The Other McCain

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The Radical Theology of Feminism

Posted on | April 1, 2016 | 51 Comments

 

Augsburg College was once a conservative Christian school, but the salt has lost its savor (Matthew 5:13) and is now good for nothing. Founded in 1869 by Norwegian Luthern immigrants and named for the famous “Augsburg Confession” of 1530, the school was originally a seminary for the training of ministers and for its first 52 years of existence, Augsburg Seminary was a male-only institution. The school’s 20th-century conversion into a liberal arts college was accompanied by the slow-motion abandonment of its Christian heritage and mission. About 2,500 undergraduate students pay $34,431 annual tuition to attend Augsburg’s 24-acre campus on Riverside Avenue in Minneapolis.

Augsburg is affiliated with the ultra-liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA) which was formed in 1988 after a schism among Lutherans that emerged in the 1970s. A specific point of contention was the ordination of women, which the ELCA’s predecessor, the Lutheran Church in America, had endorsed in 1970. About one-third of ELCA pastors are now women and, having thus “baptized” radical feminism, so to speak, in 2013 the ELCA elected a woman as its presiding bishop.

To convey a general idea of what sort of ideas nowadays prevail in ELCA circles, the election of Elizabeth Eaton to the denomination’s top post prompted this enthusiastic outburst from Linda Post Bushkofsky, executive director of Women of the ELCA:

As the presiding bishop election process winnowed down nominees, three of the final four candidates were women. . . . As I’ve written before . . . it’s not just about numbers. To respond to the needs facing the church and society in the 21st century, a collaborative leadership style is needed, and studies show that women more naturally use this form of leadership.

See? It’s about “a collaborative leadership style . . . that women more naturally use.” In other words, women are superior to men, and therefore it is “not just about numbers,” but rather about women “naturally” taking control of every position of leadership, leaving men to do . . . what?

Questions like this are never supposed to be asked by those who ponder “the needs facing the church and society in the 21st century,” nor is anyone ever permitted to notice how the abandonment of biblical teaching is reflected by the collapse into secular decadence of formerly Christian schools like Augsburg College. Recall that it was Yale University’s abandonment of its own Christian heritage that was a major focus of William F. Buckley’s famous 1951 critique, God and Man at Yale.

We must wonder what the Lutheran founders of Augsburg College would think to see what the institution has become in the 21st century. The fate of Augsburg alumna Alison Rapp — the defender of child pornography who was fired from her public relations job at Nintendo Wednesday — makes this a “teachable moment,” we might say, for anyone concerned by contemporary trends in our culture. Ms. Rapp graduated from Augsburg in 2011 and wrote, in a 2014 proposal for a conference hosted by the International Communication Association’s Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies Special Interest Group, that she had “conducted research at Augsburg College in Minneapolis, Minnesota on bisexuality in Tokugawa Japan, representations of women in Nintendo’s popular Legend of Zelda series, [and] depictions of gay and lesbian relationships” in pornographic Japanese manga cartoons.

Let the reader try to imagine what those 19th-century Norwegian Lutherans who founded Augsburg Seminary might have said about Ms. Rapp’s “research” and — when you have stopped laughing and caught your breath — think what a serious issue this really is.

Since 1974, ReconcilingWorks: Lutherans for Full Participation has advocated for the full welcome, inclusion, and equity of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Lutherans in all aspects of the life of their Church, congregations, and community. . . .
We are Lutherans working with the recognition that racism, sexism, ageism, able-ism, heterosexism, homophobia, and all the other artificial distinctions that seek to raise one group into privilege and preference over another, conspire together to diminish our world and church.

What we may call “The Gospel of Gayness” began to flourish among Lutherans not long after the ordination of women was accepted by the denomination’s liberal leadership. Was this a coincidence? What sort of theology and doctrine does the ECLA promote? Consider the Rev. Amanda Zentz-Alo of Portland, Oregon’s Central Lutheran Church:

Back when I started my ministry, I didn’t know I would be an ally to people who are LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual). I didn’t know the blessing that this work would be in my life and in my ministry. I had no idea that I would discover that I am called and convicted by Scripture to do it. In 2014, I staffed a “Sacred Space” booth at the Portland Pride Festival, a celebration of and for the LGBTQIA community. . . .
The first time I read a gospel in seminary, my professor opened my eyes to the social justice call of our Savior.

This character — “Social Justice Jesus” — is the progressive mirror-image of “Patriotic Republican Jesus,” the All-American action-hero figure invoked as an object of praise by GOP activists for whom the secular and sacred merge. Liberals have long denounced the “Religious Right” as a menace to democracy, but what about the Religious Left? The Reverend Zentz-Alo, an idolatrous High Priestess in the Temple of Social Justice, proclaims what would seem to be a “salt-free” diet of theological inclusivity and diversity, indistinguishable from the platform of the Democrat Party. The home page of her church declares:

In response to the call in Romans 15:7 to “welcome one another therefore as Christ has welcomed you for the glory of God,” we, the members of Central, join hands with all our sisters and brothers grateful for the unique gifts that each of us has to offer, regardless of race, age, gender identity, marital status, physical and mental abilities, sexual orientation, national origin, or economic status. We celebrate together both the diversity of God’s family and our unity as God’s people.

