The ELW psalter is at the heart of dissatisfaction with the book. The BCP/LBW version has been rewritten, expurgated, one may say, to avoid calling God by masculine pronouns. The principal way this is accomplished is to turn all the psalms into second-person address, “you” instead of “he.” This has been variously defended as the objections came in. It was said that many people had wanted to pray the psalms and this new form facilitated that by making them prayers, ignoring the long tradition beginning in Judaism of praying the psalms in the existing biblical form. It was then said that the new form facilitated singing, ignoring the Anglican practice of choral evensong and the principal glory of the Anglican church, Anglican chant. The Leaders Edition attempts to diffuse the continuing objections by noting that “[t]he 150 psalms presented here use a version intended for common sung prayer and proclamation, rather than a translation for study.” When one who cares about study and scholarship is referred elsewhere, one becomes suspicious of the product. Should the church use in its liturgy something that does not stand up to scholarly examination?
The creation of Evangelical Lutheran Worship (ELW) by the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, as I understand it, was generated by the convergence of two factors. One was the fervent desire on the part of a relative minority in the church to end the use of masculine pronouns (“he,” “him,” “his”) to refer to God. The other was the increasingly serious financial situation of the church’s publishing house, Augsburg Fortress. A new worship book would make congregations pray and talk about God in ways that the influential minority considered essential and would at the same time be a big seller to bail out the publisher. And so it has happened.
What about the majority of us who are not offended by God being referred to as male?