ROMAN CATHOLICS

Parishioners Evicted from Church

Defiant parishioners of Saint Joseph’s Roman Catholic Church in Worcester, Massachusetts, have been escorted by police from the church they occupied for 13 months.

Worcester diocesan Bishop Timothy Harrington, 74, had ordered the brick church closed last year because of structural safety concerns. But 45 churchgoers, many of them elderly, began around-the-clock occupation of Saint Joseph’s on May 25, 1992. They slept in sleeping bags on pews and on air mattresses on floors.

They also kept holding services, although Harrington never responded to weekly pleas to provide a priest to say Mass. Harrington had ordered the French Canadian church to merge with another one about a mile away, saying $700,000 in needed plaster and brick repairs at Saint Joseph’s would be too costly. Parishioners had raised more than $600,000 in pledges for repairs, but Harrington said he was “reluctant to impoverish the people of Saint Joseph with a debt I did not feel you could handle.”

The issue came to a head June 22 when a Superior Court judge agreed with Harrington and found the church members in contempt of court.

OREGON

Anti-Gay Rights Measures Pass

Two cities and four counties in Oregon passed antihomosexual-rights initiatives in June. The measures—some approved by as much as a 3-to-1 margin—prohibit local governments from promoting homosexuality and bar laws protecting homosexuals from discrimination.

The measures were part of a new strategy by the Oregon Citizens Alliance (OCA), which failed last year to win statewide approval of a more strongly worded initiative, Proposition 9. “All the editorial pages are still against us—big time,” says Lon Mabon, the organization’s director.

The alliance is targeting communities where Proposition 9 carried a majority of the votes in the November 1992 balloting.

The measure, dubbed “Son of 9,” was approved by majorities ranging from 56 percent in the city of Canby to 73 percent in Douglass County. Mabon says several more communities will vote on such measures this fall.

HIGHER EDUCATION

The Ultimate Christian U.

In secular academia, “Christian scholarship” is often regarded as a contradiction in terms. Outside the evangelical subculture, Christian scholars by and large feel they get little respect.

D. Ray Hostetter’s solution to the problem is to create the ultimate Christian university, complete with the whole gamut of master’s level and doctoral programs. According to Hostetter, president of Messiah College in Grantham, Pennsylvania, that university would rival major secular universities in terms of “quality and intellectual climate.” Based on a Christian world view, it would integrate all major fields of learning.

In a 24-page paper, Hostetter recently outlined his vision for a group of some of the world’s most prominent evangelical scholars.

George Marsden, history professor at Notre Dame, said the venture would face “deeply entrenched and powerful institutional and cultural forces” arrayed against a Christian university’s efforts to gain recognition. Nicholas Wolterstorff, professor of philosophical theology at Yale University, cited evangelicals’ responses to evolution and higher biblical criticism as having done the most damage to the movement’s intellectual credibility.

The biggest problem that stands in the way of Hostetter’s dream is money. In his paper, Hostetter estimates it would take $25 million just to get the university off the ground and “manyfold that amount” to develop it fully.

Although Messiah College has authorized Hostetter to continue his efforts, for now the vision is still a dream.

TELEVISION VIOLENCE

Wildmon Targets New Cop Show

Boycott-minded Donald Wildmon (CT, Aug. 19, 1991, p. 14) has a new number-one enemy: Steven Bochco’s “NYPD Blue,” scheduled to debut in September on ABC.

Wildmon, president of the American Family Association, says in full-page ads in USA Today, the New York Times, and other newspapers, “It is time to draw the line.”

Wildmon went to war when Bochco announced that his new series would be the first R-rated show on network television. Wildmon is seeking a petition drive, and advertisers and affiliates already are edgy, with some vowing to drop out if changes are not made. Bochco has boasted that the show will break nudity and profanity barriers.

“NYPD Blue” is facing objections from another front—the federal government—for violence. A Senate judiciary subcommittee headed by Paul Simon (D.-Ill.) summoned television executives in June and warned them to tone down the murder and mayhem depicted on the tube or face legislative restrictions.

Networks responded by promising to implement a “parental discretion” warning system before and during violent shows in the fall. Only one has been deemed deserving of their label—“NYPD Blue.”

PEOPLE AND EVENTS

Briefly Noted

After repeatedly criticizing Ronald Reagan during his eight years as President, the National Council of Churches (NCC) has recruited him as a fundraiser. Reagan, Jimmy Carter, and Gerald Ford will cochair a Christian unity project designed to raise $10 million for the organization. In 1981, the NCC said Reagan’s domestic policies “threaten the vision of America as the model and embodiment of a just and humane society.”

• The U.S. Senate by voice vote on June 30 confirmed President Clinton’s appointment of Boston Mayor Raymond Flynn as U.S. ambassador to the Vatican. Only Sen. Jesse Helms, (R-N.C.) who, like Clinton, is a Southern Baptist, voiced opposition on the grounds that “the United States has no business sending an ambassador to any religious entity.” Several denominations and groups opposed the appointment (CT, April 26, 1993, p. 52) because of church/state concerns. Flynn, a prolife Democrat, also was opposed by two-dozen women’s-rights and population-control groups.

• John Carter Adams is the new executive director of Olive Branch Mission, Chicago’s oldest social agency for the homeless. Adams was general manager of the New York Bible Society for ten years.

• Tampa Bay Theological Seminary in New Port Richey, Florida, will become a branch of Dallas Theological Seminary next fall. Professors from both schools will share duties at the Tampa branch.

• First Baptist Church of Atlanta pastor Charles Stanley, who is heard nationally on “In Touch” television and radio broadcasts, announced in July that his wife of 38 years had filed for “separate maintenance.” Stanley, who asked his congregation to pray “that God would heal [his] marriage,” will continue his pastoral and broadcasting activities.

• Trustees at Multnomah School of the Bible in Portland, Oregon, have approved changing the name of the school to Multnomah Bible College for its undergraduate division and Multnomah Biblical Seminary for its graduate division.

• Kenneth E. Zindle resigned June 30 as bishop of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America’s (ELCA) Slovak Zion Synod following allegations by two women of sexual harassment. Zindle said the charges were baseless and he leaves “in disgust for the way that this matter has been pursued.” The Slovak Zion Synod is the ELCA’s only synod organized on an ethnic rather than geographic basis.

• Thomas Blevins, head of the ELCA’s Department of Synodical Relations, resigned his post July 9 following charges of sexual abuse filed by the denomination’s Northwest Washington Synod. Blevins, 52, denies allegations made by a woman in January.

• Thad Gaebelein has been named headmaster at the Stony Brook School, a Christian preparatory school on Long Island founded by his grandfather, Frank Gaebelein, a former CT editor.

• Bruce Dunn, host of “Grace Worship Hour,” on radio since 1951 and on television since 1974, died July 15 of a heart attack. Dunn, 74, had been pastor of Grace Presbyterian Church in Peoria, Illinois, for 40 years.

EXODUS INTERNATIONAL

Ex-Homosexuals Find New Purpose

In contrast to the ongoing explosive debate about homosexuality in other arenas, a conference last month attended by nearly 600 people involved in the Christian ex-homosexual movement Exodus International seemed tranquil. Exodus, an umbrella organization for 70 groups in 33 states and several foreign countries, offers healing and support for men and women trying to overcome homosexuality.

“It was worth it—I got a sense of something I didn’t have at all, getting to know who God the Father is,” said 26-year-old Roger Tritapoe, a former prostitute from Virginia. “There was hardly any father relationship with my dad, an alcoholic, so it’s hard to get in touch with God as Father.”

Unlike Exodus conferences in San Diego last year and in Toronto the year before, there were no protests by homosexual organizations. In contrast, this year’s participants at Asbury Theological Seminary only had to contend with curious rural Kentucky teens asking about homosexuality.

Seminars at the conference included how to counsel transvestites, genetic factors in homosexuality, and marriage for former homosexuals. Attendees included pastors, clinicians, and former homosexuals.

By Angela Winter Ney in Wilmore, Kentucky.

IOWA

Carrier Rejects ‘Sinful’ Mail

A substitute postal carrier’s refusal to deliver copies of Time and Newsweek he considered “sinful and decadent” led to his resignation from his route in June.

Gordon Yoerger, a Roman Catholic, informed his postmaster that he would deliver all of his mail June 15 except copies of the two magazines. Time’s cover showed a scantily clad child prostitute; Newsweek’s cover photo featured two lesbians.

When he returned from his route, he was informed that he would have to deliver the magazines the next day or be dismissed. He quit. According to Yoerger, “If keeping my job meant delivering my customers into the mind of Satan by tempting them to sin at least in thought, I could not in good conscience do it.”

Yoerger explained his actions in a letter to the Moville Record. “In the end, I think that no one, not even the United States Post Office, is above moral necessity.”

Hammering fists, stomping feet, and shouts of “black revolution” marked a June meeting of African-American evangelical leaders at Geneva College in Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania. A symposium on “The Challenges of Contemporary American Evangelicalism: An African-American Perspective” drew 175 to “pass the torch” from one generation of scholars and preachers to another.

One participant said the torch felt more like a stick of dynamite.

Harsh words and accusations marked sessions as leaders from Boston, Houston, Detroit, Philadelphia, and Chicago discussed urban poverty, the rise of black Islam, lily-white religious education, and the black church’s rocky relationship with mainstream evangelicalism.

Eugene Rivers of Harvard Divinity School told the assembly he refuses to call himself an evangelical. “You just say that E-word when you want The Man to give you some money.” Rivers criticized black leaders who place white evangelical approval above black need. “Young black kids are dying, and nobody has a workable program or a policy to lead us in dealing with it.”