 

Certain passages of the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Romans might be cited by critics of the Reverend Zentz-Alo’s “diversity” doctrine, which very much resembles the Gnostic heresy. Giving heed to “seducing spirits,” and teaching “doctrines of devils” (I Timothy 4:1), heretics were a menace to the Church even greater than the persecution of Christians by the Roman authorities. Martyrs died gladly rather than to abandon the true faith, so that the Church might live, but Satan also attacked the early Church with enemies more subtle than pagan emperors. Perhaps no battle Christianity ever fought in its 2,000-year history was more crucial than its defeat of Gnosticism, a perverse cult that hypocritically pretended to be “Christian” while secretly promoting doctrines directly at odds with the true faith.

Among the deadliest weapons of Gnosticism were counterfeit scriptures like The Gospel of Thomas. Gnostic cult leaders also shrewdly attacked the Old Testament in treatises like The Hypostasis of the Archons (“The Reality of the Rulers”). Latter-day critics of Paul’s seemingly “sexist” insistence on all-male clergy have failed to comprehend how, even in the first century, false teachers were using “doctrines of devils” in their diabolic efforts to subvert Christianity through syncretism, attempting to corrupt the Church with anti-Christian pagan beliefs. A blasphemous denial of God’s sovereignty and righteousness, Gnosticism rejected the idea of Original Sin and thus rejected also the significance of Christ’s atoning sacrifice. If humans are sinless, we need no Savior, and what is necessary instead is for humans to get in touch with their inner divinity, to “become part of the universal whole by a process of self-knowledge and self-realization,” as Professor Peter Jones explained in his 1992 book The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back: An Old Heresy for the New Age.

Who Is the ‘Author of Confusion’?

Permit me here to digress and explain how easily erroneous teachings can sneak into even the most devout Christian church. More than 20 years ago, in the lobby of a Seventh-Day Adventist church in Rome, Georgia, I picked up a tract defending the King James Version against its modern critics. What the author called attention to was the way in which the proliferation of new English translations undermined the sense of biblical authority, giving credence to the often-heard skeptic’s argument that somehow errors in the translation of the Bible from its original languages means that we don’t actually know the truth of what Jesus said, et cetera. In addition, making a point incidental to his main argument, the author described a very common way in which Christians sometimes almost unwittingly adopt private or personal interpretations of scripture that are at odds with the actual text of the Bible. You see this often in Bible study groups, where a sort of round-robin discussion format prevails.

It is sadly too common for well-meaning Bible-study teachers, particularly those working with young people, to let their classes turn into a theological parliament, where students are permitted more or less to vote their consensus understanding of scripture. “What this verse means to me,” is a phrase one hears often from the members of such groups. Of course, this is nonsense; what matters is what the verse actually says, and what God means to teach us, and if what it means to you is something different from this actual meaning, then you are wrong.

There is a reason why, whenever I quote the Bible, it is always the King James Version, and I do not mean to say that other translations have no value. However, I think it is no coincidence that we have seen increasing confusion about the meaning of Christianity in the past century, as more and more new translations are pushed into print. Furthermore, neither do I think it is a coincidence that this confusion has been accompanied by a tendency toward the “collaborative leadership style” that the ELCA feminist Linda Post Bushkofsky celebrated as “more naturally” female. “For God is not the author of confusion” (I Corinthians 14:33), and perhaps some readers could cite the following passages of that chapter by heart. Paul’s concern that “all things be done decently and in order” (I Corinthians 14:40) has often been criticized by feminists, but what do we see when the alternative — the consensus approach and “collaborative leadership” — replaces a scriptural understanding of God’s creation?

“So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them. And God blessed them, and God said unto them, Be fruitful, and multiply . . .”
Genesis 1:27-28 (KJV)

You can sit around pondering the ancient Hebrew and Greek texts or engage in whatever other approach to scriptural exegesis suits you, but you cannot evade the clear meaning of God’s word here: First, that the division of humanity into male and female was part of the divine plan and, second, that the blessing came with a commandment to procreate — a commandment that has never been rescinded. Obviously, not every man or woman must marry or have children to serve God, but no one who takes the Bible seriously would ever dare to blaspheme by invoking religious authority to attack the created order.

We may watch the fools of the world go to Hell in their usual way, saying in their hearts there is no God (Psalm 14:1), but how will anyone be saved if God’s people no longer speak the truth? When the Church refuses to cling to truth, and instead becomes “conformed to this world” (Romans 12:2), who will stand apart from the world’s sin and folly? Progressive denominations like the ELCA have abandoned the gospel truth and, exchanging it for a counterfeit neo-gnostic doctrine of “diversity” and “inclusion,” have joined the parade of fools marching down the highway to Hell. Whatever else you may think of the Reverend Zentz-Alo, she is not a Christian minister. She is a liar and a fool teaching falsehood and folly. These heretical High Priestesses in the Temple of Social Justice will call you a “bigot” and accuse you of “hate,” if you teach the Word (John 1:1) and proclaim the Way, the Truth and the Life.

What a dreadful curse must fall on these “progressive” fools! They are servants of sin (Romans 6:20) who do the work of Satan, the father of lies (John 8:44), as they advocate abortion, endorse fornication, and sacrilegiously confer their blessing on sin. But I digress . . .

