An article about the current Church of England heresies. From a Russian Orthodox website. It's pretty rich: English Church Asks God to Stop Using His Preferred Gender Pronoun Though God never self-identified as "She" in any part of Scripture, the Archbishop of Canterbury determined that this non-preferred gender pronoun should be forced on God. The archbishop also suggests that we stop using the word "Father" in reference to God, since "God is not a father in exactly the same way as a human being is a father". In related news, many people have stopped referring to the archbishop as a "Christian", even though the archibishop occasionally self-identifies as one. Archbishop of Canterbury Justin Welby has said that God is “not male nor female,” after female bishops demanded the Church of England stop referring to God solely as “he.” Archbishop of Canterbury — Justin Welby — Leader of the Church of England The head of the worldwide Anglican communion told attendees at a lecture at St Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square: Professor of Christian history Diarmaid MacCulloch backed Archbishop Welby’s statement, telling The Times that the reason God has been perceived as male is due to “patriarchal assumptions” of early Christian societies of Greece and Rome. The world is now different,” Professor MacCulloch said, “and we have to show that our view of God is wider than that and not get stuck with archaic terms.” The comments by England’s most senior bishop follow those of the first female bishop Right Reverand Rachel Treweek, bishop of Gloucester, and Rt Revd Dr Jo Bailey Wells, Bishop of Dorking, who said in September that referring to God as a man was a “growing problem” and said the Church should stop referring to the deity as solely male. Treweek argued that the use of male language could be damaging to young girls and boys, and that gendered language would be insufficiently welcoming to non-Christians. Wells said she goes out of her way to use both “male and female imagery” when preaching. In the U.S., the United Methodist Church voted down an amendment to its Book of Discipline in May that would have said God is not “male or female.” Meanwhile the U.S. Episcopal Church set up a committee in July to “provide a pathway” towards revising its Book of Common Prayer to include gender-neutral language. Church leaders called for the revisions to correct the “overwhelming use of masculine language” which they believe to be a “barrier to evangelizing young people,” according to Fox News. ---- https://russian-faith.com/news/english-church-asks-god-stop-using-his-preferred-gender-pronoun-n1906
Diarmaid MacCulloch is woefully misinformed on the subject, most likely due to not reading the Bible often enough, reading too much academic dribble instead.
Diarmaid MacCulloch is an idiot. A PhD-level, atheistic, unapologetically-gay, apostate who isn't even a Christian, or a member of the Church. Who violates the doctrine of the Church, the natural law of God, and basic human decency, with every book he writes. He even presumed to write a biography of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, or put himself up as some sort of an authority on the Reformation. And he has exposed his own villainous apostacy numerous times, not the least of which is in cases like this.
God is clearly stated in scripture as being the 'Father of mankind'. Have we not all one father? hath not one God created us? Mal.2:10 Which were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Jn.1:13 God is also not a man and is Spirit, not flesh, therefore not physically male. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. Gen:1:2. God is a Spirit: and they that worship him must worship him in spirit and in truth. Jn.4:24. Not that any man hath seen the Father, save he which is of God, he hath seen the Father. Jn.6:46 God therefore, although our Father by virtue of the fact that "He made us and not we ourselves" Ps.100:3, nevertheless is not responsible for our physical conception, we were born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God. Jn.1:13 So we were not physically conceived by God, yet God is indeed Our Father. Our birth, brought about and initiated by Our Father was not "of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man", but of The Spirit of God. The same Spirit "that moved on the face of the waters". God is not a man, therefore God is not 'masculine' with the physical attributes of masculinity. I will not execute the fierceness of mine anger, I will not return to destroy Ephraim: for I am God, and not man; Hos.11:9. God is not a man, that he should lie; neither the son of man, that he should repent: hath he said, and shall he not do it? or hath he spoken, and shall he not make it good? Num.23:19. So let's have less of the nonsense suggesting that God is a man. God is THE Father and God is A Spirit. .
This seems to me a reasonably reliable indication that Justin Welby understands, as we do, that God is not a man or a woman, but that both 'man' and 'woman' were made in the image and likeness of God. "So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them". Gen 1:27. It is essentially the human race both male and female natures that are reflections of the spiritual nature of their creator. Their physical characteristics are necessary only in the physical realm, not in the spiritual realm. In the spiritual realm there is no Greek or Barbarian, slave or free, male or female. They are all "spirit" and as such bear similitude to God who is also 'Spirit'. Since God epitomizes, "all that is, seen and unseen", since God created it, God is rightly called its Father. Do not err, my beloved brethren. Every good gift and every perfect gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no variableness, neither shadow of turning. Of his own will begat he us with the word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures. Jas.1:16-18. We believers are just a start, a beginning, the first fruits of his creatures, begotten with the word of truth. There is much more yet to follow. .
