Laughter of Aphrodite: REFLECTIONS ON A JOURNEY TO THE GODDESS by Carol P. Christ (Harper & Row: $15.95; 238 pp.)

Carol P. Christ is a professor of religious studies and women’s studies at San Jose State University and the author of “Diving Deep and Surfacing.” She is also a visiting lecturer and research associate at Harvard Divinity School. Her latest book, “Laughter of Aphrodite,” is an autobiographical reflection on her pilgrimage as a feminist theologian from Christianity to the tradition of the Goddess.

Christ states in her introduction that her theology, which she prefers to consider “thealogy,” transforming the masculine prefix, is rooted in her own experience. Two intuitions ground her theology: that “the earth is holy and our true home” and that “women’s experience, like all human experience, is a source of insight about the divine.” Thus, she opens her work on both a defensive and wistful note:

“I judge everything I learn from the past on the basis of my own experience as shaped, named and confirmed by the voices of my sisters. Out of our intuition, experience, and research, Goddess traditions are being created anew. If I could appeal to Scripture and tradition to justify what I know and write, I would feel less alone and vulnerable.”

The wistfulness disappears fast. Christ proceeds to angrily attack the God of the Judeo-Christian tradition, promoting the Goddess tradition as a theology with more to offer women who are struggling to be rid of the “powerful, pervasive, and long-lasting moods and motivations” of patriarchal religion. Traditional Christianity, she believes, has devalued female power, denigrated the female body, distrusted the female will and denied women’s bonds and heritage. As women struggle to create a new culture, it seems natural to Christ that the Goddess should re-emerge as a symbol of the “newfound beauty, strength, and power of women.”

Without doubt, some of Christ’s complaints about Judeo-Christian traditions are substantive. For example, worship of “God the Father and the King” still continues in most congregations. Much of the Bible is patriarchal. And the language used in liturgy in many congregations is sexist. It’s not so much Christ’s observations and research that are objectionable in this book; it’s the conclusions she draws.

Along with many female theologians, Christ advocates “expressing anger at God” (the Judeo-Christian God in this case) because she argues that “the Christian tradition excludes and denies women’s full (emphasis my own) selfhood.”

But she gets so caught up in her anger that she becomes irrational, going so far as to suggest that women invoke within the liturgy the covenant lawsuit against God: “Through the covenant lawsuit, women can appeal to God against God. They can use God’s own words to indict God for failure to live up to the promises of covenantal relation . . . the appropriate place for this in the liturgy would be either before or after the congregation’s prayers of confession. At that time, a woman might rise and recite the ‘sins’ of God, echoing the word of the people of Israel who said, ‘My God has passed over my rights’ (Isaiah 40:27). Women might begin to collect indictments against God from their own experiences and from literary sources, which could be used regularly or at set times in the liturgy.”

What type of confession is this? Not only does it completely distort the purpose of acknowledging our inadequacies and asking forgiveness, but it divides the congregation, separating women from men, something we feminist Christians are trying to move away from. And what about other oppressed groups? Shouldn’t they have a turn?

Selectivity not only determines how Christ reads the Scriptures, but also how she interprets the meaning of the Goddess tradition. In one of her chapters advocating Goddess worship, she states, “I believe that Goddess images arose in cultures where women were not subordinate,” suggesting that there was a great feminist egalitarian culture in the European stone age. I find this hard to prove from only archeological artifacts, without written records. Nor does a female cult prove a culture was female-led.

“Yahweh as Holy Warrior” is another reason, according to Christ, for totally rejecting the Judeo-Christian beliefs: “If I cannot urge all feminists absolutely to reject war and warrior God/Goddess images, perhaps I can at least encourage those who find the symbol of Yahweh in Exodus and the prophets liberating to examine the roots of that image in the God of war and to acknowledge that the liberating God of Exodus and the prophets acts through war.”

Religious belief would be easy if it were that simple. A thoughtful reader has to ask how Christ responds to the wrathful, warlike side of nature (famine, earthquakes) since nature is one of the two foundations for her belief. Christ selectively excoriates a “holy warrior” who is just and compassionate according to other Scriptures.

Christ’s one-sided view of Christianity shows throughout the book. She asserts that “to know ourselves as daughters of a Father God who claims to be the only parent involved is a pathologically dependent relationship in which our strength and power as women can never be fully affirmed.” But what about the female image of wisdom honored throughout the Bible? I find it hard to believe that someone reading the Bible discovers God only in male imagery.

Christ makes her case so “either/or” that she would have women (and men?) believe there is nothing to learn from Christianity and Judaism; that the Goddess movement (which she rather selectively interprets, too, excluding, for instance, warrior goddess) is the only feminist religion of worth. I am not saying that the Goddess tradition has nothing to teach us. Quite the contrary, my own church recently sponsored a daylong seminar for women entitled the “Goddess in Every Woman,” taught by Jean Shinoda Bolen, author of the best seller by the same name.

But Christ’s book encourages a fracturing of Christian culture, a separation of women and men in their relation to God. Her book would suggest that no reforms are currently taking place, that men’s experiences are completely different from women’s. Is it possible that despite cultural limitations, Jesus and Moses might have some liberating things to say? Does Christ’s type of thinking mean we should disregard Freud or Jung also since they were male? Is it possible that there is some depth and power beyond sanctioned sexism in the Judeo-Christian traditions to the extent that something else has been transpiring throughout biblical history?

Last May, in a commencement address, I heard the presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church state that his “vision of the church is a community wherein the value of ‘inclusiveness’ has the highest priority.” In my own parish, women and men state the creeds almost completely without gender reference, including the Nicene Creed, where the Holy Spirit is referred to as “she.”

Christ says she bases her beliefs on “women’s experience.” This is one female theologian whose life testifies to a different Christian reality than the one painted in “The Laughter of Aphrodite.”

It wouldn’t take a Mary Baker-Eddy to realize that there are more rational books available on feminist theology.