‘Lustful Gratification of the Flesh’

Feminists have long understood, far better than most of their opponents, that destroying Christianity is necessary to feminism’s success. In the introduction of her 1993 book The Creation of Feminist Consciousness, Gerda Lerner takes aim at the “mental constructs” of Western civilization and “the major assumptions about gender in patriarchal society.” Foremost among these, according to Professor Lerner, is the belief that men and women “are essentially different creatures” in terms of “their needs, capacities and functions.” Professor Lerner, who as a teenager in the 1930s studied Marxist theory under J.B.S. Haldane, specifically targets the belief that men and women differ “in the social function assigned to them by God.” Like every other Marxist, Professor Lerner believed the exact opposite of Judeo-Christian theology. God did not create man in His own image, the Marxist believes, but rather man created God, this fiction serving as a supernatural source of secular authority. Ideas Have Consequences, as Richard Weaver warned, and Marxism’s reversal of Christianity led to the deaths of an estimated 100 million people under the tyranny of Communism in the 20th century.

 

Despite the bloody costs of this nightmare, Marxism’s deadly ideas have persisted, thanks to the influence of feminists like Professor Lerner. Chapter 5 of her book is devoted to a number of women whose claims of mystical insight served to cloak their proto-feminism in religious authority. These included Margaret Fell, a follower (and subsequently the wife) of George Fox, founder of the Quakers, as well as Ann Lee, who played a crucial role in the Shakers, a sect that split from the Quakers. While serving a jail sentence in 1772, Ann Lee claimed to have a vision and, asserting this as the word of “Christ who dwells in me,” proclaimed that “lustful gratification of the flesh” (i.e., sex) was “the source and foundation of human corruption.” This vision became the basis of a doctrine of celibacy among her Shaker followers who “called her Mother Ann Lee of the New Creation,” as Professor Lerner explained on page 102 of The Creation of Feminist Consciousness:

To escape persecution Ann Lee and eight followers traveled to New England and soon settled near Albany, New York, where she founded a utopian colony and continued her preaching and proselytizing missionary work. . . .
Ann Lee’s doctrine revitalized the concept of an androgynous God — Sophia, Holy Wisdom of the Bible, was the female element in God; in Christ the masculine side had been made manifest and in Mother Ann Lee the feminine side had been reincarnated. Ann Lee’s revelations indicated that the millennium was at hand and that the Shakers, with their celibate, pious life would hasten its coming. . . .
In line with Mother Lee’s theology, Shakers believed in the equality of the sexes. In their communities leadership was shared between men and women and they practiced their belief that women, as well as men, could be teachers and preachers.

Unfortunately for the Shakers, these revelations of the millennium were not only premature, but in disparaging “lustful gratification of the flesh,” Mother Lee’s celibate followers ensured that the cult members would not have any children to continue their “utopian colony”:

At its peak in the mid-19th century, there were 6,000 Shaker believers. By 1920, there were only 12 Shaker communities remaining in the United States. In the present day, there is only one active Shaker village, Sabbathday Lake Shaker Village, which is located in Maine. Their celibacy resulted in the thinning of the Shaker community, and consequently many of the other Shaker settlements are now village museums, like Hancock Shaker Village in Massachusetts.

There are today exactly four known Shakers dwelling in their Maine village, and perhaps the “revitalized the concept of an androgynous God,” as Professor Lerner described the Shaker theology of Ann Lee’s vision, did not come from Christ, but rather from Satan himself.

 

Ye shall be as gods” (Genesis 3:5) was the false promise of Satan’s original lie, and the sinful idea that human beings can defy God, living according to our own beliefs without respect to God’s law, has been a cause of violence and evil in the world ever since. What the Shakers condemned as “the source and foundation of human corruption” is in fact merely obedience to the commandment of God, that mankind should “be fruitful and multiply.” The beauty of God’s design — man and woman together, accepting the new lives of their children as God’s blessing — should never be scorned. Ann Lee stands condemned as a blasphemer. “Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil” (Isaiah 5:20).

Goddesses, Androgyny and the Anti-Christ

What shall we say of “the concept of an androgynous God” that Professor Lerner credits Ann Lee with having “revitalized”? Its origin was paganism, “the metaphysics of the ancient Mother-Goddess religions,” as Professor Lerner explains in The Creation of Feminist Consciousness:

In the earliest centuries of Christianity the worship of the harvest goddesses Ceres and Demeter was widespread in the Mediterranean area. In Europe, heathen practices like the celebration of festivals outdoors near certain stones and springs previously identified with goddesses, continued for centuries after the acceptance of Christianity. . . . The mysterious life-giving forces of the Mother-Goddess continued to be celebrated in folklore and folk memory, such as the custom of drawing the goddess in a wagon around the fields to ensure the success of the crops.

The corruption of Christianity by the infusion of pagan beliefs is known as syncretism, and the “ancient Mother-Goddess religions” mentioned by Professor Lerner include the gruesome and perverse cults of Canaan. To cite one Baptist theologian’s description, the Canaanites practiced “a crude and debased form of ritual polytheism . . . associated with sensuous fertility-cult worship of a particularly lewd and orgiastic kind.” Any secular reader who has made it this far in my essay should pause to contemplate the irony here. Feminists generally denounce Christianity not just as patriarchal, but also as “unscientific,” yet we see that the atheist Professor Lerner celebrated these “ancient Mother-Goddess religions,” an ignorant system of superstition historically associated with the utmost cruelty of primitive savagery. How is it that a renowned academic would welcome a revival of the pagan cult of Astarte (also known as Ashtoreth or Ishtar) in the name of “feminist consciousness”?

