This post is part eight in a series looking at Donald Hook and Alvin Kimel’s 1993 article, “The Pronouns of Deity: A Theolinguistic Critique of Feminist Proposals,” published in Scottish Journal of Theology and currently freely accessible through Alvin Kimel’s academia.edu page.
In this post I explore the claim that avoiding third-person pronouns for God leads to depersonalisation, alongside arguments the authors make against other reformist proposals.
The authors begin with a quote from Roland Mushat Frye: “In English speech and writing … personhood and personality are conveyed by a choice of pronouns, and in our syntax and lexicon there is simply no means to convey this affirmation of person apart from choosing between the singular masculine and feminine pronouns. The elimination of pronouns would subvert the Christian belief in a personal God” (quoted, 318). The authors agree, writing, “In our readings of theological writings and liturgies that follow this practice, we have often been struck by the flatness, hollowness, and abstractness of the deity portrayed or discussed” (318).
This is an interesting claim, and another which I am sympathetic to. Although I can’t recall having the same impression when reading texts that avoid pronouns for God, I wonder if this will be a reality for others besides the authors. My response is threefold. First, other imagery used of God may well communicate personality to readers and listeners, such as Father/Mother, Son, Shepherd, Counsellor, among others. And no one is proposing that the second person pronoun, you, which communicates personality more directly because it is an address, be removed. Second, the personality of God is derived not only from language but encounter. If it is not communicated in the use of third-person pronouns, for many it is already apparent through their own experiences, which colour their readings of texts speaking of this same God. Third, like other criticisms the authors have forwarded, such as pronoun avoidance between conscious rather than subconscious, and the use of Godself being distracting, I wonder if this is only a problem for our current time. If pronoun avoidance persists into the future, will it communicate the same impersonality to coming generations? Or will God’s personality remain through other means, such as those noted above? This is not to say that the authors don’t have a point. But I think what they identify is more of a risk than a problem.
The authors proceed to address other proposals: 1. alternating between masculine and feminine pronouns; 2. inventing new pronouns; 3. substituting the traditional masculine pronouns for feminine ones. I will comment briefly on their criticism of the first proposal, a criticism I think is alarmist and unfortunately does not consider the value of such a proposal: “This convention, if ever widely practiced within the Church, can only have one of two consequences: either the Church will come to believe that its deity is a hermaphrodite, combining within him-and-herself both masculine and feminine principles… or semantic confusion will reign, as hearers keep wondering which God everyone is talking about” (319). But no one is proposing that God has two sexes—this seems to me no different from fearing that the use of masculine pronouns implies that God is sexually male—and no one is proposing that there is more than one God. I am surprised by the hastiness of this argument, perhaps occasioned by limits of space. Although I think we should use both masculine and feminine pronouns at times, depending on the head image being used (e.g. King, Mother), my concern here is that doing so consistently maintains a gender binary, as well as perhaps affirming stereotypically masculine and stereotypically feminine qualities as essentially masculine and feminine, respectively.
At the end of this section the authors provide a summary criticism of various proposals. It is interesting and deserves consideration: “All of the current pronoun proposals transgress the cardinal rule of the anaphoric pronoun: they draw excessive attention either to the pronoun (or pronoun substitute) or to the proper noun, often with undesirable syntactic and semantic consequences. In the words of linguist Dwight Bolinger, they refuse ‘to take the back seat that all languages reserve for pure anaphora'” (321; “Bolinger was speaking specifically about the ‘clumsiness’ of the double ‘he or she’ pronoun in secular discourse” [n. 46]). Again, this is a legitimate concern, though my response is the same. If these changes persist and constitute common theological style in one hundred years, will these criticisms still be relevant? Put differently, this is about opportunity cost. Theological language is always one of compromise because it attempts to approach the ineffable. There are upsides and downsides to both traditionalist and reformist approaches to God’s pronouns. If the debate continues (though it has certainly cooled off significantly since the nineties), the question must be, What compromises do we make to speak of God today?
Other posts in this series:
#1 Feminist proposals
#2 Grammatical gender
#3 Gender and pronouns in English
#4 The masculine God in Scripture and English
#5 The gender of the Holy Spirit
#6 Pronoun avoidance and the issue of clarity
#7 Godself
‣ #8 Pronoun avoidance, depersonalisation, and other reformist proposals
Cameron Coombe 