What’s
Wrong With a “Female Adam” Anyway?
A
“Christian feminist” at Christians for Biblical Equality asks, “How many of you know the name of the woman who lived in the Garden of Eden
before the Fall?”
“What was
her name? Her name was Adam.”
The CBE lecturer then
teaches that it was a sin on Adam’s part to give Eve a different name, calling it a “hostile kind of act.” [See my article entitled “Christians” Teaching First
Woman Named Adam? for sources of quotes at http://www.christianworldviewnetwork.com/article.php/689/Dwayna_Litz ]
This evangelical
feminist group’s teaching and paradigm is not incredulous in today’s pop-culturally
debased “soularizing” of Christianity.
Their practice of calling
God “mother” is gaining ground within the emergent church as they unashamedly reinvent church:
At THE OOZE's annual
"Soularize" conference last week in Minneapolis, some 500 pastors,
theologians, and young church leaders from across the US gathered for dozens of
workshops on topics from "theology's new groove" to "calling God
Mother" to "following Jesus as rad whole-life disciples."
"This [gathering]
is a small part of something very big and in its very early stages," Brian McLaren, pastor of Cedar Ridge Community
Church in Spencerville, Md., told the Soularize crowd. "We have no idea
what it will lead to, but we're trying to do faithfully what God wants us to
do."
[http://www.csmonitor.com/2002/1031/p14s01-lire.html
.See also post: Get
Into the Groove of Calling God “Mother” and “Soularize” .]
Consider these members and
supporters: Richard Foster, Bill
Hybels, Brian MacLaren, Tony
Campolo, Brennan Manning, Gregory
Boyd, Ruth Tucker, Gordon Fee, Carolyn Curtis James,
Debbie Gill, Bill and Aida Spencer, and Jesus People/Cornerstone leaders such
as Jon Trott and Glenn and Wendi Kaiser.
CBE President, Mimi Haddad, featured
her article What Language Shall We Use?
on proud display at the “Gender Revolution Tent” at Cornerstone, 2006, for the
parents and teens to take copies. In her article she takes a “look at inclusive
language for people, feminine images for God, and gender-accurate Bible
translations” and states (bold type mine for emphasis):
“Throughout the history of the church, some faithful Christians did in fact speak of God in motherly
terms….the most extensive documentation of God as mother comes from Caroline
Walker Bynum in her book Jesus as Mother: Studies in the Spirituality
of the Middle Ages.”
Then, the president of the “Christian” feminist organization batters the reader
who worships God in Spirit and Truth as she goes on to quote from Clement of Alexandria, Bernard of Clairvaux, Julian of Norwich,
and Teresa of Avila in support of the Divine Feminine and the idea of calling God “mother”. (I have
the book about “Jesus” referenced above for research, and I will be citing the
examples Mimi Haddad uses in her article on “leaders throughout church history”
emancipating us to call God “mother” in forthcoming columns). This attack is on
God the Father, God the Son, God the Holy Spirit, the Bible, and God’s people.
Rebecca Merrill Groothuis, member of Christians for Biblical
Equality and on their Board of Reference, teaches (bold type mine for emphasis):
“Some have suggested that
before the woman was created Adam was not a specifically male human but was a
sexually undifferentiated human. This idea seems to have some plausibility given
that the biblical text does not refer to Adam as male until after the woman is
taken out of him. In Genesis 1:26-27 and 5:1-2 we are told that God created
Adam, that Adam was created in God's image, and that Adam was created male and
female. These summary statements telescope humanity's two-stage creation so
that, whether existing in the form of a single being or as male and female separate
beings, humanity is referred to simply as "Adam." This
suggests that before the woman was taken out of the man, Adam had in himself
somehow a capacity for both maleness and femaleness. [Good
News for Women, p. 125]
Her husband Dr. Douglas Groothuis,
professor of Philosophy at Denver
Seminary, defended this teaching by writing Christian Research Net after I had
discussed this on the air with Ingrid Schlueter on Crosstalk Radio. He charged me with
taking his wife out of context, which led me to posting the entire page of his
wife’s teaching from her book to show that in fact nothing was taken out of
context after all: http://www.christianworldviewnetwork.com/article.php/1683/Dwayna_Litz
Dr.
