Theologian criticizes ReImagination of the Christian faith
The Layman Online, December 16, 1999
“The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Yahweh … God is going to change …We women are going to bring an end to God …We will change the world so much that He won’t fit in anymore.”
With that quote from Naomi Goldenberg’s Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions, Donna Hailson began her consideration of those “who have decided to be ‘in the church but not of the church.'” Hailson’s address, “The Re-Imagination of the Christian Faith: From Marcus Borg to Chung Hyun Kyung,” was presented to the November, 1999 meeting of the Evangelical Theological Society in Danvers, Mass.
Leaving the Bible behind
Today, said Hailson, the move is on to create an alternative religion for women “that effectively divinizes the self,” an observation supported by Goldenberg’s claim that “It is likely that as we watch Christ and Yahweh tumble to the ground, we will completely outgrow the need for an external god.”
“How tragic,” Hailson continued, “that so many are failing to see that the only all-satisfying answer to the deepest of human hungers is not feeding on oneself but rather turning to the one true Bread of Life. How tragic that so many miss the reality of liberation available only through the real (not symbolic) Jesus Christ. How tragically misguided is the effort to engineer a new order of humankind minus the Living Redeemer.”
Hailson also cited other prominent personalities, including Chung Hung Kyung, who has been a featured speaker at ReImagining conferences and World Council of Churches assemblies.
Lacking the ‘mental equipment’
Hailson said that when the Jesus Seminar’s Marcus Borg, whom she described as “the darling of much of the mainline,” spoke at an Ecumenical Church Educators Conference in Chicago he “dismissed the claims that ‘Jesus was born of a virgin, walked on water, multiplied loaves of bread…ever claimed any divinity for himself or sonship with God, ever claimed his death would be a sacrifice for the world’s sins, or ever physically rose from the dead.’
“According to Borg, the Bible is not in any way divinely inspired and is completely a human creation … He cited prohibitions against homosexual conduct as clearly ‘not God’s law’ but human inventions. Borg recalled that he once believed in the Christmas story as literally involving a Virgin Birth, a ‘magic star,’ and Wise Men with gifts. He [said he] did so because he lacked the ‘mental equipment’ at that age to think otherwise. Most people develop the ability for critical thinking in late adolescence, he noted. ‘Fundamentalists’ reject this route and instead uncritically cling to stories of Noah and the Garden of Eden.”
An enlightened being
At the seventh assembly of the World Council of Churches, held in Canberra, Australia in 1991, Chung Hyun Kyung “began her presentation with an invocation of the spirits of an eclectic collection of martyrs, from Hagar to the students in Tiananmen Square, from the spirit of Earth, Air and Water to our brother Jesus, tortured and killed on the cross.
“Rejecting the notion of an omnipotent God who rescues all good guys and punishes all bad guys, Chung lifted for consideration instead Ina, a Filippino earth goddess, and Kwan In, who, she said, is venerated as the goddess of compassion and wisdom by East Asian women’s popular religiosity. She is a bodhissattva, an enlightened being. Chung also called for the rejection of what she sees as false substance dualisms of body and mind, world and God. Lifted instead was the Taoist, monistic concept of ki (the universal life force that is said to pervade and enable all things).”
Thus, said Hailson, “in this one presentation at the World Council of Churches assembly, participants were called upon to reject traditional Christian teachings and/or to meld them with spiritism, goddess worship, monism, ecofeminism, Buddhism and Taoism. … Yet, Chung was back at the podium again [in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1998] leading a women’s assembly in a shamanistic ritual.” This even though she has called for the church “to move away from Christocentrism and away from the doctrinal purity of Christian theology.”
Presbyterian participation
It was at the 1996 Re-Imagining conference in Minneapolis that Letty Russell told her audience she had decided to be “in but not of the church.” Russell, a lesbian activist who teaches at Yale Divinity School, was honored with a Women of Faith Award by the Women’s Ministries program area of the Presbyterian Church (USA) at the 1999 General Assembly.
