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March/April 1997 1. The Pagan Revival in America "Paganism...is fast developing as the new religion of the twenty-first century."1 This is the judgment of seventeen academics in the United Kingdom, all committed pagan worshipers. What none of us expected was to see that paganism is in the process of gaining the upper hand in the land that was until very recently the fortress of the Christian faith in the modern era. The change is subtle. America does not abandon Christianity for secular humanism, or Druid worship. America simply adopts the religion. The faith of our Fathers is turned on its head to say the very opposite of what our Fathers actually said. This is not a loss of faith, as in Europe, where non-Christian paganism is on the rise. This is not heresy, which unduly emphasizes one doctrine to the detriment of all the others. This is apostasy, literally, the "standing away from" everything really Christian by dressing up paganism in Christian clothing in an attempt to take over the Christian faith. Only big lies work. For the pagan lie to succeed, it needs to look as much like the truth as it can. Hence the imperious necessity in the malevolent eschatology of spiritual darkness for the appearance of a new hybrid - "Christian" paganism. And where better for it to emerge, than in the modern citadel of faith, in the land where most everyone is a believer. The New World Order has re-ordered many people’s thinking. Christianity is not only marginalized in Christian America. According to the new, all-tolerant, pro-choice, globalist faith which is fast becoming the national religion, Christianity threatens world peace and religious harmony. Neither the atheists nor the Moslems lead the battle against Christian orthodoxy today. The attack comes from within from once-committed Christians, who have consciously apostatized from Christian orthodoxy. Often from positions of great power within the Church, they have succeeded in branding orthodoxy as a marginal aberration of Christianity, and are in the process of rehabilitating their new-found spirituality as true Christianity. The following are some notable examples. II. ROMAN CATHOLICISM: From Convents to Covens a) Flying Nuns Eighty thousand nuns have left their orders within the last twenty years. A new Reformation? roman Catholic journalist, Donna Steichen, documents that many of these nuns, their faith destroyed by liberal criticism, have actually flown the convents and ended up in wiccan covens. She shows how the nuns are now into crystal reading, dream work, tarot cards, other New Age techniques for their spiritual quest, and especially forms of witchcraft.2 When Steichen began her research she could not believe what she was seeing. "At my own first exposure to witchcraft, I thought I had stumbled into a uniquely lunatic social cul-de-sac. I didn’t know it was part of a movement and didn’t guess how closely it was entangled with general theological dissent, broader political feminism and epidemic neo-gnosticism."3 She documents how radical feminism, which she believes is the purveyor of this new pagan spirituality, has infiltrated the church to an extent few realize. "Feminist women (and men) occupy prominent chairs in theology at Catholic and secular universities; they are members of seminary faculties; they hold powerful diocesan offices; they are writers and editors for Catholic journals and Catholic publishing houses that produce catechetical materials used throughout the Catholic school system; they have access to financial resources and often official ecclesiastical support for endless conferences and workshops involving many thousands of Catholic teachers, retreat leaders, directors of religious education, etc. They are liturgists, chaplains of Catholic hospitals and sit on boards of abortion clinics."4 Her judgment of the present state of the Roman Church in America is damning: "Most of the old Catholic culture has been devoured by spiritual termites, leaving behind a structure that looks solid to the eye but crumbles at a touch."5 b) Mary Daly The gold medal for flying nuns goes to Mary Daly. This ex-woman religious has with two earned doctorates in theology is presently professor of Theology, with tenure, at the Jesuit Boston College. Having made a spectacular exit from Catholicism, and denouncing the Christian faith as fundamentally unredeemable, she now describes herself as an eco-feminist lesbian witch. While Daly has moved out of Christianity [this is at least an honest thing to do] and promotes a sort of mystical wiccan/lesbian paganism, her writings