Wrestling with the Living Word

MANY INDIVIDUALS AND CONGREGATIONS have struggled with the problem of exclusive language in scripture, especially the biblical passages used each week in worship. Some have felt hurt and excluded by words that are meant to heal and unite, and find the worship experience itself marred by the very texts that call them to be God's people.

Some people have attempted to deal with exclusive language in scripture by simply amending biblical passages to remove the troublesome expressions. Others don't accept this approach; they feel that it is inappropriate to change scriptural texts regardless of how offensive they may be. These people have preferred to suffer through readings that contain language that in any other context would be considered anachronistic.

Parishioners at St. Stephen and the Incarnation Episcopal Church in Washington, D.C. have attempted to plow a middle ground. Holding that scripture is sacred and inspired by God, and yet convinced that there was a way around the problem of exclusive language in the weekly lectionary readings, the people of St. Stephen's began what became a four-year project that evolved into an inclusive-language lectionary called Hearing the Word.

The authors of the St. Stephen's lectionary are not scholars or theologians, and their work was not an attempt to produce a new standard biblical translation. While they used standard committee translations in their work, and in most cases attempted to render accurately the meaning if not the specific phrasing of the original manuscript, at times their process departed considerably from the standard practices of biblical translation.

Hearing the Word, as the authors readily admit, is not the definitive word on lectionary interpretation. And the process used by St. Stephen's Church -- while it worked well for them -- may or may not be appropriate for other congregations. What is essential, as Laura Mol explains, is that we continue to grapple with the living Word as it reaches into our minds and our hearts and beckons us always deeper into the bosom of God.

-- The Editors

WE GOT EDGY, SOME OF US, INCREASINGLY RESTIVE. Every week, three times in one hour, the words would come soaring out from the Bible on the lectern, reverberate around our cavernous sanctuary, and, with frustrating frequency, clobber some of us -- not with all-too-appropriate calls for repentance, or announcements of much-needed grace, but with the jarring intrusion of this-is-not-meant-for-me.

We'd hear the Pauline grandeur of "brothers in Christ" and hear our inner voices whisper, "I'll never be a brother." We'd hear the gospel lesson: "If a man would gain his life, he must ..." and it would set off the inner clamor, "It may say 'man,' but I know Jesus meant it for me, too." The inner whispering, the outrage, the mental editing -- it got to be too much. It was getting in the way of our worship.

Our custom at the parish of St. Stephen and the Incarnation was for scripture readers to read aloud from whatever translation they chose. Bit by bit, more and more, some of the readers would do some ad hoc inclusivizing of the language. But it didn't happen consistently, and the rough edges of inexperience and uneven skill at the editorial task proved to be intrusive.

Our worship was planned, liturgical season by season, by rotating "design teams." The Lenten design team for that year, 1981, decided to take the problem in hand. A few people were asked to take on the task of revising the readings based on our most commonly used translation, the Jerusalem Bible. And so we did.

"Why does it matter?" was not a question that provoked protracted controversy in our particular congregation. There were of course some worshipers who didn't understand what the fuss was about; to them, "man" and "him" were obviously generic, and if "Father" was good enough for Jesus, it was good enough for them. Some said, "Let's give our attention to more important issues, like our need for a decent choir, or the problem of drugs in our parish neighborhood, or the war in El Salvador." But coping with our own diversity in race, class, age, sexual orientation, theological vocabulary, and liturgical druthers had left us with a sturdy heritage of forbearance. We'd learned that love covered not only sin but a multitude of political passions and personal peculiarities.

So when some asked, "Why is it necessary to mess with this nonsense?" they were answered in personal rather than ideological terms by those to whom it did matter greatly. We didn't hold forth about language as a subtle and pervasive form of oppression of women. Rather, we testified, "It's distracting for me when I'm trying to worship." There were people who needed inclusive language; there were people who wanted to work on it; and from Advent 1981 on, the successive design teams agreed to do just that.

AT FIRST WE SIMPLY USED the Jerusalem Bible as our base translation and looked in three or four other translations for alternative wordings when needed -- often finding that one of those others "did the job" for us. This melding-together approach was a significant starting point, not only as an indication of our reticence to tinker with the text, but as the wedge which opened us to the question, "What is good translation anyway?"

