11/16/2002

By CHRISTINE WICKER / Special Contributor to The Dallas Morning News

Last winter, Bible scholar Robert W. Funk called for new symbols to represent a new kind of Christianity that centers on the historical Jesus movement. By spring, scholars at his Westar Institute were coming up with ideas.The Lord's Supper would stay, but it would omit any mention of sacrifice. Consuming the blood and body of Jesus would probably be out. Instead, he envisioned a dinner, open to everybody, representing the kinship of all humans.

Dr. Funk is the founder of the Jesus Seminar, a group of scholars who use historical records and ancient texts in an attempt to separate what the human or historical Jesus actually did or said from what his followers later attributed to him for spiritual or political reasons.

In his new faith, salt might replace the cross as a central symbol because followers of the historical Jesus typically don't believe that Jesus died for humanity's sins and was physically resurrected. Salt has ancient spiritual meanings in many faiths, which would meet Dr. Funk's goal to form a faith that could communicate across cultural boundaries. To substitute for the idea of God as an omnipotent humanlike being, Dr. Funk believes the concept of light has possibilities, which meets another of his goals ­ symbols that have universal meaning in the same way that scientific language does.

Dr. Funk's efforts are bold. His suggestions are among the boldest, but he isn't alone. Efforts to expand, de-emphasize and in some cases do away with traditional Christian symbols are coming from many directions.

Most often, the search for new symbols arises among mainline Christians and those who might like to follow Christ's teachings but feel constrained by church doctrines that they don't accept. Many churches aren't ready to reject old symbols, but they want to include new ones to match changes in their core beliefs. Others want merely to enlarge and vivify Christian experience. Feminist believers want new symbols to reflect their sense of God's feminine aspects. Interfaith proponents want symbols that will transcend religious boundaries.

Even some evangelical churches are engaging new images and giving old ones less prominence. Willow Creek Community Church near Chicago left the cross out of the church sanctuary because its presence might intimidate newcomers not raised in a church setting. Another ministry attempting to attract postmodern converts allows worshippers to write their sins in a bowlful of sand and then wipe them away.

"There's nothing wrong inherently with having new, fresh symbols as long as these symbols stand for the reality that the Christian faith stands for," said William Lane Craig, a research professor of philosophy at Talbot School of Theology in La Mirada, Calif. Dr. Craig has publicly debated members of the Jesus Seminar, who are famous for having used colored marbles to vote on what Jesus did actually say in the New Testament.

A form of poetry

"Religious imagination created them, and we can reject them if we don't find them helpful," said Dr. Maguire, who is also president of the Religious Consultation On Population, Reproductive Health and Ethics.

Some might question whether completely new symbols can ever have the value of age-tempered ones. Psychologist Carl Jung linked traditional symbols with what he called universal archetypes that speak to the deepest human experience. Joseph Campbell found symbols such as the cross and the snake and stories such as the virgin birth and resurrection in ancient cultures across the globe.

Good symbols are psychological events, a form of poetry, said Dr. Maguire, a former priest. Bad ones shrink the mystery of spiritual experience to "thing size" and diminish it, he said.

New symbols can't be pulled out of the air, Dr. Funk acknowledged. "Symbols are not made. They are, we like to say that they are autogenous, that they spring up out of earth. They are self-generating. ... They live primarily where they are embedded in stories," he said.

Or in spiritual experience, say others.

When the United Methodists sent the Rev. Diana Brown Holbert out to minister to artists in the Dallas area, she knew she was approaching a group that might be resistant. One woman told her right away, "The name Jesus gives me the shivers."

Ms. Holbert eschewed all overtly Christian symbols for the group's Sunday night meeting place at Grace United Methodist Church.

"I'm just not going to be putting up things that are overly familiar and formulaic for a bunch of artists," she said. "I'm trying to free us from the idolatry of old symbols that are empty for us and move us to the edge, where we have to have our own experience of the Christ."