play a very dominant role in the thinking of many leading religious feminists who remain in the Church. Copyright 1996, Peter Jones, Escondido, CA, MAIN ENTRY EDITIONS c) Rosemary Radford Ruether Professor of theology at Garrett Evangelical Seminary in the mid-west, this daughter of the Catholic Church has chosen to remain within the Church even though at the outset of her academic career, she rejected Catholic belief saying that she found paganism more attractive than Catholicism.6 "A lot of evil had been done in the name of Christ," she wrote, but "no crusades or pogroms had been sent in the name of Ba’al, Isis or Apollo." From within the Church, Ruether has reconfigured "Christian" worship to fit with her feminist paganism. In her Women-Church the liturgies come very close to wiccan ceremonies and the names of God and Jesus Christ are never mentioned. She proposes a Halloween ceremony in remembrance of the persecution of witches.7 At the same time Christianity is joyfully abandoned as the essence of an outmoded world view that produced "inquisitions, witch-hunts, pogroms, executions, censorship and concentration camps." In the Brave New World of this apocalyptic vision, "the Goddess is ourselves and the world." All distinctions are eliminated and everything goes as "our culture as a whole...evolve(s) toward life."8 In Ruether’s new style Christianity: Mother Goddess is reawakening and we can begin to recover our primal birthright, the sheer intoxicating joy of being alive. We can open our eyes and see that there is nothing to be saved from...no God outside the world to be feared and obeyed.9 In a vivid playing out of the rejection of the patriarchal "myth of original sin" and Eve’s "victimized" place within it, the Women-Church community celebrates the "blessing of the apple," saying: This is the apple of consciousness raising. Let the scales of false consciousness fall from our eyes, so that we can rightly name truth and falsehood, good and evil.10 Incredibly, the very act of original sin in the Garden of Eden is now elevated as the sacrament of gender liberation. The Fall is now hailed as the ascent to divinity. Clearly we are in the presence of two opposing views of spirituality. One is true, the other is false. One is Christian, the other is apostasy from Christianity. Ruether is one of the guiding voices among feminist Bible teachers in seminaries and universities and as well as among radical women’s groups in the Church at large. As we elect a new president, and national issues are debated in the national media, the most revolutionary event of recent history is never mentioned by any of the major parties, viz., the feminist revolution. Egalitarianism is taken for grated as American as apple pie. Notice, though, that motherhood has to be eliminated from the old formula. III. MAINLINE PROTESTANTISM: The Goddess Comes to Church a) The RE-Imagining Conference Why did 2000 mostly middle-class, middle-aged women from middle of the road, mainline Christian churches end their conference on imaginative spirituality, as they blessed the sacramental milk and honey of a sort of Lady’s Supper, with a hymn to the goddess that bordered on lesbian pornography? Read for yourself:
While the Bible joyfully celebrates sexuality within marriage, there is absolutely no equivalent of this in the Hebrew or Christian Scriptures as a description of God, so this is "imagination" with a capital "I." How can people so much in the middle be so far into the extreme? As Donna Steichen has shown, mainline Protestants "discovered" this kind of spirituality only because orthodox groups in the Presbyterian and Methodist churches blew the whistle.12 But it has been a feature of feminist religious groups since the early eighties.13 Speakers at the Minneapolis RE-Imagining Conference, which was the brain-child of the Women’s Ministry Unit of the Presbyterian church (U.S.A.), defended sex for children, and playful sex among friends as normative and healthy. These examples are but the tip of an enormous iceberg, a sort of religious/theological justification for the sexual liberation of the sixties, and the beat goes on. Though the Presbyterian Church USA in its General Assembly of 1994, denounced RE-Imagining, a similar conference in June, 1994, at San Francisco’s Episcopalian Grace Cathedral sounded the same note, as conferees were told to "discover and cultivate sacred Eros in all its ecstatic connections."14 Under the guise of Christian freedom, sin and spirituality are ritually wedded. At the RE-Imagining Conference, one of the speakers held up an apple, bit into it, and then with cheers from