“White folks are unwilling to empower black people,” said Clarence Hilliard, chairman of the Commission of Social Action for the National Black Evangelical Association (NBEA). “Look at the top. We ain’t there. We need to learn to do for ourselves.”

“Urban ministers—and black and white churches—work in isolation from each other,” said Bill Krispin, head of the Center for Urban Theological Studies (CUTS). “Centuries of sin and alienation divide us.” CUTS inaugurated the William H. Bentley Institute for Black Evangelical Studies at the symposium. The institute is designed to foster studies of black history, ministry, and theology and encourage grassroots urbanministry programs.

“We want to be reformers, and the NBEA needs some reforming so it can move ahead,” said H. Malcolm Newton, the institute’s first director. “A lot of people see the NBEA as dormant. A lot of us are second-generation NBEA. The gray hairs aren’t willing to give it up. But now we’re on the scene, ready to take over. If NBEA is to be alive and vital, the leadership must change.”

By Rebekah Schreffler in Beaver Falls, Pennsy lvania.

Televangelist calls word-of-faith ‘New Age.’

Christian Research Institute president Hank Hanegraaff and evangelist James Robison have taken televangelist Benny Hinn to task for his teaching of the word-of-faith doctrine, telling Hinn that if he does not change his ministry, it eventually will fail due to false teachings.

After meeting with both leaders, Hinn has apologized to his congregation, eschewing the faith message he has been preaching for almost a decade.

In interviews with CHRISTIANITY TODAY, both Hanegraaff and Robison detailed their roles in bringing Hinn to a change of heart. Hanegraaff, author of Christianity in Crisis, says Robison phoned him to say he had “called Benny Hinn and told him that if he didn’t change now, his ministry would go down the tubes.”

Robison confirms, “I told Benny that every time I prayed for him, the Lord showed me his displeasure over what he was doing. I didn’t want to see Benny continue in his slaughter of the innocent sheep.” Robison says he brought the same message to Jim Bakker, Jimmy Swaggart, and Larry Lea, but none of them heeded the warning. Hinn, says Robison, reacted differently.

“Benny went to pieces and was very contrite,” Robison says. “I told him God didn’t anoint him to preach erroneous teachings and perform extravagant theatrics like knocking people down, waving his coat around, and blowing on people, and, if he continued, his ministry would be destroyed within three years.”

You gotta have faith

Hinn, pastor of the 7,000-member Orlando (Fla.) Christian Center, greeted his stunned congregation in June with his renunciation of the faith message, which includes positive confession, the prosperity gospel, and the divine right-to-be-healed concept. Under such teachings, followers are told God wants them to be “healthy and wealthy.” The right amount of faith will secure anything, from a cure of cancer to a new, expensive automobile. To be in debt or to be sick shows a lack of faith.

In front of a jolted and teary-eyed congregation, Hinn censured the “word-of-faith” movement. “It’s faith, faith, faith and no Jesus anywhere. We have to have faith in Jesus, the author and finisher of our faith. So, where do I stand on faith? Stop seeking faith and start seeking the Lord! The word-of-faith message is New Age and it doesn’t work. I’m going to stop preaching healing and start preaching Jesus.”

In a July interview with CT, Hinn delineated the way faith teaching has harmed him. “I was heavily swayed by Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland. And, none of them talked about salvation. It’s all faith. The faith message is a message of lack, without the Spirit anywhere.”

In his June sermon, Hinn, seemingly resolved to “right the wrong I’ve been teaching and doing,” continued his strong denunciation of word-of-faith teaching. On “prosperity,” Hinn asserts: “The very word itself has been twisted around and has become a major business in the ministry. Money, money, money. It’s almost like going gambling!” And Hinn lambastes both healing, his ministry’s cornerstone, and positive confession.

“I once said if my daddy knew what I know, he wouldn’t have died of cancer. [But] it was God’s will to take my father home. I became so convinced I was right. God had to shake it out of me.”

Bruce Barron, a Pittsburgh scholar who has followed the faith movement for a decade, says, “The health and wealth gospels are, in their extreme, a symptom of a deeper problem, that being an ongoing tendency to elevate redeemed humanity at the expense of God’s transcendence and sovereignty. This inclination can take its form by placing humanity and human powers at the center of the universe, and placing God at man’s disposal.”

Robison is convinced of Hinn’s turnaround. “I told Benny that what I hear God saying is that he anointed him to lead people into his presence with abandonment to [God’s] will. I think Benny will do that this time.”

“There has been a hunger inside me for the past few weeks,” Hinn says softly. “I really want Billy Graham to pray for me.”

Still skeptical

Hanegraaff, though encouraged by Hinn’s changes, says he still has concerns. “I told James [Robison] that at the risk of sounding cynical or skeptical, I have seen Benny [repent] before, so I’m not sure if he’s sincere.”

Hinn has recanted the faith message before (CT, Oct. 28, 1991, p. 44; CT, Oct. 5, 1992, p. 53), and Hanegraaff has reason to be wary. Hinn has publicly threatened his critics, including Hanegraaff, in the past, once saying he wished God would give him “a Holy Ghost machine gun” to destroy them.

According to both Hanegraaff and Robison, there is only one way for Hinn to demonstrate his rectitude. “The real test,” says Hanegraaff, “is whether Benny will pull his books. In other words, will he continue to sell books that promote the very thing he says he is turning away from?”

“Benny must demonstrate repentance and a turning away from what he has been teaching and doing, including pulling his books,” Robison says.

At Thomas Nelson, Bruce Barbour, head of the company’s book division, says pulling books from store shelves is not a decision made by a publishing house alone. “We don’t publish Thomas Nelson books, we publish authors’ books. If one of our authors has a problem, we want to react clearly.”

Hinn, later, said he and Thomas Nelson came to an agreement. Lord, I Need A Miracle is being extensively revised, Hinn said, deleting all references to word-of-faith teaching. Good Morning, Holy Spirit has no faith teaching in it, and only one editing change is needed in The Anointing, according to Hinn.

Hinn says that on future books, he’s enlisting sound counsel. “I’m having Dudley Hall [a Robison associate] work on my books with me,” he says, “not only on what I’ve already done, but on future ones.” Hall is working on Hinn’s new book, The Blood, published by Creation House and distributed by Word, which is owned by Thomas Nelson.

This latest Hinn confession has coincided with a new round of media scrutiny. In the summer 1993 issue of Cornerstone magazine, William Watkins, a former managing editor of Thomas Nelson’s book division, recounts his unsuccessful attempts to correct Hinn’s unorthodox theology in his first two books. And the July issue of The Quarterly Journal published by Personal Freedom Outreach says Hinn has shown a “propensity for exaggeration” and details further his “personal mythmaking” about everything from circumstances of his childhood to details of healings. Earlier this year, “Inside Edition,” the tabloid TV show, planted a woman who faked a healing on one of Hinn’s broadcasts. In the August issue of Charisma magazine, Hinn says he has instituted new procedures in which physicians will closely question those individuals who claim healings so as to verify their claims. In addition, Hinn reports he has stopped wearing his Rolex watch and now drives a Lincoln instead of a Mercedes.

Recently, some Christian retailers have begun to react harshly to word-of-faith books. Steve Adams, president of Evangel, Inc., says his recent decision to get rid of books by faith teachers was a matter of knowing what God’s Word says. “Our industry needs to police itself against unscriptural and heretical teaching. That’s why I took Copeland’s, Hagin’s, and Hinn’s books off my shelves. It’s aberrant teaching.”

Bookstore owner and Christian Bookseller’s Association (CBA) chairman Jim Reimann says, “We can carry any book that has a correct view of who Jesus Christ is, from the biblical standpoint.

“We [as an industry] need to search the Scriptures and determine what is biblical, then compare what we’re offered to sell in our stores and not sell what is unbiblical.” Reimann does not sell books by Hinn, Copeland, or Hagin.

CBA board member Winston Maddox, of Evangelical Books and Bibles, also recently stopped carrying books by Hinn, Hagin, and Copeland. “We need to examine all our teachers and we must ask ourselves: Does any teaching utilize only a small part of the Bible and neglect the whole … and are the practices meant to glorify God or the teacher?”

By Perucci Ferraiuolo.

Does a new curriculum for families build up the parent-child relationship, or put infants at risk?

Medical professionals around the country are sharply questioning a new Christian education curriculum, Preparation for Parenting, which is suspected of contributing to inadequate weight gain in some newborn infants.

On the market since 1987, the curriculum has gained a significant foothold in churches. The authors, Gary and Anne Marie Ezzo, estimate that about 500 churches in the United States are currently using their program and nearly 40,000 copies of the manual were sold in 1992. A Northridge, California-based firm, Growing Families International (GFI), distributes the Ezzos’ curriculum and sponsors their radio program, airing at least monthly on about 90 radio stations across the country.

Yet, the marketing success of Preparation for Parenting has not come without controversy. Some physicians and nurses are concerned that the rigidity of the feeding program the Ezzos’ advocate may put some newborn infants at risk of inadequate weight gain, especially in the first weeks after birth. In addition, the program has caused strong disagreements in a few churches, leading at least one to drop the Preparation for Parenting program.

The Ezzos wrote Preparation for Parenting to teach parents how to use “a biblical mindset” in raising children from infancy. “Working from a biblical mindset,” they say, “automatically assumes a routine that leads to order.”

The Ezzos say putting babies on a “parent-controlled” feeding schedule is a major part of establishing that order. They are strongly critical of “demand feeding,” the idea that newborn infants should be fed when they signal readiness.

The Preparation for Parenting manual, which sells with audiotapes for $29, says, “Demand feeding is based on a philosophy that denies man is made in the image of God and now exists in the condition of depravity.”

