Confessional Pronouns
This article is excerpted from the current issue of Gottesdienst. Not a subscriber yet? Click here.
The other day I began paging through a book about classical education theory, which I found to be a compelling read. The book, In Vital Harmony, was written about five years ago by Karen Glass, but its subject is a nineteenth-century figure, the classical education writer Charlotte Mason. Miss Mason has become a favorite among homeschoolers in our day who want to pursue and rediscover what a classical education should look like.
As I read, I soon began to realize, rather to my surprise, that one of the things that I found so enjoyable about the reading was something that’s only tangentially related to the subject of classical education. To be sure, I also found myself quite in agreement with the arguments of the book, and of Charlotte Mason. It’s refreshing to see someone so grounded in what ought to be common-sense principles and applying them to the education of children. But aside from that, what I read in this book was language that seemed fairly unaffected by the new pronoun conventions of our day.
And that got me thinking about how the pronoun warriors first overtook academia and succeeded in forcing their feminist views on our language. That was roughly half a century ago, and today the language shift is mainstream. It didn’t take long, being part of the cultural decay that rapidly led us to a society whose intelligentsia are now pushing robustly for their perverse cultural agendas with alarming success. The decay has gone far beyond the simple days of feminism, of course, as now we see the deterioration in all its rottenness on full display: from claims of gender “dysphoria” to irreversible sex changes for confused minors without parental consent, to males “identifying” as women, competing in women’s sports, and invading women’s locker rooms. But the origins of all this madness could be detected already in the feminist pronoun wars.
It’s doubtful that anyone could definitively show whether the pronoun agenda was a contributing factor in the feminists’ success or whether it is simply a symptom of it, although it seems to have appeared before the cultural gender upheaval overtook the civilized world. That would suggest a causative role, but still, it’s hard to say.
Feminists were quite intentional in their role as pronoun warriors, however, and what is clear is that the way we think about things is strongly related to the way we speak about them, and that this is something the pronoun warriors were well aware of when they began to push for their egalitarian goals in the use of pronouns.
As part of a robust foray into social engineering, a campaign against the generic use of masculine pronouns was becoming a much more visible part of the feminist agenda, whose aim ever since the days of feminist pioneer Margaret Sanger (1879–1966) had been to erase any traces of male supremacy from our cultural norms. The generic male pronoun, the use of “he” to refer indiscriminately to a human being, had to go. And the use of the female pronoun was undesirable too, when used for nouns that do not refer to females: it was no longer acceptable to employ the female pronoun to refer to the earth or the church, and downright heretical to refer thus to a hurricane. Since 1953 the U.S. Weather Bureau had been giving hurricanes female names, but that was “corrected” by the World Meteorological Organization in 1979 so that male names would be used equally.
Feminists have claimed that the generic use of terms like “he” and “man” contribute to making women “invisible” and to obscuring the importance of women and even distracting from their existence. The problem, they say, is that terms like “he” and “man” are not entirely generic when they cover both men and women, but implicitly carry the sense that maleness is the norm, which is a symbolic insult to women. The generic use of terms like “he” and “man” makes men the norm for humanity and is therefore a contributing factor of sexism and the perpetuation of male dominance. Some feminists even allege that men have deliberately encoded this “sexism” into language to consolidate their claims of male supremacy.[1]
The allegation that women are made “invisible” is imprecise. In what sense are women made invisible? The argument is that the generic use of the masculine makes one less likely to think of women and thus clearly contributes to their invisibility. But historically the generic pronoun has always been taken to include women, and in fact the term “woman” itself derives from “man”; that is, she is in a way a particular kind of man, a wo-man. But feminists see this as inadequate, as it makes woman a kind of subset of man. Yet if we consider the creation account in Genesis, we find that woman indeed derives from man, quite literally: this is precisely how womanhood came to be: she was taken out of man.
