533 - Inclusive Language and Linguistic Blindness

Inclusive Language and Linguistic Blindness

By Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite

Long afterward, Oedipus, old and blinded, walked the roads. He smelled a familiar smell. It was the Sphinx. Oedipus said, "I want to ask one question. Why didn't I recognize my mother?" "You gave the wrong answer, " said the Sphinx. "But that was what made everything possible," said Oedipus. "No," she said. "When I asked, What walks on four legs in the morning, two at noon, and three in the evening, you answered, Man. You didn't say anything about women. " "When you say Man, " said Oedipus, "you include women too. Everyone knows that. " She said, "That's what you think." ¹

When a project generates as much heat as has the publication of the Inclusive Language Lectionary ² one begins to look around to see if there is some light being generated as well. Reactions to the introduction of inclusive language into a translation of portions of Scripture have been mixed and have, at least in some quarters, precipitated discussion of the issue of the linguistic exclusion of women in the biblical canon and its modern translations.

The more one examines language and its use, the more one is convinced that making meaning through language is no simple task. Also, the fact that meaning is made in a certain way has profound

In this symposium on the Inclusive Language Lectionary, four members of the National Council of Churches committee that composed the Lectionary articulate some of the thinking that has gone on in their own minds as they have engaged in this task. They hold convictions concerning why the Lectionary is important and how the work needed to be carried out. They say what some of their hopes for the Lectionary are, and mention some limitations they see in it. These statements were first made public in oral form at a panel discussion during the 1985 Meeting of the American Academy of Religious and the Society of Biblical Literature. - ED.

Susan Brooks Thistlethwaite, Associate Professor of Theology and Culture at Chicago Theological Seminary, has been a member of the Inclusive Language Lectionary Committee since its inception. She wrote Metaphors for the Contemporary Church (1984) and edited A Just Peace Church (1986). She is also a member of the Editorial Council of THEOLOGY TODAY. Parts of this essay appeared in Religious Education (Fall, 1985) and are reprinted by permission.

¹ From "Myth," The Collected Poems of Muriel Rukeyser (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978).

² Philadelphia: Westminster Press. Year A, 1983; Year B, 1984; Year C, 1985.

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implications for how we see the world. Ruckeyser's poem very neatly illustrates this point. Because the answer that Oedipus gave was in a certain linguistic form, possibilities were closed for him. Had the language not deceived him about the linguistic invisibility of women, he would not have been blind to his mother's existence and so, now, blind as a result of his incest. The play on the word "blind" here is, of course, deliberate. Certain words do blind us. In fact, it is their function to do so.

Inclusive language is born in the struggle of those who are linguistically invisible as they come to the recognition that their invisibility reflects and perpetuates the exclusivist bias of the institutions of their society. When a corporation head decides to hire "the best man for the job," women have stopped wondering why they are not hired. Economic exclusivity depends on linguistic exclusivity. And lest we think that this is a problem of excluding only women, consider who the "Man" is in the black community. The "Man" is the white male boss. In terms of use, "man" is not only male; he's white and of the managerial class.

Movements for liberation throughout the world have exposed the myth that universalism can simply be posited by the projection of the identity of one particular group onto the whole. What is preached as the unity of "mankind" is but a limited sample, and one that is anything but representative of the whole. "Mankind" as defined in such projection is a particular class, race, and sex which is to be taken as normative.

Critical consciousness arises as one becomes aware of one's own sexual, racial, and class location and recognizes that the route to the universal is far rockier than one had previously imagined. The point is that for the needed universality to emerge, one must move through the particulars of experience as diverse as they are and not minimize the diversity in order to arrive at some homogenous whole.

In contrast to the view that this critical consciousness distorts biblical translation, the point to be made is that experiments with inclusive language are an effort to do better scriptural translation. We turn to the most difficult change made in the lectionary translation to explore this argument.

I

One of the more thoughtful of the responders to the Inclusive Language Lectionary wrote to the committee as follows:

MS page 346: (God) the Father (and Mother). This is probably the best way to deal with the problem. Retaining Father respects the original text, while placing Mother in brackets calls attention to the theological problem....

Several arguments for this procedure could be added. In the patriarchal society of antiquity, the patriarchal figure represented all the people in a way that our individualistic society could never comprehend. H. Wheeler Robinson tried to grasp this aspect of personal identity in antiquity by using the term "corporate personality." Since we no longer have such a sense, the use of the patriarchal term for God gives only a partial indication of the original meaning.

