Jesus called God, "Father," and used the pronoun, "He." So should we.
God is neither man nor woman.
***Jesus called God, "Father," and used the pronoun, "He." So should we.***
As does the TNIV*:
Matthew 5:44,45
"But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven. he causes his sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends the rain on the righteous and the unrighteous."
The TNIV quotes Jesus as calling God "Father" and using the pronoun "He".
Substituting a gender neutral term when the term from the text is gender neutral isn't that big a deal, although in English it makes the reading clunky. "He or she or it went to the store. The difficulty with this translation is that it substitutes gender neutral terms where gender specific terms were used in the original text.
The problem with many of the new translations, and there are a ton of them out there now, is that the translators openly bring their own agenda into the mix. Many of them also view the scriptures as a kind of Aesop's fable, which should be modified to sell current philosophical thinking.
I have always liked the New American Standard, but one thing I noticed was that they cleaned up several Old Testament passages, which were actually pretty rough in the original texts. For example, in threatening a city, David stated that he would kill any male that could piss on a wall. This was a pretty direct threat that any male that wasn't a baby in it's mother's arms would be killed. The NASB alters that text. While I understand the desires of the translators to avoid offending people, and have honestly never heard a preacher read the original King James text of that passage from the pulpit, this type of modification of the original is inherently destructive to the teaching of Scripture.