Genderless Jesus

The Scottish Episcopal Church has decided the Christian God is no longer male and is instead “beyond human gender .”  

They have removed words such as “Lord,” “He,” “His,” “Him” and “mankind” from services in order to promote this idea. Some ministers have even changed the final blessing, which includes the phrase “Father, Son and Holy Spirit,” to “Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier .”

In this new form of worship, the one true ruler of the universe is no longer a male. The qualities of masculinity are no longer at the top of the food chain. He has been demoted.

Critics of these new practices accuse the Church of succumbing to political correctness , and perhaps they’re right. Maybe the brains behind this initiative wanted to make the biblical terrain a little more equal for women.  

It certainly is a nice thought. By classifying God as a man, while also illustrating God as superior to every life-form, man is elevated. But by eliminating the association between man and God, women can more easily be viewed on equal terms as men.  

But as virtuous as that sounds, the Church may have started something they cannot finish, for to rid the bible of masculine bias, one would have to give it a lobotomy.

The bible is extremely misogynistic.

Its views towards women represent a time period which had more in common with a hunter-gatherer society than one which had lived through the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.

The Old and New Testament were written by people who lived in a rigidly patriarchal social structure.

How else can you explain quotes such as “Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you ,” from Genesis 3:16. Or how about this: “I permit not a woman to teach, nor to have dominion over a man, but to be in quietness,” from Timothy 2:11.

And let us not forget Exodus 21:7-11, which advocates the selling of daughters into slavery .

Women in the bible are treated as servile playthings who are lucky to even be allowed in the presence of a male. Their task is to obey their man and keep their mouths shut. If someone wrote a book with this kind of sexism in it, Rush Limbaugh would probably call for the author’s assassination.  

If this new approach to worship was even a small attempt by The Scottish Episcopal Church to rectify the status of women in the bible, sadly it is too little and much too late. You would not only have to rewrite most of the text, you would need to change history.


E-mail: joskraus@umail.iu.edu