Probably it was mere coincidence that 
the gender inclusiveness debate greeted me
when I first signed onto this list.
It may seem to some that this thread has 
long since been spun out. That nothing more
can or should be said about it. Yet to me
the debate about gender inclusive or exclusive
language reaches deeply into the theological
topics that concern Bonhoeffer and us.
Most evidently there is a great deal of work
to be done to reconcile the demands of feminism
for womens' equal status in society
with a religious tradition (Ueberlieferung) of many millenia
that assigns a subordinate status to woman 
incident to her creation, and
attributes the redemption of mankind
to a Son who was sent into the World by
a divine Father. None of the comments made on
this discussion list suggest to me that
the beginning of this monumental and perhaps
impossible task has been made.
Certainly, toying with grammar
will do little to solve the problem.

It also seems appropriate to me,
if we take Bonhoeffer seriously,
that, before we endorse the claims of feminism
we examine its implications 
for the sacrament of marriage.
(das Mandat der Ehe, (Ethik, 1953, p. 70))
Bonhoeffer writes: "In der Ehe werden die Menschen
eins vor Gott ..." (In marriage humans become one
before God.) Arguably this unity is precluded
when *either* partner insists on equality,
because equality presupposes the separateness 
of the partners.
If marriage, as I believe to be the case,
is the partners' reciprocal conveyance to each other
of bodily and spiritual possessions,
then marriage serves
to redress any inequality between the sexes;
and indeed such compensation is perhaps one of its
unrecongized functions.
The institution of the family,
and of marriage in particular,
bestows on each person who participates in it
the opportunity, the privilege, and perhaps
also the duty of redressing the inequalities
created by nature and by society,
to the extent that they manifest themselves
within the relationship.
A militant and consistent feminism
mandates an externally imposed political equality.
It disdains the equality that can arise
in the traditional marriage 
from the reciprocal love and sacrifices of the partners,
and which can become the strongest bonds between them.

I should be the first to admit
that the traditional marriage relationship often fails,
and that its failure is well-night universal,
that the equality issuing from it is mere hypothesis,
and that therefore marriage is a wholly inadequate
protection of the interests of women.
And I am sympathetic with those
who would scrap traditional marriage on the grounds
that it has not worked.
But not Bonhoeffer. He, I believe,
would have applied to the marriage relationship
the same criteria of sufficiency
that he applied to other social institutions:
not whether the institution bestowed equality upon the participants
but whether it did justice to their relationsip to God.
In the light of this criterion,
I do not think he would have found the complaints
and claims of contemporary feminism convincing.

In a different perspective,
the petition for gender inclusiveness in language
is a demand not only for outward social conformity
but also for an inward, spiritual compliance.
Linguistic gender inclusiveness is
an emblem of allegiance to an ideology of feminism.
To those of us who are sensitive to the nuances of language,
gender inclusiveness is a demand upon the spirit,
it is a religious imperative,
and compliance with it is a religious act.
Bonhoeffer, however, if I understand him correctly,
objected to *all* ideologies,
no matter how noble their intent,
on the grounds that they are idolatrous
and interfere with the individual's
relationship to his or her God.

Thus the imperatives of feminism might be expected
to compete with the demands of Bonhoeffer's God
for the faith and obedience of the believer;
and it is plausible that Bonhoeffer's teachings
should properly be interpreted as proscribing feminism
as the worship of the idol of equality,
as he suggested in the passage
on the lamentable consequences of the French revolution,
a passage which I quoted and translated in an earlier posting.
The circumstance that dedication
to an ideal of womens liberation might be stigmatized by
the logic of Bonhoeffer's Ethik as being idolatrous,
does not entail as its necessary consequence
that the fact of women's liberation
should be subject to similar opprobrium.
Indeed it might well follow,
that even though
the idealization of women's liberation is godless and idolatrous,
the fulfillment of womens liberation
is a necessary manifestation of divine love.

===============

What is in issue here is the use of words, is language,
and language has the characteristic that it mediates
between the inward and the outward,
between what is private and what is public.
The same word has both a public and a private significance:
that is the source of its meaning and of its power.
The word, written or spoken,
exteriorizes the experience of the individual
to make them part of a communal language.
In turn the community relies on language
to procure the cooperation
and the conformity of the individual to its purposes.

The learning of language is the essence
of the socialization of the individual.
The common language more than any other
facet of community binds the individual to it;
and remarkable to the point of being miraculous
is the fact that the individual,
the child learns the language eagerly,
gladly, makes the conformity its own,
and is in no way oppressed by what he has to learn.
Relies on grammars and dictionaries, on style books,
and mimics the language of famous authors....
There do come times when the prescription
of language by the dictionary becomes oppressive,
but this is the case less often than one might think,
because these prescriptions in general
do not concern matters
of the individuals subjective experience,
or they do so only tangentially.

It is a different matter, with regard to things that are
important to him. With these the individual commonly
resists change and clings to expressions which reflect
his own experience. And this is the juncture at which
he must come to terms with censorship and dogma.
Censorship is the process by which society prescribes
to the individual what he may not proclaim to the outside
world. Dogma is the teaching by society of what a person
is to deem to be true. Both censorship and dogma are 
irrelevant for dispassionate speech, which does not
involve the individuals soul. Both censorship and dogma
are indispensable to a society for the purpose and function
of integrating its members into it. And this is the facet
of experience peculiarly in the sphere of theology and
religion, and of the church. Indeed, one can say that
whenever a government imposes censorship for the purpose
of controlling its citizens' behavior, it has become
a quasi religion and has usurped the function of the church.

=============

Theology is the only discipline I am aware of
that takes into account the human soul,
that purports to deal with subjectivity.
and that is why theology has to be the root
of all viable social science and of all sociology
and perhaps also of all history.

=============

The force which compels censorship and dogma is
the passionate belief
that something is truly right or truly wrong.
The dialectic between passion and tolerance
reflects on the one hand
the force of the individuals conviction,
reflects on the other hand his inability
to control the thought of his fellow man.