Jubilate: a conversation about Prayer Book revision and the language of our prayer

Ruth A. Meyers

“What language shall I borrow, to thank thee, dearest friend?” asks James Waddell Alexander, nineteenth-century Presbyterian preacher, teacher, and writer, who introduced this question addressing the Crucified One in his translation of the plaintive hymn “O sacred head, sore wounded,” by the seventeenth-century German Lutheran theologian and hymnwriter Paulus Gerhardt. ¹

“What language shall I borrow?” asks the poet and hymnwriter Brian Wren, a self-described “English, white, male, heterosexual . . . who values the Reformed tradition and has been shaped and enriched by it.” ² Sharply criticizing the predominance of masculine language and metaphors for God in worship texts, Wren called for new ways to name and praise God in worship.

“What language shall I borrow?” asks this straight white Christian cisgender woman, a priest of the Episcopal Church for over thirty years, a lifelong Episcopalian whose journey has taken her from the Diocese of Newark, to the biretta belt of the Midwest, and now to the mission fields of Berkeley. I will address this question first by investigating the nature of liturgical language. Then I will turn to some strategies for speaking rightly about God. Finally, I will consider some specific language that we might borrow.

Liturgical language

Liturgical language is a unique kind of communication, an amalgam of different forms of speech, some scripted, some extemporaneous, some handed on from generations past, and some newly crafted. Debra Rienstra and Ron Rienstra describe worship as a dialogic encounter, “a loving conversation between God and the people of God,” in which we speak to God, God speaks to us, and we speak to each other. We speak to God in words of praise, thanksgiving, confession, intercession, and sometimes lament. God speaks to us through Scripture and in words of welcome, healing, absolution, and blessing. We speak to one another in words of encouragement and confession, sharing our joys and our burdens, offering one another the peace of Christ. ³

Although God is beyond our comprehension, yet in corporate worship, we dare to name and call upon God. ⁴ As Christians, we claim that God reveals Godself to us and is active in human history, and we draw upon this partial knowledge, what we can see in a mirror dimly (1 Cor. 13.12), to shape the words of our worship.

British liturgical scholar Juliette Day proposes that the language of worship has several functions. Perhaps most obvious is that language communicates meaning, not just through the words themselves but in the context of ritual actions. Liturgical language articulates our experience of God, providing language for our personal prayer and forming our attitudes about God and the world. It also shapes our identity as the body of Christ, expressing our place within that body and creating bonds between worshipers. ⁵

Worship language edifies, that is, it builds up the body of Christ, a principle enshrined in the preface to the first Book of Common Prayer, which criticized the Latin of the late medieval Western liturgy because the people did not understand it and so “have heard with their ears only; and their hearts, spirit, and mind, have not been edified thereby.” ⁶ The language of worship not only transmits intellectual knowledge but is intended to form the whole person. Thus, worship language must be accessible to the assembly, not just in the language of the people but in words and images that resonate with our lives and experiences. Day points out that Jesus “conveyed complex ideas . . . using the images and language of everyday.” ⁷

Drawing on the work of Belgian philosopher Jean Ladrière, Day explains that liturgical language does not merely describe our actions or attitudes but “makes present that of which it speaks.” For example, the prayer, “Lord, hear us,” presupposes attitudes such as trust and veneration, and speaking those words brings those attitudes into effect. Using the collective pronoun we in a liturgical text brings into existence a community of those who participate in that prayer, whether everyone voices the prayer. Moreover, through proclamation and sacramentality, when we speak in liturgy of the mystery of Christ incarnate, crucified, and risen, or proclaim the reign of God, we make these a present reality, not just an event that is past or a hoped-for future. ⁸

These multiple functions of liturgical language require a certain kind of language, with inflections that vary depending upon the tradition. Several years ago, the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music identified qualities that together characterize public prayer in Anglican tradition:

The use of metaphor is essential when speaking to and about God. We know God as God chooses to reveal Godself to us, most especially in the incarnation, life, death, and resurrection of Jesus. Although we can speak concretely of the male human Jesus who was born of Mary, suffered under Pontius Pilate, and was crucified, dead, and buried, we grasp for words to comprehend the mysteries of incarnation and resurrection.

Brian Wren explains that metaphors “can organize thinking, encourage a transfer of associations and feelings between the matrices they intersect, extend language, generate new insights, and move us at a deep level by their appeal to the senses and imagination.” ¹⁰ When Moses says to the Israelites, “You were unmindful of the Rock that bore you” (Deut. 32:18), he did not mean that God is literally a hard, solid mineral material, nor did he mean that each of the Israelites, or the community as a whole, came forth from the womb of God. Yet in bringing together these metaphors—“the Rock that bore you”—Moses suggested something about God’s steadfast love, God’s action in forming the people of Israel, and God’s abiding care for the Israelites. ¹¹ The metaphors spark our imagination, inviting us to recognize God’s care for us and reminding us that the steadfast love of God never ceases.

