This magazine is a forum for Lutherans. There’s lots of room for debate. The only parameters we set on the debate are those set by our own Lutheran confessional documents, to wit: 1) the Holy Scripture of Old and New Testaments are the source and norm of Christian teaching; 2) the Creeds confess that teaching accurately and faithfully; 3) the unaltered Augsburg Confession and other writings of the 1580 Book of Concord witness to canon and creed. Needless to say, debate about the meaning of canon, creed, and confessions are part and parcel of the business of being a Lutheran forum. But they are our common theological ground.

Pronouns create confusion and mistakes in English-language letters nowadays, so we have to set an editorial policy about their use. If we are referring to hypothetical individuals, we find the most felicitous solution to be alternation between “he” and “she,” since “s/he” is cumbersome and “one” can be a bit too formal and “they” usually is followed by grammatical errors. And when we talk about multiple members of the human race, we use terms like “humanity” and “people” rather than “men,” since “men” sounds like “many males” rather than “many persons.”

When we speak of God and find it necessary to employ a pronoun, we use “He” (also “Him” and “His”) with the capital H. This is for two reasons. First, because Scripture authorizes the use of the masculine pronoun while clarifying that God is neither male nor masculine. Secondly, because the lower-case “he” used in the same casual fashion as for human males can in fact be misleading about the non-maleness and non-masculinity of God. The person of Jesus Christ may be referred to with a lower-case “he,” however, since he was truly human at the same time He was truly God. For consistency’s sake, relative and second-person pronouns used of God will be capitalized as well (e.g., “You” and “Who”).

We generally do not like endless repetition of the word “God,” as in “God Godself saved God’s people,” as it implies a kind of robotic impersonality alongside the syntactical awkwardness. If, however, as an author you cannot in good conscience see your way to using the “He,” you may use the repeated “God,” but we ask you to provide an endnote explaining your rationale.

“She” as a referrent to God has no canonical basis, and to our minds only encourages the erroneous notion that God is sexual or perhaps hermaphroditic, which neither mitigates the problem of the “He” nor finds scriptural warrant. As such we decline to use it in these pages.