Cheryl Schatz

Lamb,
It is good to be back. My resolution this new year is to be far more active on my blog and to make it more of a priority even while I am still researching and writing my new script.

Gengwall,
My post isn’t just about CBMW, but about complementarians which do very somewhat from each other. However the typical comp response that I have been getting from comps is that God is male. Where do they get this from?

CBMW says things like:

Biblical, masculine language for God is not culture-dependent, but rather is God’s chosen self-revelation of his identity.

Thus CBMW can speak out of both sides of their mouth. They can deny in places that God is male, yet out of the other side of their mouth they affirm that He is masculine. His identity, they say, is masculine. What does masculine mean? What does identity mean?

identity: condition or character as to who a person or what a thing is
male: pertaining to or characteristic of a male person; masculine
masculine: pertaining to or characteristic of a man or men

CBMW writes:

Therefore, the masculine language for God in the Bible is not due to what Israel or the early church thought about God, primarily, but, ultimately, this way of speaking of God comes from God himself. Because the Bible is God’s own chosen self-revelation, we must take seriously the language God chose to use to communicate to us what he is like. This revelation, by God’s choice, includes all the masculine God-language of the Bible, and therefore it cannot be dismissed as merely the by-product of a patriarchal cultural. To dismiss the masculine language for God in the Bible is to dismiss how God has spoken of himself, and this is a serious matter. http://www.cbmw.org/Journal/Vol-13-No-2/How-Shall-We-Speak-of-God-Seven-Reasons-Why-We-Cannot-Call-God-Mother