But what the feminist worldview maintains is that the Bible is itself complicit in an unjust push for male dominion. Paleologist Christopher Rollston makes the claim of biblical misogyny by citing as examples the fact that Noah’s wife and three daughters-on-law are not named, and that even the Ten Commandments classify wives as the property of husbands, listing them with slaves and work animals.[2] The feminist worldview is at its roots fundamentally and diametrically opposed to the Sacred Scriptures and, as such, is at odds with reality itself. The underlying assumption of the feminist worldview is that women have been historically the victims of an unjust male supremacy. But there is another unspoken assumption behind that one, namely, that this male “supremacy” somehow arose in an evolutionary way that needs to be undone. The root assumption of feminism is that Scripture is not truthful in its record of the origin of the world, but rather, that Scripture is itself the product of the unjust male supremacy that arose of its own accord.
What is abundantly clear is that the biblical account of creation does indeed affirm something like a kind of male “supremacy,” by virtue simply of the fact that God created Adam first, and then from Adam’s side fashioned the woman, though the term “supremacy” is not the right term, in that it may be taken to imply superiority, which is not what Scripture affirms. Rather, “priority” or “primacy” might be a better term, as an acknowledgment that the man was made first, and then the woman, as St. Paul also puts it: “Adam was first formed, then Eve” (1 Tim 2:13). Further, Adam’s creation in God’s image provides an unmistakable rationale for the biblical ascribing of the male pronoun to God, and to God’s ultimate revelation of Himself as Father and Son. The biblical record provides further, and also unmistakably, that the basis of all feminism is the Fall of Adam through Adam’s acquiescence to the error of Eve. The primeval error of Eve was to listen to the serpent instead of her husband, and that error is now embedded in her sinful nature, as the Lord made clear to her: “Your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you.” (Gen 3:16). That desire is specifically the desire to become lord in his place.[3] Implied here is that there is also embedded in the man’s sinful nature a tendency to acquiesce to her desire, a tendency which is at the same time a desire to reject God’s own lordship over him. Adam’s duty to resist his tendency to acquiesce is also implied: “he shall rule over you.”
Adam’s creation in the image of God includes the original attributes of Adam in his pristine state of being. We may venture to say that among Adam’s pristine attributes is humble submission to his Maker. His primeval sin was to refuse to submit. This attribute of Adam, as it happens, is also an attribute of God, because Adam’s creation was in the image of God. Humility is not commonly listed among the attributes of God, but it’s an important one. God is humble. He is of course omnipotent, but He is not tyrannical. This is precisely why our salvation was accomplished. Christ came down from heaven, who is the image of the Father, and humbled Himself unto death, even the death of the cross. This humiliation was not contrary to His nature but a most magnificent expression of it. And since this is so, the putting off of humility was the primeval sin. The putting off of humility is the essence of pride. Therefore, the order of creation is not an order of male supremacy or superiority but just the opposite. God is not a tyrant or a despotic dictator whose creation of mankind was to lord it over mankind, and this is exactly what Christ portrayed to His disciples in teaching them humility: “Whoever desires to be first among you, let him be your slave —just as the Son of Man did not come to be served, but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many” (Matt 20:27–28). What this means for man is that selfish ambition is opposed to righteousness, and humility is the ideal disposition to be sought. From this perspective, it could even be said to be advantageous to be a woman because womanhood is, by virtue of the way it came into being, more suited to being in a position of humility. But by the same token, womanhood is also an easier target for evil to attack, which explains why the serpent beguiled not the man but the woman.
Contrary to feminist thought, patriarchy is in its pristine and pure form a thing of beauty: God is Father, and His people are created so as willingly to be submissive to Him in a wonderful order. And this order is then reflected in the way man is created, male and female. In this beautiful design, the male dutifully and humbly reflects the headship of God, and the female reflects the willingness of humble submission to her husband. Feminism’s rejection of patriarchy is ultimately rejection of God’s authority, essentially another instance of Eve’s disobedience. Further, either Scripture’s consistent and undeniable pattern of patriarchy is truly tied to God Himself or the entire biblical revelation is based on a misogynist lie. Feminism requires not only the rejection of the biblical account of creation, but of Scripture in its entirety.
