No, God isn’t male. But calling Him a ‘She’ is unholy twaddle

AGROUP of leading feminists in the Church of England are calling for God to be referred to as a woman in Anglican services.

If they succeed, worshippers turning up for Matins in their village church could find themselves reciting the words: ‘Our Mother, who art in Heaven.’

Imagine how that will go down with traditional churchgoers. I can picture it now. Instead of saying ‘Jolly good sermon, vicar’, the retired colonel in the front pew will throw down his prayer book in rage.

He will decamp to another parish — and so will his wife, creating a sudden vacancy for a flower arranger. Women And The Church ( known as ‘ Watch’), the pressure group calling for the use of ‘female language’ to describe God, know that such a change would lead to bitter rows in vestries and thunderous denunciations in the General Synod, the Church of England parliament.

But they are ready for battle. Watch ran — and won — the campaign for women bishops.

They are not to be confused with the loopy Christian feminists who danced in circles, clutching ‘healing crystals’, in the Seventies. No one listened when that lot demanded that God be called ‘She’, as they did incessantly.

Dreadful

Watch, in contrast, is led by a group of politically savvy networkers. These women are embedded in the ancient structures of the Church.

They are as adept at pulling strings as any scheming cleric in Anthony Trollope’s Barchester novels — though they tend to be much nicer.

The Rev Emma Percy, a leading light in the movement, is chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford, founded in 1555, and leads services in its magnificent Baroque chapel.

She says using female language will help banish ‘the notion that God is some kind of old man in the sky’.

That’s a dreadful old cliche — have you ever heard anyone say they believe in an old man in the sky? — but the Cambridge-educated Dr Percy is no fool.

Her husband, the Very Rev Martyn Percy, is Dean of Christ Church, Oxford’s grandest college. Either or both of them could become senior bishops. We may flinch from referring to God the Mother, but Emma Percy uses subtle arguments to justify a mixture of male and female language in church — she is not demanding that all references to God as ‘ He’ should be censored.

Those arguments deserve to be taken seriously.

So let us clear up some misconceptions. Watch do not claim that God is a woman. They believe the deity is neither male nor female — which is what the Church has always taught.

God became a man in the person of Jesus Christ, but even Ian Paisley wouldn’t have said that God the Father was a man.

Nor do the Watch campaigners think the deity is a goddess. That would be making God a woman — which they think is just as wrong- headed as making God a man.

What about Jesus? The Rev Lindsay Llewellyn-MacDuff, chaplain to the Bishop of Rochester, argues that his role as Christ, redeemer of humanity, is not intrinsically male — even though Jesus the man appeared on Earth.

‘In my priesthood, I remind people that Christ is our sister and mother, as well as our brother,’ she says.

She supports female references to God because ‘how we talk affects how we think.

‘Centuries of keeping women linguistically out of the picture have helped keep them out of the picture politically, financially and legally’.

That’s hard to deny — especially where the Church is concerned. Every Christian denomination is propped up by women, who make up around 60 per cent of worshippers in Britain and the U.S.

Yet before the ordination of women priests in 1994 they were never admitted to the officer class.

The Roman Catholic Church has its own theological reasons for not ordaining women — but, even if you accept those teachings, there is no excuse for the way devout female parishioners have been patronised and bossed around by priests over the years.

One can’t help wondering: if the Catholic Church had listened to women, and mothers in particular, would its bishops have got away with covering up child sex abuse on such an appalling scale?

The arrival of Anglican women priests has certainly changed the way the Church of England thinks about women. The move was expected to divide the established Church. It didn’t.

That’s because, overwhelmingly, parishioners have got used to the idea.

These days, even tweedy lovers of the old Book of Common Prayer refer to female priests as ‘ our vicar’ in affectionate terms. They could be talking about the vicar in Dad’s Army.

Norman Tebbit, hardly your textbook moderniser, is a great admirer of the Very Rev Canon Dr Frances Ward, Dean of St Edmundsbury Cathedral, where he attends evensong.

So, are the feminists right to argue that calling God ‘She’ is no more controversial than ordaining women? The answer is: No. Language is powerful, as Watch point out. What they don’t realise is that references to ‘ God the Mother’ are completely at odds with worshippers’ idea of God, a much bigger deal for Anglicans than the sex of the celebrant.

This time it is the feminists who are patronising women — by implying that ordinary worshippers can’t reconcile words such as ‘ Lord’ and ‘Father’ with the idea that God is neither male nor female.

Anger

Watch’s members love to point out that the Bible uses feminine imagery: God is compared to ‘ a woman in labour’ in the Book of Isaiah.

But throughout the Gospels Jesus constantly refers to God as ‘Father’ — most famously in the Lord’s Prayer.

Referring to God as ‘Mother’ drives a horse and cart through Scripture. Such an innovation is guaranteed to split the C of E as never before.

And much of the anger would come from Christians whom feminists are desperately anxious not to upset — women from immigrant backgrounds. African, West Indian and Asian Anglicans — who keep many inner-city British parishes alive — think feminised worship is tainted by paganism.

For many of them, referring to God as a woman is, indeed, a form of goddess worship, something they have fought against in their countries of origin.

We should also ask why this particular question has arisen now. One influence is the fashion for rewriting history to highlight the role of women in biblical times.

Much of this is based on bad scholarship and wishful thinking. Several books portray Mary Magdalene as the real leader of the Apostles. They are about as plausible as The Da Vinci Code.

Then there’s the re- emergence of hard- edged identity politics. Emma Percy speaks naively about ‘a real resurgence and interest in feminism . . . younger people are much more interested in how gender categories shouldn’t be about stereotypes’.

Gimmick

She’s right that, at Oxford in particular, students are obsessed by gender categories.

They argue viciously on Facebook about the correct terminology for describing transgender people — and woe betide anyone who uses the wrong jargon.

The Church of England is not good at telling the difference between necessary modernisation of its practices and secular fads. Nothing has done more damage than its embarrassing attempts to be ‘relevant’.

In some parishes, every other sermon is about climate change, on which the vicar poses as an expert even though he’s done no more than skimread The Guardian.

And do you remember those hideous cathedral youth events billed as ‘raves in the nave’?

Despite weighty theological arguments, the ‘God as She’ proposal falls clearly into the category of gimmick.

Lord Carey, former Archbishop of Canterbury, has warned us that the Church could be extinct in 25 years’ time unless services become more spiritually fulfilling.

Calling God ‘She’ will not achieve that fulfilment. The proposed twist of language will do nothing to stop the decline of Christian faith in this country.

On the contrary, it will make worshippers squirm. And nothing empties pews faster than that.