Deb I forget these issues exist. I'm am very offended about changing the word "her" to "him" by the webmaster.
Given all that has happened in the theology since the early 1970s, male language as the exclusive way to refer to God is dead, dead, dead as an issue - unless you run into narrow mined people which you have here, it would seem. A problem with saying what the Bible might have been had it been written "by God's daughters instead of her sons."' is beyond reason. God is not a superman with a penis and testicles. God is not bound by physical limitations of human gender. Geneses 1 states that God created human beings "in the image of God, male and female." At the very least God transcends human sexual limitations. You can go to the hymnals of the Lutherans (With One Voice) and the United Church of Christ (New Century Hymnal) and see hymns that refer to God with feminine terminology. The Scriptures themselves refer to a God who would nourish us a mother suckles her child at the breast, and a mother hen who would draw her children under her wings. The "Spirit" as the third 'person' of the Trinity in Greek is a feminine word, sophia, (wisdom, which is feminine...) and the Hebrew words for spirit - wind, breath, are hardly gender specific. To get around this present controversy, rather than wage theological war, the solution is to eliminate all gender specific references as in: what the Bible might have been had it been written "by God's daughters instead of God's sons." That does still change another person's words but doing away with pronouns is what I do in worship all the time to avoid gender specific pronouns. Once they agree on my wonderful proposal above - can they object to saying the word "God" again - then organize a library study on Biblical understandings and terminology for God. It will blow everyone away. Vince aka (the Rev) Vince Deb Messling wrote: >I'm doing a quickie poll out there to find out if people find the use of >female pronouns for God to be offensive. > > Here's the background, if you want: I coordinate a book discussion >group, and the readers chose "The Red Tent," which is a novel based on >biblical characters, written from a female point of view. On the library's >web page promoting the group, I used a quote from an Amazon review which >said that the book was what the Bible might have been had it been written >"by God's daughters instead of her sons." > >The webmaster was VERY upset and changed the pronoun to "his," then the >library director asked me to remove the quote altogether. > >I was taken aback, and I'm tempted to make a bit of a fuss from an >intellectual freedom point of view, but if my usage was truly offensive to >sincere people, I don't want to do it. I'm not religious and I don't even >know many religious people, so it's hard for me to gauge. Is it offensive?
