“Mother” and “Father” as Theolinguistic Antonyms

Extract

Feminist religious-language reformers wish to eliminate or make substitutions for such masculine-loaded words as “lord,” “king,” “master,” and “father.” One substitute word, “mother,” is of particular interest because it is sometimes used to replace “father,” and sometimes it serves as a counterweight to “father.” The appropriateness of these terms as encountered in Christian liturgical prayers, Scripture, the Creeds, and the Trinitarian formula “Father, Son, and Holy Spirit” is often discussed nowadays. My first contention is that mother/father stand in linguistic opposition to each other, preventing interchangeable or parallel use. My second contention is that the Trinity represents an hypemymy blocking the use of feminine hyponyms.

The terms opposition, contrast, and antonymy are sometimes used without careful distinction, for they all illustrate at bottom a linguistic and philosophical fact: to establish the meaning of any word it is necessary to set up oppositional considerations. This hardly profound observation is matched by other, similar assertions by any number of structural semanticists. Trier even goes so far as to attach some psychological association of opposites in the mind of speaker or hearer upon each utterance (Der deutsche Wortschatz im Sinnbezirk des Verstandes, J. Trier, Heidelberg: Winter, 1931) even though perhaps most linguists would consider psychology to be more a part of a theory of language behaviour than structural analysis.

Everywhere we look in the universe we see opposites: forces of attraction and repulsion, left and right crystals, concave and convex, rest and movement—the list is very long. In his important little book, Opposition, C. K. Ogden reminds us that Aristotle, in his Metaphysics, discusses the oppositions of unity and multiplicity and being and not-being, and that other philosophers make reference to hot and cold, odd and even, good and evil, and so forth.