A searchable, downloadable PDF of the original article appears below. Harold Jantz is the editor of Christian Week, a bi-weekly newspaper of Christian news and comment produced in Winnipeg. This editorial appeared in the April 12, 1994 edition and is here by permission.
A conference held last November in Minneapolis has slowly been gathering attention and awakening concern. Entitled a “Re-Imagining Conference,” it was called to mark the midpoint of a decade in support of women’s issues initiated by the World Council of Churches.
The starting point for the 2,000 women and 85 men from 27 countries at the gathering was that Christianity needs to be reformulated because it has failed women. Hence the intent to “re-imagine God, the church and the family.”
The event didn’t get a great deal of press at first. But as months have passed and growing circles have become aware of what transpired there, the concerns have grown.
The United Church of Canada had the largest Canadian representation in Minneapolis. But it was the mainline U.S. denominations, like the Presbyterian Church (USA), the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America, the United Methodist Church, the American Baptist Church and the United Church of Christ, which provided most of the funding for the event and were most strongly represented.
When renewal leaders of some of these denominations met in Hamilton, Ontario in mid-March, they drew up a statement expressing “profound concern” for the “trampling underfoot of the Christian gospel” which took place in Minneapolis.
It will be hard not to see the Re-Imagining Conference as a kind of end point which Christian feminism can reach when it disengages itself from a full and sufficient revelation of God in Christ through the Old and New Testaments. Instead of seeing “the Christian faith as a gift of God,” participants treated it as “a human invention to be reformulated or re-imagined,” said the renewal leaders in Hamilton.
The re-imagining that was taking place at Minneapolis under an apparent “Christian” flag was sweeping.
At the forefront was a new way of imagining the divine as the goddess Sophia, the spirit of wisdom and “primordial female power” which gave birth to the male spirit. In place of the wisdom (sophia) which Proverbs describes, the participants in Minneapolis proposed someone who could substitute for God, whom they described as creator and worshiped through a eucharistic-like liturgy which included the use of milk and honey as the communion elements.
In the liturgy to Sophia, the women recited, “Our maker Sophia, we are women in your image. With the hot blood of our wombs we give form to new life… With nectar between our thighs we invite a lover… with our warm body fluids we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations.”
Not one of the 34 main speakers represented orthodox Christian faith, said Presbyterian journalist and ministerial candidate Susan Cyre. Speakers denied basic Christian tenets like the incarnation and atonement of Jesus Christ and the transcendence of the God of Israel.
In a gathering where participants were urged to come not as critics but as worshippers, “speakers proposed that God is one with trees, mountains and rivers.” One speaker led conference participants through New Age healing techniques.
Renewal leaders expressed dismay that participants of the Re-Imagining conference “also joined in a celebration of lesbianism, bisexuality and transsexuality… denounced the traditional family structure and proposed the acceptance of sex among friends as a normative expression.”
Said Susan Cyre, “The speakers attacked the Christian church and orthodox Christian doctrine as the source of oppression of women, racism, classism, violence in our cities, abuse of children, abusive rejection of gay and lesbian sexuality, and pollution of the environment.”
She quoted the former United Church of Canada moderator (and immediate past president of the World Council of Churches) Lois Wilson, who told the Minneapolis gathering, “Christianity as practised in today’s world demonstrates more of a nightmare than a vision.”
Reconciliation between the sexes can only be gained through mutual submission and a new appreciation for one another in Christ.
Virginia Ramey Mollenkott, who years ago began her journey as an evangelical, told the group: “I can no longer worship in a theological context that depicts God as an abusive parent and Jesus as the obedient trusting child. This violent theology encourages the violence of our streets and our nations.” She and others rejected the atoning death of Christ as an abuse of power which provides the undergirding for continuing abuse of the powerless.
Who did they speak for?
The conference in Minneapolis does a disservice to many Christian women and men, because it will give some the impression that this is where feminism is headed. Yet it also represents a warning that this is where some feminism will end up, when it casts itself adrift from the biblical anchors that should provide its direction.
As Elizabeth Achtemeier has pointed out, the effort to transform God into a goddess creates problems on a number of fronts.
For one, it sexualizes God. Nothing about the use of male language for God in the Bible introduces notions of sex into it. But when God is made to be female as well as male, sex becomes part of the equation. Thus it was not surprising that there was support for lesbianism, bisexuality and transsexuality or that a conference speaker would say, “Imagine sex among friends as the norm… pleasure is our birthright of which we have been robbed in religious patriarchy.”
Calling God a goddess supports the view that god is the “womb” out of which all that is comes. Such a view leads easily to pantheism and the notion that we are all part of the divine, and that we ought to be “worshipping” one another rather than a transcendent God.
That means we don’t need redemption. The atonement becomes unnecessary. It also leads easily to a belief in many gods and not surprisingly a Chinese feminist at Minneapolis offered China’s 722 gods and goddesses as an example of “radical inclusivity.”
It rejects the way God has revealed himself. Contrary to the peoples around them, the Israelites worshipped a God who revealed himself in personal language that was masculine rather than feminine. When the Bible uses feminine language for God, it is by means of simile: God is “like a woman in childbirth,” crying out and gasping and panting (Isa. 42:14). But when God is named directly, it is by metaphor, writes Elizabeth Achtemeier. God is Father, Judge, Husband, and Master, and most importantly the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Christ is the central issue
And therein lies the central theme around which a response to voices like those from Minneapolis must be framed.
The response ought to be to affirm that Jesus Christ is the route through whom we understand God and speak about God, and the one through whom we must understand ourselves.
Jesus helps us understand that we are not divine, we are part of the creation, brought into being by the word of God. We find our redemption not by elevating ourselves, but by coming in repentance and faith to Christ for that which we cannot do for ourselves. Reconciliation between the sexes can only be gained through mutual submission and a new appreciation for one another in Christ. We dignify one another not by attributing divinity to one another, but by the confession of our creatureliness and by the change that we allow the spirit of Christ to bring to our attitudes.
Feminism stands at a crossroad. The Re-Imagining Conference represents a pagan dead end. Promise for women and for men will be found only where Christ truly is Lord and his word genuinely is allowed to shape us.