Re-Imaginers: Christians wrong to believe Jesus died for their sins
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, June 23, 2003
MINNEAPOLIS – Two feminist theologians, considered leading lights in the Re-Imagining movement, told their fellow travelers that Christians have been wrong for centuries to believe that Jesus died to atone for their sins.
Rather, Rita Nakashima Brock and Rebecca Parker told about 200 women gathered for the 10th anniversary and final Re-Imagining Gathering that the so-called atonement theology was concocted by 10th-century Christians to justify violence, including the Crusades and the Inquisition.
Rita Nakashima BrockEven today, they said, President George W. Bush, as a conservative Christian, has the “warrior” instinct that stems from a fundamentalist view that Christians are soldiers. Other speakers were less reserved. One called Bush a “fascist.”
The Re-Imagining Gathering on the campus of the University of Minnesota June 19-21 had a number of political overtones, particularly against Bush and other conservatives. Some of its participants promoted abortion at every level, including the late-term procedure that destroys a baby’s life in the process of delivery. Some called on government to sanction “marriages” for same-sex couples.
Brock and Parker spoke after conference participants welcomed them to the stage by raising arms in the manner of a “wave,” similar to a fan demonstration at athletic events. “Let Sophia be your wisdom,” they chanted. “Share her wisdom.”
While some of the participants claim that they do not worship a goddess named Sophia – after the Greek word for wisdom – their rituals unquestionably leave that impression. The wave and chant were standard greetings for speakers at the conference.
Brock is a research associate at the Starr King School for the Ministry of the Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, Calif. Parker is president of the seminary and a professor of theology. Both unmarried, they work together and travel together. Both have been invited speakers and consultants at Presbyterian Church (USA) events.
They are the co-authors of Proverbs of Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering, and the Search for What Saves Us – which suggests that women are redeemed by their own suffering, whether natural (child birth) or as a result of oppression by men. Jesus, sometimes called “Jesus-Sophia” by the re-imaginers, becomes a model, but not a savior.
They seem to relish being on the cutting edge of controversy over the atonement, a fundamental doctrine of the Christian faith. “Once the ‘Evil Empire’ fell,” said Brock, “the religious right identified us as the new Evil Empire and came after us with a vengeance.”
Rebecca Parker“We know we are right, and we are in it for the long haul, and for our lives’ sake,” she said. “Though the world has changed, we were right at the first Re-Imagining. We were right about Sophia. We were right to celebrate her. She has been and will continue to be a major figure in Christianity.”
Parker recalled that the 1993 gathering dropped a theological bomb when feminist theologian Delores Williams declared, “We don’t need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff.”
But Parker claimed atonement theology – focusing on the death of Christ on the cross – was out of skew with Christian history. Before the 10th century, Christians depicted Christ alive on the cross, she said. The death of Christ did not become a central doctrine of Christianity until the 10th century, she said, and “the emergence of a dead Christ marked a shift in Christianity toward violence.”
Further, she said, the Crusaders used the cross to justify killing “approximately 10,000 Jews in the Rhineland, nearly a third of the Jewish population in Europe. With this first crusade, war became a way of Christian life – holy war with the invention of genocide.”
Parker argued that male theologians, offering their “first full-blown explanation of a substitutionary atonement,” concluded that the execution of Jesus was “a gift that liberates humanity.” Hence, “Man cannot give himself more fully to God than when he commits himself to death.”
That, she said, made “the resurrection and the life of Jesus unnecessary … With this theology, Western theology turned to violence. The fastest route to paradise was to kill or be killed for Christ. Self-sacrifice became the highest love. Death by torture became salvation.”
Brock, who called herself a “happy heretic” when she agreed to be photographed by The Layman Online, said the atonement theology was the church’s error – even though sacrifice for sin runs from Genesis to Revelation, hardly a 10th-century discovery. But she believes “The church confused the mystical body of Christ with the literal body” of the Jesus who died on the cross.
In the substitutionary theory of atonement, she said, “the Crusaders substitute Jews for the Romans, Jesus substitutes for God, God substitutes for Satan” and Christians “substitute violence for the moral virtues of restraint and serenity.”
He brought her analogy into the present: “Afghanistan can substitute for Al Quaida; Saddam Hussein can substitute for Osama Bin Laden; all Arab men can substitute for terrorists … The emergence of this theology marks the beginning of a 1,000-year period in history dominated by violence and self-sacrifice, images of war, terror and abuse.”
And she declared, “We have a right to reject any theology that makes violence a way to save the world.”
Before the church adopted atonement theology, Brock said, it focused on baptism as the beginning “of the journey toward becoming divine,” not as a cleansing from sin, and the eucharist as a celebration of joy, not as a remembrance of the death of Christ.
After baptism, she said, confirmands fasted before their first eucharist, and “to break that fast, they were first given a cup of milk sweetened by honey.” With that teaching, the re-imaginers have justified their own use of milk and honey as a sacrament. They do not use the traditional elements of juice or wine and bread to symbolize the blood and broken body of Jesus.
Parker described baptism as a “process called theosis, or becoming divine – a process of becoming divine by incarnating Sophia.”
Saying she was abused as a child, Parker told of retreating to a Hindu community and living for a while in silence. She described one of her paintings in which she portrayed her body as having been penetrated “by an old gray penis.” With her paints, she said she surgically removed it, sutured up that area of her body and concluded, “Surely, goodness and mercy will follow me all the days of my life.”
For Brock, paradise is not some far-off resting place, but an earthly location “found in this life. Paradise was the living of a sanctified life in the world” where the “divine spirit is incarnate in all of the world.”
“The idea that the body and blood signify the sacrifice is very late,” she added. “The body and blood represent not the death of Jesus, but the resurrected life.”
“We have a warrior culture,” said Parker. “We think the dominant culture is a culture of violence. We have to see ourselves as caretakers for the well-being of our whole nation and our globe.”
But what about the violence against the early Christians by Rome? Brock was asked.
“The persecution we hear about the early Christian church wasn’t all that common,” she said. And she spoke disparagingly of the way Christians responded to the persecutions in what she called the development “of the cult of the martyr.”
She added, “When these unusual deaths happened, they called that a certain kind of energy. People would take souvenirs, pieces of bone or clothing. There was a coalescing of power. The same thing happened with the lynchings” in the United States. “The relics of the martyrs who stood firm for their faith were especially powerful amulets, if you will.”