Joining the Eternal Conversation

John’s Prologue & the Language of Worship

by Robert W. Jenson

To allay some possible misgivings, let me say at the beginning: This essay will not be concerned with the old gender-feminist assault on liturgical language. Substitution of modalist or simply pagan formulas for “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit,” playing about with syntactically impossible pronominal neologisms, the gabble of “God . . . God . . . God . . .” and all that like, have been refuted enough times and enough ways. And indeed, their refutation is almost trivial. Moreover, except in church bureaucracies and seminaries the constituency for gender-feminist tinkering with language is retiring or departing with its promoters. That is not to say that in large tracts of what may or may not still be Church, the damage has not already been done, or that more is not still to come. But there is little that can be done about that in articles or books; the bureaucrats don’t read such things, and the various “theorists” in faculties only read each other.

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