Hello, Tiffy. I was thinking about your posting this morning, and it raised some interesting questions for me. You wrote: "Their physical characteristics are necessary only in the physical realm, not in the spiritual realm. In the spiritual realm there is no Greek or Barbarian, slave or free, male or female. They are all "spirit" and as such bear similitude to God who is also 'Spirit'." I am not sure how to think about this. My understanding is that we will have gloried resurrection bodies; we will not be/remain disembodied spirits. And I am not sure that the verse you cite means that we lose those distinctions completely in the next life. Was Paul any less a Jew after he became a Christian? When he writes that there are no slave or free, male or female, he doesn't make the distinction between material/spiritual realm. Not being argumentative, I liked your posting. Just questioning whether or not we all become some sort of gender-less, ethnic-less beings in the next life. I tend to doubt it, since so much of our identity is shaped by such things. I think he is making a symbolic statement, just as we could say during wartime that we are all Americans (or Britons), downplaying differences. If I meet Paul in heaven, I assume he will still consider himself a Jew, just as my mother will still be a woman, not simply a faceless spirit. Christ is still masculine, the Son of God, in heaven.
Hi Botolf. They are indeed interesting questions. We are told by St Paul that we shall have 'spiritual bodies'. 1 Cor.15:44 He contrasts it to the physical bodies we shall no longer have and uses the same metaphor of sowing and growing as Jesus used concerning his own death and resurrection, that of bearing fruit by becoming something different in kind to the seed that was sown. Jn.12:23-26. 1 Cor.15:36. I take this to mean that the natural physical characteristics of human beings will not necessarily be duplicated by the 'spiritual body', that we will inhabit when we 'become as He (i.e. Christ) is now'. The only scriptural evidence we have are the resurrection appearances and the statement by Jesus that, "For when they shall rise from the dead, they neither marry, nor are given in marriage; but are as the angels which are in heaven." Contextually the implication seems to be that gender is not a distinguishing feature for those who 'rise from the dead'. We may assume from this statement that angels are either genderless creatures or that marriage and sexual procreation is for some reason forbidden, impossible or utterly unnecessary and inappropriate in a genderless environment. My guess is that the gratification we get from sexual union in marriage will be replaced by something even higher and more gratifying still, perhaps something akin to the perfect spiritual unity and concord of the Holy Trinity within the Godhead. The appearances of Jesus might offer some tantalising clues to the changes involved in the process of resurrection. I think it probably unlikely that the atoms which formed our physical bodies on earth will be collected together again to form another physical resurrection body. Not least because those atoms will have been shared by many other people and things besides just us at many other times. The metaphor or vision of Ezekiel was probably not a foretaste of the mechanics of Resurrection, but rather a vision and metaphor of National and Spiritual Regeneration. It should not therefore be taken too literally. Ezek.37:1-14. The resurrected body of Jesus was often not immediately recognised physically. Though, in the upper room, it bore the wounds he suffered at his execution, it was only when he broke bread, perhaps repeating a particularly characteristic method of doing so, that the Emma-us road disciples recognised him. The disciples who ate the fish breakfast were afraid to ask him "who are you". They knew it was the Lord. Jn.21:12. It may be that recognition was not a matter of seeing or hearing, but more of 'feeling' within oneself. A "warming of the heart within". Luke 24:32. Which is a spiritual experience not a physical perception. John did not go so far as to say they knew it was the Lord because of his wounded hands, that is left to our imagination. Physical characteristics may be predominantly the way we recognise others now, but they are not the only means of recognition in the realm of the spirit, presumably. I agree Paul does not specify that the redundancy of differentiation applies only to our spiritual condition after death and subsequent resurrection. True! But, Paul is certainly bringing forward that projected experience of non difference 'spiritually' into the present when he implies that living in The Spirit, as opposed to living in the flesh, entails dispensing with old categories of differentiation and division that once held sway over us. We are supposed to be 'one body in Christ', Rom.12:5, 1 Cor.8:6, Gal.3:28. 1 Jn.1:7. Our fellowship is a fellowship of The Holy Spirit, not of the flesh. Marriage symbolises and epitomises a spiritual fellowship which unites in spite of difference or is even enhanced because of difference. It is not a struggle for supremacy, but is a dance of joyous sharing. I think the resurrection body of Jesus was a concession to human lack of spiritual perception. We needed to see him in a body to believe that he had indeed risen from the dead. Jesus did not need a body to visit the incarcerated in hades or John the Divine on Patmos. He appeared in the upper room though the doors were 'locked for fear of the Jews'. He vanished during the act of breaking bread at a fellowship meal. His resurrection body could therefore materialise and dematerialise at will. He could presumably appear as anyone or anything his wished in any manner at all. My guess is that the realm we call 'spiritual' is as real to 'spiritual' creatures as our physical world appears to us. However we now know that out perceptions even of this physical 'reality' are entirely mental constructions made by the functions of our brain, of the atomic energy in everything surrounding us. Nothing is anywhere near as solid as we think it is. Matter is more a matter of energy than it is a matter of matter, atomically speaking. Heaven may be simply an alternative reality, but just as real in its own way as is this present 'reality'. .