the audience asked, "What taboo have you broken today?"15 The taboo was the warning against apostasy found over again in the Scriptures. Their sacramental sacrilegious bite ingested the forbidden fruit of paganism, the worship of the creature rather than the Creator. One has come to expect such excesses from theological liberalism, but surely not from evangelicalism! IV. EVANGELICALISM: The Coming of Age of American Apostasy a) David Spangler One of the early New Age gurus and a leader of the New Age Findhorn Community in Scotland for some years, Spangler calls the second coming of Christ the "Luciferic Initiation," the time when Lucifer will lead humanity into the Age of Aquarius. Like one of the witches I met in Chicago at the Parliament of the world’s Religions in 1993, Spangler was raised in a fundamentalist Christian home. b) Emily Culpepper Emily Culpepper was raised in an evangelical Baptist church in Macon, Georgia, Culpepper became involved in the counterculture movements of the sixties. Today she is an eco-feminist lesbian witch replete with "familiar," a spirit guide from the Hindu goddess Kali that, according to Culpepper, possessed her cat. Describing her Christian roots as "compost," she proposes the following agenda: Christianity should be seen as "a complex tissue of truths and lies"; the idea of the Incarnation is not only "implausible...(but) offensive" to feminists; she promotes the adoption of "an expanding personal pantheon of goddesses and other mythic images (as) a great psychic counterweight to the father gods of patriarchy." Through her cat, Culpepper found great inspiration from Kali who is pictured as a female deity with "red eyes, disheveled hair, blood trickling at the corners of her mouth, lips saturated with fresh blood, a dangling tongue, long sharp fangs, a gaunt, dark-skinned body...Her necklace contains fifty human heads; her waistband is a girdle made of severed human arms; she is wearing two dead infants for earrings...She holds a blood-smeared cleaver in her...left hand and a dripping severed head in the...left." How can such a bloodthirsty picture inspire anyone? Lest the reader think that I am attempting to be sensational by the use of such marginal and bizarre material, they should realize that this essay by Culpepper was required reading for bright sixteen year-olds in the Governor’s School [a summer program for gifted teenagers] in Arkansas in the late eighties.16 Apparently some state officials in the so-called "Bible Belt" believe that today’s bright teenagers need such spiritual resources for a fruitful contribution as adults in tomorrow’s America. c) Virginia Mollenkott The future age of bliss, called by some the Luciferic Initiation is described by the radical feminist/lesbian pagans as the Sophianic Millennium, the imminent utopia where the goddess shall reign where ‘ere the sun doth its successive journeys run - well, at least from sea to shining sea! The Rev. Nancy Wilson, senior pastor of the homosexual Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles, who calls herself a "lesbian ecu-terrorist" [ecu = ecumenical], adds a kinky twist to this radical eschatology. She proposes a "queer theology" justifying all sexual choices, that can lead all Christians, gay lesbian, and straight, into the next Queer Millennium.17 Virginia Mollenkott, the "evangelical" applauds her work as a "stunningly important, both for our tribe [gays and lesbians] and for any other person, church or organization that seeks to be whole."18 Virginia Mollenkott was raised in Brethren circles, taught at Nyack Missionary College, and in 1993 was still being called an "evangelical author" by Christianity Today in 1992. Prior to that date Mollenkott was "born again" into a new spiritual freedom using I Ching (pagan Chinese divination), Tarot Cards and the study of the New Age text, A Course in Miracles.19 She calls her experience of enlightenment both a coming "out from fundamentalism," and: one distinct "holy instant" [a notion taken from the A Course in Miracles, as she admits]...like my Elder Brother, Jesus, I am a sinless Self traveling through eternity and temporarily having human experiences in a body known as Virginia Mollenkott...Perhaps my Self has been on earth before in other bodies, perhaps not.20 In this new freedom sin is eliminated. "Gone," she declares, "are traditional Christianity’s emphasis on sin, guilt, and retribution; instead, we are empowered toward co-creatorship, welcomed to continual renewal on a continuous Great Non-Judgment Day.21 Her freedom is not just spiritual. It is sexual and moral. Now, as an openly practicing