The Language We Use – The Attempt to Rid the World of “he” and “she”

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Dr. Al Mohler from today’s briefing:

Humpty Dumpty once said to Alice, as in Alice In Wonderland, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean. Neither more or less.” Alice responded to Humpty Dumpty, “The question is, whether you can make words mean so many different things?” Humpty Dumpty’s retort? “The question is, which is to be master? That’s all.”

There is incredible wisdom and an embedded threat within that quotation. If one is the master of language, then one controls the entire communication system, and for that matter eventually the culture. To control the lexicon, to control the dictionary, to control the vocabulary is eventually to control the meaning, indeed, the entire worldview of a society. The worldview shapes the vocabulary, but make no mistake, the vocabulary shapes the worldview.

Therefore, we have to take seriously a serious opinion piece published recently in The New York Times by the Times columnist Farhad Manjoo. He wrote an article with the headline, “The Perfect Pronoun, Singular ‘They.'”

Manjoo wrote, “I am your stereotypical cisgender, middle-aged suburban dad. I dabble in woodworking, I take out the garbage, and I covet my neighbor’s Porsche. My tepid masculinity apparently rings loudly enough that most people call me, ‘he’ and ‘him.’ And that’s fine; I will not be offended if you refer to me by those traditional uselessly gendered pronouns, but ‘he,'” the author went on to say, “is not what you should call me. If we lived in a just, rational, inclusive universe, one in which we were not also irredeemably obsessed by gender, there would be no requirement for you to have to guess my gender just to refer to me in the common tongue.”

Farhad Manjoo has written for Slate. He’s written for the Wall Street Journal, and now for the New York Times. He’s dabbled in the gender issue before, even writing a piece in which he suggested that men should wear makeup. But in this article, published recently in The New York Times, he is calling for the rejection of traditional gendered pronouns and instead simply the use of the word “they,” even in the singular.

You’ll note that in the article’s opening sentences, he went on to say that this is how we should speak to one another. Manjoo is making a moral argument. He intends to make a moral argument. He is effectively arguing that it is morally superior to use non-gendered language, including pronouns. And the specific pronoun he recommends, well, we know this already, it’s “they.”

Later in the article, he writes, “So, if you write about me, tweet about me, or,” he says, “if you’re a Fox News producer working on a rant about my extreme politics, I would prefer if you left my gender out of it. Call me ‘they,'” he wrote, “as in, ‘Did you read Farhad’s latest column? They’ve really gone off the deep end.'”

He goes on to say, “And unless you feel strongly about your specific pronouns, which I respect, I would hope to call you ‘they’ too, because the world would be slightly better off if we abandoned unnecessary gender signifiers as a matter of routine communication. Be a ‘him’ or ‘her’ or whatever else in the sheets, but consider also being a ‘they’ and a ‘them’ in the streets.”

Well, his suggestion of a linguistic difference between the language used between the sheets and on the streets might be a little bit clever, but it’s way too clever when you consider what’s really at stake here. What he’s calling for is a revolution, not only in the language, but in the morality, and not only that, in the entire worldview, even the understanding of who human beings are, what it means to be human, what it means to be a him or a her, what it means to be a they.

You should remember that earlier in the column, as I quoted, he went on to speak of those traditional uselessly gendered pronouns. Useless. That’s very interesting. He’s calling gender pronouns uselessly gendered. Well, is that true or is that false? Is it important when we speak to one another that we speak to one another as male or as female?

Well, let’s just consider the fact that that is not only the traditional way that human beings have conceived, known, and spoken of one another, throughout the entirety of human existence. It is also something that is deeply embedded not only in the language but in the entire system of meaning. It’s also something that the Bible affirms as a matter of God’s revelation. Indeed, it’s a matter of the creation that God has brought about to his glory. When he created human beings, the only beings in his image, he created us, male and female.

It’s right there in the very first chapter of the Bible. Thus a he and a she, a man and a woman, a male and a female, this is written into the entire structure of creation, and even as Farhad Manjoo refers to them as being now useless, they’re hardly useless. And furthermore, Manjoo protests the fact that many elite institutions that presumably are entirely sold out to and enthusiastic about the moral revolution, including the gender revolution, they haven’t yet caught up with the linguistic revolution.

