Monday, November 27, 2017

The Church of Sweden has voted to adopt a controversial new handbook which says masculine references to God, such as “He” and “Lord” should be scrapped so as to be more “inclusive”

The following story is an interesting follow up to the last video I posted. Has Christianity gone to Hell?

Sofia Camnerin, the deputy chair of Sweden’s Equmenia Church, defended “inclusive language” in the church, stating that the need for it “is based on an awareness of different types of discrimination and inequality in our society.”

“Referring to God as ‘Lord’ consolidates [gender] hierarchies and the subordination of women in a white, Western feminist context,” she argued in a blog.- Church of Sweden Officially Drops Calling God ‘Lord’, ‘He’ to be More Inclusive

Below I've quoted Dr. Edward Feser on the issues of God's gender, which I think are relevant to the idiocy coming out of the Church of Sweden and many other converged "Christian" churches infected with SJW values.

Is God Male?

Being immaterial and incorporeal, God is not an animal, and thus he is not a rational animal or human being. And since he is not a human being, he is not literally either a man or a woman. He is sexless. Nevertheless, the traditional practice has been to characterize God in masculine terms...Some contemporary writers object to such usage, dismissing it as "sexist" and lacking in rational justification. Hence they often adopt the "politically correct" and clumsy practice of referring to God as "he/she/it". But in fact there are good philosophical reasons for the traditional usage.

Consider first of all that as we have seen, there is in God intellect and will, and these attributes are definitive of personality. Accordingly, God cannot appropriately be characterized in impersonal terms, as an "it". But then, why "he" and "him", rather than "she" and "her"?

The reason is that God's relationship to the world is much more like a paternal relationship than it is like a maternal relationship. biologically speaking, a father's role in procreation is active insofar as he impregnates, and a mother's role is passive insofar as she is impregnated. There is no change to a father's physiology as a consequence of impregnation, whereas there is a radical change in the mother's physiology. The mother becomes more physically dependent on the father, who must provide for his mate and for their unborn child-even if, unfortunately, some fathers do not do their duty in this regard. As that sad fact indicates, the father is in no way physically dependent on his mate or their child, which is why he can (even if he shouldn't) leave the scene. There is also a literal physiological connection between the child and its mother that doesn't exist between the child and its father, whi is literally more distant during the whole process of gestation.

Now, there are obvious analogies here to God's relationship to the world. God is active insofar as he creates the world, whereas the world is passive insofar as it is created by God. As pure actuality, God is entirely unchangeable, whereas the world is a mixture of actuality and potentiality that is continuously changing. The world depends entirely on God at every instant, whereas God in no way depends on the world. The world could not exist without God even though he could exist without it. God is also utterly distinct from the world rather than being identical to it (as in pantheism) or even continuous with it (as in panentheism).

So, given the key elements of classical theism...the most natural and least misleading way of characterizing God is in paternal and thus masculine terms. Maternal imagery would suggest that God is changeable or continuous with the world, which would in turn suggest a panentheist conception of God, or a pantheist conception, or a conception which in some other way is at odds with God's immutability, immateriality, eternity, and pure actuality. - Dr. Edward Feser, Five Proofs of the Existence of God

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