Goddess-worship is now widely practiced in ECLA churches. The denomination ordains lesbians as ministers, and what is called “feminist spirituality” is promoted at Ebenezer Lutheran Church in San Francisco where, on Christmas Day 2015, Pastor Stacy Boom posted this “prayer”:

Sophia our Goddess,
As a full moon rising,
You unveil your vision of love
for the universe
and work within us
to bring about your healing purposes.
Sophia our Goddess,
as a full moon rising,
give us the wisdom to understand
that your justice exceeds
even our best intentions,
and your love is a cosmic quality
we only begin to discern:
that, trusting in your moon-risings,
in your birth-giving powers,
we celebrate and embody the coming
of your peace on earth;
Sophia our Goddess,
As a full moon rising,
You are the One Sacred Thread
and Source for All Times,
Grandmother, Mother, and Child,
Blessed She!

This is definitely not a Christian prayer. Any student of the occult would recognize the reference to “Grandmother, Mother, and Child” as an invocation of the so-called “Triple Goddess” (Maiden, Mother, Crone) of modern neo-pagan Wicca. So far gone is the ELCA in its abandonment of biblical truth that it accepts witchcraft in its “Lutheran” pulpits.

“There are many different ways of looking at the Divine Feminine within the same liturgical setting. Darkness is another image for the Divine Feminine, reclaiming Darkness as being as holy as Light. . . . The mission of Ebenezer/herchurch Lutheran is to be a prophetic voice within the patriarchal church. Inclusion of the Divine Feminine will change the whole structure of the church. Eventually the clergy structure will be dismantled.”
Pastor Stacy Boom, 2011

Certainly we should take this seriously, because such teachings will “change the whole structure” of the church — or rather, would do so, in any “church” that follows the ECLA down the road toward pagan worship of “the Divine Feminine.” The list of “Recommended Reading” on the website of Ebenezer Lutheran Church includes The Creation of Feminist Consciousness by the Marxist Gerda Lerner. Coincidence? I think not.

 

“All expressions of gender identity are a blessing!” What this ECLA church celebrates is a denial of God’s created order, a latter-day expression of the ancient Gnostic belief in which “the divine being is . . . best expressed by androgyny . . . the erasure of the male-female distinction,” as Peter Jones observed in 1992. Gnostic believers sought “the attainment of an androgynous or sexless state,” Jones wrote in The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back. This “radical refusal of sexual differentiation” was an expression of a “refusal of creational sexuality as presented in the Genesis account,” according to Jones. “The inversion of sexual roles leads to sexual confusion” and, because “true divinity is androgynous, it follows that the true Gnostic will finally seek androgyny.”

This weird heretical cult belief has been revived in our time in large part because modern feminism specifically rejects Jesus, the Son of God, a male incarnation of divinity sent by God the Father. This anti-Christian attitude led Professor Mary Daly to propose “castrating God.”

 

In her 1973 book Beyond God the Father, Professor Daly called for “cutting away the Supreme Phallus” (p. 19) so that “Christianity itself should be castrated” (p. 71), because “the role of liberating the human race form the original sin of sexism would seem to be precisely the role that a male symbol cannot perform. The image itself . . . functions to glorify maleness” (p. 72). Daly endorses “an ethic which transcends the most basic of role stereotypes, those of masculine/feminine,” bringing about an “androgynous world” free from “the archaic heritage of psycho-sexual dualism,” a liberation made possible by women “castrating the phallic ethic” (pp. 105-106). As bizarre as all that may sound, Daly furthermore called for a “renaming of the cosmos” by a feminist sisterhood she called the “Antichurch . . . the bringing forth into the world of New Being” (pp. 138-139). Daly continues on pg. 140:

There is a bond, then, between the significance of the women’s revolution as Antichrist and its import as Antichurch. Seen in the positive perspective in which I have presented it, as a spiritual uprising that can bring us beyond sexist myths, the Antichrist has a natural corrrelative in the coming of the Antichurch, which is the communal uprising against the social extensions of the male Incarnation myth, as this has been objectified in the structures of political power.

Daly describes this as “the Second Coming of female presence not only as Antichrist but also as Antichurch,” as a “rising woman-consciousness” that “has an organic consequence in the rejection of sexist rituals” (pp. 140-141). Daly sees this “spiritual dimension of feminist consciousness” as unleashing chaos and terror by destroying the “Christocentric cosmos”:

This women’s revolution as Antichurch represents this terror of chaos and says it will no longer kept at bay. It rejects not only the myths of patriarchy but their externalization in ritual.

Dismiss this as the ranting of a maniac, if you wish, but ask yourself: Can anything else explain what has happened to Augsburg College?

 

Augsburg College [in 2014] was named to Campus Pride’s list of the Top 50 LGBT-Friendly Colleges. Campus Pride, a nonprofit organization aimed at creating more LGBT-friendly colleges, compiled the list using schools that achieved the highest ratings in categories such as LGBT academic life, LGBT student life, LGBT housing, and more. In 2013, Campus Pride awarded Augsburg College a perfect score of 5 out of 5 stars on its LGBT-Friendly Campus Climate Index.

