I know that the article you posted is not serious, but it contains Holocaust denial. From the linked article:
At the time of going to press, a comprehensive reading of the past hundred years of German history showed no documented incidents of any racial bias.
It is probably illegal in countries that have laws against Holocaust denial, including Germany.
As for the Church of Sweden, sure whatever. Christians have been redefining things for a long time so I can’t be surprised at this.
As @tekk pointed out, and @PatrickD got nearly right, Hebrew is a gendered language and nearly all Names in the Tanach are in the masculine form. There are exceptions but getting into that in this thread, it depends too much on rabbinics and issues that are not really explainable without a pretty good foundation in Torah study to begin with.
AKA Maimonides Negative Theology. No he wasn’t the first to advocate this, as you point out there were Christian discussions much earlier. I only link to this since discussion of gender in relation to God can only be viewed with consideration of the Hebrew sources.
But official policy in Sweden is that Norway is a cesspool of terrible people.
When I lived in NE England in th 80s I regularly listened to the English-language radio broadcasts from the public radio services of both Sweden and Norway. A large chunk of the broadcasts from each were fairly nasty jokes at the expense of the other country. The one thing they could agree on was how terrible the Danes were.
(I should add that I am a member of a pan-Scandinavian professional organization, and all the people I know in my field seem to get along great, at least when people like me are in the room. However, I know better - I’ve lived in both Wisconsin and Minnesota.)
No, Jesus was Batman
Have we decided yet what gender to assign to Russell’s teapot? Is the spout a possible clue, or should we follow Disney’s doctrine?
From the press release: “Of course, the traditional expressions of Christian faith remain in the new worship book. However, some gender neutral ways of addressing God have been added in some prayers".
Oh yeah, and before I forget it:
I can concur with both claims. In past experiences within multiple protestant denominations I found only a specious criticism within limited parameters was encouraged. The boundaries of what was appropriate wasn’t always explicit or clearly defined but anything that called into question fundamental beliefs or assumptions seemed to be actively discouraged.
Knowledge of “the other” was dangerous. When it suited the party line I was encouraged to “research and be prepared to give a reason for what I believed.” When it didn’t suit whomever in the hierarchy (literally rule by the sacred) it was up to us fallible mortals to “accept our sinful inferiority and obey.” Why? Because The Book said so.
All part of classic brainwashing techniques:
Curiously I find myself currently unequally yoked with believers. While loosely following my brother-in-law’s theological training I notice he is continually venting his frustration that his studies keep circumventing his personal interest and passion, that the required reading is too limited and boring, and that he must continually parrot back his instructors perspective. Maybe such leadership training includes the hidden benefit of discouraging those predisposed to critical thinking?
Curiously I find myself currently unequally yoked with believers. While loosely following my brother-in-law’s theological training I notice he is continually venting his frustration that his studies keep circumventing his personal interest and passion, that the required reading is too limited and boring, and that he must continually parrot back his instructors perspective. Maybe such leadership training includes the hidden benefit of discouraging those predisposed to critical thinking?
You’re not the only one who finds themselves in this predicament. I have several degrees which offer virtually no advancement without doubling down on further debt.
If your BIL is in grad school, then I would suggest he transfer his credits or find a a specific field of study suited to his interests and abilities. It’s a lot of money and time invested, only to realize that none of it got your further in your vocation.
You may have questions that remained unanswered (which means you have to design your own job requirements). Or you may have to comport yourself to the current state of religious devotion and understand which questions are intentionally unasked (which in many cases means you have to agree to lifelong precepts) .
In my experience, academics is actually the ideal place for finding out how to ask questions in a way that doesn’t denigrate religion. “Leadership training” should be more than rote learning. At the grad level, this often requires more credit-hours than a standard 40-hour MA and involves understanding multiple languages and cross-disciplinary fields.
Critical thinking is what you make of it: in many cases a “guaranteed” ministerial position is not comparable to academic tenure. In fact, it’s highly conditional depending upon the church or denomination. It would be best if your BIL did not try to shortcut the system, but rather find a school that allows a larger breadth of exploration.
Accredited ATS schools are still stuck in a model that limits flexibility. You have to find a school that already encompasses a multitude of theological debate and options. There are usually only a few choices for schools of this type (which makes it easier to choose, but harder to commit).
But of course.
Hail Eris!
What did I get wrong?
“heavily gendered” really it’s completely gendered as you expiation showed
Pedantic Me
First person verbs don’t mark gender, so not completely. (I see your pedantry and raise you a nitpick).
Um, no? Yes. Yes I am! Now, cease any and all supernatural activity and return forthwith to your place of origin, or to the next convenient parallel dimension.
“Heavily gendered” sounds like “physical sexual characteristics so pronounced that you can’t possibly miss them” to me. But then again, I’m not a native speaker.
Just for clarity, though, as a gendered language, that means that tables and lemons and clouds have gender as well, right? To me the gendered language thing doesn’t matter much because there’s a big difference between the word for a thing having a gender in a language and that thing have a gender.
That being said, I’m not here to question the work of Jewish scholars. The God of Judaism is not a thing I’m going to pretend I understand.
Even though I know Christians read a translation of a Jewish holy book, I don’t really think that it’s reasonable for me as someone who was raised Christian to think that the God I was raised with is the God of the Jews. I think the God I was raised with had been battered by centuries of scientific advancement (and an apparent need to reconcile with that advancement). Everything about that God that could be shown to be true or untrue in reality had been stripped away. We said “he” but those were the days when people insisted that “he” could be used to mean a person of unknown gender. Frankly, it’s weird to me to refer to God with a pronoun that indicates God is a “person”.
There’s lot of concepts of gods out there, and many of them have gender. Maybe I’m projecting onto the Swedes, but the kind of church that would give up gendered pronouns for Gods I’d bet is the kind of church in which those pronouns stopped making sense some long time ago when God changes from an entity to a complex synonym for “the universe.”
As I express above, I think the concept of God in at least some branches of Christianity has just moved so far from traits would could ascribe to people that it makes no sense to think of that God as having a gender. I don’t doubt that God has been gendered and still is gendered for many.
Attributed to Anselm, an 11th century theologian. The idea is that you define God as the thing than which nothing greater can be thought. The argument says that since existing is greater than not existing, if we can imagine such a thing, then it must exist. Therefore God is real!
If you are reading this (because you don’t know what the ontological argument is) then that probably sounds like the dumbest thing you’ve ever heard, but it really did have a meaningful impact on Christian theology and Western philosophy.
Sure, Anselm would have said that God is male, since he would have contended that being male is greater than being female. But since people wouldn’t say that today, the trait of “male” should presumably be dropped. So it’s not that the Christian God wasn’t male a hundred years ago, but for some sects of Christianity I don’t think God has been gendered for decades at least. I read this removal of pronouns as them just kind of waking up to that.
(At any rate, the joke was that when I said I couldn’t find a reference to God’s gender, the word “God” was a link to Azathoth in an H.P. Lovecraft wiki)
Well done.
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