Our Father God II
Scripture Texts: Matthew 6:9; John 5:17-23
Imagine a church member helping with a VBS in an inner city neighborhood sharing the gospel with some children and talking about God being our heavenly father. And a child looking perplexed asks, “You mean God is someone who comes home on Friday nights drunk, hits mom, yells at us, takes our money and leaves?”
Imagine a woman growing up with deep emotional and physical scars of abuse and neglect from her father, reads the Bible about God as Father and Jesus as Son of Man and misunderstands what that means and exchanges the truth for lies about who God is and what He is like.
Imagine seminaries in our country telling the students not to use Father and “he” when referring to God in their papers and not to use “man or mankind” when referring to people.
Imagine denominations writing study papers recommending pastors change the Trinitarian formula from “Father, Son and Holy Spirit” to:
“Creator, Redeemer, Sustainer”
“Speaker, Word and Breath”
“Lover, Beloved and Love”
“Rainbow, Ark and Dove”
“Compassionate Mother, Beloved Child and Life-Giving Womb”
Imagine hymns and hymnals being re-written with more politically-correct gender-inclusive language. Imagine the publishers of the Bible making new translations like the NRSV, TNIV and the NLB changing the words used for God and Jesus, and man and Jews.
Now let’s stop imagining and wake up to reality. To call God Father is a controversial concept in today’s culture and in today’s church.
When I was at Calvin Seminary a couple of years after coming here, I heard a couple of professors referring to God as God. I began to notice whenever they referred to God they always referred to God as God. Now you are thinking, so what? That’s a good thing right? The clue something else was up was when I heard the words “God’s self.” It sounds like this in a sentence. “When God wanted to reveal God’s self to us how did God describe God’s self to us?”
What’s going on here is a very intentional and careful avoidance of any masculine pronouns for God, like he or himself. Many of the religious institutions in our country have adopted gender-neutral inclusive language in their writing and their speaking, both with regard to God and with regard to humans.
It’s an epidemic and it has been going on for 50 plus years and gaining ground. It was creeping into my seminary when I was there 40 years ago. The young pastors coming out of seminary today are being trained and taught to abandon masculine language when referring to God or to people.
The TNIV, Today’s NIV is an intentionally gender-neutral, inclusive language version of the Bible.
Let me give you just two examples of how much the TNIV changes many texts, the first regarding people and the second regarding Jesus.
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