The Archbishop of York has a much bigger problem than the Lord's Prayer and the fatherhood of God: The Trinity's pronouns are he/him

Lord’s Prayer opening may be ‘problematic’, says archbishop :

 

“I know the word ‘father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive, and for all of us who have laboured rather too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life,” he said.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

That the Father is a man, the Son is a man, and the Holy Ghost is a man is shot through the Scriptures. They'll have to chuck the whole thing in the Thames.

 

 

See now that I, even I, am he, and there is no god with me: I kill, and I make alive; I wound, and I heal: neither is there any that can deliver out of my hand. 

-- Deuteronomy 32:39

Who hath wrought and done it, calling the generations from the beginning? I the LORD, the first, and with the last; I am he. 

-- Isaiah 41:4

Ye are my witnesses, saith the LORD, and my servant whom I have chosen: that ye may know and believe me, and understand that I am he: before me there was no God formed, neither shall there be after me.  I, even I, am the LORD; and beside me there is no saviour.  ... Yea, before the day was I am he; and there is none that can deliver out of my hand: I will work, and who shall let it? ... I, even I, am he that blotteth out thy transgressions for mine own sake, and will not remember thy sins.

-- Isaiah 43:10f.,13,25 

And even to your old age I am he; and even to hoar hairs will I carry you: I have made, and I will bear; even I will carry, and will deliver you. 

-- Isaiah 46:4

Hearken unto me, O Jacob and Israel, my called; I am he; I am the first, I also am the last.  

-- Isaiah 48:12

I, even I, am he that comforteth you: who art thou, that thou shouldest be afraid of a man that shall die, and of the son of man which shall be made as grass; 

-- Isaiah 51:12

Therefore my people shall know my name: therefore they shall know in that day that I am he that doth speak: behold, it is I.  

-- Isaiah 52:6

The woman saith unto him, I know that Messias cometh, which is called Christ: when he is come, he will tell us all things. Jesus saith unto her, I that speak unto thee am he. 

-- John 4:25f.

But when the Comforter is come, whom I will send unto you from the Father, even the Spirit of truth, which proceedeth from the Father, he shall testify of me:  

-- John 15:26

Then came Jesus forth, wearing the crown of thorns, and the purple robe. And Pilate saith unto them, Behold the man!  

-- John 19:5

For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus; 

-- I Timothy 2:5

Joseph Henry Thayer's chief example of anthropos "without distinction of sex" isn't

A woman when she is in travail hath sorrow, because her hour is come: but as soon as she is delivered of the child, she remembereth no more the anguish, for joy that a man is born into the world.

ἡ γυνὴ ὅταν τίκτῃ λύπην ἔχει ὅτι ἦλθεν ἡ ὥρα αὐτῆς· ὅταν δὲ γεννήσῃ τὸ παιδίον οὐκ ἔτι μνημονεύει τῆς θλίψεως διὰ τὴν χαρὰν ὅτι ἐγεννήθη ἄνθρωπος εἰς τὸν κόσμον.

 

-- John 16:21

John obviously had to hand τὸ παιδίον to express human being without distinction of sex if he had meant that again, but he uses ἄνθρωπος instead. The birth of a man-child was a default value of Jewish women.

Thayer was infamous in his own time for denying the "unerring verbal accuracy" of the New Testament, claiming that the Lutherans didn't make the Bible the "standard" in the same way as his fellow American Congregational Calvinists had done.

 

Thayer, lauded for his devotion to the truth by his contemporaries in the scholarly community, believed in a myth.

 

Thayer got his information second hand, not from personal knowledge of the history of Lutheranism, relying instead on Philip Schaff, who himself was notably ignorant of much about Luther, especially about the enthusiasm for the Formula of Concord in his own time, which states in the opening:

We believe, teach, and confess that the sole rule and standard according to which all dogmas together with [all] teachers should be estimated and judged are the prophetic and apostolic Scriptures of the Old and of the New Testament alone . . ..

Thayer obviously never got the Lutheran memo, either, to let John interpret John. Circumcision was for an ἄνθρωπος after all (John 7:23).

Back in those days, apparently, you could in fact tell a Harvard man quite a lot . . . of hooey.

