The Episcopal Church has decided to change its 1979 prayer book, so that male pronouns are no longer used to talk about God.
The prayer book of the Anglican Communion, which came out for the first time in 1549 and is now in its fourth edition, is a sign of unity. The Anglican Communion was formed in 1867. It is the third-largest Christian group by several members. It will take time to change God’s masculine pronouns like “He,” “King,” and “Father,” but religious leaders at a recent triennial conference in Austin agreed to the request.
The inside story
Oracular In his oracles, Isaiah talks about God as a woman giving birth and as a mother comforting her children. The book of Proverbs says that Sophia, the female figure of Holy Wisdom, helped God make the world when it was being made. Early Christians said that Sophia was the “Logos,” or the word from God. Jewish rabbis also linked God’s law, the Torah, to Sophia, which meant that divine feminine wisdom had been around. In Exodus 3, when Moses meets God for the first time, he asks him his name. This is one of the most amazing things ever said about God in the Hebrew Bible. God starts verse 14 by saying, “I am who I am.” This is just a mix of “to be” verbs in Hebrew. Exodus says that God “is,” similar to the Christian belief that God is spirit.
Even God’s name, Yahweh, which he tells Moses in Exodus 3, has a strange mix of male and female endings. God’s Hebrew name starts with the feminine “Yah” and ends with the masculine “weh.” Mary Daly is a feminist theologian, and she wants to know why “God” can’t just be a verb because verbs are the most active and lively parts of speech.
Matthew compares Jesus to the woman Sophia when he writes, “Yet knowledge is proven by her deeds” (wisdom). Matthew says that Jesus is the Wisdom of Proverbs and that he has been with God since the beginning of time. Matthew seems to be hinting that Jesus had a feminine side, in my opinion.
This is how the works of the Church fathers are put together. When Clement, a bishop from Alexandria, wrote his book “Salvation to the Rich Man,” he said, “In his ineffable essence, he is father; in his love for us, he became mother. He is both our dad and mom.” “The father turns into a woman by loving.” In the second and third centuries, Alexandria, along with Rome and Jerusalem, was an important Christian city. It was the place where Christian scholars came together.
In another book called Christ the Educator, he says that the Word of Christ is “everything to his small ones, both father and mother.” In the fourth century, Bishop Augustine of Hippo in North Africa compares God to a mother to show God cares for the faithful. In his writings, he talks about a mother’s care: “He who promised heavenly food fed us milk.”