Picture by Penny Juncker
If you can imagine riding a bike across part of Europe with your husband after World War II and studying under both Karl Barth and Gerhard von Rad, (at different universities) you can envision some of the life of Dr. Elizabeth Achtemeier.
Her last teaching position was as Visiting Professor of Bible and Homiletics at Union Theological Seminary in Virginia.What amazes me about the late Dr. Achtemeier is that in the face of so much opposition from radical feminists both within the Presbyterian Church USA and out side of it, she continued to uphold the Triune name of the Lord; Father, Son and Holy Spirit, and to defend the right's of unborn babies.
Her little book, Not Til I Have Done: A Personal Testimony is a wonderful witness of how the Lord uses Christian women in the contemporary church. It was her twenty-fifth book. Among other books she has also written, Nature God & Pulpit and Nahum-Malachi in the Interpretation: A Bible Commentary for Teaching and Preaching Series.
This is a long quote by Dr. Achtemeier but worth the time:
"What sort of God do the radical feminists offer me to replace the Father who has guided me my whole life long? An amorphous something called a
PrimalMatrix, a Mother Goddess of earth, a Sophia myth, a He/She, a God/ess, an immanent spirit in nature and all persons. They tell me I too am divine with the spirit uniting all things, when I know that is nonsense. They say I have no sin except that of dependence on my Father, a teaching that I refuted with a hundred examples of my wrong. They declare that the cross of Christ was a bloody mistake, an example of the Father's child abuse, when I know very well that sacrifice was the supreme gift of the Father's love for me. They write that there is no eternal life but
only absorption back into the goddess, but I know that any deity who cannot defeat death is no deity at all. ... "(Not Til I Have Done)
3 comments:
AMEN! May her tribe increase.
Gotta admit, never knew anything about Dr. Achtemeier until after her death. Thanks for the brief introduction. Will look her up on Amazon.
blessings,
dm
Dave, I don't know if you know but Dr. Achtemeier worked with Presbyterians Pro Life almost until her death. If you look on the list of Reformed books by women posted on the Women's Ministry Area, you will see they have no books under A. She was totally ignored by them even after some of us requested they add one of her books.
Of course I don't know that she would have wanted to have any of her books listed with those books that are there.
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