The Father Idea

Daniel Glazer

Introduction

Judith Mace asserts that "The unparalleled revelations of The Urantia Book are afflicted with our sexist language. The acceptance of these papers is seriously threatened by this offensive, inaccurate, and obsolete rhetoric. The book's language clearly addresses males and not females." She goes on to advocate a change in religious language by, for example, using Primum, Secundum and Tertium to refer to the members of the Trinity, and using te for she/he, ter for his/her, and tem for her/him. I contend that Ms. Mace's argument is quite erroneous and represents a severe misreading of The Urantia Book. An attempt to follow her proposal would do serious harm to the Fifth Epochal Revelation.

Readers of The Spiritual Fellowship Journal are no doubt aware that recent years have seen attacks on the traditional language used for both man and God on the grounds that it is, to use Ms. Mace's terminology, "sexist, offensive, inaccurate, and obsolete." The now classic critique of Mary Daly holds that, "Since God is male, the male is God."1 But, contrary to Mace and to the general tenor of The Spiritual Fellowship Journal issue in which her article appears, it is far from obvious that these attacks are soundly based and will (or should) carry the day. In the Christian churches, there are spirited debates about traditional versus revisionist (self-styled "inclusive") language for Deity. I commend to the interested reader two recent anthologies which make the case for traditional language:

Kimel, Alvin F., Jr., ed. The Holy Trinity and the Challenge of Feminism. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1992.
Hitchcock, Helen H., ed. The Politics of Prayer: Feminist Language and the Worship of God. San Francisco: Ignatius, 1992.

The Traditionalist Argument

Before joining the crusade to rewrite The Urantia Book, we would do well to ponder the arguments made in these books. I will present a number of these arguments. Most of the contributions to these anthologies focus on the issue of language about God; some also discuss language about man. (I presume it is The Urantia Book's generic use of "man" and inclusive use of "he" and "him" that leads Mace to charge that it "clearly addresses males and not females.")

Consider, for example, two points made by Suzanne R. Scorsone:2

"The English language has always, from the earliest days of which we have any written record, used the word man' in two senses. Always there have been the generic (equivalent to the Latin homo) and the male gender-specific (equivalent to vir)."
"It is...a simple and entirely familiar mental operation for the speaker of English, from the most literary to the most colloquial to sort the gender-specific uses ofman.'"

And here are Michael Levin's comments:3

"We may dismiss the idea that masculine pronouns are misleading.... It is not possible to produce a woman who believed (until feminists cleared things up) that He who hesitates is lost' did not apply to her. It is universally understood that he' is used with intention of referring to both men and women, and that this intention has settled into a convention."
"Turkish lacks gender, but Turkish women lack many rights enjoyed by women in countries with more sexist' native tongues."

As for language about God, listen, for example, to Elizabeth Achtmeier.4

"It is universally recognized by biblical scholars that the God of the Bible has no sexuality."
"The few instances of feminine imagery for God in the Bible all take the form of a simile and not of a metaphor, and that distinction is crucial."
"The Bible uses masculine language for God because that is the language with which God has revealed himself."

Achtmeier goes on to state that the use of female language for God ineluctably leads to identification of God with the world, i.e. pantheism; she cites feminist references to "the God with Breasts" who has "brought us forth from the womb of your being." She and others also point out that a female God at one with creation was a common concept among ancient peoples other than the Hebrews, in marked contrast to the Biblical concept of the Creator distinct from his creation.

The names feminists have proposed as substitutes for "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit" are roundly criticized by several authors. "Creator" is often substituted for "Father" and "Redeemer" or "the Christ" for "God the Son." Yet the critics observe that Christian theology holds that all three members of the Trinity participate in creation and the First Person of Deity is far more than a creator. And the traditional appellations, "Eternal Son" and "Son of God" and "Son of Man," are necessary to express his relationship to God the Father, as well as his personal nature.

Contributors to these anthologies point out that Jesus, "the author and finisher of our faith," always used "Father" to invoke God in prayer, and, moreover, explicitly taught his disciples to pray, "Our Father." Several authors also criticize the feminist's rewritings of Scripture for violating the integrity of the Biblical text.

Urantia Book Concepts

But, one may say, the authors represented in these anthologies presumably all write without any knowledge or acceptance of The Urantia Book. If we accept Judith Mace's reading, The Urantia Book, despite being "burdened with sexist language," contains the principles which support the development of new, "inclusive" language.

But Mace's reading is highly skewed. For example, she maintains that "The authors probably knew of the impending social evolution away from patriarchal languageundoubtedly they hoped for it." This is pure speculation and projection on her part. For support she quotes the book's declaration that it necessarily contains errors in "the associated cosmologies therein presented" (p. 1109) [emphasis added], as if cosmologies referred to "sexist language."

