For most modem Westerners, the word idolatry conjures images of dis­tant lands or times: saffron-clothed Oriental monks prostrate before golden Buddhas, ancient Aztec priests plunging their daggers into helpless virgins atop monumental temples, or iniquitous Israelites cavorting before Aaron’s golden calf in the Sinai. Certainly, the cultural dominance of Judea-Christianity has made these types of blatant and un­sophisticated idolatry rare in the Occi­dental world. Indeed, the silversmiths who manufactured idols in the Apostle Paul’s day presciently recognized that their trade could not long survive if his message prevailed. But their efforts to protect their livelihood by inciting the heathen population to riot against the Christian missionaries were in vain. The proud cries of “Great is Diana of the Ephesians” gave way to humble prayer to the transcendent Father of lights, and the fashioners of gods perforce found other employment.

But in the 20th century neoidolatry is alive and well as various crafts men shape the “isms” of modernity into attractive icons suitable for fashionable devotion. And now, instead of putting the modern idolaters out of business, contemporary Christianity seems only too happy to subsidize the labors of god-makers, even permitting them to use their seminaries and classrooms as workshops. Rosemary Ruether and Elisabeth Fiorenza, for ex­ample, are busily constructing the trendy goddess Militant Feminism in Sexism and God-Talk and In Memory of Her exhorting all to forsake the God of Scrip­ture by bending the knee to their creation; yet, miraculously, the  dustcovers of their anti-Christian polemics identify Ms. Ruether as professor of applied theol­ogy at Garrett Evangelical Seminary and Ms. Fiorenza as professor of New Testament theology at the University of Notre Dame. Even more fantastic, the acknowl­edgment pages of both works list numer­ous other church colleges and divinity schools who have courteously invited these women to their lecture halls, there to put Christ to public shame by crucify­ing Him afresh on a feminist rood. Pre­sumably Ruether and Fiorenza have col­lected honorariums somewhat in excess of 30 pieces of silver (adjusted for infla­tion) for performing this service. 

”In Memory of Her is an intense, scholarly study….a huge and complicated task, here undertaken courageously.”–Commonweal

The reasons for which Judas Iscariot betrayed his Lord are obscure, but no one need wonder why these two writers reject Him: He is male, and the promotion of feminism is not the central tenet­ of His gospel. Consequently, the doc­trine of the Incarnation must be eviscer­ated on the feminist altar. Ruether ex­plicitly repudiates “the mythology about Jesus as Messiah” and informs the reader that “we can encounter Christ in the form of our sister.” We must therefore avert our eyes from Christ’s suffering on the cross to behold instead the “‘passion drama’ of female crucifixion on the cross of male sexism.” Fiorenza is caught up in the same babbling spirit. She quotes with approbation Carol Christ’s declaration that the feminist woman perceives “the saving and sustaining power … in her­self” and therefore ”will no longer look to men or male figures as saviors.” Fiorenza also enthusiastically hails Elizabeth Cady Stanton as a true spiritual leader, citing as nearly scriptural Ms.Stanton’s opinion that from the feminist perspective there can be “no fall,  no frowning Judge, no In­ferno, no everlasting punishment,­ hence no need of a Savior.”

For authors who have deniedJesus’ unique divinity and saviorship, other doctrines centering on Him are easy to jettison as well. The physical resurrec­tion, identified by Paul as the keystone of Christian hope, is unequivocally discarded by Ruether, who argues for “agnosticism” on this question and against the immortality of the spirit:

Consciousness is the interiority of that life process that holds the organism together. There is no reason to think of the two as separable.

This heresy apparently did not trouble Fiorenza at all when she wrote her ful­some blurb for the dustcover. Nor is this surprising, since in Fiorenza’s book, Christ is “resurrected” only in the divine “Sophia Spirit” (the feminist substitute for the Holy Ghost), who comforts God’s people “from Christ’s death to Her return in glory.”