However much the words and insights of feminism were the spark that ignited our concern, it was really our passion for the Word and our certainty that the scriptures were meant by God for all of us that carried us through what turned out to be an intense four-year project. The result was a 400-page, three-volume edition of scripture readings for worship -- more than 900 readings in all -- titled Hearing the Word (HTW).

We were certain that the English of the 1940s, '50s, and '60s, in which the mainline Bible translations were cast, was becoming inadequate to communicate the full intentions of the biblical authors. Then a new and unexpected dimension of the translation/communication problem opened up: What one reads on the page, regardless of the pronouns, is not necessarily what one hears sitting in a pew, listening to the text but not seeing it. We became intensely interested in how worshipers could hear the scripture effectively. What does hearing require of punctuation, sentence structure, and word choice?

By spring 1982, these issues, ideas, and yearnings had crystallized into a subtitle for Hearing the Word: "An inclusive-language liturgical lectionary." "Lectionary" was the easy part, for like any Episcopal parish, we followed a prescribed three-year cycle of readings. The cycle we used was the ecumenical Common Lectionary, then in trial use in a number of communions. The "liturgical" part of the subtitle was central to our hermeneutic. Our work was for use in worship -- not Bible study, and surely not academic analysis. It was for worshipers to hear.

"Inclusive language," we found, had a movable perimeter. We all agreed that both men and women were part of God's people and that the translation of scripture should not obscure that truth. That men and women were equally actors, as well as audience, in the drama of God's dealing with Israel and the early church -- that got trickier. Women were often invisible in the text. How should we assume they were there? How much should we (over)compensate for the cultural erasure of women?

We believed that each part of scripture needed to be understood within the context of the whole: Scripture needed to correct scripture. In this way, we knew that God was not male, nor even masculine. But how much ought we -- could we -- counterbalance the unconscious, sexist image of the Holy One that each of us had carried for years?.

THE PRACTICE OF COMPARING A NUMBER of translations -- the purpose of splicing together words, phrases, and constructions -- was pivotal, not only as a matter of technique, but also as the way in which we came to understand our task more fully. At first we drew most heavily from the Jerusalem Bible and the New English Bible, relishing their lively renderings, feeling the import of scripture communicating with our people. Steadily the New International Version emerged as an important source, as we discovered how well the cadence and idiom of its modern American English expressed the real-people-in-real-life nature of the biblical record.

Initially we relished the variety of these and the other, lesser-used translations we consulted, but our exuberance soon turned into a somber tension. We began to focus less on which wordings would "work well" with our particular congregation and worry more about which translation -- or construction of our own -- would be most faithful to the received text. But the pressure was productive and our work became more careful, more precise. We used brackets to show our changes in the text and ellipses to mark deletions.

The practice of translation comparison also gave us a sense of grounding. It was perfectly clear: All translation was interpretive to some extent. If the concept of cultural translation wasn't acceptable, for example, all translations would have to let the psalmist say "bowels" as the seat of emotions, rather than the "heart" we name in our culture. When Wycliff translators do this with (to us) exotic language groups, it seems inspired and faithful to the Word of God and the Great Commission. But when the language-group being served is feminist-Christian, we face new issues: Is "uninitiated" the best rendering of "uncircumcised" in Paul's letters? Is "a millionaire," gender unspecified, a fair expression of "a rich man" in one of Jesus' parables? Yes, we decided, yes.

The scripture was for us in worship -- given to us, not primarily to instruct us in the culture and concerns of first-century Palestine, but as the paradigm of God's love for us, God's working with us.That's the answer we learned to give to the not uncommon question posed by people outside our parish: "By what right do you do this?"

Our authority was not in our scholarly grasp of Greek or Hebrew (though some in our group knew some, and we became handy with Young's Concordance and Marshall's Interlinear). No, ours was by the same right within our culture as the Latin American base communities struggling in their culture: We are all appropriating God's Word for ourselves, for our time, within our culture, unwilling to wait for permission from the religious institutions that surround us.