Metaphorical language can give us a glimmer of the mystery of God and kindle new insights about who God is. Yet, no matter how rich our metaphors, our liturgical language will always be inadequate, as Lutheran liturgical scholar Gail Ramshaw pointed out at a recent conference on “The Once and Future Prayer Book.” Ramshaw proposed that “the doublets of Thomas Cranmer model judicious liturgical style.” ¹² Some of Cranmer’s doublets, says British liturgical scholar Geoffrey Cuming, serve as “a kind of aural underlining,” emphasizing the meaning of the text. ¹³ “We have erred and strayed from thy ways as lost sheep,” we say in the confession of sin, a text we continue to use in Rite I Morning Prayer (BCP 1979, 41). “Give most humble and hearty thanks to God . . . submitting ourselves wholly to his holy will and pleasure, and studying to serve him in holiness and righteousness,” reads the 1549 exhortation to communion. ¹⁴ Ramshaw argues that this is more than aural underlining. “The liturgical text presents two words, and the worshipers can rest between them, leaning one way or the other.” ¹⁵ Doublets such as “Almighty and everlasting God” or “Almighty and merciful God,” which appear in several collects in the 1549 Book of Common Prayer, hold together different characteristics of God. Ramshaw urges, “Realizing the brilliance of well-chosen doublets, we will avoid liturgical language that is too easy, too simplistic, too tight, or too sure of itself.” ¹⁶

As Cranmer’s doublets historically have enriched our liturgical prayer and so expanded worshipers’ understanding of God, the 1979 Book of Common Prayer offers even more possibilities. Rather than one Eucharistic Prayer, Rite I offers two, and Rite II provides four Eucharistic Prayers, incorporating multiple metaphors and images, and suggesting that no one prayer is adequate to encapsulate the assembly’s thanksgiving for God’s work in creation and redemption. These prayers enable the assembly to rehearse salvation history in different ways, bringing to the fore various dimensions of our sacred story. Yet the prayers employ a limited repertoire of God language.

In the final stages of preparing the 1979 Prayer Book, the Standing Liturgical Commission formed a subcommittee on “linguistic sensitivity relating to women.” American English was changing, and the generic use of masculine nouns and pronouns was increasingly criticized. The committee worked through draft rites and proposed felicitous wording that was more inclusive in its references to humanity, for example, “for us and for our salvation” rather than “for us men and for our salvation” in the Nicene Creed, and “seek and serve Christ in all persons” instead of “seek and serve all men” in the Baptismal Covenant. The committee also pointed out that using exclusively masculine symbols for God, such as Father, King, and Lord, evokes the image of God as male, leaving the church “without models of ministry and worship that affirm the female.” ¹⁷ Nonetheless, as is evident from the 1979 BCP, the Standing Liturgical Commission did not make any changes to God language.

Roman Catholic theologian Elizabeth Johnson explains the problem with the use of exclusively masculine symbols for God. It is not, she says, that male metaphors are used, but rather that these terms “are used exclusively, literally, and patriarchally.” ¹⁸ Such speech, asserts Johnson, “is both oppressive and idolatrous.” ¹⁹ “It fails both human beings and divine mystery.” The use of exclusively male metaphors for God “justifies the dominance of men while denigrating the human dignity of women. Simultaneously this discourse so reduces divine mystery to the single, reified metaphor of the ruling man that the symbol itself loses its religious significance and ability to point to ultimate truth. It becomes,” concludes Johnson, “an idol.” ²⁰

Thus, our worship must speak rightly about God to invite worshipers into the expansive, transcendent mystery of God, and to enable followers of Jesus Christ to flourish as a community in which “all . . . are one in Christ Jesus,” as the apostle Paul envisions in his letter to the Galatians (Gal. 3:26–28).

Strategies for speaking rightly about God

The demand for inclusive language accelerated in the 1980s, and in 1985, the General Convention directed the Standing Liturgical Commission to prepare inclusive language texts for Morning and Evening Prayer and the Eucharist. Over the next decade, that work led to the Enriching Our Worship series, which over the past two decades has come to include alternative texts for several Prayer Book liturgies.

As the church was grappling with the use of androcentric God language in its worship, two scholars analyzed methods for using so-called inclusive language, particularly in reference to God. Marjorie Procter-Smith was Professor of Liturgy and Worship at Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, and Richard Norris was Professor of Church History at Union Theological Seminary in New York City and a priest in the Diocese of New York. Although Procter-Smith and Norris were not in conversation, at least as far as I know, their schemas are similar.

One strategy is to be noncommittal, avoiding the use of gendered nouns and pronouns. ²¹ In the mid-1980s, as the commission began its work on inclusive language liturgical texts, it prepared adapted versions of Rite II Morning and Evening Prayer and Eucharist. Except for the Creeds, the Lord’s Prayer, and a few uses of “Son” in the Eucharistic Prayers, these adaptations eliminated all masculine references to God, both nouns and pronouns. “Christ” and “God” were used repeatedly, and “Savior” or “Redeemer” replaced many references to Jesus as “Lord.” ²²

The Standing Liturgical Commission invited sixteen congregations, along with all Episcopal seminaries and two religious orders, to pray with these draft texts. Worshipers reported the following:

that these changes in God-language made God seem remote and abstract. The recurrent use of “God” and “Christ” offered a very limited and impersonal image of God, and the elimination of pronouns further diminished a sense of God as personal. ²³

Accordingly, the commission decided not to present these adaptations to General Convention in 1988.

The Episcopal Church has recently revisited this approach, with the so-called expansive language liturgies for Rite II Eucharist that the 2018 General Convention authorized. ²⁴ I am curious to learn how congregations today experience this use of noncommittal language in worship.

