Psalms for Morning and Evening Prayer

Commonweal, Nov 17, 1995 by John C. Cort

The neuterization of God seems to be well under way. You can hear priests on the altar referring to God as "he or she." The practice of substituting "God" or "God's" whenever the masculine pronouns occur is even more common. Some priests follow it in the liturgy of the Mass, and now it has blossomed into full flower in a new translation of the psalms by the International Commission on English in the Liturgy. I quote from Psalms for Morning and Evening Prayer, a study translation prepared by ICEL.

Actually, the flower is not quite full. Contributing an introduction for the commission, Sister Mary Collins, O.S.B., concludes as follows:

Still, it must be acknowledged that

the final text of this psalter is a skin

only three-quarters full of new

wine. Once the project had been

completed, ICEL forwarded the

psalter to the Catholic Bishops'

Committee on Doctrine for the imprimatur,

which that body gives for

biblical translations being published

in the United States. The

Committee on Doctrine reported

back that it had decided earlier "in

principle" that it would not give

the imprimatur to any publication,

however successful, that

had avoided calling God "he."

The principle at issue, presumably

theological but perhaps more

mundane, was not elaborated.

Anti-climactically, the translators

returned to undo some of their

original work.

The task of undoing some of their original work could not have been arduous. The translators restored, by this writer's count, exactly 6 masculine pronouns while leaving intact 703 deletions of masculine pronouns. Collins protests that the commission's "skin is only three-quarters full of new wine." Her arithmetic seems imprecise. Six is not one-quarter of 709: It is less than I percent. The wineskin is actually 99.16 percent full of new wine.

In spite of this imbalance, Cardinal William Keeler, president of the National Conference of Catholic Bishops, did grant an imprimatur to the new translation. Does he realize how little new wine the bishops were able to remove from the old wineskin.

I will not focus on the literary quality of the translation, which seems of high caliber, but rather on the issue that the bishops' committee raised, namely, the removal of God's masculinity. The translators confess that this removal is entirely their responsibility and not a question of a more faithful translation from a language whose pronouns are gender-neutral. Collins: "... [I]f the Hebrew employs language conventions like the exclusive use of masculine pronouns, the translators became responsible for appropriate critical handling of texts in this dynamic equivalence translation for contemporary prayer." Perhaps a translation of the translators is also appropriate, namely, "Even though the original Hebrew uses masculine pronouns when referring to God, the translators felt free to delete them in the interests of gender-free language."

The fight for inclusive language in the church is, by any rational standard, a just war. When Margaret O'Brien Steinfels writes in the New York Times Book Review (May 14, 1995) that "many Catholics, men and women, saw the retranslation of the catechism and its generic use of `man' for `human' asagratuitous insult," one can only applaud. Sometimes it does seem that logic and common sense, not to mention common justice, are in short supply at the Vatican. Collins holds that the neutralization of God is part and parcel of this fight for inclusive language. That is a more dubious proposition. For if it is, then ICEL's major opponent, standing like Horatio at the bridge, is Jesus Christ himself. In the Old Testament there are only about twenty-five instances where God is referred to as "father." In the four Gospels Jesus identifies God as "father" about 170 times, 109 of these in the Gospel of John alone. Even the Jesus Seminar, to my knowledge, hasn't maintained that Jesus never said it, though with the Jesus Seminar any absurdity is possible.

Then there is that immovable, massive rock, also blocking entrance to the bridge, the Pater Noster. How to get around that?

If we are Christians, we believe that the word of Jesus is the word of God. If the word of Jesus is the word of God, then we know that God wants to be addressed as father, wants to be prayed to as father, wants to be loved as father, wants to be obeyed as father, one of those old-fashioned fathers who spoke as one having authority. So, if God is recognized as father, how does it follow that he is not entitled to a masculine pronoun? Can we acknowledge him as masculine in the Gospels, but only a neuter in the psalms?

And how do you reconcile the personal God of the Old and New Testaments with a neuter God? In the real world, excluding hermaphrodite rarities, there are only two sexes, male and female. Those who have inventive minds can perhaps imagine a personality who is neither male nor female. But the product is imaginary, not based on normal human experience, not real. The only realistic members of this anti-male movement are the worshipers of Gaea, the earth goddess, God the mother.