What went wrong?

A Southern California woman, Lori Raders, was 35 and about to have her first child when she started using Preparation for Parenting. She recently had moved to a rural area of California and could not afford to call her friends frequently to ask them about parenting. There were only 29 people at her church and few new parents nearby.

A friend obtained the Preparation for Parenting book and tape series for her through the mail. She and her husband listened to the tapes and went through most of the book “step by step.”

“The parenting skills sounded so good,” she says. “They have it biblically based and it seemed really easy.” Raders followed the program and put her baby on a feeding schedule, as recommended. When the time came to schedule her son’s two-week checkup, she was unable to get an appointment with her doctor. Believing the baby was healthy, she assumed it would be okay to bring him in at three weeks.

“When my doctor saw him,” Raders recalls, “he said, ‘He needs to be admitted right away into the hospital.’ ”

“I wasn’t developing enough breast milk,” Raders says. “His weight had dropped almost two pounds since birth and his temperature was 103. He was severely dehydrated.

“I was devastated. I felt like the stupidest person in the world. I thought that if I was breast-feeding according to their plan, my baby would be okay.”

Raders is one of at least five mothers whose infants have experienced significantly low weight gain while they were following Preparation for Parenting guidelines.

Some health-care professionals say Preparation for Parenting may have contributed to the health problems of the Raderses’ infant. They believe some advice on feeding in the curriculum is flawed and is likely to contribute to health problems in infants whose parents follow its guidelines to the letter.

The Ezzos also forbid debate in their classes and tell parents not to initiate conversations about the curriculum outside class. Some professionals fear these rigid rules may keep parents from talking about the Ezzo program with their own doctors.

Gary Ezzo, who holds a master’s degree in Christian education and is pastor of family ministries at Grace Community Church, in Sun Valley, California, insists there is no basis for linking his curriculum to health problems in babies.

Enough food?

Preparation for Parenting encourages parents to schedule feed their newborn infants every three to three-and-a-half hours from the first week after birth. However, according to several health-care professionals, schedule feeding a breast-fed baby too early may interfere with a mother’s production of milk.

Jeannette Newman Velez, a certified lactation educator and registered dietician specializing in public-health nutrition, says, “It is quite possible that a mother who adheres to the Ezzos’ parent-controlled feeding schedule will experience a decrease in milk production due to inadequate breast stimulation.”

Nancy Williams, a certified childbirth educator and lactation consultant, says the Ezzos fail to make provisions for cases in which their approach may not work, such as with “sick, small-for-gestational-age, or prematurely born infants.”

A California-based registered nurse who asked to remain anonymous to protect the identity of her patient has worked with one set of parents who used the curriculum. The parents brought in the child at three days and the baby checked out fine. Between that period and the two-week checkup, the mother spoke to the nurse twice.

The nurse said, “I told her she needed to feed the baby when the baby was hungry.” When the mother brought the baby in for its two-week checkup, the child weighed two pounds less than at birth. The nurse says, “The baby was in poor condition … Neurologically the baby was lethargic.”

Ezzo insists GFI should not be held responsible for these or other health problems. “We will not assume responsibility for someone who does not read the book and listen to the tapes.

“There are so many variables that are involved in successful breast-milk production that you simply cannot state, ‘They fed every three hours—that must be the problem.’ ”

Robert Bucknam, a Colorado pediatrician and coauthor with Ezzo of On Becoming BABYWISE, says, “In the cases where babies have had health problems, there were probably other causes.”

Are Ezzos Culturally Insensitive?

According to the Ezzos, there are five “historical feeding philosophies.” One of these, “primitive feeding,” is the breast-feeding practice of “primitive societies and in the lower economic classes of Third-World nations.” Their explanation for why this approach is inappropriate for North Americans has been faulted as being culturally insensitive.

They write, “We have all seen the National Geographic scenarios of bush women slinging their babies as they move throughout their daily activity. Mothers in such societies are not worried about meeting the mortgage payment or whether Johnny will make the school bus. There is only one consideration: daily survival.”

The Ezzos say, “Primitive societies are the end of the human spectrum because of depravity, not the beginning. You cannot bring Third-World maternal disorder into a complex American society. There is no justification for Christians to look at godless societies to discover how to biblically parent.”

Diane Komp, professor of pediatrics at the Yale School of Medicine, disagrees, saying, “There are troubling ethnic implications to this statement that smacks of xenophobia. [They] need to be careful about the overuse of the term Third World and primitive for practices that are common in the Afro-American and Hispanic communities.” Jeannette Newman Velez, a registered dietician who has worked with many low-income families, says, “I find it very disconcerting and irresponsible that the Ezzos overlook the fact that a large number of women may geographically be in the United States, but live in Third World conditions.”

Gary Ezzo told CT, “There’s no light in these [primitive] societies. So why are you looking to a godless society to find out how to biblically parent?”

Making changes

Ezzo told CT that the fourth edition of Preparation for Parenting, due out this fall, will have changes and clarifications.

Ezzo has asked Nancy Williams to write part of the new edition. He says she is “one of the top lactation consultants” in La Leche League. Ironically, in his third edition, Ezzo frequently refers to the La Leche League in negative terms, saying, “La Leche League International has led the charge” toward demand feeding, which he asserts is based on unbiblical principles.

While writing the current edition, Ezzo did not actively consult any lactation experts or other health-care professionals, except his wife Anne Marie, a registered nurse with a background in pediatric nursing.

Ezzo says health-care professionals have been exposed to his curriculum and “raised no red flags.” CT also has contacted several doctors who use and endorse Preparation’s principles.

Still, Ezzo is clarifying information regarding the amount of time parents should wait between feedings.

Desensitizing parents?

For some, the problem with the Ezzos’ materials is not merely a matter of scheduled feeding. They also fear that Preparation’s teachings on crying and its emphasis on “control” might lead to some parents being insensitive to some of their babies’ other needs.

Preparation for Parenting tells parents to “learn how to assess your baby’s cry in order to respond properly.” It tells parents, when their baby cries, to “take time to listen, think, and pray.”

At the same time, it includes statements like: “The mother or father who picks up the baby every time it cries lacks confidence in decision-making.”

William Sears, a pediatrician and professor at University of Southern California School of Medicine, says, “They tell the mother that you do not respond until it’s time. In time, that’s going to develop a distance between that mother and baby. Those parents could miss medical problems.”

Cliff Penner, a clinical psychologist who holds a master’s degree in theology and writes a column for Marriage Partnership, says the materials overemphasize putting parents “in control.” “Psychologically, it sets up an adversarial system right from the start. There is an emphasis on discipline, law, punishment, judgment, on our position of power, and on control.”

Focus on the Family conducted an evaluation of Preparation for Parenting and another book by GFI. A letter sent in May to Lisa Marasco, a concerned mother, says, “Although the Ezzos’ work contains many worthwhile thoughts and suggestions … we believe there is reason to fear that some of their proposals—notably those having to do with controlled feeding schedules for infants—could actually result in child abuse if applied legalistically, inflexibly, and without regard for circumstances and the special needs of children.”

The only way?

Jenni Beeman, a mother in Montana, had been demand-feeding her infant through his first two months. But then, she says, “he began to get a little hungrier and started to thin out, and I thought, I must be doing it wrong.

“I had similar problems with my first child and was beginning to receive pressure from family members to do something.”

Members from her mother’s church shared Preparation for Parenting materials and encouraged her to schedule feed her baby. Beeman also contacted GFI and received an introductory tape and newsletter. “They use compelling Scriptures in the newsletter,” Beeman says, “to inspire families to raise children according to the Ezzos’ program.” After a month on the program, her baby lost two pounds. The parents discontinued schedule feeding and began supplementing feedings with formula.

Scott Bauer, Church on the Way’s executive director of ministries, says, “The printed materials were very dogmatic about a schedule-fed baby. Parent-directed feeding is the way, the Bible way, children are fed.”

The Focus on the Family letter on the program notes, “The authors’ claim that their particular program represents the one and only correct and biblical approach to parenting seems to us unnecessarily narrow.”

Ezzo says he did not want to create the impression that his is the only biblical approach to parenting. “There’s no biblical issue governing feeding babies. It’s an area of freedom.”

However, Preparation for Parenting paints another picture, saying, “Working from a biblical mindset and practicing demand-feeding can never be harmonized since the two are incompatible philosophies.”

Use of Preparation for Parenting has led to strong disagreements in some churches. The curriculum was discontinued in one prominent Southern California church, and teachers in at least one other church toned down its language and modified some of its principles.

Preparation for Parenting was formerly taught through the Pasadena, California, Lake Avenue Congregational Church. But according to pastoral assistant Ray Syrstad, “strong differences of opinion among members of the children’s ministry staff” led the church to discontinue using the materials in 1991.

The materials currently are taught in other prominent Southern California churches, including Church on the Way, in Van Nuys, Calvary Church Santa Ana, and Grace Community Church.

Some of these churches endorse the curriculum provided that flexibility is strongly emphasized, something they say the curriculum itself does not do. At Church on the Way, Preparation for Parenting is taught in a modified format. “The principles of the Ezzos’ material are biblical and practical,” says Bauer. “We needed to modify the harshness and the dogmatic approach.”

At Grace Community, where Ezzo is on staff, John MacArthur, senior pastor and well-known author, issued a “no comment” through his secretary, when asked his opinion of Preparation for Parenting.

Joan Wagner, former director of early childhood ministries at Lake Avenue Congregational Church, says that in person, the Ezzos encourage flexibility in their approach. “[But] their written materials do lend themselves toward a formula approach.