What would those 19th-century Norwegian Lutherans have to say about the Queer Pride Alliance at the college they founded as a seminary? Does anyone think Augsburg College’s founders would be pleased to know that it was rated one of the Top 50 LGBT-Friendly Colleges? Can we imagine those Lutheran founders congratulating the winners of Augsburg’s “LGBTQIA Student Leadership Awards”?

 

Obviously, this was not at all what the founders of Augsburg College had in mind, so how did it happen? Probably the decision to admit women students in 1922 — immediately after the ratification of the 19th Amendment, which guaranteed women’s right to vote — reflected the willingness of Augsburg’s leaders to be “conformed to this world.” Drifting along with the political trend, Augsburg next abandoned its status as a seminary to become a liberal arts college. This transition, from an all-male institution training Lutheran ministers to a coed college, was accomplished in the span of a single generation, so that the Lutheran pastor who graduated from (all-male) Augsburg Seminary in 1921 might live to see his daughter graduate from Augsburg College in 1963.

The More-Is-Better Mentality

We see in operation here the modern idea of History as Progress. As G.K. Chesterton said in 1905, “Progress is a comparative of which we have not settled the superlative.” By 1923, Chesterton remarked, “My attitude toward progress has passed from antagonism to boredom. I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday because it is Thursday.” The direction of Progress, to the modern mind, is always toward continual improvement, a society becoming more democratic according to an ideal of increasing equality. The great engine of modern Progress is education, and if education is Good, then more education is Better. This modern more-is-better mentality of Progress is also applied to the idea of democratic equality. No matter how much equality and democracy we may have now, the advocates of Progress always want more. Once women got the vote, and were admitted to formerly all-male schools like Augsburg College, the More is Better principle required that some new manifestation of equality must be adopted as proof of the continual improvement necessary to History as Progress.

So it was that Lutherans began ordaining women as ministers, and the young Lutheran who had been present on that occasion in 1970 would likely live to see a woman elected as presiding bishop of the ELCA, by which time (a) lesbian ministers would be preaching pagan goddess-worship from “Lutheran” pulpits, and (b) Augsburg College would brag about its five-star rating as an “LGBT-Friendly” campus.

This, you see, is how modern Progress operates.

Amid their more-is-better celebration of continual improvement in democratic equality, however, some Christians have lost sight of God. We might also suspect that Lutherans (and many other Americans, whether Christian or not) should have taken more seriously the lunatic rants of Mary Daly, who was clearly crazy, but not necessarily wrong. Can we now see in hindsight that the influence of “rising woman-consciousness” — feminism as the Antichurch of the Antichrist — has been exactly what she said it would be? Feminism’s radical theology, “castrating God,” has brought forth the “terror of chaos” of an “androgynous world,” unstructured by the “psycho-sexual dualism” that sees men and woman as naturally different, each necessary to the other in the created order.

+ + + + +

The Sex Trouble project began in 2014 and reader support is vital to this research into radical feminism. Contrary to what feminists claim, patriarchy is usually just another word for “paying the bills.” And remember the Five Most Important Words in the English Language:

HIT THE FREAKING TIP JAR!

Never doubt God answers prayers. Thanks in advance.




 

 

MORE FROM THE ‘SEX TROUBLE’ SERIES:

 


Comments

51 Responses to “The Radical Theology of Feminism”

  1. CrustyB
    April 1st, 2016 @ 9:58 am

    Slightly OT but this is an actual headline:
    North Carolina, Chicago Won’t Take Your Trans ‘Intolerance,’ Rahm Say
    https://www.dnainfo.com/chicago/20160331/boystown/north-carolina-chicago-wont-take-your-lgbt-intolerance-rahm-says

    Sure, we have the highest homicide rate in the country. But weird sexual perverts can pee wherever they want!

  2. Evi L. Bloggerlady
    April 1st, 2016 @ 10:50 am

    A lot of people drawn to academia are like cancer cells looking for a place to metastasize.

    A lot of schools are stage 4

  3. NeoWayland
    April 1st, 2016 @ 11:08 am

    I’m not the first to say it, but colleges and universities are hothouses. Radicals are protected and don’t have to produce results.

    Competition keeps us honest.

  4. DeadMessenger
    April 1st, 2016 @ 11:11 am

    Setting aside the fact that no one at ELCA has actually read the Bible, or if they have, they don’t understand it:

    “The person without the Spirit does not accept the things that come from the Spirit of God but considers them foolishness, and cannot understand them because they are discerned only through the Spirit.” (1 Corinthians 2:14)

    But, setting all that aside, “It’s about “a collaborative leadership style . . . that women more naturally use” doesn’t seem like a good thing at all. Being a manager, I know from experience that it’s best to just lead. Looking back through history, nowhere do we see someone with “a collaborative leadership style” called a great leader, mainly because they’re not leading, they’re taking a poll.

    For pity’s sake, even a progressive chump like Mark Zuckerberg actually leads.

  5. robertstacymccain
    April 1st, 2016 @ 11:12 am

    Let’s talk about something: When a man becomes disgruntled with his life, when he becomes alienated and withdrawn, we call him a “loner.”