He asked, “Why do elite cultural institutions, universities, publishers, and media outlets still encourage all this gendering? To get to my particular beef,” he wrote, “when I refer to an individual whose gender I don’t know here in The Times,” that’s The New York Times, “why do I usually have to choose either he or she, or in the clunkiest phrase ever cooked up by small minded grammarians, he or she?”

Manjoo doesn’t want to have it. He writes, “I shouldn’t have to. It’s time for the singular ‘they.’ Indeed, it’s well past time and I’d like to do my part in pushing ‘they’ along.” Manjoo writes as if this is probably inevitable. He says that many in the society are already adjusting to the singular “they.” He says it’s perceived as neutral in gender. “When people encounter it, they’re as likely to guess it’s referring to a man, woman or non-binary person.”

He says this makes the singular “they” a perfect pronoun. “It’s flexible, inclusive, and obviates the risk of inadvertent mis-gendering. And in most circumstances,” he says, “it creates perfectly coherent sentences that people don’t have to strain to understand.”

Well, before looking at the inherent contradiction that comes in using the word “they,” it’s also an inherent confusion, let’s consider the fact that even if you take Farhad Manjoo’s argument at face value—”Oh, it’s wrong to use gender pronouns, we would be morally superior if we get rid of those gender pronouns”—he says that there is no real loss, but of course there’s an immediate loss. We really don’t know as much as we used to know about the person being referred to. When you speak about “they,” intentionally, as he makes clear, referring to either a male or a female or what he calls a non-binary person, you really don’t know as much as you knew when you referred to someone or heard someone referred to as he or she. There’s a tremendous loss of meaning with the use of “they” in that sense, but that’s actually the point. You can’t bring about a moral revolution on gender if the language keeps showing up with those noisome “he’s” and “she’s.”

But then we have to move on to the bigger problem when it comes to the language and that is that “they” is plural. It always has been plural, but now he’s insisting that we should use “they” in the singular.

Speaking of the resistance to using the singular “they,” he writes, “Institutions that cater to grammar snoots still disfavor the usage. The Times allows the singular ‘they’ when the person being referred to prefers it, but its style book warns against widespread usage.”

Here’s The New York Times style book citation, “Take particular care to avoid confusion if using they for an individual.” Why would there be confusion? Well, because “they” implies plural, more than one person. When you speak of “they” in the singular, you begin to confuse the entire language system.

Just consider this simple English sentence: They are drowning, we need to save them. Well, of course we should respond to that with an effort to bring about lifesaving intervention. You save one person. Have we saved them? No one person is a he or a she. If we are told we need to save them and we save only one, have we failed to save another who needs saving?

But we’re talking about this because this is an argument that is coming up again and again, and here it has shown up in the most influential newspaper in the world, and in the voice of one of that newspaper’s own columnists. And furthermore, we are told that Manjoo himself wants to be referred to with the singular “they.” That is his own, you know the language now, preferred personal pronoun.

So I pulled up the biography of Farhad Manjoo on the website of The New York Times. It doesn’t work. Just listen to how he is described. “Farhad Manjoo became a Times opinion columnist in 2018. Before that they wrote the Time’s state-of-the-art column, covering the technology industry’s efforts to swallow up the world. They also have written for Slate, Salon, Fast Company, and The Wall Street Journal. To their chagrin, their 2008 book, True Enough: Learning To Live in a Post Fact World, accurately predicted our modern age of tech embedded echo chambers and alternative facts.”

The last sentence, “Farhad Manjoo was born in South Africa and immigrated with their family to southern California in the late 1980s. They live in northern California with their wife and two children.” So here we have, and remember this is straightforward, this is the official bio on the website at The New York Times, we have an individual who has moved with their family, they live, their wife.

But at this point we should note that this ridiculous exercise only works because we actually do already know who he is. He understands that the issue goes far beyond the language. That’s why the language must be conquered. He says, “One truth I’ve come to understand too late in life is how thoroughly our lives are shaped by gender norms. These expectations are felt most acutely by those who don’t conform to the gender binary.”

But he says, “Even for people who do fit within it, the very idea that there is a binary is invisibly stifling.” Well, let’s just consider for a moment the fact that the vast, vast majority of human beings, for what we know who have ever lived and certainly who speak of their judgment on such things now, are quite comfortable, indeed insistent, upon being known as a he or a she. This is not invisibly stifling.

