Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 29, 1994 TAG: 9401280088
SECTION: RELIGION PAGE: B-4 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: GEORGE W. CORNELL Associated Press
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
The furor is the latest round of conflict over attempts to modify pervasively male references to God as "He" or "Father" and to bring out biblical indications that God also has "motherly" qualities.
However, some unusually graphic feminizing of the divine at a "Re-imagining" women's conference in Minneapolis last November produced some unusually sharp denunciations.
United Methodist Bishop Earl G. Hunt of Lake Junaluska, N.C., says deifying Sophia is an "attempt to reconstitute the godhead. . .. No comparable heresy has appeared in the church in the last 15 centuries."
"This is material which must be eradicated from Christian thinking now," he told an evangelism conference this month. "When the church seems to be losing its struggle with powers and principalities, weird things begin to happen."
But participants in the conference defended it.
"We wanted women [speakers] who were doing cutting-edge theology," said the Rev. Kathi Austin Mahle of St. Paul, Minn., co-chairwoman of a steering committee that planned the event.
She said it was "definitely in a Christian context - not interfaith. . . . We wanted to set it within a biblical context, both the Old Testament and the New Testament. . . . I think we achieved what we set out to do - to provide women a place to enter into theological dialogue."
Besides venerating Sophia as a goddess, critics also charged the conference included self-identified lesbians as speakers, used bodily images to express the divine, held a workshop on belly dancing, downgraded the doctrine that God and humanity are reconciled through Christ's sacrifice on the cross, and used rites from other religions such as an American Indian tobacco ritual.
Sophia is the Greek word meaning "wisdom" and is portrayed by female pronouns in the Bible. Some groups historically have personified Sophia, invoking her in prayers.
United Methodist News Service said a liturgy at the Minneapolis conference read in part:
"Our maker Sophia, we are women in your image. . . . With the hot blood of our wombs we give form to new life. . . . With nectar between our thighs we invite a lover. . . . We birth a child; with our warm body fluids we remind the world of its pleasures and sensations. . . . We celebrate the sweat that pours from us during our labors."
The Rev. James V. Heidinger of Wilmore, Ky., editor of a conservative United Methodist periodical, Good News, said the event "was the most theologically aberrant I have ever read about, far removed from the Christian tradition."
Readers were supplied with a pull-out postcard calling on the church's women's division to "repudiate the radical teachings of the conference," make a "public apology to the church" and promise "no further involvement in similar feminist/womanist/lesbian gatherings."
About 2,200 participants - nearly all women - were from 49 states and 27 countries. More than half were either Presbyterians or Methodist in background.
The Rev. Jeanne Audrey Powers, an executive of the United Methodist Church's Council on Christian Unity and Interreligious Concerns, says the concept of Sophia is just beginning to be incorporated into Christian speech.
Other Greek terms, such as Logos (God's truth), agape (selfless love) and koinonia (community), which long ago came into common theological usage.
Now a recovery of interest in Sophia as a manifestation of divinity is advocated by feminist theology. A conference newsletter says that "Wisdom/Sophia appears throughout the Bible."
For example, the first nine chapters of Proverbs focus on her. Proverbs 3:16-17 says: "Long life is in her right hand; in her left hand are riches and honor. Her ways are ways of pleasantness and her paths are peace. She is a tree of life to those who lay hold of her."
Bible readers differ over whether the "Sophia" texts merely use a literary device to personify the abstract idea of wisdom or whether Sophia/Wisdom is an aspect of divinity.
Christian theology has long held that God is not limited to male nor female, but transcends sexual limitations.
Powers defines Sophia as "the encountering of divine wisdom."
She said that sadly feminist scholars who have "begun to find feminine elements in the godhead and who are seeking to remain within the church are sometimes condemned as radicals for trying to find elements in Scripture and tradition that they can relate to as women."
by CNB