God the Father naturally fares no better than His Only Begotten Son. Ruether opens her book with a vignette depict­ing Him as a foolish and vain tyrant while Fiorenza lauds those involved in “cas­trating” Him by rewriting the language of Scripture. Christ’s merely mortal disci­ples are likewise shown no mercy: Peter appears as a self-serving fantasizer in Ruether’s tome, while Paul is rendered a backsliding chauvinist in an imaginative “epistle” proudly displayed by Fiorenza as the work of one of her students. Mary, too, is horribly distorted when seen through the dark glass of feminism: Ruether slyly questions both Christ’s divine par­entage and Mary’s chastity by styling her as one who made “her own choices about her body and sexuality without regard for her future husband”–(apparently in a Bethlehem singles’ bar. And if there was ever any serious doubt about whether those who attack Christian doctrine can nonetheless retain its “ethical substance,” these books dispel it by scorning the Christian “identification of sin with anger and pride and virtue with humility and self-abnegation” In the neoethics of fem­inism, anger is “liberating grace,” pride is virtue, and the self is the primary focus for a valid life. Of course, the reputation for cunning and intelligence which Satan has established over the centuries since he deceived the first woman would be in serious peril if this grotesque foolish­ness could be attributed to his direct commission. Thanks to the regents of Notre Dame University and Garrett­ Evangelical Seminary, who are kindly certifying these women as “Christian” teachers, the Prince of Darkness has nothing to fear.

“Rosemary Radford Ruether’s Sexism and God Talk is firmly Christian theology…. The Bible it self thus provides the resources for her feminist critique of religion.”–Commonweal

“[Sexism and God-Talk] is a significant contribution to the continuing task of educat­ing Christians….the book is well worth reading.”–America

Fiorenza wishes to obliterate the “structural-patriarchal dualisms between Christian and Jewish women … between the church and the world, the sacral and the secular.” Likewise, Ruether avers that insights gained from Judeo-Christian­ity “do not have a privileged relation to God over those that arise from Judaism, Islam, and Buddhism.” The question then is: Why do feminists who despise Christianity choose to hold positions as official teachers of Christian theology? The an­swer is not simply their obviously clouded mental faculties. First is expedience: since feminist paganism has yet to win the support necessary to erect its own universities and seminaries, why not preach the good news of feminism at Christian institutions which offer their resources without requiring a shred of orthodoxy? The second reason for choos­ing such  employment is subversion. Judeo-Christianity built Western culture, including its “sexist” institutions.  If the new heaven and new earth of feminism are to be realized, both these institutions and their informing beliefs must be de­stroyed. How could this be accomplished more effectively than from within those very institutions? Fiorenza unabashedly announces that her intent in reinterpret­ing the New Testament as “a history of oppression” is “to undermine the legiti­mization of patriarchal religious structures,” undoubtedly including the Vati­can and the Catholic Church. And when Ruether declares–that she “seeks to dis­mantle the institutional structures and refute the ideologies that incarnate aliena­tion, “she undoubtedly has in mind Pro­testant orthodoxy and the evangelical churches who preach it.

It is in this professed political intent that the chasm between these feminist idolators and traditional religion is most apparent. The worship of God the Father may have helped foster a patriarchal so­ciety, but that is not the reason He is worshiped. The Father is reverenced as the Father because the self-existent I AM revealed Himself as such, not because propatriarchal social engineers or ac­tivists contrived such an image. In con­trast, Ruether and Fiorenza are quite self-consciously involved in creatively imagining a goddess who will serve their political and ideological ends. As Fiorenza admits, “the revelatory canon” for fem­inist theology “cannot be derived from the Bible itself’ or from any “timeless theological ideas or norms,” but must adapt itself to whatever is “politically necessary” to advance “women’s strug­gle for liberation.” Hence, no standard of truth is to be honored except “the criterion of appropriateness” to current feminist concerns.

The real focus of worship, then, is not the reconstructed goddess (or “Goddess”); she is merely a contingent instru­ment for reaching a politico-social desti­nation. Like an Avis car, this goddess is the latest spiritual vehicle, not to be bought, but to be rented at nominal cost and conveniently left in the parking lot just as soon as we arrive at the feminist utopia. (This goddess may still be #2, but her promoters definitely try harder.) Nor should feminists be singled out as the only practitioners of this kind of utilitarian idolatry: numerous liberation theologians, homosexual apologists, and secular humanists have also become ex­pert at torturing Scripture as they manufacture “usable” gods with sleek designs tested in the wind tunnels of modish progressive doctrine.

