Sometimes heretical evangelicalism merges with progressive goddess worship. While it may, sadly, inspire some, it should leave Jesus’ disciples first in shock, then shame and sorrow and finally lead to prayer and intersession for the lost. It should also lead to thankfulness since Christ has promised that no one may remove Christ’s own from the Father’s hand. We are safe in his keeping. (John 10:27-30)
In the gospel of John, Jesus tells his disciples to abide in his love, ‘Just as the Father has loved me, I have also loved you; abide in my love.” (John 15:9) Called to abide in the love of Jesus—what greater calling is there than this. But abiding in the love of the One who is truth means holding onto truth-in particular to the truth of Christ, to the truth of his word, to the truth of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit.
In the first chapter of John, we are reminded that Jesus is God, the word who was with God and was God. And how do we know God, how can we be faithful to the truth of who God is, John also tells his readers in 1:18, “No one has seen God at any time; the only begotten God who is in the bosom of the Father, He has explained him.” So in our relationship with Jesus, in our union with the eternal Son of the Father, we learn through the Holy Spirit by means of the word of God about God. If we love Jesus we will be truthful about the Holy One.
Is the Holy One—goddess? Because God is El Shaddai is he the voluptuous God and erotic? Or Sophia, Shakti, Shiva, Kali”? Never! On the Facebook page “Feminist Agenda Network,” linked to by Advocacy Committee for Woman’s Concerns, Presbyterian, Sonnie Swenston-Forbes, has linked with some delight to Mike Morrell’s blog and his article, “Weeping with the Goddess in Jake’s Kitchen.” There we learn all of these names for God and more.
Morrell, who has to do with the Wildgoose Festival, has traveled a long road from early charismatic, mystical beginnings to progressive mystical goddess’s positions. He equates the goddess with the Hebrew God of the Bible and with Jesus. But some of his names, Shakti, Shiva, and Kali are Hindu. His Sophia is Gnostic and his form of El Shaddai pagan. In fact throughout his posting are shades of panentheism and pure paganism. With an erotic cartoon Morrell writes:
In Proverbs God’s wisdom is personified as is lady folly. However, in the New Testament we are allowed to see that Jesus is the complete personification of God’s Wisdom. Paul tells the Church that because they understand the mystery of God, “Christ himself,” they know the one in whom “is hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge.” (Colossians 2: 2-3) Paul also warns the Colossians that they should not allow anyone to take them captive to the world’s deception. Goddess worship is as old as pagan cultures and as empty and deadly as any sin that has ever led the people of God astray.So for me, seeing the sacred feminine as Sophia in Proverbs, or El Shaddai in the Old Testament, or Jesus-as-Mother in several New Testament depictions (not to mention in the writings of mystics like Julian of Norwich) gives me back something I’ve never had as a man: the Voluptuous God, the female creator and nurturer who is comfortable with the space she inhabits. El Shaddai is self-possessed with a powerful, seductive eroticism, one that can both initiate and follow. When I spend time with God, she can ignite my senses with insight and proposition; she can also receive everything I have to give. When our workers [leaders over some kind of house church] encourage us to “Make love to your Lord,” guys, it’s worth reframing this!
Instead we abide in the pure love of Father, Son and Holy Spirit knowing that in Jesus Christ we know God.
6 comments:
Good Lord! Why not just call God Ba'al and run around cutting ourselves? I'm afraid there will soon be a new market for Asherah poles.
Yes, I was rather surprised that Ba'al didn't show up. How can you have a goddess without Ba'al or would that open the door to suspicions about what is really going on spiritually.
I'm not surprised that Ba'al is not listed, but might have expected Asherah as that is the female goddess among the Canaanites. But probably in an attempt not to be too offensive to Christians, chose not to use that particular female goddess...just guessing.
This is utter, unadulterated heresy unaltered from the pits of hell, most likely crated by the evil one himself. An utter abomination!
He wasn’t afraid to use Kali the goddess who has a string of skulls around her neck. I do find that extremely offensive. It is also offensive that he equates worship with sexuality. We are not progressing but falling backward into the darkness of ancient idolatries.
What if pagan deities are shadows, shades, and partial revelations of the One True God? After all, YHWH proclaims "I am the Lord your God; there is no other."
I'd be curious as to what you think of this Jewish author, Jay Michaelson, in Polytheism and Nonduality. My guess is you won't be a fan, but I have to try. :)
Christ's grace and peace be with you.
Mike,
If you had only said this, “What if pagan deities are shadows, shades, and partial revelations of the One True God? After all, YHWH proclaims "I am the Lord your God; there is no other," my answer would have been somewhat different, but because you point me to the article Polytheism and Nonduality, my answer must change.
I take it, from reading the article that you believe that all words for God all symbols; everything is a manifestation of the one. And by the way I do not find it surprising that classic Hinduism or any kind of pantheism has multiple gods. As the author points out it makes sense that all experience would have some relation to the one.
However, this remark “If we suppose that God is, as older theologies had it, a sort of Divine puppetmaster, a character who, like you or I, has separate existence, but unlike you or I also has attributes such as omnipotence and omnibenevolence, then the excesses of Hindu polytheism or Kabbalistic polymorphism … are indeed outrageous.”
I do believe his combination of omnipotence and omnibenevolence are telling. Older theologies!-the same theologies-the unchanging God who is all kind, giving and powerful is also eternal.
“Careful theology is rigorous, and like Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed, carefully edits any imputation of anthropomorphism to the Deity, ensuring that we understand all this to be mere allegory, employed so that non-philosophers can perceive a glimmer, however dim, of the truth. Really, God is beyond all proposition, so much so that even the word "God" is, at best, an approximation.”
It is I think the heart of Michaelson’s article and several comments are necessary. Being Jewish he does not believe that Jesus is God’s final and truthful revelation. And yet as a Christian, I can know that Jesus revealed by the Spirit in Holy Scripture is not a symbol but God. And human. It is God who does the revealing, the telling, etc. In Jesus is light, there isn’t light anywhere else. When Jesus calls God his Father that is what God is. And God’s Fatherhood defines what Fatherhood should be not the other way around. We cannot know all there is to know about God but we do know what God has given us in his word and in his Son.
Michaelson states that “Yes, some symbols are better than others, relatively speaking; better candles than guns. But their worth is evaluated in a consequentialist way, in terms of the kinds of life on this world they engender. In terms of the absolute, they are all technologies, nothing more; they are fingers that gesture at the moon…”
But that allows for what we say is right to be a symbol-when we could be wrong. Better candles than guns-with out the word of God who is to say… better a swastika than a cross-who knows-unless they know the One who died on the cross.
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