Later she purports to cite The Urantia Book when she says, "No language can be considered universal and serviceable unless it is gender-inclusive or genderless." But the passage referenced actually says nothing about gender; rather, it refers simply to "The conquest of dialectsthe triumph of a universal language." (p. 807:1 #10)

Mace notes, with approval, section one of the first Paper wherein many names are given for God the Father and we're told that "The First Source and Universe Center has never revealed himself by name, only by nature." But she passes over other statements in the very same section supporting the name "Father." Here are two:

"If we believe that we are the children of this Creator, it is only natural that we should eventually call him Father."
"On a planet of sex creatures, in a world where the impulses of parental emotion are inherent in the hearts of its intelligent being, the term Father becomes a very expressive and appropriate name for the eternal God."

Mace seems pleased to mention that The Urantia Book states that "Jesus sought to substitute many terms for the kingdom but always without success." Under the apparent impression that it helps her case, she continues quoting this paragraph: "Among others he used: the family of God, the Father's will, the friends of God, the fellowship of believers, the brotherhood of man, the Father's fold, the children of God, the fellowship of the faithful, the Father's service, and the liberated sons of God." (p. 1861:6) Though she quotes this full passage, she fails to remark on the significance that "kingdom" is the word Jesus sought to replace. The use of Father and the generic use of brotherhood, man, and sons are not seen to present a problem.

Mace then makes a startling claim. "In the last sentence of The Urantia Book, the authors write that at that time the Father concept was the highest available imagery to describe God to us.... In the sixty plus years since the book was transmitted, radical changes have occurred in our culture and one can justifiably suggest the authors might now choose another concept." Whoa! What does the last sentence of The Urantia Book actually say? "When all is said and done, the Father idea is still the highest human concept of God." (p. 2097) This is very different from what Mace reports. The phrase, "When all is said and done" means when all that can be said has been said, not simply when we consider what is available at this time.

In fact, other human concepts certainly were available to the book's authors, whose mandate is to "give preference to the highest existing human concepts pertaining to the subjects to be presented" and who "may resort to pure revelation only when the concept of presentation has had no adequate previous expression by the human mind." (p. 16) In the Spring, 1993, issue of The Spiritual Fellowship Journal, Matthew Block reports on his discovery of a number of published works which evidently served as source material for The Urantia Book. Block has observed that the book's authors masterfully appropriate material from these works, using ideas and expressions that fit into the book's structure and concepts, while freely editing and upstepping passages that fail to conform to the book's message.

Block has recently come upon the book, The Enduring Quest: A Search for a Philosophy of Life, by H. A. Overstreet (New York: W. W. Norton, 1931). Block has identified numerous passages in this book which are clearly paralleled in the language and thought of The Urantia Book. In a chapter entitled "God and the Modern Man" are several passages which seem to find clear echoes in the concluding pages of The Urantia Book. Among these are the apparent sources for "Mortal man has a spirit nucleus" (p. 142) (Overstreet puts it, "What is most characteristic of [man] is that he is, as it were, nucleated.5 ), and "All of man's universe romancing may not be fact, but much, very much, is truth." (p. 2096) (Cf. Overstreet on "The Truth of Man's Romancing," p. 208).

In a chapter of The Enduring Quest called "God and the Modern Man" are several passages which seem to find clear echoes in the concluding pages of The Urantia Book. Along with the passages that apparently met with the approval of the authors of The Urantia Book, we find the following:

Much that man once believed about God (or gods) we can obviously no longer believe.... In the patriarchal stage of consolidation, the god was a Patriarch, a Father. In the monarchical stages, he was a King.... None of these beliefs about the deity will any longer adequately serve us. Even the belief with which we have grown familiar, of God as a Heavenly Father, who orders our welfare and expects from us adoration and obedience, is from the modern point of view, inadequate.6

Overstreet goes on to recommend as a superior concept of God that of a "power greater than ourselves which makes for good."7 And, of course, there were other human concepts of and names for God available to the revelators.

In other words, the idea of going "beyond God the Father" did not originate with Mary Daly. It was present in other earlier sources, including a book which was one of the significant human sources for The Urantia Book. Yet the revelators explicitly reject this move to go beyond; instead they affirm the Father idea as the highest human concept of God.

Mace seems so intent on updating The Urantia Book with her own notions of gender equity that she totally ignores several ways in which the book does support certain uses of "Mother" in referring to Deity:

Consider this characterization of the Eternal Son: "In the same sense that God is the Universal Father, the Son is the Universal Mother." (p. 79)
And on page 1289, we are told: "All soul evolving humans are literally the evolutionary sons of God the Father and God the Mother, the Supreme Being."
Then there is the "local universe Mother Spirit." (p. 203)
Finally, one of the "parable prayers" which Jesus shared with his apostles contains the salutation, "Glorious Father and Mother in one parent combined." (p. 1623)

These passages, and other, similar ones, demonstrate that The Urantia Book does indicate that what we might call "God the Mother" idea does have a legitimate place. At the same time, the overwhelming testimony of the Urantia revelation is that, as regards the first Person of the Trinity, "Father" is the most appropriate name in our mortal universe frame of reference. Of many supporting passages I could cite, I will content myself with the following, written by a Divine Counselor:

