Radical feminists seek Christianity without Christ, theologian says The Layman Online Monday, November 4, 2002 INDIANAPOLIS – Radical female theologians are seeking to reimagine Christianity "without the true Bread of Life," a theologian said during the historic Confessing The Faith Conference. Affirming the core theme of the first-ever gathering of renewing and confessing Christians in North America – that theology matters – during an Oct. 25 workshop, Dr. Donna F. G. Hailson said "feminists have to leave Christ and the Bible behind them in order to create a women's liberation theology. Hailson is director of the doctor of ministry program in the Renewal of the Church for Mission and an assistant professor of evangelism and renewal at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Wynnewood, Pa., and co-author of The Goddess Revival. She provided a brief overview as to how radical spiritual feminist practices "diverge from Bible-honoring worship, ritual and prayer." Those practices, Hailson said, comprise a belief system that has been created from bits and pieces – mixing elements of Wiccan ceremonies, Eastern healing rituals, erotic litanies, drums and chants invoking ancestors, and even some old camp-meeting hymns. There was a firestorm of protest from the mainline denominations over the first ReImagining God conference in 1993, she said. In the Presbyterian Church (USA) alone, people in the pews – offended by the conference's "milk and honey communion service," the denial of the atonement, the worship of the goddess Sophia, denominational funding and incidents of lesbian activism – redirected millions of dollars in mission and per-capita budgets. Such radical feminist initiatives have not gone away, Hailson said. The tenth anniversary ReImagining God conference, titled "Generations of Wisdom," is scheduled June 19-21, 2003, in St. Paul, Minn. Two of the themes of that conference will be "How many more waves of feminism must happen before we no longer need a separate movement in our world to advocate for women's rights?" and "How can we strengthen the relationship between second wave and third wave feminists to build a better community for the future?" Referring her audience to a handout titled, "Cooking Up Gotterdämmerung: Radical Feminist Worship Substitutes Self for God," Hailson quoted from radical feminist author Naomi Goldenberg's book Changing of the Gods: Feminism and the End of Traditional Religions: "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." Hailson said that book reflects the opinion of many radical spiritual feminists, eco-feminists and liberationists who charge that "men created the God of Christianity in the image of a male authority figure, an omnipotent lawgiver and judge. This figure of fantasy has legitimated patriarchal domination; generated scorn for the female body and supported the assertion that women are not made in the image of God and are thus inferior." She said this viewpoint claims "Jesus cannot symbolize the liberation of women [because] a culture that maintains a masculine image for its highest divinity cannot allow its women to experience themselves as the equals of its men. In order to develop a theology of women's liberation, feminists have to leave Christ and Bible behind them." With such a belief system in place, Hailson said, it is a short step to the creation of a "religion" that deifies the self and, in essence, proposes that people create a new humanity. "How tragic," Hailson writes, "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. Only in Him and through Him can there be a New Creation. How tragic that worship, in the wake of all of this, has become the idolatry of self-absorption and navel-gazing when it is meant to be, as C. Welton Gaddy has explained, "a gift between lovers who keep on giving to each other." Such an emphasis on the self, a focus on personal experience and cultural distinctiveness "over against the revelation of Scripture," Hailson writes, leads to a "denial of absolute and universal truth, and it allows pluralism and relativism to prevail." This belief system, she said, reveals a "profound yearning for the deep song of Christianity" among people who have decided to be "in the church but not of it."

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