For PCUSA activists, it’s not all about gays
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, Posted Monday, November 24, 2003
A More Light congregation in California and a special-interest organization are clear examples that the issue of ordaining homosexuals is only a part of their agenda. Both feature on their Web sites theological views that are dramatically different from the Reformed understanding of the faith.
First Presbyterian Church in Palo Alto, Calif., promotes what it calls a “reincarnated Earth and Spirit” group that focuses on environmental issues.
That All May Freely Serve, the special-interest group, is promoting a sermon by Lisa Larges, a lesbian who has been denied ordination in the Presbyterian Church (USA). The essence of her sermon is that Jesus was a bigoted Jewish male who learned his divinity from humans.
Both the Palo Alto connection to Earth/Light and That All May Freely Serve are examples of what is called “progressive theology” – a philosophy that challenges orthodox Christian views.
Earth and Spirit is more than merely good stewardship of the environment. It is a New-Age type religion that ascribes god-like qualities to the earth and an earth-spirit. The Palo Alto Web site includes a link to EarthLight, “an organization and publication with which our congregation has a long and enduring history.”
EarthLight bills itself as the “magazine of spiritual ecology” and takes on a number of causes – including virulent opposition to President George W. Bush and what it describes as “fundamentalists” because they regard Scripture as the highest authority.
In 2002, the magazine promoted a religion known as shamanism, which is practiced by indigenous peoples of far northern Europe and Siberia and is characterized by belief in an unseen world of gods, demons, and ancestral spirits responsive only to the shamans.
In an editorial titled “The Shamanic Response” for that edition, K. Lauren de Boer said, “We are advocating, in this issue, for the shaman as a religious figure for our time. Most of our major religious traditions have become so attenuated in their ties to the mysteries of Earth and cosmos that they no longer fulfill their function of binding us to the sacred. The shamanic personality is not only a practitioner of the sacred, but one whose central role is healing through contact with the forces of the natural world. The need for healing is something we all share today, whether we are an indigenous person, western industrialist, male, female, child, four-legged, winged, leafed, or finned.”
“The focus of shamanism for this issue of EarthLight is not to encourage the expropriation of indigenous ways, nor is it to suggest that we all run off to do sweat lodges, make sacred pipes, and do shamanic journeying,” de Boer said. “Each of us has our own path of Spirit in this life. These indigenous practices demand our respect. They require years, sometimes a lifetime, of preparation. Our choice for this issue’s focus is more about getting to the spirit of what shamans have to teach us about ourselves.”
The Palo Alto church that promotes its relationship with EarthLight is the same congregation that called the Rev. W. Robert Martin III to be its pastor. A disciplinary action asked that Martin be tried on a charge that he denied the physical resurrection of Jesus. An investigating committee dismissed the case, but criticized Martin for giving “inarticulate” answers to questions about what he does believe.
Larges’ sermon on the That All May Freely Serve Web site is titled “The Real Deal.” Her text was Matthew 15:21-28, the account of a Canaanite woman who asked Jesus to have mercy on her and heal her demon-possessed daughter.
The Revised Standard Version of that text reads:
- Leaving that place, Jesus withdrew to the region of Tyre and Sidon. A Canaanite woman from that vicinity came to him, crying out, “Lord, Son of David, have mercy on me! My daughter is suffering terribly from demon-possession.”
- Jesus did not answer a word. So his disciples came to him and urged him, “Send her away, for she keeps crying out after us.”
- He answered, “I was sent only to the lost sheep of Israel.”
- The woman came and knelt before him. “Lord, help me!” she said. He replied, “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs.”
- “Yes, Lord,” she said, “but even the dogs eat the crumbs that fall from their masters’ table.”
- Then Jesus answered, “Woman, you have great faith! Your request is granted.” And her daughter was healed from that very hour.
Larges focused on “It is not right to take the children’s bread and toss it to their dogs,” and contended that Jesus “dismisses the Canaanite woman with a cruel and cutting appeal to racial superiority. If we are not too pious we must acknowledge that Jesus is just plain rude to the Canaanite woman with the very ill daughter, and the vehicle for his rude dismissal is race prejudice. Jesus is acting like any common bigot. ‘We must make sure that the good schools are for the white kids.'”
Then she asks, “How is it that this ordinary man, who carries within him the toxin of prejudice instilled in any Jewish man of his time, become for us the way of salvation, the truth of grace and the life beyond measure.”
” … it becomes clear that the agent that transforms the Jesus of history into the Christ of faith is relationship. It is his real encounters with real people that draw Jesus into the deep reality of God’s grace. God is finally relational, and Jesus embodies this divinity through relationship. In this way, the miracle stories and the healing accounts are more than a confirmation of Jesus’ specialness, they are essential to the incarnation. That is to say, Jesus needs to meet the Canaanite woman as much as she needs to meet him.”
The problem with Larges’ interpretation is that it depicts Christ as a sinful racist who was transformed by the Canannite woman. But the woman obviously didn’t view Christ in that way. To the contrary, she accepted the fact that she was an outsider, unschooled in the faith of Israel. And Jesus commended the importunity of her faith.
Scripture and the The Book of Confessions, the PCUSA’s constitutional theology, emphasize that Jesus is sinless and perfect, and that his perfection is not derived from relationships with people – but imparted to them.
“For our sake, he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God,” Paul wrote to the Corinthians (2 Cor. 5:21). Christ was “in all points tempted like we are, yet without sin” (Hebrews 4:15).
The Westminster Confession of Faith (6.04) declares, “The Son of God, the second Person in the Trinity, being very and eternal God, of one substance, and equal with the Father, did, when the fullness of time was come, take upon him man’s nature, with all the essential properties and common infirmities thereof; yet without sin.” And the Confession of 1967 adds, “Out of Israel, God in due time raised up Jesus. His faith and obedience were the response of the perfect child of God.”
John Calvin linked the perfection of Christ with the essence of the doctrine of salvation by grace through faith – and not of works. “Scripture, when it speaks of justification by faith, leads us in a very different direction,” he said in the The Institutes of the Christian Religion. “Turning away from our view from our own works, it bids us look only to the mercy of God and the perfection of Christ.”
Calvin also said, “We now see how Christ is the most perfect image of God, into which we are so renewed as to bear the image
of God in knowledge, purity, righteousness, and true holiness.” And, “Trust, is secure resting in him under a recognition of his perfections, when, ascribing to him all power, wisdom, justice, goodness, and truth, we consider ourselves happy in having been brought into intercourse with him.”