“I wouldn’t want [Preparation for Parenting] just out there in the community because of the chance for excess and no chance to monitor those that might be given to that excess.”

Ezzo claims that by the end of the year, 200,000 parents will have gone through Preparation for Parenting and that “99 and three-fourths of a percent” of the people who use his materials are “extremely successful.”

However large the number of current or future users and however high their success rate, Preparation for Parenting may not be the choice for everyone.

Indeed, evidence suggests in some cases it may be the distinctly wrong choice. But, to borrow advice from Focus on the Family’s letter, “[I]ts principles should be implemented only in conjunction with generous measures of common sense, intuition, and natural parental affection.”

By Thomas S. Giles.

Classic and contemporary excerpts

Civil persuasion

[C]ivility, which I take to be a strong virtue and not simply wimpishness, requires that we not try to cram our beliefs down anybody’s throats, whether we be Christian or non-Christian or even anti-Christian. But that we all try to articulate as persuasively as we can, what it is that we believe, of course in the hope that others will be persuaded.

—Richard John Neuhaus in Rutherford magazine

—(Feb. 1993)

Happiness now

People seem to believe that they have an inalienable right to be happy—“I want what I want and I want it now.” No one wants to wait for anything and, for the most part, no one has to anymore. Waiting is interpreted as pain.… People walk into my office and say they are Christians, but I see no difference except that they want to be happy and now expect God to make it so. The problem is that, in this country, you can have what you want when you want it most of the time.… People like the fact that they can buy a 50-foot tree and instantly plant it in their yard. Why on earth would anyone want to wait on relationships or wait on God?

—Psychologist Kim Hall,

interviewed in The Door

(Sept.–Oct. 1992)

The groaning creation

[I]n order to proclaim the greenness of Christianity we do not need any new doctrines or theology. We need simply to return with a new eye and new attention to the Scriptures—to the prophets and psalmists of the Old Testament who proclaim God’s continuing concern for all his creation; to the Gospel writers who portray Jesus as the man who communes with the wild beasts and who stills the storm; to St Paul who writes of the cosmic mission of Christ and who sums up the Christian approach to nature in that wonderful passage in his epistle to the Romans in which he portrays the whole created order groaning and in travail for its deliverance and liberation.

—Ian Bradley in God Is Green:

Ecology for Christians

Christ was no bore

The dogma we find so dull—this terrifying drama of which God is the victim and hero—if this is dull, then what, in Heaven’s name, is worthy to be called exciting? The people who hanged Christ never, to do them justice, accused him of being a bore—on the contrary, they thought him too dynamic to be safe. It has been left for later generations to muffle up that shattering personality and surround him with an atmosphere of tedium. We have very efficiently pared the claws of the Lion of Judah, certified him “meek and mild,” and recommended him as a fitting household pet for pale curates and pious old ladies. Those who knew him, however … objected to him as a dangerous firebrand.

—Dorothy L. Sayers, quoted

in Dorothy Sayers: A Careless

Rage for Life, by David Coomes

The need to speak the truth

And I have a strong natural inclination to speak of every subject just as it is, and to call a spade a spade.

The Autobiography of Richard Baxter, abridged by J. M. Lloyd

Thomas, ed., N. H. Keeble.

Human drama gone awry

According to most philosophers, God in making the world enslaved it. According to Christianity, in making it, He set it free. God had written not so much a poem, but rather a play; a play he had planned as perfect, but which had necessarily been left to human actors and stagemanagers, who had since made a great mess of it.

—G. K. Chesterton in Orthodoxy

Unmerited superiority

We are not happy because we are unforgiving, and we are unforgiving because we feel superior to others.

—Carlo Carretto in

In Search of the Beyond

Hurried interpretations

God makes his will visible to men in events, an obscure text written in a mysterious language. Men make their translations of it instantly; hasty translations, incorrect, full of mistakes, omissions, and misreadings. Very few minds understand the divine language.

—Victor Hugo in Les Misérables

Charles Colson offers an olive branch to journalists at the National Press Club.

After the announcement that Prison Fellowship chairman Charles Colson had won the prestigious Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion (see CT News, March 8, 1993, p. 57), he was invited by the National Press Club to address their members at their Washington, D.C., headquarters. The March 11 talk addressed journalists; but because it has consequences for religious leaders, readers of CHRISTIANITY TODAY may like to listen in. A condensed version of the talk follows:

The irony of this occasion is not lost on me and possibly not on you. It was 20 years ago in this place that I appeared to defend Richard Nixon. Many journalists who covered Watergate ended up winning Pulitzer prizes or lucrative book contracts. I ended up in prison.

Today I come, not with a hatchet, as I did 20 years ago, but with an olive branch. I hope to persuade you that the two camps which you and I represent should make peace.

My side is often stereotyped as the Religious Right—those folks described by the Washington Post as “largely uneducated, poor and easy to command.” There is considerable diversity in that group, including some who show more zeal than thought. But generally our side agrees on one thing: We harbor a fear and loathing of the media elite. That phrase—even if you don’t feel very elite—means all of you here today.

My proposition is simple: that both sides need each other for the greater good of our society.

Let me approach my thesis beginning with the subject I know best: criminal justice. Over the past 17 years, I have been in well over 600 prisons in nearly 30 countries. What I have experienced can be summed up tersely: The American criminal justice system is terminally ill. While I find Dr. Kevorkian appalling, we could use someone like him in public policy—to dispose of discredited government programs. (Nothing in government dies of natural causes.) And criminal-justice policies would top the list to be hooked up to the death machine.

The statistics tell the story. In 1973 there were 210,000 people in U.S. prisons; the incarceration rate was 98 per 100,000 U.S. citizens, well behind the notoriously high rates of the Soviet Union and South Africa. Last year the total number of people imprisoned in America was 856,000, plus 425,000 in jails. Our rate of incarceration was 512 per 100,000 (including jails). We are now leading the world by a wide margin.

In spite of the huge number of criminals being incarcerated, our crime rate has continued to rise. In 20 years, violent crime has climbed over 75 percent. And each year the people who commit these bloody crimes are younger. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control estimate that 20 percent of high-school students carry weapons to class.

Lawlessness lies just below the surface of our everyday life. Crime’s societal burden grows heavier each year. When spark touched tinder in Los Angeles, many of us saw a vision of the future of many American cities.

Statistics can leave us cold. But I have seen the dreadful cost of this system in the faces of thousands of human beings trapped in it. When I was a prisoner, I watched men spend their days lying on their bunks doing nothing, staring into the emptiness—bodies atrophying, souls corroding. Prison talk centered on how they would get even with those who had wronged them or with society in general. I have never been in a place so filled with anger, bitterness, despair, dejection.

It is no wonder to me that, after being released, between 66 and 74 percent commit new crimes within four years; the wonder is that 25 percent do not. The prison experience is brutal, dehumanizing, counterproductive.

Of course, prisons do serve one very important function. They separate dangerous offenders from the rest of society. And I should add that the failure of the system is not due to correctional officials. I’ve been greatly impressed with the high quality of people who serve in corrections—some of the most dedicated public servants I’ve known.

No, the blame for the mess we’re in today rests squarely on the shoulders of politicians; and it is shared equally by Democrats and Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Both sides have been wrong. Dangerously wrong.

Let’s consider first the liberal approach. The prevailing sociological view earlier in this century was that crime is caused by environmental factors—poverty, racism, oppression, lack of opportunity. Once this idea took root, it was hard to shake. In the 1960s, Attorney General Ramsey Clark said flat out, “Poverty is the cause of crime.” Millions of people concluded they weren’t responsible for their behavior. They were the victims of poverty.

President Jimmy Carter said virtually the same thing in response to the looting following New York’s infamous 24-hour blackout. Poverty drove New Yorkers to riot, Carter argued. But his words rang hollow a few months later when studies showed that most looters were employed, and they stole things they didn’t need or have any use for.

And last year during the Los Angeles riots we heard haunting echoes of Clark and Carter.

If the cause of crime is the external environment, then crime could be cured by changing the environment. Thus we came to believe that prisons are capable of rehabilitating criminals. But rehabilitation proved to be a costly myth. I don’t know anyone in corrections today who honestly believes that prisons have a redemptive purpose. Nevertheless, the myth lives on, and so does the notion that individuals are not responsible for their behavior.

The assumptions on the conservative side have been equally flawed. They believe the solution to crime is to lock criminals up and throw away the key. Since Christians are called to repent of their sins, I will do so here. I helped shape the law-and-order mentality popular today. Politicians have simply repeated some of the lines I wrote for Nixon that proved to be crowd pleasers. “Throw away the key. Get tough on crime,” intones the politician—and he is drowned out by applause.

This is called the deterrent theory: Lock them up and we’ll scare people out of crime. But it doesn’t work either. The problem is that fear does little to change behavior. If it did, no one would smoke. Motivations are more complex than that, particularly when it comes to crime and violence.

If prisons did rehabilitate or if the threat of prison did deter crime, surely we would be living in utopian peace. But the stark fact is this: Though we’ve thrown more people in prison than at any other time in human history, few sensible people would be willing to take a walk in this city’s combat zone after dark. One out of four American households will be victims of crime this year. Crime and the fear of crime disrupt our lives and haunt our nights.

Why have these approaches failed? The answer is as close as our conscience and as distant as our highest ideals. Both approaches have ignored our moral life. They have passed over our character and forgotten our soul. And that is where the cause of crime is rooted.