Its blasphemy notwithstanding, it is a brilliant strategy for enemies of Western religion and social order. They know that idolatry can have enormously dis­ruptive consequences, as Paul and his companions discovered in Ephesus. Shrewdly guided, it may destroy cathedrals and court houses. Indeed, Fiorenza and Ruether express their fervent solidar­ity with everyone–Marxists, lesbians, homosexuals, Third World revolutionaries, secularists, ecoradicals–engaged in the “liberation struggle” against all extant civil and religious hierarchies in the West. The contortions necessary to de­nounce the gang-rapes common in “tribal societies” while championing the superiority of Third World values over Western ones or to applaud the back-to-nature movement while insisting on the indispensability of abortion mills and chemi­cal contraceptives do provide comic re­lief in these tediously self-serious books, but it is ultimately quite sobering to realize that this is the corrosive essence of the instruction given by professors paid to teach religion at two major Christian educational institutions. One even fears that the publication of these two works will be used to justify academic promotion and larger salaries for their authors.

That school administrators and some ecclesiastical authorities passively per­mit this sort of internal contradiction seems the most impenetrable of religious mysteries. Can it be that the prelate who presides over South Bend, Indiana, has not noticed that one of his prominent under shepherds has smashed the crucifix and erected a feminist totem in the mid­dle of the sheepcote? Can the Protestant ministers of Evanston, Illinois, have failed to detect that the sign under which one of their well-paid generals is con­quering looks less like the cross than like a NOW logo?

Perhaps the explanation of these co­nundrums is to be found in the case of Sonia Johnson, excommunicated from theChurch of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for her radical feminism. The whole incident was actually quite unre­markable and should not have merited even local media coverage. Nevertheless, major newspapers and national televi­sion and radio networks took up Ms. Johnson’s case, almost uniformly romanticizing her as a martyr while carica­turing the Mormon Church as the Inqui­sition come anew. Ms. Johnson’s heresy was represented as merely her support of the ERA, while her shrill attacks on the character of Church leaders and her doctrinal deviations, including the pro­motion of prayer to Mother in Heaven, were discreetly kept out of the general public’s eye. Many of the same com­mentators who vehemently champion separation of Church and state when it comes to, say, prayer in the public schools then suggested that “someone” (presum­ably a governmental someone) ought to protect this poor woman from such awful abuse.

But no one could rightfully intervene and the Mormon bishop involved, with­ out lighting a single faggot, did a perfect­ly horrid thing: he denied a woman who repeatedly and publicly attacked Church doctrine and authority the option of con­tinuing to call herself a member of the Church. What then prevents the officials of other far larger  and more widely re­spected denominations from taking the similar steps of dismissing, censoring, or otherwise disciplining avowedly pagan teachers like Ruether and Fiorenza? One suspects that the reason is not ignorance of their opinions and actions but rather a craven fear of the kind of media drub­bing occasioned by the Johnson expul­sion. However, since surveys have estab­lished beyond question that the media are dominated by people indifferent or hos­tile to religion, why should their opinions sway policy at religious institu­tions? Would the Christians who faced lions have quailed before Dan Rather? True, a public image of tolerance is quite valuable, especially these days. But is it more precious than the souls of thou­sands of students who, at great expense, attend Church rather than state schools, only to be taught heathenism by their theology teachers? It is distressingly ironic that Ruether can charge that “those who rule pay their professors to proliferate lies,” while the professedly Christian administrators who “rule” her graciously pay her to teach any damn thing (literally) that she pleases. What indeed will become of institutions whose leaders cheerfully convert the donations and bequests of devout Christians into salaries and forums for well-read idola­tors? If Jesus was correct when He de­clared that a house divided against itself cannot stand, then the future for such in­ stitutions is very bleak. And if Ezekiel was right when he taught that those ap­pointed as spiritual watch men must bear the sins they could have prevented, then on the promised Day of Judgment more than a few deans of theologydepartments will join with the idolators in imploring the mountains to hide them from the face of their Lord.