www.byzcath.org Forums Mysteries: The Life of Worship Vespers, Matins & the Divine Liturgy The Revised Divine Liturgy WHY THE SILENCE?

This is from Fr. Petras' site:

http://www.davidpetras.com/page/response

See the response to chapter 4 of Fr. Keleher's book.

"In my personal opinion, since we believe that God saves both men and women, we should say this more often. In the Byzantine Liturgy, one of the main problems is the term “lover of mankind,” Philanthropos, “mankind” being labeled as a sexist term."

"The problem is not the biblical or theological or liturgical language, the problem is the secular language, and as much as we would like to say that the Church is free from all secular influence, that it is the Church’s duty to preach to the world and not vice versa, this ignores the Church’s mission to proclaim the gospel to all peoples. We just have not become aware yet what it might mean to English-speaking secular men and women in the twenty-first century. I have faith that a road will be found in which we can reach out with the gospel to all people."

This part of the defense I found particularly troubling
How am I to understand this? "Lover of Mankind," a problem? A problem for who? My wife never complained, nor any other females that I know of be they Eastern Catholic or Eastern Orthodox.

Dialogue with the Orthodox is very difficult for Eastern Catholics. Sometimes even moderate Orthodox want nothing to do with us, and barely tolerate our presence. Nothing that we can do will help reunion, except for us to voluntarily disband. Why, then, should we be faithful to our Eastern heritage? I find the answer in that all-important second principle: we have the right to act for the spiritual needs and welfare of our people. We should be faithful to our Eastern tradition because it is our heritage. We should be faithful because it is good and true and beautiful and the expression of our spiritual health. Rome has often seen us as a tool, but we have a dignity in ourselves, we are nobody’s tool. This means, on a practical level, we can act for our own welfare in liturgical matters. Don’t worry, it will neither hurt not harm ecumenism. In fact, it might be the best possible course of action, because at least then the Orthodox will see we have a dignity in our faith, that we are a Church that can make Christian decisions.

What more can be said? Dear bishops and IELC, where's the data? On what premise was this change made?

We just have not become aware yet what it might mean to English-speaking secular men and women in the twenty-first century. I have faith that a road will be found in which we can reach out with the gospel to all people. This might mean some horizontal inclusive language. As much as the Church would like to close the book on this change of “text” in the modern world....

It is the fashion of the day, then, [that] [t]he teacher of Christianity, instead of delivering its Mysteries, and (as far as may be) unfolding them, is taught to scrutinise them, with a view of separating the inward holy sense from the form of words, in which the Spirit has indissolubly lodged them. He asks himself, what is the use of the message which has come down to him? what the comparative value of this or that part of it? He proceeds to assume that there is some one end of his ministerial labours, such as to be ascertainable by him, some one revealed object of God's dealings with man in the Gospel. Then, perhaps, he arbitrarily assigns this end to be the salvation of the world, or the conversion of sinners. Next he measures all the Scripture doctrines by their respective sensible tendency to effect this end. He goes on to discard or degrade this or that sacred truth as superfluous in consequence, or of inferior importance; and throws the stress of his teaching upon one or other, which he pronounces to contain in it the essence of the Gospel, and on which he rests all others which he retains. Lastly, he reconstructs the language of theology to suit his (so-called) improved views of Scripture doctrine.

We just have not become aware yet what it might mean to English-speaking secular men and women in the twenty-first century. I have faith that a road will be found in which we can reach out with the gospel to all people. This might mean some horizontal inclusive language. As much as the Church would like to close the book on this change of “text” in the modern world....

The data is irrelevant if the “text” in which the Spirit writes is not yet clear.

One should consider all data even when there are if's. It's proper to hear what the other viewpoint has to say; the problem here is that they're not saying.