Among mainline support for reimagined Christianity Hailson cited “the Presbyterian Church (USA)-owned Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, [which] hosted a retreat not too long ago which was centered on the goddess. A flyer, advertising the conference proclaimed, ‘The Anasazi Ancient Mothers are calling YOU to celebrate the sacred feminine Goddess in the Land of Enchantment . . . With art, movement, ritual and song — Honor the Goddess within each woman. Tell YOUR Herstory with art, voice, dance, ritual. . . . Create art with your symbolic Goddess language. . . Dance at the Temple of the Living Goddess. Connect as a sacred circle with very special women for mutual transformation. Share the magic!!!'”
She also observed that recently “the Episcopal-affiliated Kanuga Center in Hendersonville, North Carolina, hosted the conference, ‘Jesus: A Feminist/Womanist Perspective’ with Delores Williams, professor of theology and culture at Union Theological Seminary in New York, as the keynote speakers. Williams has offered praise for a church in San Francisco for having taken down its cross and refusing to focus any longer on death. She has also said, ‘I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff, we just need to listen to the God within.'”
Confessional Christianity
Hailson contrasted the various feminist reimaginations of Christian faith with what she called “Confessional Christianity [which] is founded upon the belief in one God who is both immanent and transcendent, beyond gender, a personal being of a different essence from the created order, existing eternally in three co-equal, co-eternal Persons. This God is revealed in the Bible through a vast array of images, attributes and adjectives which include: creator, father, savior, shepherd, spirit, teacher, comforter, counselor, defender, king, a consuming fire, a rock, a shield.”
Biblical Christianity, Hailson said, “worships the fully human, fully-divine Jesus Christ and affirms His virgin birth; His earthly ministry; His death on the cross; His bodily resurrection and His ascension into heaven. Believers look forward to His second coming.
“Biblical Christianity affirms the personal nature and work of the Holy Spirit thus rejecting any sense of the Spirit as an impersonal or all-encompassing force of God. Biblical Christianity affirms the universal sinfulness of humankind and the provision of salvation only through Jesus Christ.
“And Biblical Christianity views the Bible as the inspired Word of God. When approaching it, Bible-believing Christians know they must do their best to remove their lenses of experience, allowing the Word to speak and breathe. The individual endeavors to read out of the Word rather than into the Word.”
Standing firm
Hailson concluded her presentation by asking how confessional Christians could reach those getting caught up in feminist theologies. She noted that “radical spiritual feminism is a basically untilled mission field” and that “the only ones who are likely to reach them are women who can appreciate their pain (real or imagined) and will approach them with the paradigm of reconciliation.”
To engage in such a mission “we need to submit to the Lordship of Christ and commit ourselves to finding bridges, making bridges and becoming bridges for the presentation of the gospel – fully aware of the risk in that bridges get stepped on. We need to bring an intentionality to reconciling these folks to the Lord and to the church. We must beware of looking at these people as enemies but rather persevere in patiently presenting the gospel and loving them into the kingdom. We must not just talk at them but witness with our lives as well. We have to listen to the hurt but we must stand firm on biblical principles.”
Hailson ended her presentation by sharing her experience at one of the Re-Imagining conferences, where “I planted myself at one of the tables as a participant.” When she identified herself “as an evangelical woman who had come to the event to try to understand what the Re-Imagining Community was all about” a woman “leapt up from the table and alerted the leadership to my presence. Two of the leaders came to the table and asked the women what they wanted to do with me. … they insisted I be ejected because they would no longer have a safe space if I remained. … I alerted them to the fact that they were doing to me what they claim the church has been doing to women for 2,000 years: shutting me out.
“By this time, my lunch had arrived and my ejection was to be delayed for an hour. I took the opportunity to engage my tablemates in discussion. I was encouraged by the fact that at least one woman at that conference heard what I was saying. She came to me after all of this and told me I was right: the avenue of Re-Imagining is leading to a dead end.
“She was the Damaris on that Mars Hill. Let us risk and be bold and reach out to find all the Damarises who so desperately need to hear and receive the saving gospel of Jesus Christ.”