Procter-Smith points out that one problem with noncommittal language “is the tendency for hearers to interpret non-gender-specific language as male.” Given the long history of patriarchy, not only language but also daily life “encourages the hearing of male reality as normative, even when it is not specifically stated.” ²⁵ In other words, simply eliminating masculine nouns and pronouns from worship texts will not enable worshipers adequately to perceive God who is beyond body, parts, and passions.

Given the limitations of noncommittal language, Procter-Smith and Norris offer another approach, that of positive inclusion. ²⁶ Rather than “humanity,” we might say “sisters and brothers,” or “men and women.” (Procter-Smith and Norris were writing thirty years ago, before the church was hearing the voices of transgender people, for whom binary language is not inclusive but exclusive.) Naming women as well as men from salvation history is another dimension of this approach. For many years, some presiders have been adding the names of various biblical women to the patriarchs identified in Eucharistic Prayer C. In Enriching Our Worship 1, Eucharistic Prayer 1 gives thanks that God called us into covenant “through Abraham and Sarah.” ²⁷ Intentionally naming women can enable worshipers to recognize the full and equal dignity of women in the community of faith and in salvation history.

A strategy of positive inclusion attends not only to language about humanity but also to language about God. Norris calls for the church to use “imagery drawn from women’s roles and activities and experiences to express our relationship to God, or God’s to us.” Norris asks, “If the prophet Hosea can picture God as suffering birth-pangs, why cannot we? If Jesus can picture himself as a mother hen gathering her chicks, why cannot we picture him that way?” ²⁸ By incorporating feminine biblical images and metaphors, the language of worship can expand our imagination and our perception, allowing us to speak more of the truth of divine mystery.

While acknowledging that inclusive language “restores color and clarity to language” and “encourages the inclusion of names of women to balance the names of men,” Procter-Smith points out that pairs of female and male images tend to devalue women. For example, “Lady is not comparable to Lord in common use. . . . Madam conveys negative associations absent from Sir; Mistress has almost nothing in common with its linguistic parallel, Master.” ²⁹

Given the limitations of both noncommittal and inclusive language, Procter-Smith proposes another method: emancipatory language. Her project is particularly concerned with the full equality and dignity of women, so some of her proposals are focused there, encouraging us to speak more of the truth of our human reality. For Procter-Smith, emancipatory language “refers to women directly and specifically,” describing women’s experience in ways that are not limited to sexual or social function (virgin, mother) and that “foster respect and love for women’s bodies in place of fear and hatred.” Emancipatory language, says Procter-Smith, must also “reflect the struggles of women for survival and dignity,” calling forth “both lament for unnecessary suffering and loss and celebration of courage and beauty where they are found.” ³⁰

Emancipatory language also points more fully to ultimate truth. Procter-Smith argues that language about God must include explicitly female language, drawing upon a diversity of images while also being grounded “in the lived experiences of real women” and taking into account “the particularity of women’s experience: the racial, ethnic, religious, and class distinctions, which divide us from one another as women, but which also make us distinctive.” ³¹

Norris introduces a different approach as a complement to noncommittal and properly inclusive language, a method he calls “disarming.” He points out that we sometimes “use a metaphor to explain, interpret, and control another metaphor: we do not give up our original figure—we use another figure to disarm it, to deprive it of unintended or inappropriate implications.” Norris offers the example of the hymn in Philippians chapter 2, which extols Jesus as both Lord and slave. “Each metaphor,” explains Norris,

tells us something true—and essential—about Christ, but only as limited or qualified or . . . disarmed by the other. Jesus is not your ordinary domineering Lord, nor is he your ordinary powerless slave: he is the one who rightly rules in our hearts as Lord because he made himself a slave for our sakes.

So, concludes Norris,

If we are to come to some distant apprehension of the God in whose embrace all things “live and move and have their being,” we need to picture God as a Father indeed, but a Father who sometimes looks strangely like a Mother, just as we have a Lord indeed, but a Lord who looks strangely like a Servant. ³²

Although the Episcopal Church’s liturgical texts offer examples of each of the methods that Norris and Procter-Smith described, the terms did not take hold. As the Standing Liturgical Commission developed texts to supplement the 1979 Book of Common Prayer, it eventually settled on expansive language. In the Preface to Enriching Our Worship 1, then Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold explained, “Expanding our vocabulary of prayer and the ways in which we name the Holy One bears witness to the fact that the mystery of God transcends all categories of knowing, including those of masculine and feminine.” ³³

More recently, the 2018 General Convention directed the Standing Commission on Liturgy and Music “to develop principles for the use of inclusive and expansive language in liturgical texts” and “to follow these principles in all revisions of liturgical resources and in the development of any new liturgical resources.” ³⁴ Inclusive language refers to language about humanity, while expansive language is God language that adds metaphors and images from Scripture and tradition so that we can tell as much truth about God as possible in a manner that also upholds the dignity of every human being. ³⁵