In the 1950s a psychologist, Stanton Samenow, and a psychiatrist, Samuel Yochelson, sharing the conventional wisdom that crime is caused by environment, set out to prove their point. They began a 17-year study involving thousands of hours of clinical testing of 250 inmates here in the District of Columbia. To their astonishment, they discovered that the cause of crime cannot be traced to environment, poverty, or oppression. Instead, crime is the result of individuals making, as they put it, wrong moral choices. In their 1977 work The Criminal Personality, they concluded that the answer to crime is a “conversion of the wrong-doer to a more responsible lifestyle.”

In 1987, Harvard professors James Q. Wilson and Richard J. Herrnstein came to similar conclusions in their book Crime and Human Nature. They determined that the cause of crime is a lack of proper moral training among young people during the morally formative years, particularly ages one to six.

In other words, the crime problem boils down to concepts foreign to our understanding today. The root of our crime problem is the loss of individual morality and the resulting erosion of our character as a people. Neither the liberal solution nor the conservative solution reaches this deep.

The evidence of American history powerfully supports this conclusion. In the early 1980s, the same James Q. Wilson decided to survey our history to find some trend or cycle that would correlate with crime data. He noticed a startling pattern. Crime did not correlate with poverty. During the Great Depression, for example, there was widespread poverty—34 million people unemployed—and yet crime dropped.

Nor did it correlate with factors like urbanization. The middle of the nineteenth century, for example, was a period of rapid urbanization. Yet the level of crime actually fell. Why? During that same period a great spiritual awakening took place. So from the mid-1800s to 1920, despite all the environmental, economic, and social pressures, the crime rate actually decreased.

Conversely, during the good economic years of the 1920s, crime rose. Why? Because, as Wilson concluded, “the educated classes began to repudiate moral uplift and Freud’s psychological theories came into vogue.” People no longer believed in restraining a child’s sinful impulses; they wanted to develop his “naturally good” personality. The weaker emphasis on moral training led to an increase in criminal behavior.

The same philosophy, by the way, came back into fashion in the 1960s, bringing with it a sharp increase in crime, which still continues today.

If crime stems from moral factors, then the solution to crime must be moral as well. Anything else is merely a Band-Aid to treat a sickness of the soul. What practical guidelines does this insight give us in confronting our crisis of crime and punishment?

First, we need committed people who will transmit to prison inmates a message of hope and redemption. At this moment, Prison Fellowship has 50,000 volunteers going into prisons: holding seminars, conducting Bible studies, mentoring inmates as they are released from prison, visiting their families, bringing gifts to their children.

I would not be so presumptuous to say that only the gospel of Christ can bring about moral reformation. I’m happy about every effort where people are helped. But it is Jesus Christ who made a lasting difference in my life. And this is what I can offer to others.

Does it work? Emphatically, yes—even by the standards of the most skeptical critic. A 1990 study conducted by the Institute for Religious Research at Loyola College in Maryland compared two groups of ex-offenders. They were similar in terms of crimes committed, age, gender, and race. The only difference between them was that one group had participated in Prison Fellowship programs and the other had not. The study found that, overall, offenders who had taken part in the programs were nearly 22 percent less likely to be re-arrested than those who had not.

Second, to deal with the crime crisis, we need a balanced criminal justice policy, one that offers both real punishment and real redemption. That means abandoning the idea altogether that prisons either rehabilitate or deter. Prisons succeed in keeping violent and dangerous criminals off the streets. Beyond that, they accomplish little. Yet 50 percent of those admitted to prison each year have committed nonviolent offenses.

We could solve the prison overcrowding problem overnight if we had the political courage and honesty to take nonviolent, nondangerous inmates out of prison, put them in work camps or in community-based treatment centers or in home incarceration and make them work. In this way, they could pay back their victims rather than sit in a prison cell at a cost of $20,000 a year to the taxpayers. It is redemptive for the individual, teaching responsibility for his actions; and it is redemptive for society, restoring the victims of crime.

Restitution is a biblical principle that works. In 1973, Minnesota revised its corrections system, coupling alternatives to incarceration with sentencing reform. The results are impressive. Minnesota has an incarceration rate of 73 per 100,000 residents—the second lowest in the nation. Even more impressive, Minnesota’s incarceration rate is lower than many western European countries, including Denmark, France, Switzerland, and Austria. The numbers prove that alternatives to incarceration do succeed.

Third, if the solution to crime involves a moral response, we must deal with our culture’s crumbling moral consensus. Remember what Wilson and Herrnstein said: Crime stems from a failure in moral training.

No culture can survive without a moral consensus, shared beliefs about right and wrong, a common standard of truth. This is what defines the rules we live by. It motivates self-sacrifice. It undergirds the law. It permits freedom without anarchy. It is the agreement that society is governed more by transcendent truths than by individual desires, that society is more than the sum of the choices individuals make. Without this consensus, the individual is abandoned to self-interest alone.

I’m reminded of Samuel Johnson’s reaction when he was told a certain guest believed all morality is a sham. “Why, sir, if he really believes there is no distinction between virtue and vice,” roared Johnson, “let us count the spoons before he leaves.” The problem is, after decades of value-free tolerance, we don’t have any spoons left to count. Look at all the “gates” that followed Watergate—the Wall Street scandals, religious frauds, fallen sports heros.

The problem is that our moral consensus has shattered. So how do we go about restoring it? Where does moral conviction come from?

Though George Will might argue that government can inspire and create public virtue—that statecraft is soulcraft—I respectfully disagree. I believe virtue is something that grows from within, not something enforced from above. The law does have a role in moral instruction. But the roots of our moral life go deeper than laws and bills. Government programs can feed the body; they cannot touch the soul. They can punish behavior; they cannot transform hearts.

Ultimately, the goal must be reformation, not just reform. And this points directly to the essential role of religious values and religious hope in our common life. Religion is the only way to reach into the darkest corners of every community, into the darkest corners of every mind.

Religion provides a moral impulse to do good. It has sent legions of Christians into battle against disease and oppression and bigotry. It ended the slave trade, built hospitals and orphanages, tamed the brutality of mental wards and prisons. It motivated marches for civil rights and marches for human life. It has provided a voice for the weak and a hope for the hopeless.

Religion also provides the power to be good. It subdues an obstinate will. It provides new values to old sinners—even to people like a White House hatchet man.

I sense some of you are squirming, and I know what many people think: “Christians just want to cram their religious values down reluctant throats.” But that is not my intention. I want simply to argue that Christians bring something important to our culture, something that cannot be easily replaced. I want to argue that they deserve an honored place at the table, that in a free, pluralistic society, we can contend in the public square for the truths we cherish without “imposing” them on anyone.

The great paradox of our age is this: In the interest of tolerance, we are aggressively seeking to scrub religious values, and even reminders of our religious heritage, out of our public life. Yet it is that religious heritage that is essential for the recovery of character.

There can be no truce in our “culture war” until we begin to understand one another—until we see that a society can be both tolerant and, at the same time, respect certain transcendent truths, ideas of right and wrong that inspire us to rise beyond narrow self-interest.

A good place to start is with you and me—with what we might call the conservative evangelical wing of the American church and what, for lack of a better term, is called the media elite. So long as we see one another as mortal enemies, we will make little contribution to public harmony.

I have to confess that my side bears a substantial responsibility for the gulf that divides us. We have often pictured you as extremists, who will not rest until you’ve strangled the last abortion protester with the guts of the last televangelist. You, in turn, have painted us as bigoted enemies of freedom. Every church is pictured as a carnival of corruption, with an ayatollah in every pulpit.

Both of us are wrong. And if this is how the debate continues to be framed, all America loses.

And so let us offer one another an olive branch.

Those of us who represent the Christian faith share a common interest with you, the media, in the preservation of America’s first freedom. Both of us live or die by the same First Amendment.

On our side, we need to make a better case of what is required to develop public virtue. We need to argue more convincingly that a free society depends not only on economic and political freedoms but also on the moral character that supports those freedoms.

We would ask you, on the other hand, to look at what religion actually means in American life. To be frank, Christians chafe when we see front-page coverage of our shameful scandals. Our religious excesses are fair game for your coverage, of course. But how about giving the other side of the story, too? I appeal to you, in the interest of the public welfare: Hear our case. Don’t judge us by a few zealots, just as we should not judge you by those few journalists who stereotype us as “poor, uneducated and easy to command.”

Let us come together to recognize that an escalating war between paranoia and bigotry serves no one. And in this truce, perhaps we can begin a serious discussion of our common moral life—in a society where crime makes that discussion increasingly urgent.

Some feminists argue that it is not enough to use feminine images for God; we must also alter names for God. Consider these claims:

• The word play of Genesis 49:25 between El Shaddai (God Almighty) and shaddim (breasts) demonstrates that the Deity should aptly be named “the God with Breasts.”

• The Eucharist is “a drinking at the breast of God the Mother.”

• When we proclaim that people “must be born again,” we are “urging them to experience the womb and birth canal of God the Mother.”

Some feminist theologians even call for a return to goddess religion. Mary Daly writes of “cutting away the Supreme Phallus,” explaining that the son of a divine patriarch (Jesus) is the one who cannot save women from the horrors of patriarchy. Some biblical revisionists call for a return to deistic terms for God such as Creative Process and Divine Eros. Such terminology so depersonalizes God that he no longer can hear personal prayers or respond to supplications.

Daly’s revision is greater than this, though. She claims that there will be no second coming of Christ, but instead a “surge of consciousness” realized in the Second Coming of Women. It is this men have been dreading, for they will be robbed of their power. She demands that we move beyond the patriarchalism that has resulted in what she calls “Christolatry” (worshiping Christ because he is divine).