Great thoughts, Tiffy, and much food for thought. I am not certain that the resurrection body of Jesus was a "concession to human lack of spiritual perception." Clearly, the dead still continue to exist (as with the appearance of Elijah and Moses at the Transfiguration and the souls in Hades), but the bodily resurrection is what distinguishes Christianity. As Paul said, if Christ didn't rise from the dead, our faith is in vain. That would have been a meaningless statement if being raised from the dead was only spiritual. Again, the disciples saw Elijah and Moses, were they only appearing to have form?
1 John 3:1-3 See what love the Father has given us, that we should be called children of God; and that is what we are. The reason the world does not know us is that it did not know him. Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we will be has not yet been revealed. What we do know is this: when he is revealed, we will be like him, for we will see him as he is. And all who have this hope in him purify themselves, just as he is pure. Most of the other relevant passages have I think ben mentioned. We seem often in a worldly kind of way to have a gender obsession, and whilst it is true we have little experience of humanness outside of gender, regardless of what many legislators think, I think that gender is part of the giftedness of our humanity. I have know knowledge of the nature of that grace, be it of eternal significance or merely a temporal expression. In Genesis 1 we are told that we have been made in the image and after the likeness of God, male and female. Does that mean that the dynamic nature of God could not be expressed in a single gender, and the gender difference, and the relationships we establish across the gender divide are also part of the reflection, and in a fallen world we sometimes see that we make a complete mess of that as well. The words from the first article ring loud for me, without body parts or passions and that does not suggest a dispassionate God, for God rolls back the heavens and sends a sky full of angels to tell a few shepherds thats my boy and cries a river of blood to see us come home to him through the sacrifice of calvary. Humanity is distinguished from the animal kingdom as a moral being - with soul or essence - and from the angels who are moral beings without temporal physical reality. We are the bridge beings with a foot in both camps, and we we build for fellowship, and for the worship of God. Lift up your hearts we lift them to the Lord.
Scientifically speaking ALL form is only appearing to have form. What form is, is a form of energy. Matter is a form of energy. The bodily resurrection, as Paul points out, is not a reassembling of the body we have during our lifetime on earth. It is a completely new creation but conforming to the design criteria of our original body, a blueprint reconstruction, a facsimile in spiritual terms fit for a spiritual environment, not limited to a physical environment. Paul is quite rude about the notion of just getting our old body back. 1 Cor.15:34-38. A resurrection body, (unlike those in the Jewish concept of the realm of the dead), is able to interact with both the living and the dead. Interaction is what being alive is all about. Jesus in his resurrection body 'interacted' with his disciples. Moses and Elijah 'interacted' with Jesus on the Mount of Transfiguration. Transfiguration implies 'changing into a new, and different, form'. 1 Cor.15:52.
I don’t see any evidence that Justin Welby is or was reasonable, or that he understands, anything. Whether it be of the Scriptures, or the Anglican Tradition, or the sacred theology of gender. The only theology he “understands” is what his atheistic overlords tell him to understand. This is simply a gnostic heresy, treating the bodily and the material as mostly incidental. The reason he HAD to resurrect was so as to elevate the human body and indeed all matter to be a partaker with God. As St Athanasius teaches us in On the Incarnation, “He was made as Human so that we then might be made as God”. This is the basic theology of theosis, divinization.
The Episcopal church up north here has already started replacing "Father" and "him" with gender-neutral labels like "Creator" and "God." It's very unsettling. I'm planning to leave here, and go back down South after I finish school next year. The churches there are much more traditional.
Has God stopped traditionally being a creator or God then? How is calling a spade 'a spade', less 'traditional'? Should we call it Le Pelle?