Douglas Groothuis writes:
“…what is
so horrible about the idea? It denies nothing in the Bible. Eve was taken
out of Adam, so Adam had something of Eve in him before she was extracted…”
Ken
Silva (Editor of Christian Research
Net) responds:
Hello Dr.
Groothuis,
Thank you for contacting Christian
Research Net…I do have to point out a non sequitur in your
reasoning... You say: "Eve was taken out of Adam, so Adam had
something of Eve in him before she was extracted." With all due respect,
this doesn't follow logically any more than we are forced to
believe because Adam was formed out of the dust of the earth that it
contained something of him before he was extracted. Instead it's more
accurate to think that it was Eve who had something of Adam in her because
it was extracted from him and she was then formed around it…
Blessings
in Christ,
Pastor Ken Silva
President
http://apprising.org/
Owner/General
Editor
http://christianresearchnetwork.com
Sadly, we must add Doug
Groothuis to the list of CBE supporters, as Walter
Martin Ministries and Lighting The Way recently sent him and his wife
documentation on the goddess worship of CBE, only to result in Dr. Groothuis
retaining his support of the group with his articles continuing to be posted
on the CBE web site http://www.cbeinternational.org
despite their teachings of goddess worship which our letter to him revealed. He
confirmed getting our letter, but after looking over the documentation of their
beliefs, he has chosen to continue to link to CBE from his own site
proliferating CBE’s teaching of androgyny and calling God “mother.” It matters
not whether someone is an “egalitarian feminist” or “complementarian
traditionalist”; if someone is a
CHRISTIAN he or she has no business supporting goddess worship. We must
come to God as a child, and even my small niece and nephews (ages 3 to 6)
realize that as Christians we don’t
call God “mother” or advance that teaching in any fashion. We are warned to not
be double minded in James 1:8.
So, what is wrong with a “female Adam” anyway?
How do we know that calling God “mother” is the spirit of witchcraft? Jill Martin Rische
and I discussed this on the air with Jan Markell last Saturday on Jan’s Understanding
the Times Radio Show, April 14, 2007. It can be
heard online at: http://www.olivetreeviews.org/radio/mp3/ as we addressed the above concerns on the
program. (Scroll down
to bottom of the page to April 14th, 2007, Second Hour). Jan
warns: This is a wake-up call
for the next deception to hit your church. You could be calling God
"mother" if so-called "Evangelical feminists" have their
way.
For documentation on CBE’s “mother-god”
worship, as well as Bible verses which refute it go to: http://www.christianworldviewnetwork.com/article.php/794/Dwayna_Litz Note: CBE
has removed the book Is It Okay to Call God Mother from their Internet
bookstore since the column was originally published on Christian
Worldview Network; see CBE blog entries in May, 2006, which show that they did not
have a problem with the book’s message but rather that the author was an open
homosexual. In defense of their book selection they explained, “We trust CBE
members and friends will read Equality Depot resources prayerfully and with
discernment, as we all should whenever we read any human being’s ideas about
God.”;[ May 26, 2006; 10:19 A.M.] This implies that there is no absolute truth
about God, only subjective opinion.
“…No prophecy of the scripture is of any private
interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man; but
holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost” 2 Peter 1: 20-21
At least I can thank today’s “new
kind of Christian” for giving me a
renewed appreciation for the King James
Version of the Bible and for inspiring me to read works of men such as John
Bunyan, Charles Spurgeon, and Oswald Chambers—Christians
who trembled at the thought of “reinventing church”, “reinventing God”, or “re-imagining”
people made in His image.
Dwayna Litz
Lighting The Way Worldwide
www.lightingthewayworldwide.org