He also speaks of how this applies to his parenting, “From their very earliest days, my son and daughter, fed by marketing and entertainment, and (surely) their parents modeling, hemmed themselves into silly gender norms. They gravitated to boy toys and girl toys, boy colors and girl colors, boy shows and girl shows.” He concludes, “This was all so sad. They were limiting their very liberty to satisfy some collective abstraction.”

No, they weren’t. And they weren’t just responding to cultural or consumer impulses either. They were responding to some deep knowledge within themselves. And even if the issue of color preferences related to male and female are an abstraction, the fact that even children want to clearly understand themselves as male and female is not an abstraction.

One respondent to Farhad Manjoo in the letter section of a later edition of The Times wrote, “The universal use of the singular ‘they’ by contrast would compel all speakers to change virtually every sentence and deference to the half percent of the population who identify as non-binary. In the process,” wrote Ron Meyers of New York, “it would destroy ancient and universal linguistic distinctions of gender, and much worse, the distinction between the singular and the plural, which is essential to linguistic clarity.”

Here’s something deeply essential to the Christian worldview. The Christian worldview begins with the self-existent God, the God who created everything and gave the gift of being, that is an actual objective reality, to his creation.

Of course, the Bible makes very clear the elaboration of creation from that point. But God, the Creator, gets to determine what the creation is and what the creation means. He made human beings linguistic creatures. We have the capacity for language.

Our responsibility, according to the Christian worldview, is to order our language so as most faithfully to correspond to the reality that God has created. This is a moral responsibility. It’s a theological responsibility. It’s also just a natural impulse because human beings, made in the image of God, given the gift of consciousness, given the gift of language, we desperately do want our language to make sense and to be communicable, one to the other, understandable to those to whom we speak or write or communicate. If our language, if our vocabulary becomes detached from reality, it becomes not only less linguistically useful, it becomes subversive of the very idea of communication.

But note very carefully, this is intentional. This is exactly what the moral revolutionaries, the gender revolutionaries are trying to bring about. If they do not change the language, they cannot change the contours of the worldview, and that’s what they are determined to do. Our language will, if they succeed, no longer correspond to reality, objective reality, it will instead correspond to their newly invented system of gender understanding, or we might say of gender misunderstanding, of confusion rather than of clarity, of self-deception rather than of truth.

Is Christianity based on Pagan Mythology?

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Article: Do the Gospels Borrow from Pagan Myths? by Timothy Paul Jones – original source here: https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/gospels-borrow-pagan-myths/

Timothy Paul Jones (PhD, The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary) is associate vice president and C. Edwin Gheens professor of Christian family ministry at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is the author or editor of more than a dozen books and serves as one of the teaching pastors at the Midtown congregation of Sojourn Community Church.

It’s an accusation that’s been around a long time. Even in ancient times, critics of Christianity noticed some parallels between Christian beliefs and pre-Christian myths. In the late second century, a pagan philosopher named Celsus charged, “The Christians have used the myths of Danae and the Melanippe, of the Auge and Antiope in fabricating this story of virgin birth!” In more recent times, skeptical scholars such as Marvin Meyer and Robert Price have claimed close connections between the resurrection of Jesus and the myths of dying and rising deities that marked many pagan myths.

In the simplest possible terms, here’s what these critics contend: The most marvelous claims in the Gospels—a miraculous birth, for example, as well as the idea of a deity who dies and rises again—are paralleled in pagan religions that predate Christianity; therefore, early Christians must have fabricated these miracles based on their knowledge of pre-Christian religions.

To be sure, there are some surface-level similarities between ancient myths and certain events in the Gospels. Long before the first century AD, the myths of Egyptians deities such as Osiris, Adonis, Attis, and Horus included tales of death and rebirth. The Persians venerated Mithras, a deity who (according to some claims) was born of a virgin and who died and then rose from the dead. Sacramental bread and the fruit of the vine make appearances in a few mystery cults as well.

So why should anyone see Jesus as being distinct from the pagan gods? Could it be that the New Testament stories of Jesus represent the fictive myth of an ancient mystery cult that’s survived for 2,000 years? Or is there something different about the accounts of Jesus’s time on earth?

When these claims are compared carefully with the New Testament Gospels, the distinction between Jesus and the supposed pagan parallels becomes quite distinct, for at least two reasons: first, the pagan parallels aren’t as parallel as the proponents claims; and second, many of the supposed parallels confuse later Christian practices with the actual affirmations in the New Testament Gospels

1. The Parallels Aren’t So Parallel

First, it’s important to be aware that most of these supposed pagan parallels aren’t nearly so parallel as the skeptics suppose. When the actual sources behind the myths are closely examined, the supposed parallels have little in common with New Testament narratives.

