by Michael Hampson, a published author devoting his early-retirement from parish ministry to producing practical resources for busy clergy and lay-led congregations, beginning with the weekly lectionary resource Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud, ssra.uk
Thirty years ago, in making the move from ASB to Common Worship, the Church of England took the decision to vastly reduce the use of he/him pronouns for God.
This was an incredibly bold and progressive decision for a church traditionally defined by its liturgy.
That this decision really matters is seen not least in the open wounds that continue to grieve the contemporary church: institutionalised sexism, the abuse crisis, LLF. The role and the nature of gender is a common thread through these three – especially, inevitably, the role and nature of masculinity, and toxic masculinity. If we constantly reinforce the image of God as exclusively male, we just throw more fuel on these three fires.
Let us give thanks to the Lord our God
It is right to give (him) thanks and praise
It happened at the millennium. After twenty-seven years, we would have to start omitting the word ‘him’. It makes the rhythm of the line completely different. To practice, we chanted, before the service, ‘Right! Thanks! Praise!’
Other provinces and denominations had made the change more clumsily. The lazy default is to replace every male pronoun for God with the word God; hence, in many provinces: ‘It is right to give God thanks and praise’. It is factually accurate – you could sign it in a legal document – but it lacks all poetry: that double-g is ugly and awkward, and placing the word God on a down-beat is somehow just wrong. So others chose to say, ‘It is right to give our thanks and praise’. It is a more poetic line – but it makes it all about us.
The Common Worship solution is altogether better. It considers the line in its context. A look at the previous line reveals that the two suggestions for replacing the word ‘him’ (namely ‘God’ and ‘our’) are both redundant, as they are already specified in the previous line: it is ‘us’ giving thanks, ‘to the Lord our God’. The response in Common Worship – which simply omits the word ‘him’ – is sufficient, and far more poetic. ‘Right! Thanks! Praise!’
And of course no he/him: no endless reinforcement of the false image of a masculine God.
But somehow we didn’t manage to follow through on this incredibly bold and progressive decision, made thirty years ago. The bombardment of masculine pronouns continues unabated, not only in the traditional texts still in use (and in some other legacy texts brought forward), but in our preaching, in our conversations, in our parish magazine articles, on our diocesan websites – and of course, in our bible translations.
I have actually made a point of avoiding he/him pronouns for God throughout my ministry – for more than thirty years. It takes a little time to develop the habit, and still the occasional pause to re?phrase a sentence before speaking – but pausing before making an assertion about God usually does no harm. And as a general principle, it seems appropriate not to make so many assertions about God in quick succession that pronouns become necessary. It seems appropriate not to reduce God to a pronoun at all, rather than arguing about which pronoun to use.
Late in the pandemic, I was seven years into ministry in a four-parish benefice, and it came about that the time was right to invite four different lay people each to take their first turn at providing a homily at the Parish Communion. Each brought their own unique gifts and experience to their contribution, and each was a delight. But this was interesting: one of the four had decades of faith history, and spoke of God as he/him; the other three had walked much of their faith journey in the previous few years, and they did not use pronouns for God at all; I had the impression that they would no more have referred to God as he/him than referred to God as ‘it’.
This is surely the future we need: a future without the false deification of masculinity, toxic or otherwise; indeed a future without the deification of either gender over the other; a future with God as naturally without gender, just as God is without height, weight, or race.
God’s pronouns are not he/him. And a tidy and universally uncontroversial solution is not to reduce God to a pronoun at all. We can all adopt this approach, in our preaching, in our conversations, in our parish magazine articles, on our websites; and in our liturgy, thanks to Common Worship, if we’re just slightly selective about what we use; and now, for the first time, in our bible readings as well.
Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud uses he/him pronouns for Father, for Son, and for Jesus. But God, Lord, the Holy Spirit, the eternal Word, and the eternal Christ, take no pronouns. And as with ‘Right! Thanks! Praise!’, the solution is always poetic. The first priority of the SSRA translation was that it should work well for reading aloud, in ordinary churches on ordinary Sundays. But inclusive language was just part of the translator’s DNA. So as the project reaches the milestone of publication as a perpetual print edition, it has yet another reason to be called remarkable, timely and necessary: it is the only lectionary translation in which God does not take he/him pronouns. It is done so subtly that you would not even notice unless it was pointed out. And yet the potential is a generation who would no more refer to God as he/him than refer to God as ‘it’; a generation who would simply choose not to reduce God to a pronoun at all, because that’s not how you speak about God.
So yes, the SSRA Complete Three-Year Lectionary is in print: the Luxury Hardback Edition, the Standard Lectern Edition, the Home Paperback Edition, all supported by the live website. In another surprise, I find that it also appears to be the only version of the Three-Year Sunday Lectionary in print in the UK at all, apart from the much-criticised new catholic edition in ESV. This does not speak well of our prioritisation and valuing of scripture, as a church.
One of the true joys of the last three years has been spending so much time in scripture. And one of many things I have learned is that we gain nothing from endlessly interrupting the flow of the lectionary with our special themed Sundays, with readings chosen ‘to fit the theme’. Those Sundays mirror the approach taken by our opponents: they risk presenting a false God that we have cobbled together in our own image. In stark contrast, if we just read steadily, ploddingly even, through the Gospels and Epistles for the year, as set for the Thirty-Four Sundays in Ordinary Time (given a muddle of different names in Common Worship), we hear a gospel of love and grace, and liberation from the law, condemning those who would condemn us, doggedly, week after week after week, making a mockery of those conservatives who claim to be ‘bible-believing Christians’ (and indeed of those liberals who think the solution is to respond to them by saying ‘the bible doesn’t matter any more’). What we need is a bible translation that re-engages us with the scriptures, that has us on the edge of our seats with anticipation as the readings are about to begin, that makes the reading of the scriptures a highlight of the Sunday gathering.
Sunday Scriptures for Reading Aloud aims for all of this and more. Take a click around, in time for the start of a new three-year cycle this Advent – or even in time for this Sunday – here.
Previous Via Media News blogs on SSRA are here and here
Any thoughts?