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What's next, we stop saying the Father and Son and say God the Parent, God the Child? I mean, really.
It is my contention that there are some clergy and religious in our present day Church who wish to do exactly that. This substitutionary movement is quite developed.
The implications of this trend is that replacement words that have non-genderized iconic or symbolic meanings should trump any words that lend themselves to gender specificity. Hence, we are encouraged not to think of God as Father, Jesus as Son, etc., but as Parent & Child because (after all) all humans regardless of their sex, are children who have parents. The identification, then, of the Deity as a gender neutral Being serves to embrace all humanity regardless of sex. How nice.
What is missing in this analysis, in my opinion, is that certain words in Sacred Scripture may have been chosen precisely because the symbolic/iconic language as written is intended to be gender specific. The mystery of gender language in Sacred Scripture is worthy of the fullest analysis. The premise behind any such analysis, however, would have to be that the Author of Sacred Scripture knows exactly which words to use, and is using them with decisve purpose. To second-guess God in this matter would have to be construed as being sinful and presumptuous in the extreme. I could go on, but suffice it to say, those who are using substitutionary gender-inclusive language in our liturgies and in the proclamation of the Gospel believe that this issue has been decided once and for all -- and that at least 6,000 years of faith expression and critical analysis of Sacred Scripture has been faulty!
To those who promote this gender-inclusivity, all of Sacred Scripture and all of the liturgies of the Church are nothing but a vast conspiracy engineered by people whose only interest is in maintaining some ill-defined and evil Patrimony.
Man-hatred is just as evil as Woman-hatred and it should be squelched whenever it raises it's ugly head. In my opinion, this gender-inclusive mode of thinking, at its base, is a disgusting and hateful theory that is leading our beloved Church into disintegration and heresy.
Who ARE these people? How dare they insist on imposing their novel interpretations on the innocent and most-often compliant members of their flocks. Where are our Shepherds?