Advocates of feminism have consistently adhered to a worldview that sees male “supremacy” as a problem rather than as a factor embedded in the way the world was made, and this has contributed to relentless efforts to “correct” the “problem,” particularly by reforming language, according to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
Much feminist effort has been devoted to this endeavour, and a huge variety of reforms have been proposed (see, for example, Miller and Swift 1976, 1980, and the papers in part two of Cameron 1998a).
One especially successful reform effort has been the increasingly accepted singular use of the third-person gender-neutral pronoun ‘they’ (in place of ‘he’) as in the sentence below:
Somebody left their sweater behind.
. . . Due to feminist work on the effects of ‘gender-neutral’ use of ‘he’, even prescriptive grammarians are now becoming more accepting of ‘they’. In very recent years, it is also becoming increasingly widespread to use ‘they’ as one’s chosen personal pronoun, or, less frequently, to use another gender-neutral option such as ‘ze’ (Bennett 2016; Dembroff and Wodak 2017).[4]
By this accounting, the shift in pronoun use that began to be detectable in the 1970s was not so much the product of the natural evolution of language as it was the direct result of feminist efforts. What this means is that the arising of the generic singular “they” is grotesque not merely from a grammatical point of view but from an awareness that this had been intentionally engineered by feminists seeking to impose their worldview on society.
It’s imperative for the Church to be aware of the diametrical opposition of the Bible to feminism , and to see pronoun usage as having been a feminist tool in the service of social engineering. To acquiesce even at this point is to forget the warning of Genesis 3:16.
The intentionality of pronoun shifting was certainly felt on college campuses. I remember its emergence when I was a graduate student at Marquette University in the early 1990s, when college campuses were beginning to impose what amounted to a new gender-neutral grammatical shift on their students and in their textbooks. Textbooks began to appear that would try to make the generic pronoun more egalitarian in creative ways. One was the introduction of a new pronoun, “ze,” but that trial balloon soon fell; another was a somewhat amusing attempt to give equal time to masculine and feminine pronouns, and so to use the masculine pronoun generically in one paragraph, and shift to a feminine pronoun in the next. This was no doubt an attempt to make the change feel natural, but it was actually quite jarring. By the time I began writing my dissertation, there was a rule imposed on the campus that required sensitivity to pronoun equality. (I refused to abide by that rule, and my good fortune was to have as my doctoral supervisor the late Kenneth Hagen; and he didn’t care, so I got away with it.) The fact that this took place on the campus of an ostensibly Roman Catholic campus was only one of the many pieces of evidence that feminism had already found a solid foothold by then even in the bastions of Christianity that had insisted on a male-only clergy.
The Missouri Synod was by no means immune to the inroads of feminist pronoun engineering. The failure of the Lutheran Book of Worship (LBW) to get approved in LCMS churches was mostly due to its theological question marks, such as the addition of commemorations for such “saints” as Martin Luther King and the placement of the Our Father within a Eucharistic Prayer. What was arguably the most annoying thing, however, was the alteration of treasured hymns to remove the King James pronouns (thee, thou, thy, thine) and the use of pronoun engineering. Not only was the generic male pronoun considered objectionable, but the generic female pronoun had to go, too, such as when used for certain inanimate objects.
The LBW had been the brainchild of the Missouri Synod in the first place, and they had invited all Lutherans to join in the project by forming the Inter-Lutheran Commission on Worship. The Lutheran Church in America, The American Lutheran Church, and The Evangelical Lutheran Church of Canada accepted the invitation, so there was no small amount of hand-wringing among the LCMS participants when the Synod pulled out of the project altogether just a year before its publication in 1978. This resulted in a feverish haste by the Synod to put together something more favorable. That something was Lutheran Worship (LW), published in 1982, but the hastiness of the project left much to be desired, and although it was approved, it never quite caught on. LW was less objectionable to the Synod’s conservatives than LBW but still too unlike TLH to become the Synod’s standard-bearer. It would take until the publication of the Lutheran Service Book (LSB) in 2006 before the Synod could begin to feel comfortable with a hymnal most could accept.