First and lasteternallythe infinite God is a Father. Of all the possible titles by which he might appropriately be known, I have been instructed to portray the God of all creation as the Universal Father.... In all his personal relations with the creature personalities of the universes, the First Source and Center is always and consistently a loving Father. God is a Father in the highest sense of the term. He is eternally motivated by the perfect idealism of divine love, and that tender nature finds its strongest expression and greatest satisfaction in loving and being loved. (p. 59) [emphasis in the original]

We who accept The Urantia Book as an epochal revelation of divine truth should bear in mind that Divine Counselors are Trinity-origin beings who "are the perfection of the divine counsel of the Paradise Trinity." They "represent, in fact are the counsel of perfection." (p. 217) [emphasis in the original]

The Contemporary Conflict

The battle over sexist language is raging in the Christian churches, as well as in the culture at large. I attended a Christmas service at one church where the first three lines of the carol "Joy to the World" were changed from:

Joy to the world, the Lord is come!

Let earth receive her King;

Let every heart prepare him room,

to:

Joy to the world! The promised One

Has come shalom to bring.

Let ev'ry heart prepare a room,

In the same church, when the Lord's prayer was recited, several members of the congregation said, (more accurately, shouted) "Our Creator" in place of "Our Father."

In the face of attempts to extirpate traditional language, the 1988 General Conference of the United Methodist Church passed the following resolution:

The United Methodist Church affirms the right and custom of the use of biblical languages and images in all its forms in worship and in our common life together. Phrases such as "Lord" and "King" and "Father" are an integral part of the rich heritage of the faith. A truly inclusive church will not restrict its people as to what is appropriate and what is inappropriate language and imagery about God. We, therefore, affirm the use of biblical language and images in all its forms appropriate for use in hymns, liturgy, teaching and in all areas of our common life together.8

John Levenson reports on one prominent Christian seminary where no practices or beliefs, not even belief in the divinity of Jesus, are required of students or faculty, except that the use of "inclusive" language is an absolute mandate.9

The Roman Catholic Church recently issued a new edition of its catechism. Reports are that the final version of the English translation changed "inclusive" language in earlier drafts to traditional language.

A "Re-Imagining" Conference held in Minneapolis last November and supported by several mainline denominations has elicited a fire storm of controversy for featuring prayers and liturgies addressed to the goddess, Sophia. Theologian Wolfgang Pannenberg has characterized the conference as having "enthroned" Sophia as a female goddess, which "is not in line with Christian teaching and is flagrantly opposed to Biblical understanding."

What is at stake in the language controversy? Alvin Kimel, Jr. views the "inclusive language" onslaught as an attempt to replace Christianity with a new religionand some outspoken advocates of the new language admit as much. Kimel is worth quoting:

The influential Mary Daly describes the significance of the women's revolution as anti-Christ and its import as anti-church,' and she has left Christianity. Rosemary Reuther (a prominent feminist theologian and seminary professor) has not gone that far, but it is well to remember her statement that feminist theology cannot be done from the existing base of the Christian Bible.'10

Will the new feminist vision of religionnon-Christian, or minimally Christian and non-biblicalbe closer than traditional Christianity to the enhanced revelation of the religion of Jesus, as portrayed in The Urantia Book? One may seriously doubt it.

G. K. Chesterton called tradition "the democracy of the dead." Many radical feminists would like nothing better than to overthrow traditional religion and culture, the creation of benighted "dead, white, European, male, heterosexual oppressors."

A sure effect of succumbing to the pressure to effect a wholesale revision of traditional language for God and man is that all books that use or have used such language will be stigmatized as decadent and inferior. Indeed, this is a cherished goal of many language revisionists. Before Urantia Book readers accept the Newspeak, they should consider that the stigma will extend not only to the Bible and traditional Christian theology and culture, but also to The Urantia Book. Judith Mace says that "The acceptance of [The Urantia Book] is seriously threatened" by the book's "offensive, inaccurate, and obsolete rhetoric." On the contrary, I maintain that it is precisely such a false characterization of the book which is the threat.

1 Daly, Mary. Beyond God the Father: Toward a Philosophy of Women's Liberation. Boston: Beacon Press, 1973, p. 19.

2 "In the Image of God: Male, Female, and the Language of the Liturgy," Hitchcock, op. cit.

3 "Feminism, Freedom, and Language," Hitchcock, op. cit.

4 "Exchanging God for No Gods': A Discussion of Female Language for God," Kimel, op. cit.

5 Overstreet, op. cit., p. 107

6 Overstreet, op. cit., pp. 259-60

7 Overstreet, op. cit., p. 261, quoting W. P. Montague

8 The Book of Resolutions of The United Methodist Church, 1988, p. 596

9 "Theological Liberalism Aborting Itself," Hitchcock, op. cit. p. 37

10 "Language for God and Feminist Language," Kimel, op. cit., p. 26

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