Top Divinity Schools: Use Gender-Neutral Language to Refer to God

Um, in John 1:18 the Lord Jesus refers to God as Father not mother. And His prayers began with Father not mother.  More importantly, it was God who chose to reveal Himself as male as we find only masculine pronouns in Scripture.  But in spite of all this, some divinity schools have made the decision to avoid gender specific pronouns when discussing God and suggest using the term God and Godself instead of God with himself. Katherine Timpf takes issue with America’s obsession over political correctness in a piece she penned for National Review. She writes:

The divinity schools at Duke and Vanderbilt Universities have instructed their professors to start using more “inclusive” language when referring to God because the masculine pronouns “have served as a cornerstone of the patriarchy.” For example: This year’s divinity course catalogue at Vanderbilt tells professors to give “consistent attention to the use of inclusive language, especially in relation to the Divine,” because the school “commits continuously and explicitly to include gender as an analyzed category and to mitigate sexism.”

“It is up to the individual professor’s interpretation for their classes and is suggestive rather than mandatory,” the associate dean for academic affairs at Vanderbilt’s divinity school, Melissa Snarr, said in an e-mail to Heat Street. Now, that may sound fair, but in many cases, it’s really not up to the professor. For example, if we are talking about the Christian God, every single reference to Him in the Bible uses a masculine pronoun . . . which kind of gives you the vibe that Christians have decided that their god is a dude. The fact is, teaching anything else would be giving inaccurate information — which is what makes Duke’s particular guidelines even more absurd.

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