Are we suppose to take comfort in the believing that the goal of inclusive language is evanglical? Rev Petras seems to believe so:

From Rev Petras work:

Difficulties for Translation

The controversy over the use of inclusive language in the Church has led some to seek refuge in the distinction between “vertical” inclusive language (words referring to God) and “horizontal” inclusive language (words referring to man) in the hope that, by restricting the former and allowing the latter, they might achieve the twin goals of demonstrating sympathy for those who take offense at standard language while avoiding heterodoxy.10 Unfortunately the vertical-horizontal distinction is too facile to preserve the integrity of revelation, of the liturgy, and of doctrine. Once again, this points not to a special characteristic of Catholic doctrine but to the universal nature of language. The propositions that communicate truths about the nature of man and man’s relation to God will be obscured, when not negated, by programmatic avoidance of the unmarked generic.11 This is the case even in those passages where the substitute for generic “man” (e.g., “humanity,” “people,” “persons”) is arguably synonymous.

Why is “man” preferable to “humanity” in rendering Greek anthropos or Hebrew ’adam even in those passages where the meaning is nearly the same? The preference becomes clear in considering “man” as a productive morpheme in contrast to non-productive morphemes. These terms are somewhat forbidding but the concepts they express are straightforward. Suppose we invent on the spur of the moment a completely new English verb to convey the crashing of a computer’s hard-drive. Let us imagine our verb is “to klink.” If I ask any English speaker to give me the past tense of this verb, the response will invariably be “klinked” (e.g., “Yesterday my Macintosh klinked”). We can confidently predict the past tense of “klink” because the morpheme -ed/-d is currently the only productive past-tense-forming morpheme in English.

But this wasn’t always the case, and English still preserves some older vowel-changing verbs like “drink” (past tense “drank”) and “sink” (past tense “sank”). However, this morpheme is no longer productive; it is part of the learned or static grammar of the English speaker but not of the internalized dynamic grammar. The same is true of the vowel-changing plural morpheme by which “mice” is the plural of “mouse.” It too is a non-productive morpheme, and no longer actively operates in the creative grammar of English speakers. Thus, a (relatively) recent addition like the slang noun “souse” has the plural “souses,” not “sice.”

English “man” remains a preeminently productive morpheme. This is obvious from the fact that speakers are continually using it spontaneously and unreflectively in the creation of new compounds, not only in such terms as “hit-man,” “bag-man,” “airman” and “manned flight,” but even in words we have seen emerge in our own adult lifetime, such as “point man” or “pacman.” A few moments’ consideration will show that “humanity,” “people,” or “person” are not productive in this way.

Of course, an agency or a pedant might coin a compound using these morphemes, but it does not arise from the natural, spontaneous grammar that English speakers have internalized; we would need to be coached to say “pointperson.”

Greek anthropos was also a supremely productive morpheme, naturally used in the formation of words like philanthropos, anthropomorphos, etc. Like “man” but unlike “humanity” and “person,” it served as an elementary “building-block” of the language. Hebrew does not form compounds, but mutatis mutandis the same productive status was enjoyed by ’adam and ’îs in serving as nomina recta of construct phrases.

How is this relevant to the question of biblical translation? Every language expresses certain fundamental contrasts or oppositions that belong to its universal vocabulary, and consequently only universal, elemental, productive words will serve; thus: man and God, man and beast, man and nature, and so forth. Suppose, in responding to certain pressures that come from outside the language, we render these oppositions by substituting “humanity” or “human persons” for “man.” It might be argued in a given case that the substitution almost overlaps “man” in the sense of being synonymous with “man.” But are we really translating what the original speaker said? Only in a very limited sense.

This might be clearer if we imagined a translation of theos kai anthropos by “divinity and humanity.” Even if we ignore the fact that the new words are not as universally intelligible as “God and man,” it is still plain that the new wording does not belong to the elementary vocabulary which is the common property of speakers of every age, social class, and occupation, but rather it enters the language (as it were) through a narrow door, through legal and philosophical discourse.