We were not qualified as linguists to produce a new translation, but we found that we were indeed able to be communicators. Our skill, our gift, was in listening -- listening to the text, voiced by many translators, blown into life by the Spirit. We listened to our own people -- their lives and their language, in worship and out. We listened to them, knew them, were them. And the process of our work was very much done in community, with one person drafting, two or three others critiquing, heated arguments ensuing, and the drafter revising.

IN CREATING HEARING THE WORD, our interest was not in producing a work of ideological purity any more than one of academic respectability. Really, all we wanted was to clear away the distractions to worship. Thus, we examined each verse, each line with the question: Will this get in the way, or will it open our understanding?

To hold to this one purpose, we found that it was necessary both to keep the familiar and to change the familiar. Keeping the familiar was a matter of recognizing those wordings that resonate well, that anchor is to our religious past, that give cultural continuity. For example, we decided to keep the phrase "thorn in the flesh" (2 Corinthians 12:7) used in the King James version.

At other times, however, we intentionally changed the familiar for the same purpose of not being distracting. In Matthew 5:16, for example, Jesus says, "Let your light so shine before men, that they may see your good works" (Revised Standard Version). "Men," of course, is the point requiring modern inclusive working. But if one simply replaces "men" with "people," as in the Today's English Version ("your light must shine before people"), our familiarity with the traditional wording forces us to notice the substitution. In cadence as well as consciousness, we are thereby distracted from the two most important and powerful words, "light" and "shine."

We wanted to hold the focus on those two central words but to reconstruct the verse so that the worshipers' attention would not be drawn to the alteration. So in Hearing the Word, we settled on: "Let your light shine out, so that everyone may see your good deeds." The addition of "out" amplifies the meaning and imagery of the two main words and gives an emphatic cadence to boot. "Out" conveys the same sense that "before" did in traditional renderings.

Also, in our wording, "men" and "they" are collapsed into "everyone." We wavered on that word choice, wondering whether it seemed to suggest lots of folks when the quantity didn't seem to be the point. But "people" sounded fairly ridiculous (people as distinct from dogs?). "All" was another alternative, but it had the same liability as "everyone."

This was a point where the aural intention of Hearing the Word prevailed: Although "all" has a more all-purpose biblical ring than "everyone," it tends towards the slushy, run-together reading of all-may-see. "Everyone" slows the phrase down and lets the hearers' comprehension catch up with the roll of words.

This is illustrative of the process: Every verse, every line, every word was weighed against the alternatives. It was tedious; it was exhilarating.

Our determination to make the scripture lessons aurally comprehensible (in a huge sanctuary with a temperamental amplification system) led to a whole series of techniques, in addition to word choice and cadence. Beginnings and endings of quotations needed more than the solely visual markers of punctuation or paragraphing, so we learned to insert an aural marker, enclosed in brackets, to show a change in speaker or the end of the parable and the resumption of conversation or commentary. "Tell me, Teacher," replied the Pharisee. [So Jesus said,] "Two people owed money to a certain lender ..." (Luke 7:40-41, HTW).

Scripture often quotes scripture, but a listener may not know when that's happening, unable to see the quotation marks or, as many modern editions so helpfully have, the footnotes. So we ordinarily added that information, either as a clarification or as teaching. The usual "as it is written" we altered, for example, to "as [the Psalmist] said."

The opportunity to clarify for listeners and to teach (for we, like the vast majority of North American congregations, suffer from a high rate of biblical illiteracy) led us to add introductory or contextual information. If the appointed lesson from 1 Kings 19:9-14 is read straight from the RSV, the people will hear: "And there he came to a cave, and lodged there; and behold, the word of the LORD came to him, and he said to him, "... what are you doing here, Elijah?" And he said ..." But in Hearing the Word, the lesson begins: "[When Elijah reached Horeb, the mountain of God,] he went into a cave, and there spent the night. Then the word of Yahweh came to him suddenly, saying, "Why are you here, Elijah?" Elijah answered ..."

This sample shows yet another technique of aural clarification: replacing the blur of pronouns with their rightful referent. Since the pronouns are most often masculine, using the proper referents can also reduce the sense of linguistic male overload to which some of us -- for better or worse -- have become sensitive. The gospels are loaded with "and he said to him." If we read, "and Jesus said to Peter," it's no less two men talking, but there's a subtle reorientation toward their person rather than their maleness.

