Archive: Encountering the Goddess at Church
By Thomas C. Oden
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. She is an ordained United Methodist 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 Roman 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 United 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 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 greeted one another before communion was served, I grasped the hands of two or three women nearby, then quietly left. I went down the steps from the chapel, giving hearty thanks to God for his kind counsel of wisdom in a profoundly knotty situation.
Author’s note: It is not my intention that this curious narrative be interpreted as a cantankerous challenge to my own seminary or its leadership or its liturgical planning processes. In my view liturgical life at Drew Theological School is on the whole healthier now than it has been for some time. What happened in this instance was not typical of Drew but extraordinary, and this is what made it memorable and worthy of reflection.
Thomas C. Oden is the Henry Anson Buttz professor of theology and ethics at the Theological School, Drew University. He is a contributing editor to Good News and author of numerous books, including After Modernity … What? Agenda For Theology (Zondervan), and his three-volume Systematic Theology (HarperCollins). Reprinted by permission of Christianity Today, August 16, 1993.
0 Comments