There is an important asymmetry to be noticed here. The phrase “divinity and humanity” is restricted in sociolinguistic terms, but “God and man” isn’t. The former belongs to a particular milieu which the sociolinguist can identify, but the latter does not belong to any identifiable milieu: it is universal.

Now it is a linguistic fact—not merely a subjective matter of aesthetics—that if we put the words “What God has joined together, human beings must not separate” into the mouth of Jesus, we change the language of the gospel, even if we don’t change the meaning of the words, even if we don’t put the doctrine at risk. In the revised English, Jesus is speaking like a lawyer. In the original, he speaks like a man. To repeat, it is not just a matter of how widely the meaning of the new words is known; the point is that in departing from the fundamental lexicon here we are departing from the language we are supposed to communicate by translation.

As noted above, the claim that English “man” no longer means what anthropos means is false. This is demonstrable from the fact that no rival productive morpheme exists. Some words (like “humanity” or “persons”) can be pressed into service to carry part of the semantic freight of “man” in particular expressions, but none is remotely close to filling its place in the active grammar of the speakers. Again, such elemental productive morphemes can and do change over time, but a language can no more “lose” such a building block without compensation than arithmetic can lose an operation like division or multiplication. The scenario in which an English speaker is pictured trying and failing to call to mind the English for dexter or unus or homo is linguistically vacuous.

Horizontal Inclusive Language in Operation

The difficulties that result from using inclusive language in translation are patent in all the recently issued versions of the Bible that employ such devices. In every case they have the effect of distancing the reader cognitively from the original text; it should be stressed that this is true even of so-called horizontal inclusive language. The following illustrative passages are taken from the inclusivized New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) and the Revised New American Bible (RNAB, published by the Catholic bishops of the United States), and contrasted with the very literal Revised Standard Version of the Bible (RSV). Notwithstanding their manifold deficiencies, the NRSV and RNAB are billed as “moderate” by their respective publishers in their recourse to inclusive language.

(1) The literal (and traditional) rendering of Genesis 1:27 is:

God created man (ha-’adam = homo) in his image,
in the image of God he created him;
male and female he created them.

The NRSV translation gives:

God created humankind in his own image,
in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them.

Genesis 1:27 is a key text for Christian anthropology and plays a central role in the doctrine of sexual complementarity. Of particular importance is the testimony of original unity, expressed in Hebrew by (ha-)’adam, which is realized in two ways, male and female, zakar and neqebah. The circumlocutions and alterations of number in the NRSV put the teaching of the passage beyond the reach of anyone who does not have knowledge of the Hebrew. It was not humankind that God created in his image but man. A kind (or a race) is a collectivity but man is a unity. God could be said to have created man even if Adam died companionless, but he could not be said to have created human-kind in these circumstances.

It is clear that for the sacred author the human race as such begins in the following verse, with the blessing of God and the command “be fruitful and multiply,” which is carefully preserved as an event distinct from the creation of the two-in-one. To say that it was humankind that God made in his image is to introduce, gratuitously, a number of uncertainties as to whether and how man’s resemblance to God is to be found in the collectivity, the abstract, the social, etc. The sacred author displays the same precision in the use of the object pronouns: “in the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.” The failure to preserve this shift in translation deceptively suggests that the antecedents are the same in the original; there is no way for the English reader to recover the underlying text.

(2) Consider the RNAB rendering of Romans 5:12 and 15:

[12] Through one person (henos anthropou) sin entered the world, and through sin, death, and thus death came to all, inasmuch as all sinned. . . . [15] For if by that one person’s transgression the many died, how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one person (henos anthropou) Jesus Christ overflow for the many.

The logic of St. Paul’s argument in one of the doctrinally key passages in the New Testament is here forfeited for the sake of inclusive language. The point is not that one person (one individual, one personal existent) was the source of sin and death and one person is the source of grace, but that both events are effected di’ henos anthropou: through one man, one homo. As the patristic formula has it: “What is not assumed [i.e., by Christ] is not redeemed”; we are redeemed in our humanity because God’s Son became man. The Pauline theology of redemption is irretrievable from this translation, even though the tampering is putatively horizontal in scope.

