Mitch Teemley’s observation touches usefully upon the volatile topic of “they” third persons and “he/she” third persons. English has ready at hand singular “it,” as he notes, but referring to a sentient being as “it” violates the innately sensed contrast between persons-and-pets versus clams-and-thumbtacks. Singularized “they” is the lesser evil.

How to pronominalize the divine (the “all-sentient”?) invites meditation. Cult moves slowly. In another few centuries “He” might become “They.” Meanwhile, believers commanded to preach as well as pray must talk of God in the grammatical third person, if at all. Recast the first line of the Lord’s Prayer as a sermon, replacing “Father” with “God.”

Our God, Who is in heaven, hallowed be <His/Her/Its/Their> name.

Talk of God in any person at all may argue with the literal grain of Wittgenstein’s tart dictum:

Whereof we cannot speak, thereof we must be silent. 

Or with Arthur Eddington’s:

The universe is not just queerer than we suppose; it’s queerer than we CAN suppose.” 

How to speak of what purportedly outstrips our puny faculties by infinitudes? (What do fish say about ocean?) If God’s anything they’re all of it, outside of which and whom or what is inconceivable nonbeing. I’d include in my devotions a line of Elaine Kahn’s poetry which she quotes in her essay “On Shame: In the Realm of Death and Awe” (Poetry, June 2025):

What drives me / is baseless / and therefore / indisputable.

There’s an axiom of — is it logic? — which says, approximately, What needs no proof needs no rebuttal.

(c) 2025 JMN — EthicalDative. All rights reserved