other than “old man.” And because of that, our understanding of God is enriched.


We would do well to remember the textured language of God. After all, it was God who gave us this language for Himself in the first place.




(Click HERE for Part SIX)




NOTES


* Let me be fair and say that, save for maybe one or two particular individuals, this second notion about feminism and liberalism was not overtly expressed in such terms. This was more my perception of a general ethos. My perception could have been incorrect. So, if you’re reading this and you’re from my childhood church, I hope you don’t feel offended. I’m trying to articulate my own experience here, which might not have been the same as yours.


** In case you’re wondering, I’m talking about Bethesda-by-the-Sea. And that priest was Rev. Lynne Jones, who was ordained out of The Chapel of Saint Andrew. Connections!


*** It needs to be noted that John Smyth, the founder of the Baptist movement, took things a little further than the more popular Reformers (Luther and Calvin). Both Luther and Calvin articulated a sort of sacramental theology. Smyth, following the so-called “Radical Reformation,” was able to reject this on the grounds that such a doctrine was not spelled out in the Bible. It is also interesting to note that memorialism appears to be the functioning doctrine of The Church of England during the reign of Elizabeth I, according to the 39 Articles of Religion (see Article 28 on p. 873 of BCP).


‡ Solomon is the traditional author of the book of Proverbs, but historians tend to doubt the accuracy of this.