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546 - The Power of Language in Worship |
The Power of Language in Worship
THE dynamic and motivation behind the work of the Inclusive Language Lectionary Committee reflect the desire that the Scriptures read and heard within the context of worship address all persons directly and affirm their personhood as well. The task of recasting the language of the Revised Standard Version has been undertaken for the sake of helping male and female alike encounter the Word of God without the cultural biases of the past and the present, of the original text and the succession of translators and transmitters. This work of finding the words, phrasings, and equivalences which affirm and include rather than demean and ignore intends that women see and hear themselves as a vital part of the biblical story. And beyond considerations of gender, this has been a task hoping that persons whose skin is dark might hear beyond the traditional color symbolism which equates darkness with evil and death, so that the biblical proclamation addresses them, too, as redeemed rather than cursed. Similar affirmation is intended for those with physical impairments, so that their personhood is not equated with and defined in terms of that impairment. Also sensitive to encouraging more positive Jewish-Christian relationships, the recasting effort has moderated those texts which, for example, casts the "Jews" rather than the religious leadership of that day as enemies of Jesus and vice versa.
The significance of these considerations, broadened beyond that of gender-specific exclusivity and inclusion, considerations which take care not to allow racist and anti-Semitic biases of later periods and of today be heard in the passages read, emerge out of the realization of just how powerful Scripture read within the context of worship is in shaping one's identity before God and in relation to one's neighbor. Scripture read and heard in religious assembly is a potent determinant of what people perceive to be their God-given identity, as male and female, as white and non-white, as somehow physically different from others and as Christian in relation to other faiths.
I
The power of worship to shape identity is found in the encounter between the divine and the human during the sacred assembly. That designated time and place enables a new dynamic to take place between God and the gathered people of God. At the very heart of the occasion is
Robert A. Bennett is Professor of Old Testament at Episcopal Divinity School. In addition to being a member of the Inclusive Language Lectionary Committee, he has served on the Standing Liturgical Commission of the Episcopal Church and chaired of its Inclusive Language Committee. Dr. Bennett has written The Bible for Today's Church (1979) and God's Work of Liberation (1976).
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the reading and hearing of the divine revelation, the very focus of which is the power of God to forge human identity and to shape human history anew. Worship, whether self-consciously liturgical and cultic or not, is powerful because it is a reenactment of what has been played out already within the biblical narrative. This reality, whether expressed as high mass or revival meeting, is what makes the Scripture read, the creeds rehearsed, the prayers prayed, the sermon preached, the hymns sung, the liturgy enacted, and the silences observed such powerful determinants of how we perceive God and ourselves. Worship, therefore, is not merely our natural human response to the reality of God within our lives, but more importantly a vital setting wherein God is encountered.
How this reality is articulated, the language used to describe and foster it, is a powerful shaper of our own identity and of our conceptualization of God. We are well aware today that the words we speak and hear are not merely tools for expressing our thoughts. They are potent determiners of who we are and of the world in which we live. Both of these aspects of speech are expressed in the biblical doctrine of creation and redemption:
"And God said, 'Let there be . . . .' and it was so" (Gen. 1:9).
"And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us" (John 1: 14).
Psalm 33 hymns the glory of God in terms of God's power to forge creation and guide human history, so the biblical record is itself conscious of the power not only of God's word in nature, but also in the affairs of men and women, nation-states, and societies. And by extension, the human users of that divine word also share in its creative and destructive power. The legacy of the use of Scripture in worship-and beyond-is expressed in the commissioning of the prophet Jeremiah:
Behold, I have put my words in your mouth.
See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms,
to pluck up and to break down,
to destroy and to overthrow,
to build and to plant (Jer. 1:9-10).
II
This spoken and heard biblical word is never encountered without some human determinant attached. It is never without some human context. Three particularly powerful matrices which affect just what it is we hear in the Bible are cultural mores, particular theological stances, and church tradition. The Bible itself is the product of the cultural mores of the peoples and societies of the Eastern Mediterranean two to three thousand years ago. The male centeredness and patriarchal bias of that age shaped even Israel's expression of God who was beyond gender and human form and the worldview of nature religions. The theological restatement of the salvation story in philosophical idiom and with a heretofore unused linguistic precision encountered in Christianity's westward expansion also changed the expression and perception of the
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548 - the Power of Language in Worship |
biblical revelation. Church tradition, the historical self-awareness of the ongoing community of faith, also determined what was heard, particularly in the emergence of lectionaries which juxtaposed selected biblical texts for specific church needs. These three matrices not only affected the textus receptus, but are reinforced all over again with the work of the translator from the original Hebrew and Greek into Latin and the emerging national languages.
