The ‘Sons’ post (below) received two comments. I’ll call them A and B. Here they are again:
(A) “The academic community needs to be more sensitive to language use. Instead of sons why not use gender-neutral terms ‘children’ or ‘heirs’ or ‘beloved ones’? By insisting on using sons it subtly reinforces the superiority of the male gender in religious arguments. Unless you make the above argument explicit at the beginning of every book or journal article the use of male language reinforces negative gender stereotypes. There are many women in the religious academic world and church community who feel that they are ‘not good enough’ to study, research, preach and teach because they have encountered years of bias. I am a female systematic theologian and know of countless women who feel inferior as a result of hearing and reading male dominated religious discourse throughout their lives.”
(B) “The reason why we should not (in general) use gender-neutral terms is that such terms just don’t say the same thing as ’sons’. Our adoption in Christ is our taking on the sonship of the Son who is the Son of the Father. It is not a matter of bias here. To speak of ‘children’ INSTEAD of ’sons’ is to de-Trinitarianize the meaning of the language and evacuate it of its essential reference to our incorporation into the Second Person of the Trinity. (Such language-replacement is theologically comparable to replacing language of ‘Father, Son and Holy Spirit’ with ‘Creator, Redeemer, Sanctifier’.)
I think two things are important:
(1) The term ’son’ when used of our incorporation into Christ does not signify a sexually-divided mode of existence. In fact, it signifies quite the opposite – a mode of existence which transcends sexual opposition, in which there is neither ‘male nor female’. So a person who takes the language to be ’sexist’ is misunderstanding it. And a person who denies it is possible to use ’son’ in this Christian way denies the Gospel.
(2) It is quite possible that, given contemporary forms of language-use and the pressure exerted upon people to conform to ‘gender-neutrality’ language which does not respect the difference between the sexes (equality doesn’t mean identity, &c) – in this situation it is quite possible that people will misunderstand Christian language about sonship. In that case, we must explain what the language means, not stop using it because someone has misunderstood it. We must be faithful to our own language.”
The first ‘Sons’ post is here.
