Why Do We Call God "Lord"?

I got asked this question this week: why does the Bible call God "Lord" so often? One of our newer members asked me this. She'd been sitting with some discomfort around the word, and wanted to understand where it came from before deciding what to do with that discomfort. It seemed worth answering here for anyone else turning the same question over.

The short version: "Lord" is mostly not a description of God's character, the way "Shepherd" or "Rock" is. It's a stand-in for God's actual name.

Here's the background. God's proper name in the Hebrew Bible is four letters — YHWH, sometimes called the tetragrammaton. By at least the Hellenistic period, observant Jews had stopped pronouncing it aloud, out of reverence, substituting "Adonai" — Hebrew for "Lord" — whenever they read the name in the text. That's the origin point. "Lord" enters the tradition as a spoken substitute for a name too sacred to say.

This carried over into Greek. The Hebrew scriptures were translated into Greek in the third and second centuries BCE, in the version scholars call the Septuagint, for Jewish communities who now spoke Greek rather than Hebrew. Where the Hebrew text had the divine name, the Septuagint's translators used the Greek word for "lord" — kyrios. The New Testament, by contrast, wasn't translated into Greek; it was written in Greek from the start. But its authors quote the Old Testament constantly, and when they do, they inherit the Septuagint's habit of rendering the divine name as kyrios. Of roughly 695 uses of kyrios in the New Testament, about 22 percent are direct quotations of, or allusions to, God's own name. That's a significant chunk of the word's use in scripture — not a title so much as an echo of the Name itself.

This matters for how the New Testament talks about Jesus, too. When the Gospels and Paul call Jesus "Lord," they aren't just being respectful. They're applying to Jesus the very word Greek-speaking Jews used in place of God's own name. That's a theological claim, not a courtesy title: Jesus is being identified with the God of Israel.

So that's the "why" of it historically. The follow-up question is the more pressing one for us today: if "Lord" carries centuries of hierarchical, master-and-servant, monarchical baggage, why do we still use it — and are we allowed to use something else?

We are. In 1985, General Convention directed the church to prepare inclusive-language liturgical texts, and by 1997 those resources were gathered into a book called Enriching Our Worship. It draws on ancient biblical and patristic images and offers language for God that doesn't rely only on familiar masculine terms — Mother alongside Father, Holy One, Sustainer. Congregations can use these texts with the bishop's permission, and many Episcopal parishes do, in whole or in part.

Even in those texts, though, "Lord" tends to survive more than "Father" or "King" does. That's not an oversight — it's because "Lord" is doing two different jobs, and only one of them is really about gender or hierarchy.

In the Psalms and canticles translated from Hebrew, "Lord" is often functioning as that placeholder for the divine name. Replace it with a different word entirely, and you haven't just softened a metaphor — you've lost the connection to the Name the text is pointing at.

When the word is applied to Christ, it's carrying that same weight: the identification of Jesus with the God of Israel. Remove it there, and the theological claim underneath gets harder to see.

So here's where I've landed, and what I'd say back to her: it's right to question "Lord." Every generation should look hard at inherited language and ask what it's carrying. Sometimes the honest answer is that "Lord" is patriarchal language propping itself up as piety, and Mother or Holy One says something truer. But sometimes "Lord" isn't functioning as a gendered title at all — it's standing in for a name we don't say, or making a claim about who Jesus is. Worth knowing which one you're looking at before deciding what to do with the word.