PCUSA women’s group schedules speaker who denies Christ’s atonement
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, June 25, 2003
Rita Nakashima Brock, who told a Re-Imagining god Gathering in Minnesota last week that Christians are wrong to believe Jesus died for their sins, will be the keynote speaker at a denomination-sponsored event for women at the Montreat Conference Center in North Carolina.
Rita Nakashima BrockIn announcing Brock’s role in the August 9-12 conference, the Office of Women’s Advocacy of the Presbyterian Church (USA) described her as a “noted public speaker” who has “lectured and preached around the world.”
While also saying that Brock is the co-author of Proverbs to Ashes: Violence, Redemptive Suffering and the Search for What Saves Us, the PCUSA women’s office did not mention that her book denies that Christ died on the cross as an atonement for sin. Neither did it mention that Brock is one of the leading figures in the Re-Imagining god movement that the 1994 General Assembly declared “beyond the bounds of the Christian faith.”
While that same general assembly, trying to repair the damage that resulted from participation by the Presbyterian staff in the 1993 Re-Imagining god Conference, declared that “theology matters,” PCUSA leaders have continued to give Brock and other opponents of traditional Christianity a platform for their views at denominational expense.
Sylvia Dooling of Loveland, Col., president of Voices of Orthodox Women, an evangelical renewal group for women in the PCUSA, said, “It saddens me to see this woman is the ‘best’ that our PCUSA conference planners have to offer the women of our denomination.”
Brock’s views are unquestionably antithetical to what Presbyterians – and all Christians – believe: that Christ’s death on the cross was a necessary atonement for sin. Instead, Brock says patriarchial church leaders have used the atonement as theological justification for war, oppression, abuse of women and other acts of violence.
“We have a right to reject any theology that makes violence a way to save the world,” she told the re-imaginers in Minnesota.
But many leaders in the PCUSA have been reluctant to reject the aberrant theologies of Brock and other re-imaginers, despite the declaration of the 1994 General Assembly. One of the planners for and participants in the Minnesota conference was Manley Olson, a member of the PCUSA’s General Assembly Council. One of the council’s mandates is to carry out the actions and declarations of the General Assembly.
Besides denying the atoning death of Christ, Brock advocates a self-incarnational theology of a “journey towards becoming divine.”
Brock has been summoned to the PCUSA’s stage since 1994. In 1999, the Presbyterian Health Education and Welfare Association (PHEWA), a denominationally-funded network in covenant relationship with the General Assembly Council’s National Ministries Division, hired her to serve as “conference theologian” at the PHEWA/National Ministries Biennial Conference.
The denominationally funded National Network of Presbyterian College Women (NNPCW) used her material and other resources from radical feminists in its own manual, which included elements of Sophia worship and advocated the practice of lesbianism, which the denomination has declared sinful.
The re-imagining movement strongly advocates lesbianism. That was evident in Minnesota by a number of women who extolled the compatibility of lesbian causes – including ordination – with radical feminism and rejection of Scripture. In addition, the meeting area included a large display from the Shower of Stoles Project that honors “gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people of faith.”
Shower of Stoles display at Minnesota Re-Imagining GatheringThe NNPCW has served as a major conduit for lesbian and pagan themes emanating from the re-imaginers. In 2000, the 212th General Assembly had to quell an eruption from the pews against the Network. It ordered the NNPCW to quit using or disseminating its published material, placed it on three-year probation and began requiring theological oversight for the women.
Brock is a research associate at the Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, Calif., an official seminary for “Unitarian Universalist ministers and progressive religious leaders.”
She and the school’s president, Rebecca Parker, have made their campaign against the Christian faith a political issue. They called on Attorney General John Ashcroft to repudiate a statement in which he said, “Islam is a religion in which God requires you to send your son to die for him. Christianity is a faith in which God sends his son to die for you.”
Brock and Parker said, “Ashcroft needs to apologize for his grievous mischaracterization of Islam. He also needs to rethink his characterization of Christianity.”
Brock’s upcoming role in the denomination’s women’s conference at Montreat is reminiscent of another denomination-sponsored conference in which a major speaker delivered a lecture opposing another foundational doctrine: that Christ is Lord and Savior for all the world.
In 2000, Dirk Ficca, a Presbyterian minister who is the executive director of a multi-religion organization in Chicago, addressed the PCUSA’s annual Peacemaking Conference and asked, “What’s the big deal about Jesus?”
He was arguing that Jesus is not the only way, life and truth. Ficca’s presentation ignited a backlash from the pews that resulted, two years later, in the 214th General Assembly declaring: “Jesus Christ is the only Savior and Lord, and all people everywhere are called to place their faith, hope and love in him … No one is saved apart from God’s gracious redemption in Jesus Christ.”
The event in Minnesota was the last sponsored by an organization known as the Re-Imagining Gathering. One of its leaders, Sara Evans, said the gathering was closing its office because it was no longer needed. In the 10 years since the 1993 Re-Imagining god Conference, she said the movement had succeeded in gaining widespread sanction for its views among leaders of mainline denominations and seminaries.
The PCUSA’s Office of Women’s Advocacy has published information about the conference on the denomination’s Web site. Additional information is on the Web site of the Montreat Conference Center.