For example, there are dying and rising gods in some pagan myths—but these deities died and arose each year, certainly not the same pattern as Jesus’s substitutionary once-for-all sacrifice. And the pagan myths of miraculous births are closer to divine impregnation—a mortal woman conceives a child as a result of sexual relations with a god—than to the virgin conception described in Matthew and Luke.

Example: Jesus vs. Mithras

To exemplify how these supposed parallels aren’t nearly as parallel as the critics claim, let’s look at the myth of Mithras, which is often presented as a predecessor to the New Testament.

So what about Mithras’s miraculous birth?

According to some reconstructions of the ancient sources describing the Mithras’s birth, Mithras was born from solid stone, and he got stuck on the way out. Some nearby persons in a field pulled him from the stone, which left a cave behind him. Some skeptics connect this birth to the birth of Jesus in a stable with shepherds arriving soon afterward. A few even refer to Mithras’s birth as a “virgin birth.”

But referring to the rescue of Mithras from stone as a “virgin birth” seems to me a stretch.

I mean, I guess that birth from a rock is sort of a virgin birth. But how can you tell if a rock is a virgin, anyway? And how do rocks lose their virginity? Parallels of this sort are too vague and too dissimilar to support the claim that Christians borrowed their beliefs from pagans of previous generations.

James Tabor, a professor at University of North Carolina, doesn’t believe in the virgin conception of Jesus, and he denies that Jesus rose from the dead. Yet even he is able to see how radically Jesus’s birth in the Gospels differs from any supposed pagan parallels:

When you read the accounts of Mary’s unsuspected pregnancy, what is particularly notable . . . is an underlying tone of realism that runs through the narratives. These seem to be real people, living in real times and places. In contrast the birth stories in Greco-Roman literature have a decidedly legendary flavor to them. For example, in Plutarch’s account of the birth of Alexander the Great, mother Olympias got pregnant from a snake; it was announced by a bolt of lightning that sealed her womb so that her husband Philip could not have sex with her. Granted, both Matthew and Luke include dreams and visions of angels but the core story itself—that of a man who discovers that his bride-to-be is pregnant and knows he is not the father—has a realistic and thoroughly human quality to it. The narrative, despite its miraculous elements, rings true.

Let’s take a quick look at a few of the supposed parallels between Jesus and Mithras:

Supposed parallel: Mithras had 12 followers.

Significant problem: One piece of ancient artwork depicts Mithras surrounded by 12 faces, but there is no evidence these were his “disciples.” In fact, Mithras had only two companions, Aldebaran and Antares.

Supposed parallel: Mithras was identified as a lion and a lamb.

Significant problem: There is no surviving evidence for connecting Mithras to a lamb. Yes, Mithras was identified as a lion. However, that imagery for a royal ruler existed among the Israelites (Gen. 49:9) several centuries prior to the emergence of any Mithraic myth; the New Testament writers were using familiar Jewish imagery when they depicted Jesus as a lion.

Supposed parallel: Mithras initiated a meal in which the terminology of “body and blood” were used.

Significant problem: The earliest evidence of such terminology in the context of Mithraism is from the mid-second century—nearly 100 years after the Gospels were written. In this instance, it is far more likely that Mithraism borrowed from Christian practice.

Supposed parallel: Mithras sacrificed himself for the sake of others.

Significant problem: Mithras is frequently depicted in the act of sacrificing a bull—but Mithras himself never becomes the sacrifice.

Supposed parallel: Mithras rose from the dead on the third day; his followers celebrated his resurrection each year.

Significant problem: There is no surviving evidence from the pre-Christian era for a resurrection of Mithras on the third day. Because of his association with the sun, it’s possible that his followers celebrated a renewal or rebirth each year.

Supposed parallel: The resurrection of Mithras was celebrated on Sunday.

Significant problem: There is no surviving evidence from the pre-Christian era for a celebration of a resurrection on the first day of the week, though the followers of Mithras—and of other sun-related deities—did worship their gods on Sunday. The reason for the emphasis on the first day of the week in the New Testament Gospels was, however, more closely tied to the fact that, in Genesis 1, God’s work of creation began on the first day. The implication was that, through the resurrection of Jesus, God was initiating a new beginning, a re-creation of his world.

