Scottish Inclusive Language

The Scottish Episcopal Church’s College of Bishops has approved inclusive language prayers, authorising optional changes that remove “Lord”, “He”, “his”, “him”, and “us men” from its 1982 Eucharistic Liturgy.

On Aug 2, the SEC published a list of seven permitted changes. Spokesman Lorna Finley said the changes were offered by the College of Bishops as an “interim measure” as the General Synod Liturgy Committee prepares new Eucharist rites.

The permitted changes include altering “God is love and we are his children” in the Confession and Absolution to “God is love and we are God’s children.”

In the Gloria the phrase “and peace to his people on earth” becomes “and peace to God’s people on earth;” the Nicene Creed is revised with the phrase “for us men and our salvation” making way “for us and for our salvation;” while the opening responses in the Eucharist Prayer change “it is right to give him thanks and praise” to “it is right to give God thanks and praise.”

The Christological Prayer in Eucharistic Prayer IV changes from “He renewed the promise of his presence” to “Your son, Jesus Christ, renewed the promise of his presence.” Eucharistic Prayer V allows revisions to the phrase “Give thanks to the Lord for he is gracious, And his mercy endures forever,” with “Give thanks to our gracious God, whose mercy endures forever;” and substitution of the phrase “which is your will for all mankind” with “which is your will for all the world.”

Ms. Finley said the revisions incorporate changes suggested by the clergy after a questionnaire was distributed in 2007. “The use of inclusive language was one of the key comments arising from this questionnaire,” she noted, adding the permitted changes prepared by the Liturgy Committee in consultation with the Faith & Order Board of General Synod and the College of Bishops “help bring our common texts in to line with the English Language Liturgical Consultation recommendations.”

However, the Rev. Stuart Hall of the Scottish Prayer Book Society on Aug 5 urged the Primus and College of Bishops to rethink the revisions as “some of the tinkering” to the liturgy “are going to do some incidental damage.”

Dr. Hall, Professor Emeritus of Ecclesiastical History at Kings’s College London and Honorary Professor of Divinity at the University of St. Andrews stated he believed there were problems of doctrine and aesthetics with the new liturgy.

The revisions “disturbed” the liturgy’s musical settings and upset the rhythm of the verses. The “compilers and revisers of the 1982 [Liturgy] have from the start been culpably indifferent to music,” he observed.

“The absurd thing is that the whole difficulty, if such there be, could be avoided with reference to all the ancient originals from which the Eucharistic dialogue was translated,” Dr. Hall said.

The Latin Dignum et iustum est or Greek axion kai dikaion is translated in the Book of Common Prayer as “It is meet and right so to do,” he said, asking “Why could our translators not have avoided the whole issue of God’s sex and stuck with ‘It is proper and right,’ or preserving the rhythms of the original Greek and Latin, ‘Proper it is, and right’.”

Changing the words of the Nicene Creed was problematic, he said. “On principle, liturgy-writers should not tamper with the text of ecumenical creeds,” and omitting ‘men’ has doctrinal consequences, he said.

The Greek words tous anthropous in the creed uses ‘men’ in the sense of all humanity. “If you leave it out, the reference might be taken to mean us Christians, or even us Episcopalians,” Dr. Hall said, adding that Hooker had to defend the phrase ‘that it may please thee to have mercy upon all men’ in the Litany “against dissenting critics who thought we should pray only for the Elect, not for everybody.”

In the original Creeds, the same word anthropos is applied to the incarnation of Jesus Christ, who is not just enfleshed, ‘incarnate of the Virgin Mary’, but puts on total thinking humanity, enenthropesen, ‘made man’, Dr. Hall explained. “So there is a balance: for us humans … he became human. And his fleshly humanity is entirely derived from the Virgin Mary: her manhood becomes his. If ‘men’ applied to ‘us’ excludes women, then Christ is said not to have become human, but to have become male.”

Prudence Dailey of the Church of England’s Prayer Book Society told CEN she was “sorry” the SEC “felt the need to be squeamish” about gender specific language in relation to God.

“I would hope that the authorised liturgies of the Church of England will never go that far down that particular path. The Prayer Book Society would not wish worshipers to be encouraged to feel uncomfortable with the traditional usage of masculine pronouns, as found in the Book of Common Prayer of 1662,” she said.