An old religion in new clothes

The call for goddess worship is no mere corrective to the worship of Yahweh; it is a call to a new religion. More precisely, it is an old religion in new clothes. In it, the goddess dwelt with a male god as his consort. Pantheons of male and female deities were, like humans, sexually active. The fertility of humanity and the earth was thought to depend on the fertility and the eroticism of the gods. In fact, the development of temple prostitution evolved as persons, through their own eroticism, wanted to inspire the behavior of the gods so that they might again bring fecundity to the earth.

This idea of an impregnating male God and a female deity giving birth to the world appears nowhere in Scripture. While it is true that goddess worship was common, even popular, in the religions of the Sumerians, Egyptians, Canaanites, Persians, Greeks, and Romans, it is regarded only in a negative perspective by the Old Testament writers. Israelite religion, while informing us about the maternal characteristics of God, strongly opposed goddess worship.

There are some who argue that the prophets (and later, Jesus) did not speak of God as Mother because hearers would not have been able to grasp this. But the people of Israel were surrounded by peoples who envisioned their gods in just that way. As Elizabeth Achtemeier remarks, “It must puzzle those feminist theologians, who appeal to the prophets’ championship of the oppressed, that the prophets nevertheless never address God as female,” quite sparingly use female images for God’s activity, “and indeed, condemn the worship of all goddesses.” (See Deuteronomy 16:21; 2 Kings 23:4; Isaiah 27:9; Jeremiah 7:18–20; 17:2; 44:17–23; and Micah 5:13–14.)

Disappointment with goddesses

It is also worth noting that goddess worship can work against feminist goals. In no pagan religion was the goddess the Chieftess; rather, she always played a subordinate role. In the pagan religions mentioned in the Hebrew Scriptures, El is the senior god, the father of humankind. The goddesses Anat, Baal, and Asherat are all given secondary roles.

And goddesses are always interconnected with motherhood and fertility. In biblical times, infertility was the ultimate curse that could befall a woman. At this time, when feminists are attempting to fight against being reduced to “baby factories,” the appeal to a goddess religion as salvation from patriarchy seems contradictory.

In spite of this, some still call for a return, not only to goddess worship, but also to matriarchal societies in which women ruled in peace and harmony. They stress the move away from the judgmental and bloody Yahweh religion of the Old Testament with its concomitant patriarchal oppression.

That female deities make for a more peaceable religious tradition is contestable. Theologian Susanne Heine writes that the Canaanite goddess Anat “acts just like Yahweh, at least when it comes to annihilating her enemies. Why is Yahweh then accused of violence by feminists and not Anat? At any rate, it is a sign of progress that Yahweh does not wade with joy in the blood of his enemies (as Anat does).”

Further, societies that worshiped goddesses were far more oppressive and patriarchal than that of the Old Testament.

The biblical message is clear: there is no multiplicity of divinities; God needs no female partner to perform the sex act with him, thereby giving birth to the earth and its creatures; God is above the condition of human sexuality. When it comes to goddess worship, the whole tenor of the Hebrew Scriptures is open hostility.

The rejection of goddess worship ultimately comes from understanding that Creator and created are separate. Hebrew society did not reject goddess worship because of its patriarchalism (though it clearly was patriarchal), but because of its awareness of God’s transcendence. God did not create the world as a result of some cosmic sex act, but by a simple verbal command. “By the word of the Lord were the heavens made, and all the host of them by the breath of his mouth” (Ps. 33:6). God is not our equal, but our Maker.

By Dale Youngs, associate pastor of Forest Hills Presbyterian Church, Helotes, Texas.

A response to feminist God-talk in the church.

Sexuality and gender issues continue to have a profound impact on church and society. Now some feminist thinkers are challenging the idea of God as our heavenly Father. (Fortunately, most evangelical feminists are more interested in fairness than in revising names for God.)

Elizabeth Achtemeier believes the issues in this debate penetrate to the core of the Christian faith. Not all readers will agree with every aspect of her analysis (as, for instance, our own J. I. Packer and Kenneth Kantzer disagree with each other about women’s ordination). Most readers, however, will agree with Achtemeier’s conviction about what is at stake.

No aspect of the feminist movement promises to affect the church’s life more basically than that movement’s attempts to change language for God. Rather than refer to God as Father, many feminists insist, Christians must be more “inclusive” in how they speak to or about God.

With the introduction of the first volume of the National Council of Churches’ Inclusive-Language Lectionary in 1983, such language has steadily made its way into the Scriptures, prayers, liturgies, hymns, and publications of the mainline churches, often to the dismay of the people in the pews. While inclusive language for God is less hotly debated in evangelical churches, the issue has wide implications and relevance for all Christians.

The radical feminists argue that women in the church have been oppressed since the first century, and that language has contributed to the oppression. By the use of generic terms such as man and mankind, males have come to be seen as the definition of what it means to be human. And the use of masculine titles and pronouns for God absolutizes maleness and gives men the right to rule over women. “Since God is male,” radical feminist Mary Daly says, “the male is God.” Claims feminist theologian Anne Carr, “God as father rules over the world, holy fathers rule over the church, clergy fathers over laity, males over females, husbands over wives and children, man over the created world.” Such a hierarchical worldview must be abolished, say these feminists, and one way to do that is by changing our language.

In many respects, women have legitimate cause for concern. They have suffered discrimination in the church for centuries. They have been denied respect for their learning and persons. They have been labeled the source of sin in the world. They have been kept from key leadership roles because they do not biologically “resemble Christ.” Discrimination continues today, with the Bible misused as its instrument.

Such discrimination is a corruption and fundamental denial of the Christian gospel. The Scriptures clearly proclaim that both female and male are made in the image of God (Gen. 1:27), that husband and wife are to join flesh in a marital union of mutual helpfulness (Gen 2:18), that the ancient enmity between the sexes and the subservience of women are a result of human sin (Gen. 3), that such enmity and subservience have been overcome by the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ (Gal. 3:28), and that all women and men are called equally to discipleship in the service of their risen Lord. The Scriptures further show that our Lord consistently treated women as equals and that the New Testament churches could have women as their leaders.

It therefore seems only fair for feminists in the church to ask that the church’s language about human beings be changed to include them, so that males no longer define humanity. The New Revised Standard Version of the Bible takes seriously that request, and in its translation, generic English terms have been changed to reflect the meaning of the original texts. For example, John 12:32 now reads, “And I, when I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all people [rather than ‘men’] to myself.”

There is, however, a great difference between feminism as fairness and feminism as ideology, as Catholic thinker Richard John Neuhaus has cogently pointed out, and it is in relation to language about God that some feminists are most radically ideological. By attempting to change the biblical language used of the deity, these feminists have in reality exchanged the true God for those deities which are “no gods,” as Jeremiah put it (2:11).

IS “HE” REALLY “SHE”?

The feminist claim is that all language about God is analogical and metaphorical, and that therefore it can be changed at will to overcome the church’s patriarchalism and foster women’s liberation. The radical feminists therefore seek to eliminate all masculine terminology used of God, either by supplementing it with feminine terminology or by using only neuter or female images for the deity.

In speaking of God and Christ, some simply use she and her. For the Trinity of Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, others substitute Creator, Liberator, and Comforter. They avoid the excessive use of terms such as Father, King, and Master by substituting God, Yahweh (the Hebrew name for God), or Abba (an affectionate Aramaic word for Father). In An Inclusive Lectionary, the Bible’s Father is changed to Father (and Mother); Lord to Sovereign; King to Ruler or Monarch; Son of Man to Human One; and Son of God to Child of God.

Theologian Rosemary Radford Ruether consistently calls her deity Godless, while Jewish feminist Rita Gross uses God-She. Others apply feminine usage only to the Holy Spirit or avoid the problem altogether by using impersonal terms for God such as Wisdom, Holy One, Rock, Fire, and First and Last, or neuter terms like Liberator, Maker, Defender, Friend, and Nurturer. Jesus is described as a male only in his earthly life, while he becomes Liberator, Redeemer, and Savior in his representation of the new humanity.

Those who attempt to justify such changes in biblical usage point to female imagery for God in the Bible or claim that the Catholic cult of Mary furnishes us with a tradition of female language and imagery in speaking of the divine. “If we do not mean that God is male when we use masculine pronouns and imagery,” asks Rita Gross, “then why should there be any objections to using female imagery and pronouns as well?” She continues, “Female God language compels us to overcome the idolatrous equation of God with androcentric [man-centered] notions of humanity in a way that no other linguistic device can.”

Several things must be said in reply:

• Biblical scholars agree universally that the God of the Bible has no sexuality. Sexuality is a structure of creation (Gen. 1–2), confined within the limits of the creation (Matt. 22:30), and the God of the Bible is consistently pictured as totally “other” than all creation. This is what the Bible means when it says that God is “holy”: he is “set apart.” “I am God and not man, the Holy One in your midst,” he says in Hosea 11:9. “To whom then will you liken God, or what likeness compare with him?” asks the the prophet (Isa. 40:18).

By thus insisting on female language for God, the radical feminists simply continue to emphasize the nonbiblical view that God does indeed have sexuality. In fact, some of them have misused the biblical concept of the image of God to say that God must be female as well as male, since both sexes are made in God’s image (Gen 1:27). That is a complete (or fundamental) distortion of the biblical understanding of God, who is without sexual characteristics.

• The few instances of feminine imagery for God in the Bible all take the form of simile, not metaphor, as literary critic Roland Frye has amply demonstrated. That distinction is instructive. A simile compares one aspect of something to another. For example, in Isaiah 42:14, God will “cry out like a woman in travail,” but only his crying out is being referred to; he is not being identified as a whole with the figure of a woman in childbirth. In metaphors, on the other hand, the whole of one thing is compared to the whole of another. God is Father or Jesus is the Good Shepherd. Thus the metaphor, as Frye writes, “carries a word or phrase far beyond its ordinary lexical meaning so as to provide a fuller and more direct understanding of the subject.” Language is stretched to its limit, beyond ordinary usage, to provide new understanding.