 

The one God is not feminine μία, by definition, and neither is the mediator

 οὐδεὶς ἀγαθός· εἰ μὴ εἷς ὅ Θεός. -- Matthew 19:17
 οὐδεὶς ἀγαθὸς εἰ μὴ εἷς ὁ θεός. -- Mark 10:18
 οὐδεὶς ἀγαθὸς εἰ μὴ εἷς ὁ θεός. -- Luke 18:19

Ἄκουε Ἰσραήλ κύριος ὁ θεὸς ἡμῶν κύριος εἷς ἐστίν. ... καὶ εἶπεν αὐτῷ ὁ γραμματεύς Καλῶς διδάσκαλε ἐπ᾽ ἀληθείας εἶπας, ὅτι εἷς ἐστιν Θεὸς, καὶ οὐκ ἔστιν ἄλλος πλὴν αὐτοῦ· -- Mark 12:29,32

εἷς γὰρ θεός εἷς καὶ μεσίτης θεοῦ καὶ ἀνθρώπων ἄνθρωπος Χριστὸς Ἰησοῦς. -- I Timothy 2:5

At least Rome tried to stop the barbarian invasions from the north, the LCMS' Matt Harrison has welcomed the hordes from the global south for a decade

 Here.

You will be replaced by better Christians, he says. It is God's will, he says.

Except you won't be. You aren't being. The future is oblivion for the LCMS, not replacement.

This has only been the LCMS' latest gimmick in a long line of gimmicks to stem the tide of decline.

The first, minor dip in the numbers for the LCMS was from 1974. Seminex. It amounted only to a pruning of the tree. The second, steeper dip from the late 1990s was purely demographic, and cut to the root. Peak Baby Boom in 1957 reached age 40 in 1997, after which it is difficult for a woman to have children.

It was already then too late.

The LCMS was always an improbable enterprise to begin with, suffering from multiple personality disorder, just like the religion itself. Simul justus et peccator. The members were at once disloyal to the homeland as immigrants to America, yet here they were, still strangely German proud. It worked for quite a long while out in farm country, where animal husbandry kept the prime directive always in mind, but the forces of anti-German discrimination started to take their toll during the Great War, and finished off the German-lovers in the Second.

My grandfather, a graduate of Springfield who had been a missionary and church planter in places such as Oregon and Wisconsin, introduced English services once a month during The War To End All Wars. The anger over that expressed by church members caused him a massive heart attack which killed him suddenly in 1919 the day after an ugly voters meeting. He was only 52. His last of nine children ended up volunteering to fight Hitler in 1943, to the quiet consternation of the extended family, some of whom had retreated to the safety of the Wisconsin Synod. The LCMS continued to grow only because its loyal sons like my father survived the war and continued to have relatively big families of four.  I happily grew up taking German from the 7th Grade onward in the public school. In college I read Faust and the Lutherbibel.

But we were too few.

Some of the people running the show then weren't stupid. They knew what was coming if they didn't DO SOMETHING. And so there were desperate attempts pushing evangelization programs on the youth in the 1970s, many of them non-Lutheran in inspiration.  There was the Ongoing Ambassadors for Christ. The group would descend on a town for a weekend and cold-call at front doors, doing a survey, presenting the Gospel, inviting them to church. There was the Jesus Movement, then the Charismatic Renewal, The Purpose Driven Life, and the Church Growth gimmickry.

They all came to nothing, except to infect the LCMS' church life and worship with the same laxity infecting the wider culture. Die, Der, und Das was too hard! back then, but now we must learn over 100 gender identities. 

What they should have done is make babies. That is how one honors father and mother.

And so it is not well with the LCMS. And it will not live long on the earth.

The soul of the LCMS was required of it a long time ago. The only question now is whose things shall these be which remain?

Down he points.

 

Gender dysphoria in one lesson

 

You'd think an historian searching for very early Christian evidence of gender equality would know about Galatians 3 and I Corinthians 7, but you'd be wrong

Am I missing anything by way of obvious sources? Put another way, without Romans 16 above all, and a couple of other comparable lists of “Say hello to” greetings in other letters, would any later scholar dared have portrayed very early Christianity in the gender-equal way that modern scholars suggest? Think how easily something like Romans 16 might have dropped out of the transmission history of that document, if an early scribe had decided it was just personal stuff, and not worth preserving. If that had occurred, just what would we know or think about gender roles in early Christianity then? 


 

 

There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.

 

-- Galatians 3:28

For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does.

 

-- I Corinthians 7:4