Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 04:4 (Spring 2000)
Article: Death Of Father Language
Author: David Lyle Jeffrey

Death Of Father Language

David Lyle Jeffrey

Attacking The Heart Of Christian Identity

The Father, from whom al/fatherhood in heaven and earth is named… (Ephesians 3:14–15)

Stories normalizing “goddess religion” now appear almost daily. Venues may vary, but not the theme. A Catholic cathedral in Sacramento celebrates a Mass with diaphonously veiled dancers and a version of Psalm 23 in which the feminine pronoun is used exclusively: “she restores my soul.” In the new service book of the United Church of Canada, by far Canada’s largest Protestant denomination, baptism is no longer required to be in the name of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. One declares now in the name of the “Creator, Liberator, and Healer” or, alternatively, in the name of “God, Source of Love; in the name of Jesus Christ, Love incarnate and in the name of the Holy Spirit, Love’s power.” In the first 100 pages there is only one reference to God as “Father”; instead, one prays to “Mother and Father God” or more simply “Mother God.” As with the Inclusive Language Lectionary on which it is modeled, this new liturgy represents a “systematic attempt to remove sexuality from males and to impose it on God.”1

Meanwhile, 1999 has seen two most improbable recordings appear at the top of the pop music charts in Europe and Britain—the CD “Abba Pater,” with Pope John Paul II chanting prayers, and Cliff Richards’s phenomenally successful “Millennium Prayer,” a version of “Our Father Who Art in Heaven,” sung to the tune “Auld Lang Syne.” At the turn of the millennium, from out of the vast unchurched proletarian ranks there seems to have come, as it were unbidden, a deep yearning cry for ultimate Fatherhood. Have the makers of the new lectionaries noticed?

Even if they have, we may doubt that it will much alter their altar. There is now a substantial, if aging, vested interest in feminized prayers, deities, and priestly vestments. A tradition of sorts has been established, and with it the anxious jealousies of institutional power. As so often is the case with the middle-aged “hip,” an apprehension of belatedness serves only to intensify, rather than diminish, hardening of the categories.

In most North American churches committed to the inclusive lectionary, the feminizing of God and erasure of the actual language of Jesus has after all been consistently and persistently part of a larger disenfranchisement of biblical teaching, first in the seminaries and then in the pulpits, for more than two decades. This ecclesiastical generation, deaf to biblical language, might choose to igno...