    Disgruntled and alienated women, by contrast, have a “social justice” movement that rationalizes their alienation, so that the same type of antisocial personality which, among males, would be viewed as a cranky loner, instead becomes a political force that unites women in their antisocial rage.

  6. robertstacymccain
    April 1st, 2016 @ 11:17 am

    “Being a manager, I know from experience that it’s best to just lead.”

    Some people are natural-born leaders, but these personalities are by no means common. There is a certain charisma that makes a great leader, a force which inspires others to follow him. However, too many people don’t understand teamwork. They resent the prestige of the natural leader, and will seek to sabotage him. It is these selfish backstabbers who make life so miserable in the modern workplace.

  7. DeadMessenger
    April 1st, 2016 @ 11:31 am

    Wait a sec.

    In the Zentz-Alo quote above, she says “The first time I read a gospel in seminary, my professor opened my eyes to the social justice call of our Savior.”

    So. This mysterious “social justice call” can only be discerned after being pointed out by a “professor”? Not much of a professor though, really, because he (or more likely, she) doesn’t seem to grasp that the Gospel of Jesus Christ is simply what is found in 1 Corinthians 15:1-11, and that is, Jesus was born, He died, He went into the tomb, was raised on the third day, and was subsequently seen by many. That’s it. That’s the Gospel, no matter what King James claimed.

    I’m not seeing social justice in there anywhere, let alone the celebration of sin.

    I only have one word at this point: Laodicea.

  8. The Radical Theology of Feminism | Living in Anglo-America
    April 1st, 2016 @ 11:36 am

    […] The Radical Theology of Feminism […]

  9. Fail Burton
    April 1st, 2016 @ 12:04 pm

    Odd to see a seminary converted to an insane asylum.

  10. Durasim
    April 1st, 2016 @ 12:39 pm

    The “Mainline” Protestant churches are gone.

    What was once the majority and bulwark of American Christianity lost the culture wars decades ago. Now almost all the “mainline” denominations are falling all over themselves to conform to every new progressive demand: proclaiming feminist revisions of doctrine, ordaining woman and open homosexuals as clergy, dismissing heterosexual marriage as superfluous, sanctifying homosexual marriage, and so forth.

    The infiltration and destruction of the “Mainline” has been an unmitigated success for Leftism and Feminism. They are now attempting in earnest to do the same to the evangelical churches. We see the progressive press gushing over people like Rob Bell or Matthew Vines who openly announce their intentions to do so. There will be more of their cohort. Such a thing would have been unthinkable less than a decade ago.

  11. RS
    April 1st, 2016 @ 1:27 pm

    The problem with the term “mainline,” is that it is too inclusive. Even those denominations which we think as very liberal, i.e. Presbyterians, Anglicans, etc. have conservative branches which have refused the rush into the abyss. As I mentioned in the last post about Augsburg College, the Missouri and Wisconsin Synods retain their conservative, Bible-based theology. Even among the so-called “evangelical” denominations, due to extreme congregational polity, there are those which have gone off the theological rails. I could point to Baptist churches which have more in common with an ELCA congregation, than your typical Southern Baptist church. As always, one must be discerning and discriminating in listening to what comes from the pulpit and the leadership in any individual congregation, regardless of denomination.

  12. RS
    April 1st, 2016 @ 1:32 pm

    [T]he Canaanites practiced “a crude and debased form of ritual polytheism . . . associated with sensuous fertility-cult worship of a particularly lewd and orgiastic kind.”

    Quite so. And for that reason, the Israelites were commanded to destroy them utterly, which, alas, they did not do. However, contemplate the above and read the story of Christ healing the Canaanite woman’s child, who on her knees expressed her faith and begged him to allow to “eat the crumbs” from the master’s table. The Canaanite culture makes that story so much more significant on so many different levels.

  13. Dana
    April 1st, 2016 @ 2:10 pm

    The concept of an androgynous God is something which indicates not God, but the limitations of human understanding. We use the male references when it comes to speaking or writing about God, but God is not male: to be male necessarily implies the incomplete nature which requires a female. God is not male, and God is not female: God simply is, and our weak understanding of beings which are not sexed in one way or another misinforms our intellect on this subject.

    The androgynous God concept is one formed by limited minds.

  14. Why is Cruz Turning Down Airtime? | Regular Right Guy
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    […] The Radical Theology of Feminism […]

  15. DeadMessenger
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:08 pm

    You can usually make such a determination right on the church’s own website, weeding out at least a good 90% of the dross that way.

    Personally, I’m in the market for a good, old-fashioned Reformationist church. Having trouble finding one of those, though.

  16. John Zane
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:09 pm

    Another book for you to read, if you haven’t already:

    Goddess Unmasked (http://www.amazon.com/Goddess-Unmasked-Neopagan-Feminist-Spirituality/dp/0965320898)

  17. DeadMessenger
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:10 pm

    There’s so many layers of meaning to that story, that I wrote a paper on it once. That’s exactly why I love the Bible so much: there are many layers of meaning to everything in there.

  18. DeadMessenger
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:12 pm

    Here’s where we disagree: I believe the Bible supports the fact of God’s maleness.

  19. Adobe_Walls
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:15 pm

    So there is hope after all.

  20. M. Thompson
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:16 pm

    Neither hot nor cold, and thus useless in the sight of the Lord?