Naming God

What language, then, shall we borrow to expand our vocabulary of prayer? The biblical figure of Wisdom offers one feminine image. Wisdom is grammatically feminine in Hebrew, Greek, and Latin, and Jewish wisdom literature personifies divine wisdom as a woman. In the early stages of Wisdom tradition, Wisdom is portrayed as the first of God’s created works, who was at God’s side in creation and calls people to ways of justice, truth, and righteousness (Prov. 1:20–33; 8:1–36; 9:1–6). As the tradition developed, Wisdom was identified as Torah (Sir. 24:23; Bar. 4:1), was associated with the Spirit (Wis. 9:17) and the Word (Wis. 9:1–2), and became a personification of God (Wis. 7:22–10:21). ³⁶

We have one historical remnant of Wisdom in our liturgy: the O antiphons for the final week of Advent, introduced into Western liturgy during the early Middle Ages, which in The Hymnal 1982 form the verses of “O come, O come, Emmanuel”: “O come, thou Wisdom from on high, who orderest all things mightily, to us the path of knowledge show, and teach us in her ways to go.” ³⁷ While there is nothing inherently feminine about wisdom, ³⁸ expanding our use of Wisdom language is one way to broaden our understanding of God.

Some Christians today use feminine pronouns in reference to the Spirit. Grammatically, the Hebrew word ruah is feminine, while the Greek pneuma is neuter and the Latin spiritus is masculine. Theologian Elizabeth Johnson proposes that images of the Spirit in Scripture can be understood as analogous with women’s historical experience, albeit not exclusively so. ³⁹ She concludes her survey of the Spirit in Scripture by citing a 1975 article by religious studies scholar Jay G. Williams:

In the divine economy, [the Spirit] is not the feminine Person who remains hidden and at home. She is God in the world; moving, stirring up, revealing, interceding. It is she who calls out, sanctifies, and animates the church. Hers is the water of the one baptism. The debt of sin is wiped away by her. She is the life-giver who raises men from the dead with the life of the coming age. Jesus himself left the earth so that she, the intercessor, might come. ⁴⁰

Imagining the work of the feminine Spirit in this way might enable us to recognize and respect women’s agency, their ability to respond to God’s call and participate in God’s mission.

Like wisdom, spirit is not an inherently feminine concept. Yet perhaps we can expand images of the Spirit in liturgy and from time to time introduce feminine pronouns when we speak of her work, and in so doing point to ultimate truth in a new way.

For explicitly feminine language, we can call upon God our Mother. The prophet Isaiah uses disarming language:

The Lord goes forth like a soldier,

 like a warrior he stirs up his fury;

he cries out, he shouts aloud . . .

For a long time I have held my peace . . .

now I will cry out like a woman in labor,

 I will gasp and pant. (Isa. 42:13–14)

A few chapters later, the prophet asks, “Can a woman forget her nursing child, or show no compassion for the child of her womb?” (Isa. 49:15), and in the final chapter of Isaiah, the prophet gives voice to God: “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you” (Isa. 66:13). Deuteronomy compares God to a mother eagle:

As an eagle stirs up its nest,

 and hovers over its young;

as it spreads its wings, takes them up,

 and bears them aloft on its pinions,

the Lord alone guided [Israel]. (Deut. 32:11–12)

Hosea alludes to a mother’s ferocity: “I will fall upon them like a bear robbed of her cubs” (Hos. 13:8). In another metaphor from the animal world, Jesus describes himself as a mother hen gathering her brood under her wings (Matt. 23:37; Luke 13:34).

Some have argued that Mother is not a true parallel for Father, that Father is the revealed name of God, not a metaphor. Yet Father is not the only nor even the primary term that Scripture uses to speak about God. “What is [your] name?” says Moses at the burning bush. “I am who I am,” comes the reply (Exod. 3:13–14). Some have argued that Jesus’s use of “I am” in John’s Gospel deliberately echoes this name of God. ⁴¹

With regard to Father, the Old Testament contains only a handful of references. In the New Testament, we find four references in Mark and fifteen in Luke, while Matthew uses Father 49 times, and John, 109. ⁴² This suggests theological development in the apostolic church rather than Father as Jesus’s sole or preferred name for God. Biblical scholar Mary Rose d’Angelo argues that Jesus may have used Father to undercut the patriarchal authority of the Roman Empire rather than to assert a unique father–son relationship with God. ⁴³ Elizabeth Johnson concludes, “The gospel tradition demonstrates variety and plurality in Jesus’ speech about God rather than the exclusive centrality of speech about God as father.” Like d’Angelo, she argues that when Jesus did use father or abba, it was subversive, presenting God not as a patriarchal figure but as “a God of the oppressed, a God of community and celebration.” ⁴⁴

Father is important in the trinitarian formula Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, language that points to relationality within the Godhead: the Father is the Father of the Son; the Father sends the Son and sends the Spirit. But many contemporary discussions of trinitarian theology emphasize that “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is a shorthand way to speak of inner-trinitarian relations and the economy of salvation. Trinitarian doctrine asserts that God’s very being is relationship and that God is also in relationship with the world, giving life to the world and seeking to reconcile the world to Godself. ⁴⁵

There are multiple ways to speak of the triune God, beginning with Paul’s “the grace of the Lord Jesus Christ, the love of God, and the communion of the Holy Spirit” (2 Cor. 13:13). Augustine pointed out the inadequacy of all trinitarian language:

It is not easy to find a name that will suitably express so great excellence, unless it is better to speak in this way: the Trinity, one God, of whom are all things, through whom are all things, in whom are all things. ⁴⁶

In his treatise On the Trinity, Augustine offered several models, for example, lover, beloved, and love. Julian of Norwich used images such as power, wisdom, love; source of our nature, mercy, and grace. Hildegard of Bingen described a brightness, a flashing forth, and a fire. ⁴⁷

I am not proposing that we abandon the classical language of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. However, using this language exclusively results in other metaphors and names being “forgotten or marginalized.” The result is that these designations, including Holy Spirit, are taken literally, signifying “that maleness is an essential character of divine being.” ⁴⁸ We thereby fail to point to the ultimate truth of God, and we also deny the human dignity of women.

