Theologian criticizes ReImagination of faith By Robert P. Mills The Presbyterian Layman Volume 33, Number 1 Posted March 27, 2000 “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, assistant professor of evangelism and renewal at Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary in Philadelphia, 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 toward 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 said, “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.” Lacking the ‘mental equipment’ Hailson said that when the Jesus Seminar’s Marcus Borg, who was described in an article by Mark Tooley of the Institute on Religion and Democracy 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.” Chung Hyun Kyung, a featured speaker at ReImagining conferences, began her presentation to the 1991 World Council of Churches Assembly “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,” Hailson said. “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 in Harare, Zimbabwe in 1998, even though she has called for the church “to move away from Christocentrism and away from the doctrinal purity of Christian theology.” It was at the 1996 ReImagining 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.’” She also observed that recently an Episcopal conference center “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 speaker. Williams has 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.”

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