We form our ideas of God from language about human beings. This is

535 - Inclusive Language and Linguistic Blindness

one of the meanings of the imago dei. in many streams of biblical thought, the human being is not an amalgam of body and soul as in Platonism, but a vitalized whole. The power of this whole extended beyond the confines of the individual human being. The human personality is conceived as extending throughout the household and there is no absolute separation of the discrete individual from the kin-group, but an ever widening circle of relationship. There is a resulting oscillation between the individual, the kin group as an association of individuals, and the kin group as the unit or corporate personality.

We may imagine that language about God drawn from understandings of the human meant to convey this sense of corporate personality. One clue which allows this speculation is the same fluidity of reference from the one to the many and from the many to the one in reference to the Godhead.

There is no denying that Yahweh was worshipped as a member, though the chief member, of a pantheon of gods. Thus, in Genesis there remains reference to the marriages between the "sons of the gods" and the "daughters of human beings." "When humankind began to increase and to spread over all the earth, and daughters were born to them, the sons of the gods saw that the daughters of human beings were beautiful; so they took for themselves such women as they chose" (Gen. 6:1-3).

The prologue of the Book of Job contains a picture of a heavenly court or divine assembly of "sons of God" or "sons of the Gods" or simply "Gods" who are said to present themselves before Yahweh (Job 1:6; 2:1). In the Psalms, there is the injunction:

Give to Yahweh, you Gods,
Give to Yahweh glory and strength...

The prophet or messenger of Yahweh is an example of this fluidity of movement. The true prophet is more than Yahweh's representative. The prophet stands for Yahweh in certain circumstances. Some prophetic utterances illustrate this extension of corporate personality from God to human beings, as there is also the extension in the other direction (for example, the projection from human existence to the nature of God).

And Moses summoned all Israel and said to them: "You have seen all that the Lord did before your eyes in the land of Egypt, to Pharaoh and to all his servants and to all his land, the great trials which your eyes saw, the signs, and those great wonders; but to this day the Lord has not given you a mind to understand, or eyes to see, or ears to hear. I have led you forty years [who is speaking, Moses or God?] in the wilderness; your clothes have not worn out upon you, and your sandals have not worn off your feet; you have not eaten bread, and you have not drunk wine or strong drink; that you may know that I am the Lord your God [clearly this is God now speaking.]

Moses becomes God's representative in speaking to the people and so moves into first person language. ³

With this background, how differently we hear the Father language

³ Aubrey Johnson, The One and the Many in the Israelite Conception of God (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1942; 1961), p. 35. See also p. 27f.

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of the New Testament. The corporate sense of pater familias, the father of the household, is lost in contemporary usage; but it is part of the biblical use of the term "father." The authority of the father within the household was absolute, extending through wife, children, and servants who, in a sense, were regarded as extensions of the father. Servants could speak and act for the pater familias in the same way as Moses is able to speak in the person of God. The role of stewards in both Testaments evidences this extension of the personality of the master or father of the household through the agency of the steward (Gen. 44:4ff.; Luke 16:1-9).

Also included in the biblical corpus is the New Testament witness that Jesus broke with the sense of the authority of the father as dominating the household. Those whom Jesus included in God's family (as opposed to the biological family, see Mark 10:28-31) are thereby freed from submission (see Mary and Martha, Luke 10:38-42). These texts support an interpretation of the use of the term father for God as the one who frees us from oppression by including us in the family of God. When the will of God is done, none is excluded from this extended family.

The extended family is one of many meanings of corporate personality in the New Testament. The word "father" is used 170 times by Jesus in the gospels, the majority of these references occurring in Matthew. It is used on three levels: "my father" when Jesus prays and reveals his special identity in the household of God; "your father" in teaching the disciples how to relate to God; and "the father" when describing his message that God is a compassionate father who forgives us, provides for our needs, and wants to bring us home. That God's personality is to extend through the household of God, as in the Hebrew Scriptures, is clear from teachings such as Matt. 5:43-48.

"You have heard that it was said, 'You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy.' But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may be children* of your Father who is in heaven; for he makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the just and on the unjust. For if you love those who love you, what reward have you? Do not even the tax collectors do the same? And if you salute only your kin group,** what more are you doing than others? Do not even the Gentiles do the same? You, therefore, must be perfect, as your heavenly Father is perfect. (*RSV "sons"; **RSV, "brethren"; italics added)

The Father metaphor conveys a sense of the corporate life of God's kin group. This extends in both directions, as pericopes such as Luke 11: 13 (Matt. 7:11) illustrate. "If you then, who are evil, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the heavenly Father give good things to those who ask him?"