We need language that expands our understanding of the triune God and counters misperceptions of God as masculine. Catherine LaCugna points out,

Through the eucharist we participate explicitly in the triune life of God: We offer praise and thanksgiving to God who is the fountain of all holiness; we join our prayer to that of the high priest Jesus Christ who presents our prayers and petitions to God; we call upon the Holy Spirit to create a holy Body of Christ. ⁴⁹

It is not the use of a trinitarian formula that makes the Eucharist trinitarian, but how it proclaims the mystery of God and celebrates “the good news of human liberation and cosmic reconciliation coming from God through Jesus the Christ in the Spirit.” ⁵⁰ Consider, for example, an opening acclamation in Evangelical Lutheran Worship: “Blessed be the holy Trinity, one God, the fountain of living water, the rock who gave us birth, our light and our salvation.” ⁵¹

The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America began its work on Evangelical Lutheran Worship by articulating principles for worship, including guidelines for the use of language. Worship language must speak rightly of God: “The language of worship reflects the God revealed to us and evokes the mystery of God beyond human understanding and experience.” ⁵² God language also shapes the community of faith: “The language of worship embodies God’s mercy and justice, forming us to live as merciful and just people.” ⁵³

Katherine Sonderegger

As a proud feminist, I want to advance a bold and provocative thesis: masculine language for God is a settled matter, for liturgy and the church. I believe this is compatible with feminism; indeed, I believe it to be a feminist proposal. But I know it will not strike many readers that way, and I want to defend it here, and to show as best as I might that it undergirds and properly orients a Christian liturgical renewal.

Let me begin with what might seem the most glaring part of my thesis—that masculine language for God is a settled matter. Just what can I mean by “settled” here? Ella Wheeler Wilcox famously wrote that “no question is settled until it’s settled right” ⁵⁶ —and whether you are a fancier of Victorian verse or no, you might well say that Episcopal conferences over Prayer Book revision is evidence sufficient that the matter has not been “settled right.” I myself want to take some issue with Wilcox here: I do not believe that all affairs that are settled matters must themselves be settled right, nor that justice should overturn all convention, or history, or rite, in language or practice. For something to be “settled,” that is, is a complex artifact of tradition, cultural inheritance, material conditions, school of thought, and yes, the sediments of gender, class, and race in the language of the human family.

Something that has been settled in human affairs has deep in its marrow the rich and immeasurable rhythm of repetition, of reception, and of use that just is custom in the world’s cultures. It is what the celebrated French historian Fernand Braudel called la longue durée, the enduring past. Braudel spent his marvelous career reflecting on the Mediterranean, the Middle or Great Sea, of ancient Europe, and he discovered there mountains and plateaus, human patterns of building and working, of setting out to sea, of mending what has been torn or broken, that have altered little in the centuries in which human lives have put out into the deep. Of course there has been change—in the Mediterranean as in every place on the globe! ⁵⁷ Braudel is no Luddite, at least no Luddite of the popular sort. He means that the contours and artifacts of the ship, for example, have followed familiar patterns, sometimes in subtle, even hidden forms, in the vessels that have plied those waters, from the trireme to the modern trawler or cruiser. The design of a boat—that it should have greater length than width, that it should have a element for steering in control of the crew, that it should have cords of some material for securing the side of the boat to a pier, that the crew faces forward, that they can sit down, that they follow a captain —these we might call the “settled matters” of ship building. They endure in the midst of great, sometimes very great, change.

Now I take a purposely neutral and rather common sense example to begin my discussion here because I want to highlight the way in which an affair being settled may have some distance from matters of ethics, justice, or moral reflection. A settled matter may simply be what we consider “common sense,” received wisdom, good habit; it seems indeed to be just what we mean by a “fact.” I want to propose that masculine language for God is settled in just this sense. It is not the only sense, not by a good measure! But the church’s liturgical language is settled in at least this very deep, very human, and very intractable way.

I want to be quick to say here, however, that this is not a liturgical version of Wittgenstein’s conservative argument for convention. I am not aiming here to say that since culture is a form of “rule following,” a received custom and way of life, that custom and habit must be followed in almost all cases—because, Wittgenstein held, that was all we had, at base, in the culture of human affairs. ⁵⁸ This is a deeply conservative, sometimes reactionary view, and I do not mean here to give a rather lengthy apologia for the adage “The old way is the best way.” No! The profound change that is historical becoming is to be accepted, sometimes welcomed, sometimes spurred on and demanded. I think any feminist who considers the women’s movement revolutionary, as do I, would think along these lines. But this insistence upon change I believe to be compatible with, indeed inseparable from, the “enduring past,” the settled matters of human and ecclesial existence. What I aim to say here is that amid profound changes in the enduring mystery of the church, some matters have received definition: they have taken on a measured, recognized, and stable form, and they have settled in for a lasting stay amid every change and chance. The masculine language for God is settled in this sense: this is the thesis I want to defend.