LSB did a lot to remove the gender engineering in the hymns. Joy to the World had been altered by replacing “her” with “its” (“Let earth receive her its King”), and “men” with “all” (“Let men all their songs employ”), but LSB, to its credit, changed it back. So also, in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing, “man” was restored in LSB, having been replaced by “us” (“Pleased as Man with man us to dwell”).
Yet there were some corrections even LSB was loath to make, perhaps fearing perceptions of misogyny. So, the loss of generic “men” in O Little Town of Bethlehem (“and peace to men on all the earth”) was not corrected in LSB. Nor was its loss in It Came upon the Midnight Clear (“Peace on the earth, good-will to men all”), notwithstanding that this was also a “correction” of a biblical text. That biblical text, the song of the angels (Luke 2:14), was also altered in the Gloria in Excelsis in LBW, and remains in three of the five settings in Divine Service in LSB. Settings I and II retained the altered “Glory to God in the highest, and peace to His people on earth,” and setting four, similarly, has “To God on high be glory And peace to all the earth.” Is “Good will toward men” misogynist? To be fair, perhaps the editors were thinking the cultural assimilation of the removal of the generic masculine is so complete that to use it now would create confusion. But if so, why is it never confusing to hear Luke 2:14, none of whose translations substitute “all” for “men”? [5] What seems more likely is that the editors were passively and unknowingly capitulating to the social engineering of pronouns. To be fair, this is likely how most of us are affected, unwittingly. We unknowingly or naively acquiesce over time to the impositions and demands of the feminist Zeitgeist, many of which happen subtly, gradually, and with a great deal of successful propaganda in media, entertainment, and education.
But the time has come to stop doing that. The rapid advances of gender confusion with which our culture has been victimized have brought us to the point of the need for a strong confessional response.
To be sure, the LCMS is already forthright in opposition to gender confusion, particularly with the publication of strong theological statements. Prominent on the Synod’s website are a plethora of articles affirming the biblical views on sexuality and marriage, and unabashedly proclaiming the Biblical stance in opposition to the gross cultural perversions evident in today’s society. The online resources are commendably clear and worthy of use and promulgation in our churches.[6]
But the assault on the pronoun remains largely unchecked in many corners of our conversation. Some of the feminists’ successes in pronoun engineering have been widespread, to the point where we are learning to expect grammatical “corrections” where the generic masculine pronoun used to be normative.
To demonstrate just how normative it once was, consider a line from the Sermon on the Mount, in the King James Version: “Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake” (Matt 5:11, italics original). The italicizing of “men” was to indicate that it was supplied by the translators idiomatically. It was once considered customary and normal to refer to indiscriminate people as “men.” Another example is in the Declaration of Independence, which declares that “all men are created equal,” as a natural reference to all human beings. No one at the time thought this was meant to exclude women. The generic masculine terminology for the whole human race was universally accepted and assumed.
No longer. Modern translations of Matthew 5:11 have consistently replaced “men” with “they” or “others,” which appears to be more literally accurate, until one considers the idiomatic sense of “men” that once obtained universally. The KJV is not less accurate; on the contrary, it stands as a clearer reflection of the structure of humanity itself that was once embedded in the English language. “Mankind” was the human race, and, generically speaking, “men” could quite naturally be said to refer to both sexes, depending on the context. That’s because of how creation happened. But with the feminist onslaught of societal engineering through language usage, things have changed. Feminist societal engineering is the only reason the generic use of the masculine is less than universally accepted in our day.