The room in which her ArtSpirit Covenant group of 35 meets is now decorated with what looks like a huge mandala. It was created during a presentation led by a woman whose husband had recently died. Ms. Holbert introduced her by saying: "She's here to take us to death's door. We're here to take that journey vicariously, knowing that each one of us will have to go there."

The woman read from her journal and from the Song of Solomon. Participants then took their places around a piece of paper that showed a three-and-a-half-foot circle cut into pie-shaped pieces. Each person was asked to draw what it means to believe that love is stronger than death, that the grass withers, that the flower fades but the word of the Lord stands forever.

After five minutes, they moved to the right and added something to the next piece. When they arrived where they had started, each picture was enhanced by everyone else's additions.

"We all stood up and we went, 'Ahhh. It's so beautiful.' We were close to tears with what we had made," said Ms. Holbert.

She said to the group, "It's the body of Christ." And so they put it on the wall.

Seeking essence of God

"They don't work well because our world view has changed in the last 400 years, ever since Galileo looked through his telescope," said Dr. Funk.

He recognizes that conservative churches, which embrace traditional interpretations of the Bible, are growing while liberal ones are dwindling, but he is not convinced that such numbers undercut his argument. "The mythical matrix of the Christian creed has collapsed, but it will live on for many centuries after the supporting world view has gone," he said. The real test of a religion, according to Dr. Funk, is whether its believers integrate it into their daily lives. In his opinion, traditional Christians don't and can't because the outside world so contradicts their faith statements.

Even ideas used to symbolize the essence of God are being shifted by some churches.

"I still use the language of God," said the Rev. Jerald Stinson of the First Congregational Church of Long Beach, Calif., "but by God I mean what Paul Tillich meant 50 years ago. God as the ground of all being. I use the word God because it's what I grew up with, and I don't have a better term."

In a global age in which horrors from around the world confront people daily, the idea that God can be symbolized as "an actual personal super-being" may seem harder and harder to accept, Dr. Maguire said.

One of the most controversial changes in mainstream churches has been the shift to more feminine or gender-neutral terms for God. When 2,000 people from mostly mainline denominations gathered in Minneapolis in 1993 for a Re-Imagining Conference, they personified Sophia or wisdom as the feminine aspect of God. Their new symbols and rituals touched off national controversy.

Gender isn't the only problem. In the United Church of Christ's "New Century Hymnal," one of the most controversial hymns is one called, "Bring Many Names," said Mr. Stinson. Its reference to an "old aching God gray with endless care" didn't square with many people's notions of God, he said.

Some churches are sidestepping the whole idea of God as an image.

"I think God is a verb," said the Rev. Leslie Penrose of Tulsa's Community of Hope. "God is loving one another. Not 'God asks us to love one another,' but God is loving one another. That is the essence, the nature of God. When we love one another we are in touch with God, and when we abuse one another, we are frustrating God."

She said her church, now part of the United Church of Christ, was formed after she performed holy union ceremonies for gay and lesbian couples in the United Methodist Church and was brought up on church charges. The church that she led voted to withdraw from the denomination rather than answer the charges.

Although the Community of Hope displays a cross decorated with multiethnic human figures, its message is interpreted somewhat differently than in traditional churches. The cross is seen as a symbol of the price that Jesus paid for his insistence that all people be equally welcome at the table and within the "kin-dom" (they don't use the term kingdom) of God.

"Our primary symbol is the table," said Ms. Penrose "It's right in the center. We worship in the round. We want to re-imagine God not as something transcendent but as something in our midst, as the power of right relationships in our midst."

In line with that, one of the church's most important symbols is a wall on which a picture of the globe has been painted. People are invited to dip their hands in paint and add their handprint to those already surrounding the earth. The mural refers to the congregation's emphasis on making all touch sacred, said Ms. Penrose.

"People with AIDS or people with mental illness are considered basically untouchable," she said. "What we want to say is that they are not only touchable, but when you touch them you're touching God."

Christine Wicker, a former staff writer, is a free-lance writer in Milwaukee.