Certainly it is easy to point to the ccumenical and historical dimensions of such enduring use. The Episcopal Church, were it to take a radical position on language for God, could fall out of step with Christians of other denominations, with other Anglicans, and the long communion of the living with the blessed dead, the church of many centuries. To refer to the Triune Lord without any use of the biblical Name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, would be to sever ties with Christians in every past age, and with Christians now at prayer and altar around the ecumene. Now, I do not think anyone in the liturgical committees of our church is proposing a complete revision of the masculine Name for God, nor for reference to him. It seems to me, rather, that some substitutes and some abstractions are being proposed for Eucharistic Prayer to Almighty God, and these more constrained proposals need to be examined on their own merits. But my larger point here is this: the language we use in ecclesial worship is not for us to determine independently. We exist, even in fractured communion, in a single body, whose head is Christ, and we are properly constrained by this membership. Indeed, ties of these kinds compose much of the force of “settled matters”; each and of all these are the ones of whom we never say, I have no need of you. That is one, ecumenical dimension of the status of masculine language for the Holy Trinity.

It is not the only one, however. For constraint is not prohibition. We could never innovate over tradition were ecumenical and communal practice our only norm. (Indeed, just this is one of Wittgenstein’s central points.) A matter being settled is more ordinary, more commonsensical and tactile than all that. There may be little moral reasoning at stake here; it may not even reach to that conceptual height. A settled matter is what is bred in the bone. We may not even like it. We may find it odd, or faintly risible, or sad, but in a settled pattern, the enduring past lives on and simply demands our acknowledgment of its stubborn perdurance. Let me take a more sensitive, more gendered, and more sharply moral example that touches the lives of every feminist: the existence of the family. That human society has been and continues to be organized by family is what I consider a settled matter in human affairs. It has not gone without challenge! Older groupings of tribal and ancestral lineages test the limits of family as social organization. Modern gatherings of adults, chosen as kin, form families in which lineage or descent is not primary. The ancient practice of adoption is both tear in the fabric of family and deep tribute to it. In the Leninist era, the Communist International aimed to corrode family ties to promote class identity, and the formation of syndicalist cells. Feminists, from the days of Friedrich Engels on, took aim at the family as source of oppression of women and of the rise of the very concept of private property. ⁵⁹ All this revolution; yet the family persists! “Marriage equality,” as defined recently by the U.S. Supreme Court, pays quiet tribute to the settled power of the family: same-sex couples simply want and demand the legal right to live ordinary lives as neighbors down the street, parents in a car pool, next of kin at a lonely hospital bed. They want to take their place in this old, old story: human beings, gathered into one place as a family. We have learned in recent generations that gender identity and gender assignment is complex, hardly inevitable or determined; they too are subject, as Freud taught, also, to the vast depths of adult self-definition and struggle. Yet families persist, among the binary and nonbinary; we seek them out; we fashion and fight for them, with fight against them. Most feminists, even those in collective houses, live in families and as families; they create and accept them, even as they change them within; they bind themselves to one another; and they settle into the patterns of house work and shopping and relaxing at days’ end in that small, stubbornly persisting group that we have learned to call family. It is a settled matter, I believe, and we come to love and sustain it, even in the midst of great reservations about it, and critical analyses of it, stem to stern. A settled matter has its own gravity, and we cannot escape its magnetic pull. In this way, too, I believe masculine language for God lives on, in its steady persistence and profound, almost gravitational, pull of that Sun on our small planet.

I have so far spoken about settled matters in as broad and worldly a fashion as I could, touching theological and scriptural topics only lightly, and at a passing distance. I do that not because I consider the doctrinal matters secondary or insignificant, by no means! Rather I want to appeal here to our most capacious sense of how profound customs and habits in human culture can appear settled—not monolithically or rigidly—but forcefully and unmistakably. I think our Names and pronouns for Almighty God belong in this wide family, at least in part, and might be accepted, received, tested, and reworked, all as the inscribed cultural pattern and lingua franca of Christian worship. I will reserve till later my theological reflections on language revisions in proposed Eucharistic Prayers, but only after and against the backdrop of the enduring past in human culture.

More urgent at this moment is the explanation—and defense, if possible—of this thesis of settled masculine language as a feminist position. I want to linger for a bit on this point because I think for too long feminism in the church has been identified with matters of language and of referent, especially about Almighty God. Although certainly feminists have written and provoked and struggled for full participation of women in every aspect of the Church’s life, the theological and conceptual work of feminism in church circles has centered closely on language use, and the problem of theological epistemology. In systematic work, the doctrine of God has received careful attention, pivoting on proper predication for God, and the degree of “unsaying” or “unknowing” in human speech about the Divine. Feminist concerns in liturgy have been long preoccupied by linguistic matters as well, exploring and refining questions about inclusive and expansive imagery and predicates for God, and for the Divine Persons of the Holy Trinity. Now, as Elizabeth Johnson has shown so convincingly, these are deep and long-standing problems, tracing a royal lineage back, certainly, to Thomas Aquinas, but probably further back still to Dionysius and the Platonic and Aristotelian architects of late antiquity. ⁶⁰ Certainly, the reach of human knowledge for the Mystery who is God, and the proper expression of his Aseity and Glory are deep matters for theology, and so for feminist theology as well. But I do not believe that feminism has been properly faithful to its revolutionary past by such a “linguistic turn” in its chief articles.