This striking theme of caring and concern of parents for children and of family members for one another is a representation of the goodness of corporate human life which images divine life. This is expressed three thousand years before Christ in the hymn to the Moon God Sin from Ur:

537 - Inclusive Language and Linguistic Blindness

"Compassionate and merciful father in whose hand the life of the whole land lies." About this hymn, the well-known biblical scholar Joachim Jeremias comments: "From the earliest time the word 'Father' when applied to God included for the Orientals something of what 'mother' means to us." ⁴ Jesus was such an "oriental."

II

Jeremias' declaration underlines the dictum that use needs to be taken into account in determining meaning. As has so often been observed in the work of Wittgenstein, "the meaning of a word is its use in the language." ⁵

It must be noted as well that use beyond the text cannot be dismissed in considering the meaning of a term taken in the biblical context but used in a contemporary setting. Thus, women's objections to the sexism of certain biblical words have less to do with their use in the biblical context and much more to do with their use in contemporary settings. This is conveyed very well by Rosemary Ruether when she states that "the exclusively male image of God in the Judeo-Christian tradition has become a critical issue of contemporary religious life. This question does not originate first of all in theology or in hermeneutics. It originates in the experience of alienation from the male image of God experienced by feminist women." ⁶

Thus, while the use of the term Father may have had the sense of the corporate personality of God within the biblical world, the translator must also take account of the use of the term Father within the contemporary world on a number of levels. Not only has the term "Father" lost the connotation of the representative of the household or kin group and the care and support shared in the group, but it has regained a sense of one-sided power over other members of the family which was, in fact, challenged by Jesus' relationship with God as Abba.

The substitution of "(God) the Father (and Mother)" for Father language in the New Testament is consistent with the biblical use of the term Father to convey the corporate nature of God, a sense which the solitary term "Father" today does not convey.

Parental care for the household of God is clearly the intention of so many texts in imaging God, including many images which are female, such as Jesus' lament over Jerusalem: "O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I

⁴ Joachim Jeremias, "Abba" in Abba. Studien zur neutestamentichen Theologie und Zeitgeschichte (Gottingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht, 1966), p. 162. Quoted in Robert Hanmerton-Kelly, God the Father: Theology and Patriarchy in the Teaching of Jesus (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1979), p. 81.

⁵ Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (New York: Macmillan, 1953), section 20e.

⁶ Rosemary Ruether, "The Female Nature of God: A Problem in Contemporary Religious Life," in Johannes-Baptist Metz and Edward Schillebeeckx, eds., God as Father? Concilium 143 (1981) 3, . 61.

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have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you would not!" (Matt. 23:37-38). When the biblical corpus pictures Jesus imaging himself as female, God is also so imaged, as Jesus is an extension of the personality of God. "My Father is working still, and I am working" (John 5:17-27). How much more sense does the addition of Mother make to the translation of Father given both the presence of female images for God within the biblical text and the attenuated individualism of Father language in contemporary English usage!

III

Like Oedipus, we are linguistically blind. We think that we can separate meaning from words and the way they are used. "Man" is said to be generic, even though its use is to designate one sex and not the other. God the Father is said to be beyond gender, but we find that this blinds us to the functional maleness of God in Christianity. And so, like Oedipus, we make all kinds of mistakes. Wittgenstein observes this confusion:

You say: the point isn't the word, but its meaning, and you think of the meaning as a thing of the same kind as the word, though also different from the word. Here the word, there the meaning. The money, and the cow that you can buy with it. ⁷

But "here the word, there the meaning" is nonsense. Meaning does not exist in any abstract, a historical location apart from words.

These mistakes are serious in everyday discourse. They are disastrous in Christianity. Christianity is a "language and the actions into which it is woven." ⁸ Christian speech is part of the activity of what it means to be a Christian. And, consequently, the activity of being a Christian depends upon speech. When a part of the Christian people are linguistically invisible, the community is functionally deformed.

The language of worship is particularly critical for the activity of being a Christian. Worship helps to create the people of God. The lectionary as a liturgical tool is thus a particularly significant form of speech for the activity of being a Christian. The direction of contemporary English usage has been toward the fragmentation of human community and must be countered in translation with the biblical message of interdependence, of the corporate nature of human community as it interacts with the corporate nature of God. This indicates the need to say more and not less.

But further, inclusivity in reference both to God and to human beings draws the biblical message into contact with contemporary experience and challenges both. The linguistic visibility of women gives flesh to the biblical metaphor of the Body of Christ in ways which are certainly

⁷ Wittgenstein, Investigations section 49e.

⁸ Ibid, section 7.

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implied in the biblical corpus (Gal. 3:28), but which are understood in new ways in the contemporary context.

The work on the implications of inclusive language translation is in its infancy. Nevertheless, some fragments of insight on language and its function have been made available by this work which have, perhaps, not been available in the same way before.