Moreover, the circumlocution “person” introduces a particularly regrettable conceptual anachronism into the text. To use the word “person” for an essential, defining characteristic is to beg confusion with the later notion of prosopon as a person of the Trinity, though of course this meaning is nowhere found in St. Paul. Thus, through the reviser’s avoidance of the only natural equivalent of anthropos, not only is the authentic teaching obscured but false scents are dragged across the trail and the reader is gratuitously made prey to misconceptions that are difficult to put right without access to the original Greek.

(3) A literal translation of Revelation 22:12 is:

Behold, I am coming soon, my recompense [is] with me,
to repay each according to his work.

The RNAB says:

Behold, I, Jesus, am coming soon. I bring with me
the recompense I will give to everyone according to their deeds.

This passage is instructive in showing how even minor departures from natural language have unanticipated consequences for meaning. Here the revisers needed to resort to defective grammar by correlating singular “everyone” with plural “their” so as to avoid the English masculine (unmarked) form corresponding to the original. Less obvious however is the decision to render the Greek hekastoi “to each” as if it were panti “to everyone,” and thus suggesting, wrongly, that the recompense will be the same for all. Small adjustments require other small adjustments, which, taken together, warp the natural way in which languages convey meaning.

(4) The literal (RSV) translation of Psalm 71:11 is:

[My enemies] say, “God has forsaken him;
pursue and seize him.”

The NRSV translates:

They say, “Pursue and seize that person
whom God has forsaken.”

For Psalm 41:8 the RSV has:

[My enemies] say, “A deadly thing has fastened upon him;
he will not rise again from where he lies.”

But the RNAB gives:

I have a deadly disease, they say,
I will never rise from my sickbed.

In these passages the Psalmist speaks in the first person, and, in the course of his complaint, he recites the taunting of his enemies—taunts that, in the Hebrew as in the RSV translation, indicate that the Psalmist is male. For the sake of inclusivity the revisers of both the NRSV and RNAB have rewritten the pertinent verses in order to neutralize the masculine pronouns of the Hebrew. Now it is a peculiarity of first-person-singular discourse that the gender of the subject-referent does not need to be made grammatically explicit to the hearer; gender revelation occurs “gratuitously” in languages with composite adjectival tenses (cf. Italian sono andato vs. sono andata) and of course by other kinds of incidental self-reference (“I am a seamstress”).

Accordingly, when we read first-person-singular discourse, we usually have to find oblique clues as to the gender of the speaker. So, for example, in reading a first-person lament such as Psalm 71 (“In thee, O Lord, I take refuge . . .”), we have no clues, grammatical or narrative, as to the gender of the speaker, and the first ten verses could be put into the mouth of a man or a woman indifferently. But beginning with verse 11 we have a gender-specific self-reference: “For my enemies speak concerning me . . . and say, ‘God has forsaken him; pursue and seize him; for there is no deliverer.’” Since this phrase is embedded in first-person discourse, it specifies the gender of the narrative “I” as masculine—as unambiguously as it is specified in the Italian phrase sono andato. A commentator may be entirely justified in believing that the narrative has theological application not only to the speaker but to men and women indifferently, but the translator must be faithful to the device of the author, which (in this case, as in Psalms 35, 27, 41, 42, 109, and 119) is to announce himself as male. When the NRSV writes “Pursue and seize that person” we have circumlocution in place of translation.