After all, why have we academic feminists taken a linguistic turn at all? European Marxists were quick to point out the apolitical and highly abstract qualities of early analytic philosophy, and its minute examination of semantic form, just at a time when the countries of the North Atlantic were settling down after the great trauma of war and casting their hopes on a lasting bourgeois peace. It is from a wing of this analytic tradition that we receive the notion of a linguistic turn as imperative, and for some, the only convincing path forward in conceptual and argumentative work. ⁶¹ I find much to admire in the analytic philosophical school, and I do not mean here a brief and rather cheap rebuke of this careful and clarifying conceptual and linguistic work. But I do worry about its quiet inhabitation of the house of feminism, especially in the church.

It is commonly said in theological feminism that “language shapes reality,” and under the shadow of this maxim, linguistic matters are given elevated Christian status. But the analytic tradition itself teaches us that the relation of language to referent, of words to the world, is hardly as monochromatic as all that. Words can indeed become deeds: the stylish analytic philosopher J. L. Austin taught us that in his celebrated notion of the speech act. ⁶² Words can be weapons. I need not tell anyone in this journal that home truth. Hate speech both creates and destroys reality, and few weapons are as potent as that. But language also masks reality, and allows us to paste pretty pictures over the horrors we will not see. Just that, after all, is what we mean by a lie. From this alienation of language from reality come the familiar categories of cliché, of bromide, euphemism, cant. Were language always to shape reality, after all, we could transform the life of a garbage collector—the danger of his work, his low pay and lower status, and his invisibility to the city that depends utterly upon him—by simply naming him a “sanitation engineer.” To speak of the dead in war as “collateral damage,” “body count,” or “attrition” transforms nothing in the bloody endeavor that is war, but it does mask it, and through delicate deception, allow it to rage on. Some language, that is, alters the world, and fashions new realities, but other language is simply dulled by use, its edge blunted by repetition; still other language transformed in meaning by the reality that imposes itself on it—use, we say, determines meaning. The whole complex relation of meaning to referent needs to make itself felt in linguistic discussions in liturgy and in feminist theology. Masculine language and imagery for God—the linguistic matter I say is settled—might very well be the prime example of use determining meaning: feminist practice can determine the meaning of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit that creates, supports, and advances the full flourishing of women. That, too, I believe is a feminist thesis I would want to defend. But in the end, linguistic matters, I say, should occupy a small room in the feminist library.

Christian feminism should span generous territory, as Sarah Coakley has shown us in her marvelous, path-breaking works. ⁶³ But feminism has a central commitment, I believe, to “material conditions,” as Marxists would put this point; it is preoccupied properly and profoundly by the real, as I would put it. Feminism is not first or principally a matter of language. It is rather a movement, a body of thought, an analytic tool, and, for some, a Christian confession about women’s life, their full dignity and humanity, and their complex, rich, and unfolding relations with men and women and children and the other real species in this tangible, pulsing, and breathtaking creation. I would want to see feminism in the church turn its powerful attention to the women who work as secretaries or assistants or cleaning staff in our parishes. I would want feminist theory to address directly the way women rectors work with these other women on their staff, to address why these are perduringly, stubbornly women’s jobs, and why they do not fall under the same leave and benefit and salary ideals of clergy. A feminist theologian is properly concerned with why all staff members, from rector to sexton, are not paid the same wage; with why the altar guild, overwhelmingly female, is brunt for clerical gossip or complaint; and why the flower arrangers, also constituted by women, over many generations, seem always peripheral to the “ministry of the church.” Who are the church school leaders in a parish and why? Who leads and chaperones youth groups? How do matters of sexuality and maturity and commitment receive gendered discussion in young adult forums? How is the Christian life described and taught and preached in such a way that the full flourishing complexity of women, their reality, is upheld, honored, and passed on? Feminist theology and practice, in my book, should dedicate itself to making the full dignity of women a settled matter for the Christian faith.

Our theological preoccupation and analysis, that is, can certainly, should certainly, focus on global matters—on sex trafficking; on migration and border crossing; on climate change and the environmental defilement of the world women and their families live in; on poverty, the great assailant of women and children; and on critical race theory, the indispensable correlate to feminist theory. But feminist theology cannot afford to look past its own domain: our churches, our parish halls, our seminaries, our nursing and retirement homes, our day-care centers, and our soup kitchens and shelters. Christianity is lived out in these places, close to home, and the theology we teach will undergird or overturn what we do there. We need to bring the full armor of Christ into this task: to shed that glorious and liberating Light on the structures, practices, fears and failures, of women’s lives in our midst, and their place among the powerful and among the weak. To curtail the oversized attention to matters linguistic, as I see, is to open up conceptual and analytic room for a feminism of the real. To say that masculine language for God is a settled matter is to permit, and in the end, to urge that feminist theology takes up the open wound that is women’s diminishment and defilement and cheapening in this, God’s world. That is why I think this thesis is a feminist position, and well worth defending.

