God the ‘Father’ isn’t sexist

Calling God ‘Father’ may be ‘problematic’, pronounced the Archbishop of York at Friday’s formal opening of the General Synod. Watching the live stream, I did a double take and had to rewind a few seconds to play it back. Did he really just say this? Archbishop Stephen Cottrell explained his reasoning: ‘For all of us who have laboured too much from an oppressively patriarchal grip on life…’ Who is the ‘us’ here? Is it too personal to ask what in Cottrell’s history has been oppressive? Can he really claim to have laboured under the patriarchy?

But more importantly, do we really need a gender-neutral makeover of our sacred liturgy? Why can’t the Church have faith in the intelligence of its congregation and, indeed, the word of God written in the Bible? Surely you don’t need to be a Cranmer or Aquinas to grasp that there is a world of difference between the fatherhood of God and a human father? It’s obvious that interchanging the divine name to ‘mother’ or reducing the same to the anodyne ‘our parent’ is not only theologically dubious and disrespectful to the authority of Holy Writ but also aesthetically awful.