2. Claims of Parallels Confuse the NT’s Historical Claims with Later Christian Practices

What’s more, proponents of these parallels consistently conflate later Christian traditions with what’s found in the Gospels. It’s true, for example, that pagan festivals occurred around the time when Christians later celebrated Christmas—but the New Testament documents never suggest a date for Jesus’s birth.

Identifying a date to celebrate Christmas occurred centuries after the time of Jesus; Christians probably arrived at a date near the winter solstice because of an early tradition that Jesus was conceived on the same date that he died, and nine months after Passover landed the birthdate in late December. In any case, since the New Testament makes no claims regarding the date of Jesus’s birth, the celebration of Christmas is irrelevant when it comes to discussing whether the New Testament description of Jesus’s birth is rooted in real historical events.

The same holds true when it comes to connections between pagan fertility festivals and later Easter celebrations. The term “Easter” comes from “Ishtar,” a Sumerian goddess who died, rose, and ascended, and several familiar Easter motifs originated in pagan fertility cults. Yet, except for a King James Version mistranslation in Acts 12:4, no New Testament text even mentions Easter. The pagan roots of later Easter imagery have nothing to do with the historicity of the Gospels.

Likewise, later Christian art incorporated both Egyptian and Mithraic motifs, especially when depicting Jesus and his mother. Yet later depictions of pagan myths in Christian art has nothing to do with whether New Testament events actually occurred. It simply means that Christian artists could be a bit more creative when choosing sources for their inspiration.

What If Pagan Parallels Do Exist?

Let’s suppose for a moment, though, that some patterns present in the life of Jesus couldbe pinpointed in some previous religion. Would this weaken the historical foundations of the Christian faith?

Not necessarily.

The real question isn’t, Are there similarities between the New Testament’s descriptions of Jesus and some previous pagan myths? Perhaps there are—although I must admit that every ancient parallel I’ve examined has turned out to be vague and weak when seen in its original context.

Every ancient parallel I’ve examined has turned out to be vague and weak when seen in its original context.

The crucial question is, Did the events described in the New Testament actually occur? The answer doesn’t depend on parallels in pagan practices.

Parallels in other ancient religions neither prove nor disprove the authenticity of the New Testament documents. They simply demonstrate the common expectations of people in the first century AD. Even if some clear parallel did exist between the story of Jesus and previous religious expectations, this wouldn’t warrant the belief that the apostle Paul or the Gospel authors “borrowed” the tenets from other faiths.

It would mean that, when God dropped in on the human race, he chose to reveal himself in ways the people in that particular culture could comprehend. If that’s indeed the case, it would merely mean that the myths of dying gods and miraculous births are rooted in longings that run deeper than human imagination; although the pagan religions twisted and distorted these motifs, they’re rooted in a God-given yearning for redemption through sacrifice that makes the world right and new. C. S. Lewis addressed this possibility:

In the New Testament, the thing really happens. The Dying God really appears—as a historical Person, living in a definite place and time. . . . The old myth of the Dying God . . . comes down from the heaven of legend and imagination to the earth of history. It happens—at a particular date, in a particular place, followed by definable historical consequences. We must not be nervous about “parallels” [in other religions] . . . They ought to be there—it would be a stumbling block if they weren’t.

Not a Borrowed Religion

When it comes to parallels between the New Testament story of Jesus and the myths of pagan gods, the supposed connections aren’t sufficiently parallel to claim that Christian faith is borrowed. Even if some parallels were indisputable, that would merely mean God worked out his plan in a manner that matched the context within which “the Word became flesh and pitched his tent among us” (John 1:18).

So what should you do the next time someone pulls out a pagan parallel?

1. Locate the primary source.

With the rarest of exceptions, the primary sources—that is to say, the actual ancient texts that describe the pagan practices—don’t include any real parallels to the New Testament.

2. Determine whether the supposed parallel precedes or succeeds the New Testament.

Every text in the New Testament was in circulation no later than the late first century AD. If the pagan parallel is from a text written later than the first century AD, the New Testament writers obviously couldn’t have borrowed from it.

3. Determine whether the supposed parallel connects to the New Testament—or to later Christian traditions.

Connections between pagan practices and later patterns in Christian worship or holiday celebrations may be interesting—but these links have nothing to do with whether New Testament accounts of the life of Jesus are historically accurate.