But I promised a more direct liturgical and theological response to proposed revisions of Eucharistic language, and I hope to deliver on that promise now. ⁶⁴ At my seminary, Virginia Theological Seminary, we have incorporated the proposed anaphoras in our rotation for weekday celebrations of the Holy Eucharist. I have had the chance to pray these Great Thanksgivings from the pew and from the altar, and I have to confess some theological unease with them. These liturgies strike me as palpably aiming to avoid using certain masculine words, Father, Son, and at times, Lord. The opening acclamation—“Blessed be God: Holy, Glorious and Undivided Trinity”—and the responsorial—“And blessed by God’s reign, now and forever”—seem to substitute an abstraction for a Name, and to avoid masculine terms as if neuralgic scars. The desire to replace the Triune Name, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, from the priestly blessing carries the air to me of a kind of pious work-around, a desire to refer silently to the Mysterious Name of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit without uttering the syllables. Of course, everything that is new gives off an air of being an avoidance of the old, and habit and custom and repetition rubs this sheen off a liturgy and “naturalizes” it. So it may well be that my unease with these changes reflects merely their novelty to me and to my setting. But I think there is some particular, dogmatic cost to an attempt to sidestep Triune Names and predicates. Let me give you a few examples.

In the revised Great Thanksgivings proposed for our use, the body of the prayer is offered to “Almighty God,” to the “Holy One,” or to the “Eternal God.” The remainder of the anaphora remains the same as that found in the 1979 Book, including the work of Christ and the double epiclesis, the invocation of the Holy Spirit over the gifts and the people. This seemingly innocuous substitution of “God” for “Father” has the unwanted and unintended effect of suggesting that neither Christ nor the Spirit are God, for they are distinguished from the original and prime recipient and subject of the Eucharistic Prayer. Nor is that all. The Holy Eucharist, liturgical theologians tell us, enact the pattern of the Holy Trinity: the prayer is offered to the Father, through the Son, and in the Holy Spirit. These “prepositional” relations stem from St. Paul’s benediction in Romans, and have received careful trinitarian elaboration in Augustine’s pioneering work De Trinitate, in the Cappadocian texts such as the Theological Orations and the Contra Eunomius, and in modern trinitarians as diverse Jürgen Moltmann, Sarah Coakley, and Karl Rahner. Revisions that mask the place of the Father as Arche or Origin of the Godhead also mask the liturgical participation in the Triune Life. As priest and people, we too are swept up in the movement to the Father, the great return of all things to their Source and End in him, through the life and passion and victorious rising of the Son, in the Spirit he has breathed out, from the Father, to his disciples. That is why the Eucharistic species is the “bread of heaven.” We might preserve that trinitarian pattern by substituting Arche or “Origin” for Father—but in my brand of feminism, this would be unnecessary and distracting. The primary aim here is rather to draw all of us, as disciples, into the Holy Mystery that is the distinction between the Divine Nature and the Persons. The dogma of the Holy Trinity teaches us to see a categorical difference between the Attributes or Perfections of God—God’s Nature as omniscient, say, or spiritual—and the Divine Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, who reside in or consummate the Nature. The word God remains indeterminate: it could refer to the Blessed Trinity, as a whole; to the Deitas or Divine Nature; or to a Divine Person. When we take the word God or the phrase the Holy One on our lips, it is not transparent whether we intend the Triunity, or the Divine Nature, “Godness” Itself, or a Divine Person. It is the Name of the Father that clarifies our use. I believe we are well served to retain it in our Eucharistic liturgy.

Let me take another example, this time from the heart of the proposed liturgical revision. In the body of Eucharistic Prayer B, the text invites us to praise God in second-personal address—as You—who sent “Jesus, to become fully human.” Now, this is not what the framers of this Eucharistic Prayer intended to convey, I am sure. As it stands, the prayer expresses the Eutychian-like idea that Jesus is himself eternal, and at the Incarnation, became temporal and embodied for us and for our salvation. Once again, a distinction important to the tradition has been blurred by the proposed revision. Traditionally, the Eternal Son or Word exists in the Triune Perfection without flesh; this is given the Greek term Logos asarkos. The holy Name Jesus refers instead to the Word enfleshed, the Logos ensarkos. This distinction matters because it wards off the idea that the creation is necessary to God: the Triune God is glorious, and perfect, and eternally whole even if the Word did not assume flesh, did not “become Jesus.” The reason this unshaped phrase found its way into the anaphora, I believe, is that it offered a substitute for the words “Son,” or as in the original text, “him”; this time it offers a concrete and individual one—a male one, in fact—rather than an abstract and universal one. “Eternal Word” could certainly be adopted instead, and has been used well in other proposed liturgies, and occupies already a prominent place in Eucharistic Prayer B. But again, the triune pattern of the Eucharistic Prayer needs clear expression, and we, the participants in this divine liturgy, need the medicine of immortality that is life in the mysterious Oneness of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Christian feminism shares with theologians of many schools and stripes the confession of the Holy Trinity: in the ceaseless fruitfulness who is God, the Father eternally begets the Son, and in this Divine Self-offering, the Father and Son breathe forth the Spirit, in whom they all are One. In any revision of the Prayer Book, this faith must stand at the center. In my brand of feminism, it may simply stand, in quiet confidence, that this faith can be received, taught, and handed on in the Holy Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. And may this Holy Name be now and forever blessed.