The RNAB resorts to another device in rendering Psalm 41:8. Here the revisers change the grammatical person of the embedded quotation from third (“he will not rise”) to first (“I will never rise”) in defiance of the Hebrew. In so doing they have given rise to two further departures from the original text. First, whereas the Hebrew lets us hear the actual taunts of the Psalmist’s adversaries in direct discourse, the inclusivized version changes this to indirect discourse; the literary effect is not the same. Second, the neutralization of gender also constricts the range of intertextual (typological) interpretations beyond that available to the Hebrew text. This subject requires a discussion of its own.

The Preemption of Types

Problems of Christological and other typological interpretation are markedly compounded by application of inclusive-language devices to the translation of the Old Testament. To take an example that has been a recent subject of controversy, should the beginning of Psalm 1 be translated literally (“Happy the man who walks not in the way of the wicked”) or is the inclusivized rendering acceptable here (RNAB: “Happy those who do not follow the counsel of the wicked”)? The patristic exegetical tradition shows some diversity in its judgment as to whether “the blessed man” in question is or is not a typological reference to Christ.12

Yet even if the case for Christological interpretation is put at its weakest, the fact remains that not all translations are equally revelatory of the various possibilities of interpretation. The literal “happy the man” rendering permits the Christological (or another typological) interpretation, but it does not require it; even if the sentiment were general/aphoristic (i.e., a truism about men in general), all readers except the most committed feminists would be able to find that reading in the English. The symmetry does not hold for the inclusivized version, however; “happy those” cannot be given the historical specificity needed to make it typological. The literal translation preserves multiple levels of meaning; the non-literal seals off all but the one before the mind of the translator.

But the problems do not end there. Psalm 119 begins, “Happy are those whose way is blameless. . . .” Here the Hebrew itself is plural; the general application is explicit and no interpretative effort is required to reach it. The prima facie conclusion is that, since the Hebrew authors were capable of expressing a generally applicable truth with the plural, they may well have had a good reason for using the singular in the instances where it is found; even if this reason were purely stylistic, it is reckless to disregard it without compelling arguments to do so. In the RNAB the distinction between the kinds of discourse exhibited in Psalm 1 and Psalm 119 is lost.

Secondary Negative Effects

The use of horizontal inclusive language has a collateral effect that is too seldom noticed. Once the translator eliminates the unmarked generic to a perceptible extent, he paradoxically puts exaggerated and misapplied emphasis on the maleness of the masculine forms that remain: In effect all masculines become marked for gender.

The NRSV, for example, is generally ruthless in excising “man” for anthropos, but retains it in Romans 5—not unreasonably, when one considers the problems with the alternatives (see the discussion of the RNAB version above). But when we read in the NRSV, “sin came into the world through one man,” our confusion is genuine; precisely to the extent that our expectations are based on the NRSV grammar (without generic “man”), we will understand St. Paul to be speaking about one male.13

In introducing exactly the kind of misunderstanding for which they are invoked as the cure, the inclusive devices cut their own throat. The same problem vexes the RNAB, in which male kinship terms are neutralized so often (children for sons, friends for brothers, ancestors for fathers, etc.) that where the direct translation is retained, the semantic stress on maleness is disproportionately great.

Bedrock Terms

The solecisms created by inclusive language in the examples we have discussed are not the kind of problem that a more skillful translator could eliminate. They are a necessary consequence of the program of departing from the “eco-system” of a natural language, in which meanings and stresses are assigned with subtlety and precision by devices native to its genius, in favor of a system of contrived meanings and emphases whose values are laid down by fiat.

In the short term, it may seem prudent and advantageous to employ words like “humankind” and other such devices as interim solutions to a vexed pastoral problem. But in the long term such compromises must change the language in which God has revealed himself. Where the Bible and the liturgy speak to us in the elemental, universal terms of existence, we cannot replace them with legal, philosophical, or political contrivances without changing the nature of the documents themselves.

Rather than manipulate the bedrock terms of revelatory discourse in the hope of hitting a moving target, it is wiser to preserve as carefully as possible the language of the text, trusting in the natural linguistic intuitions of its hearers to find the intended meaning. They almost never fail.