AVOIDING MASCULINE PRONOUNS for obviously male persons, however, is of minor value compared with avoiding masculine pronouns for the God who is neither male nor female, who incorporates both feminine and masculine, according to the testimony of scripture. It was in response to this "whole counsel" that we determined not to use any pronouns for the Holy One. We let the particular passage instruct us in which of the many names of God to use -- Yahweh, Adonai, the Lord, God -- in place of he, his, or him.

Another common technique for dodging unwanted masculine pronouns was sentence reconstruction: altering the structure without changing the meaning. In Luke 6:35, Jesus says (RSV): "But love your enemies ... and your reward will be great, and you will be sons of the Most High; for he is kind to the ungrateful and the selfish." Hearing the Word reads: "... for you will be sons and daughters of the Most High, who is kind even to the ungrateful and wicked."

Naming God was the thorniest of issues for us when it was Jesus doing the naming. At first we agreed: If Jesus said it, we don't touch it. So "my Father" and "your heavenly Father" stayed intact. But with more and more exposure, looking in the most detailed way at the words and how they were being used, we began to realize the extent to which the naming of God was a matter of convention or even insignificance.

It's easiest to see this using Gospel Parallels (edited by Burton Throckmorton), which arranges the synoptic gospels in parallel columns, matching up similar verses. Matthew 6:26, for example, is beside Luke 12:24: "Look at the birds of the air ... yet your heavenly Father feeds them." "Consider the ravens ... and yet God feeds them."

If our main business Sunday mornings were to learn the distinctive characteristics of the evangelists, we would need to be exposed to their various namings of God. But that's for Bible study, not worship. So we took upon ourselves the sticky task of deciding when to change "the Father" to "[God]" or some alternative. The Pauline formula, "... from God the Father and from our Lord Jesus Christ," became, "from [our God] and from the Lord Jesus Christ."

BUT FORMULAIC CONSTRUCTIONS ARE only a small part of the vastness of scripture. The subtlety and the uniqueness of each text needs to be respected. The cardinal principle of inclusive-language editing, we learned, is that mechanical, rote substitution absolutely will not work. Every sentence of scripture must be listened to for what it is, and for what it is in its context. In addition, its meaning, rhythm, and vocabulary must be respected.

Guided by this aversion to rote substitution, we used four other techniques in inclusivizing, in addition to sentence reconstruction and pronoun avoidance/replacement. The first was simple extension. For example, 2 Thessalonians 2:13 begins: "But we feel that we must be continually thanking God for you, brother ..." (JB). "We are bound to thank God always for you, brothers and sisters ..." (HTW). Here we did not bracket the extension, "and sisters," because we understood the Greek actually to mean the inclusive, which the old-fashioned English masculine-as-generic rule rendered (and to modern sensibilities, reduced to) "brothers."

The technique of extension was also used in changing "Abraham" to "Abraham [and Sarah]." Here, care had to be taken not to put such inclusive sentiments into the mouth of someone who never would have said that -- Moses, for example.

A second technique, closely related, is that of noun substitution. "Watchmen" can be "sentinels"; the "brothers and fathers" of Acts 7:2 can be "kindred"; "fatherless" can be "orphaned."

Often, inclusivizing techniques must be worked together to make sense and sound harmonious. Luke 1:39 required sentence reconstruction as well as substitution in order to deal with the patriarchal custom of identifying a home by the male resident: "Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judah, where she entered Zechariah's home and greeted Elizabeth" (NIV). In Hearing the Word, the passage becomes: "She set out and hurried to the town [where Elizabeth and Zechariah lived] in the hill country of Judah. Mary entered the house and greeted Elizabeth."

A third technique is pluralizing. "Blessed is the man" becomes "blessed are those." But pluralizing is sometimes not appropriate, for example if the text is emphasizing individual responsibility.

Meaning must also be very carefully weighed in using the fourth technique, which is changing from third person to direct address (using "you" instead of "he"). This technique worked well in Mark 8:35, when Jesus is teaching the crowd: "Whoever cares for his own safety is lost; but if a man will let himself be lost for my sake and for the gospel, that man is safe. What does a man gain by winning the whole world at the cost of his true self?" (NEB).

