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 thus 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 far 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 mwomens' equal status in society
with a religious tradition of many millenia
that attributed the redemption of mankind
to the Son who was sent into the World by
God the 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.

But on a level even more profound, the demand
for gender inclusiveness is a demand both for 
outward social conformity but also for an inward
compliance, a demand which in many, if not all
instances requires a conversion of the spirit
analogous to the conversion which is required
of any nonbeliever. And because it is a demand
upon the spirit of human beings, it is a religious
imperative, and compliance with it is a religious
experience.

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
seems to be quite 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
opprobium. Indeed it might well follow, that even though
the idealization of women's liberation is godless, 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 words, 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 teachingh 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.

the dialectic between passion and tolerance

The force which compels censorship and dogma is
the passionate belief that something is truly right or
truly wrong.