Ian Warden | Our parent, who art in heaven

"Our parent, who art in heaven," Giles Fraser, an Anglican clergyman and columnist shudders in a piece for the online UnHerd magazine.

"It [the Lord's Prayer] has rather lost something [with this opening], don't you think?

"Father has gravitas. It speaks of intimacy, protection, nurture. Parent, on the other hand, is one of those cold, anonymous, bureaucratic words ... It's the language of the census, not a warm embrace.

"But," Fraser continueth, "that is the kind of language the Church of England is considering. No more He for God. The pronouns of the Almighty are going to be They/Them."

Reading good commentators' reactions to the church's Big Idea I find myself strangely, strongly interested in the matter. Although I am an agnostic now I am, as the poet Philip Larkin described himself, an 'Anglican agnostic'.

I was brought up in a very Anglican part of England and loved, and continue to love so much about Anglicanism, albeit with this love complicated and made a little tragic for the last 50 years by my not believing in God.

And yet (and lots of lapsed, faded Christians will confess to this) when you have had a Christian childhood it is difficult, perhaps impossible, to rid the mind, the emotions, of absolutely every Christian habit of thought. Perhaps the ex-Christian but now agnostic or atheistic thinker pricks up his or her ears at discussion of God because he or she still believes in God on occasions, some of the time, on some Sundays. I calculate that I still believe in a kind of God, a kind of Christian one, about 9.5 per cent of the time.

And if, when we do think of God we automatically, unthinkingly think of Him as a him (there I am, you see, doing just that), as male, why do we do it? Why may we find it a bit of a wrench to give up that biblical habit?

While all of thee, this column's massed congregation of readers, think about those Big Questions, we turn to what the aforementioned Giles Fraser and another intellectually nimble thinker are thinking about all this.

"First, let me state the obvious," Rev. Fraser opineth, "no one thinks the Judeo-Christian God is a man.

"Father is a metaphor. Words are inadequate to describe the author of life. But they are all we have. None one believes [God] has a gender identity, still less a sex. That's just how the language works. The fact that, grammatically speaking, God in the Bible mostly takes male pronouns doesn't mean God is male."

"But I do get it: language matters. And gendered nouns do influence the way we think about the reality of the thing to which they refer. And this can easily be extended to how we describe the almighty. Given that people of faith think of God as another way of talking about ultimate reality, the gendered nature of God language could easily be a way of projecting male superiority in the very nature of things. Patriarchal assumptions are reflected and reinforced and then projected onto the stars."

Sharon Jagger, a university lecturer in religion, insists for The Conversation: "The dominance of masculine language for God certainly matters.

"As feminist theologian Mary Daly wrote, 'If God is male, the male is god'. In other words, talking about the Christian God in exclusively masculine terms privileges men in society and underpins male dominance.

"According to a Church spokesperson, the official Christian doctrine is that God has no gender. Yet 'He' is described almost exclusively in masculine terms. And since the Church continues to struggle with issues of gender equality this project is likely to be contentious."

She anticipates horrified Christians will splutter the church's proposal is an attempt to undo the long Christian tradition of calling God 'He' and 'Father'.

"But feminine language and imagery has also been part of Church history," the professor reminds.

"Hildegard of Bingen, a respected abbess (also known as a mother superior) in the Middle Ages, imagined the feminine side of God in her artistry and writings. And in the 1300s, female mystic Julian of Norwich spoke of 'the motherhood of God'."

Following this new debate this columnist is a little startled by my realisation of how unthinkingly I have always thought of God as male and by thoughts of how difficult one may find it to give up this daft but stubborn habit.

From whence cometh this habit?

For a start there is the influential part played by the Bible's insistence throughout on the Him and He, and on the way the rages, wraths, massacres and vengeful cruelties of the warlike Old Testament God are suggestive of the very worst male awfulness as we know it.

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Then it surely has something to do (for those of us who are cultured) with how all of the depictions in great art of God always show him as a manly man.

See for example how bearded and bemuscled He is in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel portrait of Him, how His outstretched mighty right arm is the arm of a bodybuilt brute of the all-time-greatest Mr Universe.

Would Michelangelo lie? These images fix in the impressionable, credulous, readily-awed mind (minds like this columnist's own) and become less like mere paintings of what's imagined than spiritual photo-journalism at its best - reliable reportage of what's eternally true.