  21. DaTechGuy on DaRadio
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:33 pm

    You mean to say that Luthor’s vision of separating from the church had the end result Lutheran Churches abandoning God for pagan worship?

    Who woulda thunk it?

    Quite a contrast to Mother Angelica who was buried today who preached an orthodox Catholic faith, love of Christ and following the Gospel and the Eucharist.

    Let’s see which church endures

  22. M. Thompson
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:36 pm

    Darn sure they overwhelming supported people like Phyllis Kahn* and Keith Ellison each election. Both of whom are complete and utter progressives.

    *She’s been parked in the Minnesota Legislature since 1974, and has supported first cousin marriage and giving 12 year olds the vote, as well as being a complete NIMBY.

  23. M. Thompson
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:36 pm

    Rather common though.

  24. kilo6
    April 1st, 2016 @ 3:59 pm

    Would the Luther insult generator be an appropriate addition to this thread?

  25. Adam
    April 1st, 2016 @ 5:02 pm

    These type of universities are merely the modern day version of good old fashioned mental institutions. The only problem is that they then go and let them out.

  26. Fail Burton
    April 1st, 2016 @ 5:23 pm

    It may not be entirely a coincidence that lesbian supremacist ideology lends itself so well to a religion, since its unquestioned faith in the unseen and tendency to see its own identity as some kind of Messiah most closely resembles a religion, even down to being cast out of the garden by heterosexuality. It is also reliant on a handful of true believers most closely knowledgeable about their own “oppression” to mainstream their religion to the moneychangers and Romans as it were. That can be clearly seen in the womens and gender studies classes offered, which have a significant cluster of Mexico, Latin American and African women’s. The one true voice comes from she who is most oppressed – the non-white lesbian (or straight woman who has not yet seen the light) – as one would expect of an intersectional (racial) lesbian supremacist movement.

    The question is what can this new religion produce. For all its bluster it continually infiltrates institutions and even architecture it cannot itself produce. Unless it can become something rather like a state religion, it will never have armies or a police force to protect it, or technologies to impel it.

    Given its addiction to the Third World and immigration and its de facto admission it cannot survive either in those places or mass exposure to it, it seems more like a cult of failure or even suicide than a success story. Too much of its success depends on things it itself cannot do: reproduce and survive.

    And we have already seen what kind art it produces; all of it prioritizes past grievances and one’s sexual and racial relation to those grievances – art, story-telling, music, etc. while producing nothing new. Hamilton is a good example of the its intersectional arm, a play which resembles a cargo cult more than anything else. By putting on the appearance of success, it assumes that IS success. Ironically, that is the very cultural appropriation they so bitterly complain of. The difference is Europeans didn’t build a Taj Mahal and then wait for an empire and it’s armies and success to emerge. Maybe lesbians should dress up as a Rolls-Royce Merlin engine for Halloween.

  27. Durasim
    April 1st, 2016 @ 5:59 pm

    I understand that the term “Mainline” is large and slippery, which is one reason I put it in quotations. The decentralized nature of Protestantism only compounds the issue. What I generally meant was the denominations that have existed in the U.S. for more than a century, have some antecedent foundation in Europe, and claim to be in doctrinal conformance with their official, national church hierarchy. These were the denominations that comprised the “P” in “WASP.”

    Belonging to one of these “Mainline” denominations used to be a marker of middle-class or genteel respectability (before the 1960’s). If one was a college-educated, professional, middle or upper class person, it was expected that you belonged to some mainstream denomination (whether or not you were actually pious).

    When the leftists co-opted the notion of middle-class respectability and changed it to conform to their mandates, the “Mainline” churches fell because their official hierarchies wanted to maintain their status of “respectable” and “mainstream.”

    Now, we are told that “respectable” and “mainstream” churches must emphasize unconditional “inclusion,” erase the “judgmental” concept of sin, celebrate homosexuality and other diverse forms of “love,” crusade for “social justice,” etc.
    And if you do not agree, then you must be some unwashed, illiterate peon squatting in a warehouse and dancing with snakes.

  28. Finrod Felagund
    April 1st, 2016 @ 6:56 pm

    Well, we know for a fact that Jesus of Nazareth was male.

  29. RS
    April 1st, 2016 @ 7:25 pm

    Agreed.

    I would note, such Protestantism was generally supported in the public school system, as well. The Roman Catholics and the Lutherans maintained their own schools, leaving the public schools to, at least, nominally confess a generic Protestantism. That’s why parents today have such a hard time believing what goes on in public schools. The train left the station, beginning in the late ’60s and was completely gone by the time Clinton became president. It’s departure was hastened the moment Jimmy Carter ushered in the Department of Education.

  30. RS
    April 1st, 2016 @ 7:33 pm

    I once had an argument with an atheist who used that story to demonstrate that Jesus was a “religious bigot.” (Yes, I know, facepalm.) Without reciting the argument, I noted inter alia that the story appears immediately after a confrontation with the Pharisees in which Christ informs them that their outward manifestations of religious piety avail them no good. He then not only converses with but heals the child of a Gentile and not just any Gentile, but the lowest of the low: a Canaanite.

    Moral? No matter how crappy you are, repentance and faith before God is always accepted.

  31. Dana
    April 1st, 2016 @ 7:39 pm

    Then God must be incomplete, because to be male is to need the female.