• The Bible uses masculine language for God because that is the language with which God has revealed himself. Biblical Christian faith is a revealed religion. It claims no knowledge of God beyond the knowledge God has given of himself through his words and deeds in the histories of Israel and of Jesus Christ and his church. In fact, it is quite certain that human beings, by searching out God, cannot find him. Unless God reveals himself, he remains unknown to humanity.

But the God of the Bible has revealed himself. Contrary to modern theologies (such as that of Sallie McFague) that claim God is the great Unknown and that therefore human beings must invent language for God, the God of the Bible has revealed himself in five principal metaphors: King, Father, Judge, Husband, and Master, and then finally, decisively, as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.

If we ask, “What is the actual nature of God?” we must reply, “God is the Father of Jesus Christ.” As the Episcopal writer Alvin Kimel explains,

God is not just like a father; he is the Father. Jesus is not just like a son; he is the Son. The divine Fatherhood and Sonship are absolute, transcendent, and correlative.… The relationship between Christ Jesus and his Father, lived out in the conditions of first-century Palestine and eternally established in the resurrection and ascension of our Lord, belongs to the inner life of God. It constitutes the identity of the Almighty Creator.… “Father” is not a metaphor imported by humanity onto the screen of eternity; it is a name and filial term of address revealed by God himself in the person of his Son.

If one believes that Jesus Christ is the Word of God made flesh, the Son of God incarnate in time and space—a belief that feminists such as Elisabeth Schussler Fiorenza and Rosemary Radford Ruether and a host of others would deny—then there is no contradiction that can be made to the particularity of God’s self-revelation. God is not just any god, capable of being named according to human fancy. No, God is the one whom Jesus reveals as his Father.

Encountering The Goddess At Church

Recently I went to the regular Thursday Holy Communion service at the theological school where I teach. A highly visible feminist leader led the service, an ordained minister who has for some time had an uncommon fixation on the worship of the goddess Sophia, or Wisdom, poetically described as the agent of creation in a few biblical passages.

I come from a tradition that views Communion as a sacrament that unites the body of Christ. In all my 60 years of participation in the United Methodist Church, I have never seriously considered withdrawing from a Communion service because of a scrupulous conscience. This time I struggled with whether to attend at all. At one point, I told myself I should not because I might be tempted to do or say something rash. (The ugly fantasy of dumping over the Communion table flitted through my mind.) No, that would merely cause a stir and tend toward scandal and disunity. And this is my worshiping community, so I felt I had a right to receive the sacrament duly administered, even if occasionally by an unworthy minister. I decided I must go.

Bad poetry, worse theology

Our first hymn, entitled “Sophia,” sang the praise of the goddess Sophia, who “ordains what God will do.” “She’s the teacher we esteem, and the subject of life’s theme.” This was bad poetry, sung to the tune of Salve Regina, which Catholics sing in honor of the mother of the incarnate Lord.

With this surrogate hymn I began to feel more queasy. I wondered if I was in a place where some Lord other than Jesus Christ was being worshiped.

Then came the homily, addressed solely to feminists and those who readily make concessions to radical feminists’ demands. In the name of inclusiveness, all other audiences were demeaned and excluded.

The sermon focused not on a Scripture text, but on an event in the woman’s experience as a feminist preacher. It was a “victory” story in which a pious Methodist lay leader and other members were driven out of her church and forced to join another after they challenged her authority to offer the Lord’s Supper in the name of the goddess Sophia. She recounted triumphantly how she had preached on the virtues of doctrinal diversity and invited all members who did not agree with her to look for another church. She was apparently oblivious to the fact that in the name of inclusiveness she was practicing exclusion.

Scripture was imported occasionally into the service, but it was culled chiefly from the Apocrypha, Proverbs, and Psalms. She quoted the apocryphal Sirach, but only passages that seem to reify Wisdom into a deity distinguishable from the triune God. Then, incredibly, she likened the yoke of discipleship to sadistic and masochistic sex.

Could I in good conscience receive Holy Communion under these circumstances? I began to consider how I might inconspicuously withdraw from the service. And I confess that for a brief moment I did ponder a comic response: going calmly to receive Holy Communion while holding my nose. But that seemed out of sync with the very nature of the service of Communion.

I prayed for wisdom to know what to do—not to her goddess but to God, who by grace illumines our hearts and minds.

The preacher herself gave me the decisive clue. She urged those present not to wait to assert their authority in worship. She then offered the invitation to come to the Lord’s Table, not in the Lord’s name, but in the name of the goddess who was speaking through Christ. We were invited to Christ’s table, but only in Sophia’s name.

That did it. I decided that she was inadvertently correct, that I could not delay in attesting the authority of Christ in the worship service. As we were “passing the peace,” I grasped the hands of two or three women nearby, then quietly left. As I went down the steps from the chapel, I gave hearty thanks to God for his kind counsel of wisdom in a profoundly knotty situation.

By Thomas Oden.

GOD DEFINES HIMSELF

We find the same particularity in the Hebrew Scriptures. Once again, God is not to be identified with just any god. For this reason, the central commandment in the Bible, first contained in Deuteronomy 6:4, begins with, “Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord.” That is, the God of Israel is not identical with the diffuse gods known to other peoples but is one particular God who has done particular things in particular times and places. Principally, he is “the Lord your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage” (Exod. 20:2 and throughout the Old Testament). If Israel asks who God is, the reply is that he is the God of the Exodus. And it is that God of the Exodus whom Jesus also reveals to be his Father (see Mark 12:29–30). God defines himself in the Bible, through centuries of acting and speaking in the life of his covenant people, and it is only through that self-revelation, now handed down to us in the Scriptures, that we have any knowledge of him.

Several questions arise, however. The first is this: Why does God reveal himself primarily in personal terms? If God has no sexuality, if he is Spirit (John 4:24), then why does he not name himself through the medium of impersonal, metaphorical language? Why are not his primary designations Rock, Fire, Living Water, Bread, Way, Door, Refuge, Fortress, and other such metaphors found throughout the Scriptures? Put another way, why does the Bible insist on those awkward anthropomorphisms for God, in which he is described as having hands and feet and mouth like a person, and which are finally brought to their ultimate anthropomorphism in the incarnation of Jesus Christ? Why a personal God when God transcends all human personality?

For one, a God named primarily Rock or Door does not demand that we do anything. All those impersonal biblical metaphors for God are encompassed within a principal revelation of God as supremely personal. The God of the Bible meets us Person to person and asks from us the total commitment of ourselves: “You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might” (Deut. 6:5); “If you love me, you will keep my commandments” (John 14:15). God asks of us primarily love in return for his love that was manifested in his dealings with us: “When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son” (Hos. 11:1); “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son” (John 3:16). No impersonal designations of God, except they be explained by the Bible’s personal names for him, can adequately express that gracious and demanding relationship of love with himself into which God woos and calls us.

More pressing for the radical feminists, however, is the question of why God reveals himself only in masculine terms. Scholar Elaine Pagels is quite correct when she states that “the absence of feminine symbolism of God marks Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in striking contrast to the world’s other religious traditions, whether in Egypt, Babylonia, Greece and Rome, or Africa, Polynesia, India, and North America.” But why could a personal God not have revealed himself in feminine metaphors instead? God is never called Mother in the Bible and is never addressed or thought of as a female deity. That was unique in the ancient Near Eastern world; Israel was surrounded by peoples who worshiped female deities—Asherat and Anat, Nut and Isis, Tiamat and the Queen of Heaven, Demeter and Artemis. And such a masculine conception of the deity is still unique in our world.

The radical feminists argue that the names for God in the Bible have been determined by the patriarchal cultures out of which the Bible arose, but that argument founders on the revelation in Jesus Christ, as we have seen. These feminists have a very difficult time with God the Father and the Son, although some of them hold that the feminine element is introduced by the Holy Spirit, even though the Spirit, too, proceeds from the Father and from the Son and is one with them. No, the Bible’s language for God is masculine, a unique revelation of God in the world.

The basic reason for that designation of God is that the God of the Bible will not let himself be identified with his creation, and, therefore, human beings are to worship not the creation but the Creator (Rom. 1:25). To be sure, God works in his creation through the instruments of his Word and Spirit; he orders his creation and sustains it; he constantly cares for it; but he is never identified with it. And it is that holiness, that otherness, that transcendence of the Creator, that also distinguishes biblical religion from all others.

A GOD WHO BREAST-FEEDS?

It is precisely the introduction of female language for God that opens the door to such identification of God with the world, however. If God is portrayed in feminine language, the figures of carrying in the womb, of giving birth, and of suckling immediately come into play. For example, feminist Virginia Ramey Mollenkott writes of “the undivided One God who births and breast-feeds the universe.” The United Church of Christ’s Book of Worship prays, “You have brought us forth from the womb of your being.” A feminine goddess has given birth to the world! But if the creation has issued forth from the body of the deity, it shares in deity’s substance; deity is in, through, and under all things, and therefore everything is divine. Holding such a worldview, Mollenkott can say that “our milieu” is “divine,” just as Zsuzsanna E. Budapest can go even further and write, “This is what the Goddess symbolizes—the divine within women and all that is female in the universe.… The responsibility you accept is that you are divine, and that you have power.” If God is identified with his creation, we finally make ourselves gods and goddesses—the ultimate and primeval sin (Gen. 3).