The cultural overlay within the time-bound human medium of expression, while not difficult to detect, is not easy to root out. The patriarchal worldview of ancient Israel is expressed in the genderspecific terms used to talk about God. While this is mitigated by the theological awareness that God was not a human, let alone a male, what was then used metaphorically has for today's hearer become descriptive statement. For all of the masculine nouns and pronouns used in the Bible to designate the transcendant deity, Israel could unequivocally affirm: "For I am God and not man (lo'-ish)" (Hosea 11:9b). It is this theological sophistication as well as gut sense of God as beyond gender that saves the Bible from its own excluding cultural overlay and which also enboldened the Inclusive Lectionary Committee to follow the spirit of the text sometimes in the face of the gender specifies of the original text.
English translations have for the most part reinforced and actually expanded the gender specification and patriarchal bias of the ancient cultural contexts of the Bible. Numerous instances can be cited where the original Greek and Hebrew are neutral or ambiguous with regard to gender, but are regularly rendered in English Bible translations as masculine. The Greek indefinite pronoun tis, generally understood as meaning "someone" or "anyone," becomes in the King James Version and the Revised Standard Version "any man," as in Mark 4:23 ("If any man has ears to hear. . .") or John 7:17 ("If any man will do his will . . ."). Sometimes translations have introduced male references not found in the original text. The Greek behind the RSV translation of 11 Cor. 5:17 ("If anyone is in Christ he is a new creation") has neither the pronoun subject nor the verb. Renderings closer to the original, as in the Jerusalem Bible and New English Bible, simply read: "If anyone is in Christ there is a new creation."
Theological statements as found in the words of creeds, hymns, and prayers are also potent shapers of what we perceive as real in our world and how we view our own identity. Our God-language in prayer, preaching, hymnody, and creeds does not merely state what the faithful think about God, but effectively forges those images that condition our view of God, ourselves, and our neighbors. The language that we use to articulate our belief in God profoundly affects how we relate to God and to one another. Much theological discourse shows the effect of transposing the idiom of the biblical witness into the thought-world of Greco-Roman culture and philosophical discourse. The passionate, action orientation of the biblical drama of redemption is turned into the
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dispassionate, precise terminology of the philosophers and dialecticians of the West. Biblical metaphor gives way to more "scientific" metaphor. But as New Testament scholars of Christian origins remind us, patriarchal bias becomes more entrenched and more dominant under GrecoRoman listings of virtues and systems of household codes. The work of New Testament scholars such as Elizabeth Schüssler-Fiorenza is essentially one of decoding the theological overlay and attempting to reencode it from a feminist perspective. If nothing else, this hermeneutic of suspicion should sensitize us to the heavy hand of early theological statement in shaping both our reading of Scripture and the very text of Scripture itself.
Church tradition joins culture and theology to forge still another link in the chain which binds us to view Scripture as most of us do today. The excluding terminology and ideology associated with biblical views on male dominance and female subordination, light and dark color symbolism, the rejection of physical impairment as indicators of sinfulness become the more fixed when in church tradition certain biblical texts are culled out and placed in juxtaposition with others within the liturgy. Traditionally, certain texts become associated with specific occasions, such as the reading of Ephesians 5 on female submission as part of the marriage liturgy or the reading of Proverbs 31:10-31 on the dutiful housewife for female religious figures. Needless to say, it makes a difference when on liturgical occasions such as celebrations of the state or government we select Romans 13 on obeying appointed authority. Even though negative examples have been chosen, the point is that the choice of Scripture reading on certain occasions is clearly meant to influence and shape the consciousness of the hearer. Tradition no less than culture and theology influences the identity of the worshiper, and when all of these are joined in the matrix of worship, little wonder that we can speak of the power of language, specifically of biblical readings in worship. 1
Within the liturgy and experience of worship, Scripture, culture, theology, and tradition meet to form a most powerful arena for the formation of self-or for the destructive denigration of one's personhood. In the sacred moment and sacred place, these shapers of one's reality converge and are experienced not merely as neutral tools for expressing one's faith in God, but as the occasion of forming a new being. Language within worship has the power to renew and enliven or to oppress and destroy.
