My father, a retired protestant minister, says he heard someone (a male) at a pastors' conference butcher John 3:16 almost identically to the way you have it rendered.
David,
I rest my case. It's all around us, and if we're not careful, we will find ourselves inadvertently censoring ourselves when it comes to gender-specific traditional turns of phrase.
It IS ugly. It destroys the poetry in the psalms, the hymns, the prayers and the scriptures--to serve the ends of a few at the expense of everyone.
PP,
The answer is simple. Use masculine terms for divine entities like "Father" or "Son" but always remember that we are employing METAPHORS. J. Soskice defines a metaphor as "a figure of speech that says one thing in terms suggestive of another thing." Other scholars define the term "metaphor" in terms of conceptual domains. However, one defines "metaphor," we know that the Bible employs plenty of such terms to delineate God.
And as far as the term "Father" goes, it is an old metaphor used by Plato and Plotinus. We also have the Greek poets waxing metaphorical when they depict the immortals of yore as partaking of nectar, which is an image that should be construed tropically, not literally.
Best!
NOR had an article on this some time back -- how the use of standard English is a good Catholic witness, and how the feminization of English is directly aimed at attacking the effectiveness of the Gospel.
Non- (non) Politicus,
It's not that easy. Metaphor is only one of three kinds of analogy and, unlike analogy of proper attribution, is in one sense false. God is our "shield" is true in the sense that God protects us, like a shield; but is false in another sense because God is not literally a shield. God is our "defender" is literally true, although in a sense incomprehensibly other than is humanly fathomable. God may be our "Father" in a metaphorical sense, but He is the "Father" of His Son in a literal sense, although a sense incomprehensibly other than is humanly fathomable.
Furthermore, it's not enough to say that Christ is the Bridegroom or Lover of the Church in a "metaphorical" way (despite the fact that it is true), if this can be supposed to mean that the metaphor is arbitrary and we could just as easily substitute God the "Mother" for "Father"; because there is a metaphysical basis for God's Fatherhood that does not obtain for His being called "Mother," despite biblical similies of a mother "hen" used by Jesus to describe His relationship to Jerusalem, etc. The fact is, even if God's fatherhood is metaphorical with respect to His creation, He is metaphorically our Father and cannot be our Mother; and He is literally Christ's Father, by whom He is eternally begotten.
PP,
Along with Paul Ricoeur, I prefer to say that metaphor preserves the tension between the "is" and "is not." What Ricoeur appears to say is that there is a sense in which God both is and is not a Father (etc). I don't know that I'm too comfortable with saying that all metaphors are literally false. My research of these tropes or conceptual domains have led me to the tentative conclusion that metaphors often truly and distinctly say what literal speech or language often cannot. Josef Stern has addressed this aspect of metaphors in an article that can be found here: http://philosophy.uchicago.edu/f...rn/
metaphor.pdf
The issues that you bring up regarding the eternal generation of the Son or the Church being "our Mother" are interesting studies in themselves.
Best!
The use of "their" and "they" for "his" and "he" is ugly too.
Another bad effect of gender-neutral language is that it keeps people ignorant of the universal sense of "man" and the gender-neutral sense of "he", and that makes them think our forefathers were sexist for using the words that way.
The butchering is saddest when it ruins beautiful lines in hymns, like "Pleased as man with man to dwell," or "She bore to man a Savior," or "Father-love is reigning o'er us / Brother-love binds man to man."
(Non-non) Politicus,
Point taken.
Rachel,
I agree emphatically. The plural pronoun "they" is regularly used with singular subjects in a manner that is not only grammatically erroneous but simply silly. Most of all, as you suggest, it is iniquitously ugly.
I know that in common parlance, gender specific pronouns have come to signify gender specificity in a way that makes the conventional use of masculine pronouns and nouns in a universal way sound odd. Yet I think the only way of combating the grammatical idiocy is to refuse to bend.
What's more, there is a commitment to rival metaphysical perspectives implicit in the alternatives. Those who consciously promote the grammatical revisionism are well-aware of this. It is the Catholic world, by contrast, that often seems oblivious of what is at stake.
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