The Archbishop of York is wrong. The Lord’s Prayer isn’t problematic

The Archbishop of York recently called the Lord’s Prayer ‘problematic’ because it refers to God as ‘Father’. Christians might like to debate the gender of God, but there’s a reason scripture uses the male pronoun, says Tony Wilson

”Problematic” was the word the Archbishop of York used to describe the Lord’s Prayer while addressing the General Synod of the Church of England last week. ”For if this God to whom we pray is ‘Father’ – and, yes, I know the word ‘father’ is problematic for those whose experience of earthly fathers has been destructive and abusive, and for all of us have laboured rather too much from an oppressively, patriarchal grip on life”, the Most Rev Stephen Cottrell said.

His comments were spoken as an aside to the main thrust of his talk, which was about unity, but the conservative and liberal wings of the Church of England are on a hair trigger when it comes to points of tension like this. Commentators on one side were quick to own the Archbishop’s words by agreeing that the Church has abused others in its patriarchal history. On the other side, traditionalists pointed out that Jesus himself instructed us to pray in this way.