  32. Dana
    April 1st, 2016 @ 7:39 pm

    On earth, as a human, yes.

  33. Adobe_Walls
    April 1st, 2016 @ 7:43 pm

    I’ve no doubt Jimmy will rot in hell for it.

  34. Adobe_Walls
    April 1st, 2016 @ 7:47 pm

    Why yes, yes it would. Thanks, what a wonderful toy!!

  35. Joe Joe
    April 1st, 2016 @ 7:52 pm

    RSM,

    First, excellent article. There’s a lot to chew on here. I have read it through, have bookmarked it, and will read it again. I’ll share with you the reactions I’ve had to the first reading:

    1. The attack on the Word. Christianity is based on Logos (order) which can also be translated as “the word”. As Christians, we are people of the word, and the written word (in the form of the Bible) takes a prized position in our lives, culture, and spirituality. The fact that Critical Theory specifically attacks the written word–the text–and claims the “death of the author” and that the text only means what the reader thinks it means links to Critical Theory’s anti-Christian bias. The spread of the Frankfurt-inspired “post structuralism” is evidenced in everything you have pointed out about “cooperative” interpretation of the Bible.

    2. The “prayer” to Sophia reminds me of a funny experience I had in the 90s. I was involved with a Catholic church here in California and one of the women had come back from a church workshop in “new worship.” She explained that the service involved the four elements: earth, air, fire and water. (It also involved women dancing.) Having known a feminist wiccan in 80s (through a friend–long story, but it was the 80s), I lost my breath for a minute. It sounded as if pagan ritual–wiccan, specifically–was making its way into the Church. I don’t know enough about church doctrine to know if there is a legitimate use of the elements, but the way it was being described dovetailed with the preparation of a pagan altar.

    3. I thought you might appreciate the first 10 minutes of this video:

    Mother Anglica was trying to save traditional Catholicism in the wake of so many liberal, modernist elements that were destroying the faith of our fathers. In this clip from the early 90s, she was infuriated by a youth mass in which Jesus was being depicted as a woman by a mime. (The mime should have been enough to guarantee hellfire for whatever priest was presiding that day, but I digress.) Mother Angelica died this week after a very painful illness. She was the voice of traditional Catholicism in a Church that was selling its soul.

  36. Fail Burton
    April 1st, 2016 @ 8:05 pm

    The gay feminist sci-fi Tiptree Award winning novel was just announced. It is Lizard Radio by Pat Smatz. It depicts a “dystopian society” where men are men and women, women. In other words, all of human history. This is the legacy of the year 1963, when Adrienne Rich published a poem and Betty Friedan a non-fiction work which depicted marriage the same way Orwell depicted England in 1984. Don’t be surprised the most awarded sci-fi novel in history was Ann Leckie’s 2013 Ancillary Justice, promoted mostly for its “genderblindness” and subversive lesbian pronouns. The only dystopia I know about projected from today would be a world ruled by Third Wave Feminism. What a pack of nutballs. These people are devoted fanatics living in a world of delusion.

    I have an idea for an alt-history novel. I go back in time and arrange it so suffragettes are used at the Battle of the Somme as shock troops to deplete German ammunition while waving little figurines of Ishtar, convinced it makes them bullet-proof.

  37. DeadMessenger
    April 1st, 2016 @ 8:23 pm

    Not for God. I don’t even see why a human male would need a female to be complete, and in fact, the Apostle Paul even says that if you can, you should not marry, but devote yourself to ministry. For that matter, apparently angels are all male, too.

  38. DeadMessenger
    April 1st, 2016 @ 8:25 pm

    And He didn’t need a woman.

  39. RKae
    April 1st, 2016 @ 9:42 pm

    An old high school friend of mine is an ELCA pastor.

    There is nothing too left wing for him to accept. His favorite thing to do is to sarcastically present a right wing idea and then snicker after it.

    I’m pretty sure he disagrees with 90% of the Bible.

  40. Joe Joe
    April 1st, 2016 @ 9:46 pm

  41. RKae
    April 1st, 2016 @ 9:49 pm

    The collapse of civilization due to feminism:

    Fun video. Well… “fun” of sorts. The collapse of civilization isn’t actually fun.

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  43. Adam G. Yoksas
    April 2nd, 2016 @ 2:43 am

    Not all Lutherans are like that.

    The German Lutheran Church (Lutheran Church Missouri Synod) is the second largest denomination of Lutherans in America. It is some old time religion in there, as Biblical as they come.

    Those folks are hard, rock-ribbed textual confessionals, who won’t even pray at those “interfaith prayer ecumenical” functions every other religion in America does, since they see it as a sin.

    I don’t think those old-time German Lutherans are praying to Sophia. They are too busy singing in their 100 year old hymnals.

  44. M. Thompson
    April 2nd, 2016 @ 12:39 pm

    The Merlin- 12 cylinders of freedom.

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  46. DeadMessenger
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 1:19 pm

    That’s a sad story, right there. At this rate, he will be one of the ones who cry out “Lord, Lord”, and is told, “I never knew you.”

  47. DeadMessenger
    April 3rd, 2016 @ 1:19 pm

    That’s a sad story, right there. At this rate, he will be one of the ones who cry out “Lord, Lord”, and is told, “I never knew you.”

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