The Cult of Sophia

By William R. Cannon

March/April 1994

The cult of Sophia is the strangest phenomenon to arise in the church in this generation. In many ways it is reminiscent of the “God is Dead” movement of 30 or more years ago. There is, however, one major difference between the two. The “God is Dead” movement was confined to the works of less than half a dozen religious philosophers and was limited to academic circles. It never got off college and university campuses. It had no influence whatsoever in the life of the church or society in general. It was short-lived, lasting little more than a year, so that one might say it was dead almost as soon as it was born. In contrast, the cult of Sophia is more general in its manner of expression, appealing to the popular rather than to the academic mind. It is not limited to literary and oral exposition but is accompanied by rites and ceremonies, bringing with it an agenda for worship, a program for action, and its own ministry and mission. Its purpose is enhance the value of women in society, and its manner of doing this is to project feminism onto ultimate reality or to enshrine womanhood as such in the very nature of the Godhead itself.

The Sophia cult gained attention through Wisdom’s Feast: Sophia in Study and Celebration, a book written by two United Methodist ministers and a Roman Catholic in 1988. It provides liturgies and services of worship to Sophia. One such service was conducted in the chapel of the Theology School of Drew University, as a substitute – so we have read in news reports – for Holy Communion.  It would appear, therefore, that the present day Sophia cult is prominently promulgated by some pastors of the United Methodist Church.

It is further assumed that they got their justification for the worship of Sophia from a series of ancient gnostic manuscripts discovered in upper Egypt in 1945. We have known of Gnosticism long before this discovery was ever made through the writings of the Fathers of the Church, as early as the Second Century, when Gnosticism was declared a heresy and its adherents were expelled from the Church. These manuscripts provide no new information, though one of them may well be the writings of Valentinus, the most important of the gnostics.

The promulgators of present-day Sophia worship claim that they are using Sophia as just another name for God, and they do this in order to show that there is a female side to God and that God must no longer be referred to by male names and images alone. From a historical point of view, the name Sophia is a very unfortunate choice. Ancient Gnosticism did not depict wisdom in either the Greek or the Hebrew meaning of the word, or as we understand wisdom today. Sophia was a clever, mischievous, misguided, and misplaced entity at the very end of the chain of emanations. She produced the demiurge, who at her behest, created a world so evil that God had to send help in the form of another emanation named Jesus to rescue us from it and return us through knowledge (gnosis) to an ordered existence.  The whole gnostic system was a tapestry of speculation, fantasy, and mythology, with no basis in fact and history. And the same seems to be true of present-day Sophia worship. Those who promote it offer their own thoughts and theories as truth and, as did the gnostics of old, substitute their beliefs for the New Testament account of the nature of Christianity.

In contrast to all other religions which advance teachings or the thoughts and opinions of their founders, Christianity rests on the mighty acts of God in history. It is a religion of fact which antedates and creates faith. It begins with a babe in a manger in Bethlehem, focuses on a teacher and performer of miracles in Galilee, points to an old rugged cross, and a man dying on it, and culminates with an empty tomb in a garden outside Jerusalem and a Savior risen from the dead. Christianity rests on history, not ideology.

It is pitiable that a group of feminist enthusiasts within the church find that the only way they can advance the cause of women in this “Ecumenical Decade: Churches in Solidarity with Women” is to modify the doctrine of God to the degree that the feminine principle is made a part of the Godhead. If they only thought through carefully the teachings of Christianity, they would realize that this is unnecessary, even redundant. There is more than enough in the Bible that affirms the importance of women and gives them their opportunity of leadership and creativity in society alongside and equal to that of men. In the Old Testament there are Miriam, Deborah, Naomi, Ruth, and Queen Esther, who serve as role models along with David, Solomon, and the prophets. In the New Testament there are Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, Mary and Martha, Mary Magdalene, Lydia, and Priscilla, all of whom either played an important role in the earthly ministry of Jesus or else joined and supported the apostle Paul in the formation of the Church. Except for our divine Lord himself, there is no person  in the Bible more significant than the Virgin Mary. It was through her, a woman, that the incarnation took place. It was Mary, a woman, who was the mother of the Incarnate God. Mary said of herself in the Magnificat, .. All generations will call me blessed, for the mighty one has done great things for me” (Luke 1:48-49). It is not possible to conceive a position more noble than that of the Virgin Mary – a woman – mother of Christ.

There is not a single instance to be found in the Bible where the name Sophia is used as a female name for God. To be sure, Wisdom is personified by the use of the feminine gender in chapters 7-10 of the Book of Proverbs, but this is purely a literary device used to enhance the value of wisdom and its importance in the conduct of life. Never is wisdom in those passages equated with God. On the contrary, wisdom is equated with us. Our marriage to wisdom and her marriage to us is essential to our success and happiness in life.

Since this Sophia cult appears to offer a service to Sophia as a substitute for Holy Communion, in which milk and honey take the place of bread and wine, this act contradicts history. When God became human in Jesus of Nazareth, he took the form of a man, not a woman. No matter how one feels or how intensely one wishes it might have been otherwise, it is impossible to alter history. Historically speaking, we cannot transpose the principle work of Jesus on to someone else. We cannot change Jesus of Nazareth into Sophia.

When any person or group of persons, male or female, exalts its own interests and values above everything else, especially to the extent of trying to alter the concept of reality to suit its own aims – then that person or group of persons collapses into idolatry, worshipping self and class rather than God. They are described correctly by the pre-Socratic philosopher who said, “If horses and oxen had hands, they would make God in their own image.” This is precisely what the adherents of Sophia have done. These extreme feminists have made for themselves an idol and they call that idol God. Without knowing it, they are worshipping themselves.

Christianity rests on God’s own disclosure to us. It cannot tolerate our projection of ourselves on to God. We are bound, body and soul, to the teachings of the Bible. One dares not  add to or subtract anything from those teachings. St. Augustine deals succinctly with this matter when he writes: “If you believe what you like, and reject what you dislike in the Gospel, it is not the gospel you believe, but yourselves.”

 

William R. Cannon is a retired bishop of the United Methodist Church, former dean of Candler School of Theology, former chairman of the executive  committee of the World Methodist Council, and author of 14 books.

 

 

Bishop Hunt Addresses Sophia

UMNS

Recent efforts by some Christians to fuse worship of “Sophia” with Christianity is nothing more than an “attempt to reconstitute the godhead,” a heresy that “staggers the religious mind,” said UM Bishop Earl G. Hunt at the January meeting of the Congress on Evangelism.

“No comparable heresy has appeared in the church in the last 15 centuries,” observed the retired bishop from Lake Junaluska, North Carolina.

“When the church seems to be losing its struggle with powers and principalities, weird things begin to happen,” he told the convention of more than 1,000 lay people and clergy.

Bishop Hunt called the current interest in Sophia ” a weird prostitution of the Eastern Orthodox idea of Saint Sophia” and said that “this is material which must be eradicated from Christian thinking now.” He called upon his fellow bishops to deal with the heresy “forthrightly and firmly.”

In a list In a list of steps that could be taken to renew the denomination, Hunt said that the church must be “cleansed of heresies old and new.”

He warned that “one of the danger signs is that church leaders, in effect, have declared ours to be a post-heresy age” in which almost anything can be construed as “Christian.”

Hunt said emergence of such trends signals a need for a “deep and sweeping change, a radical transformation” across the denomination.

Bishop Hunt is president of the Foundation for Evangelism, which raises money to fund evangelism professorships at United Methodist seminaries.

Adapted from United Methodist News Service.