III
The language we use in worship should not only express the truth of God's creating and redemptive work, but also consciously assist in affirming that all of God's creatures-female as well as male, dark as
1 See Marjorie Procter-Smith, "Images of Women in the Lectionary," Women: Invisible in Church and Theology, eds. Elizabeth Schüssler Fiorenza and Mary Collins. Concilium 182 (1985) 6, pp 51-61.
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well as white-hued, the physically impaired as well as others-are addressed for these divine purposes. This is not always true when culture-bound language excludes and makes all sensitive persons uncomfortably aware that the salvation proclamation is not heard as such by all. With the realization that sacred assembly shapes who we are, what we can hope to become, and what our relationship to our neighbor should be, the task of An Inclusive Language Lectionary takes on increased significance. The negative impact of a predominance of male terms for God and for the people of God is now seen as a tool to enforce male superiority and female inferiority. One is often confronted in the worship service not with theological, let alone biblical affirmation, but with socio-anthropological proclamation.
The bias of patriarchal assumptions which is expressed in the language of much of our worship is that the male is superordinate and the female subordinate, that the male represents the species thereby making the female a subspecies. It is just this worldview that linguists-along with educators, child psychologists, book publishers, and even the civil service system and the news media-are now attacking within secular society. The National Council of Teachers of English, for example, published its Guidelines for Nonsexist Use of Language over ten years ago. Groups such as this have already accepted the fact that male nouns and pronouns are not used generically in the English language. They cannot, they do not include female as well as male referents. It is also increasingly obvious that these terms were never really used generically, but-as in the legal system-referred exclusively to males.
The Introduction to An Inclusive Language Lectionary states:
It is apparent that any selection of Scripture read in a service of worship has been lifted from its biblical context. In the study of the Bible, the context in which a biblical passage occurs is crucial to its interpretation. When passages are read in a service of worship, however, they are read in a new context, in relation to one another and to the Church Year. This radical change in the context of selections is a major fact that differentiates a lectionary from the Bible.
This distinction between a lectionary and the Bible explains the difference between the work of the National Council of Churches of Christ's Inclusive Language Lectionary Committee and the Revised Standard Version Translation Committee. The one recasts the language of the RSV to meet the needs of its use in worship; the other is a translation of the Hebrew and Greek texts within their original historical context. The legitimacy of the task of recasting language for use within worship today is based upon its practical, pragmatic, and functional role of assisting the bearer of the divine word to encounter it as creative and redemptive. Scripture read and heard during the worship service is a key determinant of human identity as well as revelation of divine presence.
The work of the Inclusive Language Lectionary Committee can profitably be interpreted as part of the new awareness of the importance
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article, John Barton moves debate about the relative virtues and limitations of the historical-critical approach (with its focus on the original context and genetic meaning of a text) and those of structural analysis and canonical criticism (which stress the meaning of the final form and context of a passage) beyond the present impass. 2 Neither approach, Barton argues, adequately accounts for God as the Bible's major referent, or for that matter the religious community which is the ultimate depository of Scripture. The emerging image is that of a quadrant formed by God and the community of faith as well as the original historical context of the Bible and text qua text. If the genetic thrust of historical criticism makes it seek truth primarily in the original meaning and intention of a passage, and the contemporary immediacy of structualism seeks meaning in a range of final impressions, then fundamentalism tends to be locked into God-as-sole-referent of Scripture. An Inclusive Language Lectionary stresses the reader/hearer side of the quadrant.
Recasting lectionary texts in the interest of the needs of the community of faith is not only legitimate. It stands as a challenge to the up to now nearly exclusive claims to legitimacy given to translations which seek to convey the original historical meaning of a text. Barton astutely links this latter claim with Romanticism's fascination with an author's original intention as the exclusive meaning of a text. The power of language within the context of worship is such that we are moved to address the issue of exclusivity in the interest of the spirit of the gospel and of the needs of the worshipers. Redaction criticism emerged as a discipline when the historical critic became interested in the needs of the first hearers of the proclaimed word. Why must we pay attention exclusively to the ancient hearers of the word and ignore the claims of the modern assembly upon the revealed word? An Inclusive Language Lectionary is a challenge to the biblical scholar to acknowledge the legitimacy of the divine/human encounter in worship as an unfolding of the meaning of Scripture beyond its original culturally conditioned limitations. The Bible itself is still the most articulate witness to the salvation drama as one that challenges the culture, accepted theology, tradition, and biases of every age.
2 John Barton, "Classifying Biblical Criticism," Journal for the Study of Old Testament 29 (June 1984), pp. 19-35.