In Hearing the Word, this passage reads: "For you who want to save your life will lose it; but you who lose your life for my sake, and for the sake of the good news, will find it. What would you gain by winning the whole world, yet losing your own life?" This changing from third to second person cuts through a lot of language problems and is often very helpful in worship for focusing on talking to God and not about God.

WORKING SO CLOSELY WITH a lectionary system brought about changes in us -- two at least. The first was no surprise: We found that occasionally the assigned lessons did not seem to be the best choice. Sometimes it was a minor matter of where to begin or end a lesson. But at times there was a more important issue. Exodus 14:10-15:1 is a good example; it is the account of Israel's deliverance at the Red Sea.

We believed that the final verse in this reading should not be 15:1, when Moses and the Israelites sing the opening of their long song to Yahweh. Rather, we wanted to replace 15:1 with 15:20-21, which scholars think is the more ancient fragment, the original on which the longer Song of Moses is based:

Then Miriam the prophet, who was the sister off Moses and Aaron, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women followed her with tambourines and dancing. And Miriam led them in this refrain: "Sing to Yahweh, who has risen up in triumph, hurling horse and rider into the sea" (HTW).

Our interest, one can see, was not just an issue of scholarship. Using these verses shows a woman in leadership, and it pictures the women of Israel in a vivid, dramatic action -- in contrast to the portrayal of women in much of scripture.

To some extent, at least, our choice of Miriam's song rather than that of Moses was part of a technique of overcompensation, which we sometimes used in Hearing the Word. Where it proved workable, we "inclusivized" Jesus' parables, portraying the characters without reference to their gender, although the received text clearly indicated them to be male. We did the same with the two who were walking on the road to Emmaeus, who recognized Christ in the breaking of bread.

The second effect of working so closely with a lectionary system was an appalled awareness of how little of the Bible we were actually reading in our worship. While a lectionary can serve to protect a congregation from the preferences and avoidances of the preacher or worship planner, the reality is that any three lessons once a week just can't cover the vastness of the Bible.

We came to see ourselves, as individuals and as a congregation, as deficient in our exposure to the Word. We were just tasting what we ought to be marinating in. We became increasingly convinced that we need -- not just ought, but genuinely need -- to read more and comprehend more, to preach more and pray more out of the scriptures.

WE HAVE INDEED BEEN CHANGED. The dire warnings from the tents of orthodoxy are right: It's a slippery slope we set our feet upon. And we've plunged right down the face of the mountain. We thought we were setting out to deal with language about God's people, and we found ourselves confronted with language about God's own self. We set out to clarify, and we ended up changing some as well. We began by struggling with pronouns, and we ended up struggling with the patriarchy in which all of scripture seems to be set.

And yet we feel we've done no violence to the essence of the faith, despite our rejection of the male domination of our heritage -- the patriarchy of Israel, the subjugation of women in the early church, the unintended bias of writers and translators of scripture, and the perversities of our own language. We found that we were freed by the process -- opened to hear the scripture "in our own tongue," "awakened" in our prayer lives to newer, deeper, fresher connections with the one God.

We came to see that there is risk in not facing what we faced, that it's even more dangerous to keep the God of heaven and earth encased in culture, bound in unholy shackles. We're called to listen to what God says to us, from inside the Bible and outside of it. God continues to be revealed to us -- in the struggle for freedom in South Africa, in the cast of light under a bridge, in the gesture of one of our children. Amid the tumult of our times or the deafening roar of our own psyches, there is a voice to be heard, a word addressed to each of us, alone.

To hear that voice, to discern that word, can be a terrifying prospect. And so of course the human instinct is to construct some guidelines, some safeguards, some security. But however much church, scripture, theology, or the community of believers may help, any can be a barrier if we use it to hide from the wild, unpredictable word of God in our lives.

None of us who worked on Hearing the Word would think to claim that it's more the voice of God than any other rendering. Its value to us is in the accessibility it creates, opening the doors of scripture for us. And all of us who have been deeply involved in this work have been confronted, moved, instructed. We have found ourselves -- more than the text -- changed by our wrestling with the living Word.

Laura Mol was a writer for the Children's National Medical Center in Washington, D.C. when this article appeared. She had been a member of St. Stephen and the Incarnation Church since 1978.