A major part of being a confessing Christian in our day is to speak the truth in contrast to the falsehoods of the cultural decay. Since that decay has been tied to our language and pronouns, it is sensible for us to confess even in the very use of pronouns. We ought to use pronouns that best reflect the order of creation and the way things actually are. The human race came forth from Adam, a man. Woman was taken out of his side. Language that best reflects our origins is the better language. The use of “he” generically, and even of “men” or “mankind” to refer to the human race, is in keeping with what we know about how we came into being. The English language was much better at doing this before the feminists got ahold of it. The retention of “mankind” has become a confessional matter.
Not only in English was the manner of creation reflected in its pronouns, but also in the Greek New Testament, which doubly makes this a confessional matter. Jesus used the masculine pronoun when He said to His disciples, “If anyone desires to come after Me, let him (εαυτον) deny himself, and take up his (αυτου) cross, and follow Me” (Matt 16:24). Jesus always employed the masculine pronoun in generic usage. That alone should be reason for us to do so as well.
Translations of the Bible that claim to be more accurate in places where they remove the generic use of “man” and “men” base their rationale on a very literal rendering of terms. But they do a disservice to the language that came into being in a world of humanity that was once constituted in one man, Adam. To be confessional is to have our speech “seasoned with salt,” and, in particular, the saltiness can be “tasted” when we make it our intentional way of speaking to resist the feminist incursions into our usage of grammar and pronouns.
Not only are hymns and canticles that reject the feminist assault strongly to be encouraged, but Christian women in LCMS churches can learn to take delight in affirming during the confession of the Nicene Creed that Jesus became incarnate “for us men” and even in explaining this to their daughters: we are, whether male or female, mankind. That is a reflection on how we were made, in the beginning. Pity the members of the Wisconsin Synod who have to endure the grammatically engineered change to the Nicene Creed by the omission of “men”: “For us and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the virgin Mary, and became fully human.”[7] They can’t even confess that Jesus is man, to say nothing of the rest of us.
Preachers must learn to be comfortable with generic pronouns; where once the indiscriminate person was easily and naturally referred to as “he,” today we must be intentional with our grammar, training our tongues to go back to that lost generic use without apology.
Writers and speakers must likewise recover the generic pronoun, much as Karen Glass did in Vital Harmony, as I indicated above.
Homiletics professors and other instructors in the faith would do well to drive the point home. As wordsmiths, preachers must learn to have and employ good grammar, and a robust piece of that usage should be a subtle but stubborn insistence on a return to the generic male pronoun. We might well even to begin to think of this as training in confessional pronouns. Since it has become clear that the feminist assault on our culture is theological in nature, being a rejection of the order of creation, it is also clear that a theological response is in order. And since this assault is on grammar, the response should also be grammatical. There are times when Christian people must simply refuse to acquiesce, and instead insist: the human race is mankind. All men are created equal. The angels proclaimed good will toward men. Christ became man and He did so for us men and for our salvation. The confessing Christian Church of the twenty-first century needs to be comfortable in saying so.
[1] “Feminist Philosophy of Language,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. <plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-language/>.
[2] <biblicalarchaeology.org/daily/biblical-topics/bible-interpretation/first-person-misogyny-in-the-bible/>.
[3] The same grammatical construction and interpretation of “desire” can be seen in the Lord’s warning to Cain in the next chapter: “And if you do not do well, sin lies at the door. And its desire is for you, but you should rule over it” (Gen 3:7).
[4]“Feminist Philosophy,” <plato.stanford.edu/entries/feminism-language/>.
[5] The majority of English translations of Luke 2:14 have used the variant reading that has εὐδοκίας for εὐδοκία. This variant moves “good will” from the subject of the clause to being a modifier of ἀνθρώποις. All of the English translations of Luke 2:14 that follow the majority tradition translate ἀνθρώποις as “men.”
[6] See <lcms.org/social-issues/sexuality>.
[7] For further discussion, see my critique on this: “A Creed for Us Men” in Leave It Alone. You’ll Break It. (Kewanee, Ill.: Gottesdienst, 2018), 203–210.