But we can never rightly understand ourselves and our place in the universe, the Bible tells us, until we realize that we are not gods and goddesses. Rather, we are creatures, wondrously and lovingly made by a sovereign Creator: “It is he that made us, and not we ourselves” (Ps. 100:3). The Bible will use no language that undermines that confession. It therefore eschews all feminine language for God that might open the door to such error, and it is rigorous in its opposition to every other religion and cultic practice that identifies creation with creator.

The principal fight found in Deuteronomy through 2 Kings and in the prophets is with Canaanite baalism and with Mesopotamian star worship, in which God has been identified with his world. The New Testament implicitly endorses the separation of creation and Creator by carefully stating that before there was the creation, there was the Word and the Word was God (John 1:1). Indeed, prophets and psalmists and the New Testament are quite certain that the world may pass away, but God will not pass away, because God and his world are not one (Pss. 46:1–2; 102:25–27; Isa. 51:6; Mark 13:31 and parallels).

God, the biblical writers are saying, is in no way contained in or bound up with or dependent on or revealed through his creation. God creates the world outside of himself, by the instrument of his Word. Between God and his world stands the Word of God (John 1:2), which always addresses the creation as an object of the divine speech (see Isa. 1:2; 40:22, 26; Mic. 6:2–8). The world does not emanate out of the being of God or contain some part of him within it. He has not implanted divinity within any part of the creation, not even in human beings, and therefore no created thing or person can be claimed to be divine.

Rosemary Ruether has written liturgies for worshiping groups of women that celebrate the cycles of the moon, the solstices and the seasons, as well as the cycles of menstruation and menopause.

VANITY OF VANITIES

The assurance and meaning that this biblical understanding of the Creator’s relation to this creation give to faith, then, are profoundly important. First, because God is not bound up with his creation, that means that heaven and earth may pass away—we may blow the earth off its axis at the push of the nuclear button—but the eternal God is able to take those who love him into an everlasting fellowship with himself that does not pass away (see Ps. 102:25–27; Isa. 51:6; Mark 13:31 and parallels). In this nuclear age, the person of biblical faith can therefore lead a life not of fear and anxiety, but of joy and certain hope in God’s eternal salvation (Ps. 46:1–3).

Second, because God is not bound up with nature’s cycle but stands above and beyond its spiral and subjects it to the linear time of his purpose (see Rom. 8:19–23; Isa. 11:6–9), the pattern for human life is no longer that of nature’s endless round of becoming and passing away. It becomes instead a joyful pilgrimage toward God’s kingdom.

The feminists, who want to make Creator and creation one, should realize that there is no meaning to human life if it is patterned after and subjected to nature’s round. As Ecclesiastes puts it, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.… A generation goes, and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.… What has been is what will be, and what has been done is what will be done; and there is nothing new under the sun” (1:2, 4, 9).

In Samuel Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, no action takes place because all action is meaningless. Life goes around in a circle and finally means nothing. History is an endless repetition of events, having no goal or purpose.

Such meaninglessness results from a theology that identifies God with his creation. And that identification almost automatically comes about when feminine language for God is used. Many feminists argue that that does not necessarily happen. But feminist writings demonstrate it does.

This can perhaps most clearly be shown from the works of Rosemary Radford Ruether, perhaps the leading feminist theological writer in the United States today. Ruether wants to use female language for God, and therefore she names the divine God/ess. But Ruether, like many feminist writers, does not want her deity to rule over her. For them, God must be not a Sovereign but a “friend” (Sallie McFague) or a “householder” (Letty Russell) or the power of love-inrelation (Isabel Carter Heyward, Dorothee Sӧlle). Ruether therefore defines her God/ess as the Primal Matrix, as “the great womb within which all things, gods and humans, sky and earth, human and nonhuman beings are generated.” But this is no mere image or metaphor for Ruether. This God/ess is divine reality: “the empowering Matrix; She, in whom we live and move and have our being … She comes; She is here.”

For Ruether, then, this God/ess is very much bound up with nature’s life. Therefore in her book Women-Church, Ruether offers liturgies for worshiping groups of females that celebrate the cycles of the moon, the solstices and the seasons, as well as the cycles of menstruation and menopause. We “reappropriate the hallowing of nature and cyclical time of ancient pre-Judeo-Christian traditions,” she says. We “reclaim our true relationship with somatic reality, with body and earth, and with the Great Goddess that sustains our life in nature.” That is clearly a return to the worldview of Canaanite baalistic and Mesopotamian pagan theologies.

The result is that Ruether and all those feminists who want to erase the distinction between God and his creation finally share with the most radical feminists, who have abandoned the Christian church and faith altogether, a view of divinity that is at home in modern witches’ covens. Writes Starhawk, a self-proclaimed Wicca worshiper,

There is no dichotomy between spirit and flesh, no split between Godhead and the world. The Goddess is manifest in the world; she brings life into being, is Nature, is flesh. Union is not sought outside the world in some heavenly sphere or through dissolution of the self into the void beyond the senses. Spiritual union is found in life, within nature, passion, sensuality—through being fully human, fully one’s self.

Our great symbol for the Goddess is the moon, whose three aspects reflect the three stages in women’s lives and whose cycles of waxing and waning coincide with women’s menstrual cycles.…

The Goddess is also earth—Mother Earth, who sustains all growing things, who is the body, our bones and cells. She is air … fire … water … mare, cow, cat, owl, crane, flower, tree, apple, seed, lion, sow, stone, woman. She is found in the world around us, in the cycles and seasons of nature, and in mind, body, spirit, and the emotions within each of us. Thou art Goddess. I am Goddess. All that lives (and all that is, lives), all that serves life, is Goddess.

In such views, meaninglessness haunts human life. Perhaps that meaninglessness can be most poignantly illustrated by Ruether’s view of death. There is no eternal life for those of faith in Ruether’s female God/ess religion. Rather, the end she envisions for all of us and our communities is that we will simply end up as compost: “In effect (at death), our existence ceases as individuated ego/organism and dissolves back into the cosmic matrix of matter/energy, from which new centers of individuation arise. It is this matrix, rather than our individuate centers of being, that is ‘everlasting,’ that subsists underneath the coming to be and passing away of individuated beings and even planetary worlds.”

Such a view finally means that there is no purpose for the creation of each individual human being, and that my life and yours in our communities have no eternal meaning beyond their brief and transitory appearances on this earth.

EMBODYING THE DEITY

Most disturbing of all is the radical feminists’ claim to embody the deity within themselves—in other words, to be divine.

“I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely,” exults Carol Christ; that is the logical result of a religion in which the deity is believed to be contained in all things and all persons, and feminists who hold such views then become a law unto themselves. Indeed, for feminists Dorothee Sölle and Isabel Carter Heyward, there is no such thing as original sin, and the “fall” of Genesis 3 is good, a liberation into knowledge and action and reliance on one’s self. “We do not have to sit around all year singing, with Luther, ‘Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing,’ ” writes Sölle. No, “We are strong; we can accomplish things.” According to Sölle, “The most telling argument against our traditional God is not that he no longer exists or that he has drawn back within himself but that we no longer need him.”

God is in us, maintains Sölle, as our capacity to love. We are one with God in a mystical relation. We do not serve God; we manifest him. And because God is in us, all we need is love. That is the central idea in the Bible, she maintains.

To the contrary, however, in a world where torture is the rule in most of the globe’s prisons, where a person on a subway platform in New York City can push a woman in front of an oncoming train just for “kicks,” where little children in a nursery school can be tied up and sexually abused, where whole races can be uprooted or starved to death or burnt up in gas ovens, it must be said that Sölle’s is a naïve understanding indeed. We do need a Power greater than human evil—or, for that matter, a Power greater than even the highest human love and good, for it was the best religion and the best law that erected the cross on Golgotha. If there is not a God who is Lord over life, who intervenes, judges, and confirms, and who has given his final judgment and won his decisive victory in the cross and resurrection of Jesus Christ, then human evil will always have the last word and there is no hope for this world.

The radical feminists, believing themselves to be divine, think that by their own power they can restructure society, restore creation, and overcome suffering. But the tortured history of humanity testifies to what human beings do when they think they are a law unto themselves with no responsibility to God, and those feminists who are claiming that God is in them will equally fall victim to human sin.

The God of the Judeo-Christian biblical faith is holy God, the almighty Creator and Lord, totally other than everything and everyone he has made. We therefore cannot know and worship him unless he reveals himself to us. But with a love surpassing human understanding, he has revealed himself to us as the Holy One of Israel, who delivered her out of the house of bondage, and as the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. In that revelation, now mediated for us through the Scriptures, he has offered to adopt us as his beloved children (John 1:12; Gal. 4:4–7), to allow us to call him Father, Abba (see Rom. 8:14–17), and to know him as his Son Jesus Christ knows him.

If in trust and obedience we accept that offering of himself to us, he promises to be with us all our lives long, to guide us in the paths of righteousness, to give us joy in the midst of the world’s tribulation, to unite us in communities of love and peace with like-minded believers, to send us out to perform tasks that will give meaning to all our lives, and finally, at death, to receive us into his realm of eternal life and good that cannot pass away.

For my part, I can imagine no reason ever to reject such a God or to exchange him for those deities of earth that are “no gods.” Women suffer discrimination, yes; our world is full of all kinds of evil. But God is holy, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth, and by faith in him we shall always be more than conquerors, and nothing shall ever separate us from the love he has for us in Christ Jesus our Lord.

Loren Wilkinson is the writer/editor of Earthkeeping in the ’90s (Eerdmans) and the coauthor, with his wife, Mary Ruth Wilkinson, of Caring for Creation in Your Own Backyard (Servant). He teaches at Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.