lesbian, - "one of my identities is that of an evangelical lesbian feminist,"22 - with a new moral code, Mollenkott is righteously committed to lying and deceiving to bring down the heteropatriarchal culture.23 With no sin, there is no guilt for Mollenkott’s lesbian activity, which, all of a sudden, becomes "sensuous spirituality," (the title of her recent book). She will not condemn those who engage in "promiscuous or easy [casual] sex,"24 nor women who have abortions.25 "I believe that every honest attempt to relate to another human being is a good attempt, including recreational sex or sensuality, if that is all a person can achieve."26 With this newly-minted "evangelical" faith she can speak of "the one really foolish assumption...that anyone could possibly arrive at a situationless, culture-free, objective interpretation of any text, let alone a text as complex as the Bible.27 One must wonder what happened to the evangelical notion of the sufficiency and perspicuity of Scripture? Her new faith has a new eschatology. At the RE-Imagining Conference in 1993 she re-imagined the future church’s message: ...we would avoid the androcentric language (Father, Son, etc.) and the dominant submission theology..., I can no longer worship in a theological context that depicts God as an abusive parent and Jesus as the obedient trusting child.28 Submission and the Father making the Son to be sin for us sounds like the Gospel to me. But in the gleaming future of pan-sexual syncretistic spirituality the Bible, the Christian message of redemption and the Christ of the Scriptures will not be welcomed, especially by ex-evangelicals. d) John Shelby Spong, Episcopal Bishop of Newark Militant anti-evangelical ex-Evangelicals seems to be coming out of the woodwork these days. On National Public Radio (October 2, 1996), interviewer Terry Gross in her program Fresh Air spoke at length with Faye Waddleton, president of Planned Parenthood from 1978 to 1992. Much of the debate centered around her background as the daughter of an evangelical preacher of strict biblical ethics. Waddleton confessed to abandoning her early faith believed she could justify the killing of the innocent by her newlook reading of the Bible. A day later your tax dollars paid for an interview with Phil Jackson, NBA Coach of the year (1995-96), about his book, Sacred Hoops, in which he too repudiated his Evangelical background in favor of his new spirituality of Zen Buddhism. In the same week day Terry Gross interviewed prolific author and radical theologian, John Shelby Spong. Spong denies the resurrection, the virgin birth and the atoning death of Jesus. Spong affirms radical feminism, the ordination of homosexuals and homosexual marriage, and all loving pre- and post-marital sex acts. This great spokesman for the pagan transformation of Christianity described his upbringing. He was raised by a very "committed Presbyterian Calvinistic mother" who, along with a somewhat unwilling husband, attended an evangelical Episcopal church in North Carolina where the young Spong was taught to read the Bible as God’s inerrant, infallible word. Now Spong exults in the new "Bible" scholarship that mixes ancient heresy (the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas) with the "fallible" Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. e) The Jesus Seminar If there is a Jesus in the new, liberated world of tomorrow, he will fit all the parameters of this new-paganism. The Jesus Seminar will see to that. But what has The Jesus Seminar got to do with apostatizing evangelicals? Are not all these scholars coldly objective scientists giving us a Jesus liberated from church dogma and irrational faith? i.) Robert Funk A recognized New Testament scholar, Funk is the founder of The Jesus Seminar who is committed to bringing the fruits of his radical critical scholarship to the average Christian in the pew. According to Funk Christians need to mature in their knowledge and realize that most of what Jesus says in the Gospels was placed on his lips by later believers and that most authentic sayings of Jesus come from a hypothetical document, Q, which some scholars believe is embedded in Matthew and Luke, and from the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. In 1993 Funk published a best-selling book, The Five Gospels, setting this heretical text alongside the four canonical Gospels as an equally valid source for access to Jesus.29 This is like asking Christ and Belial to share the Sunday morning service. This can only confuse the average Christian and promote the coming of pagan religious syncretism. Not every member of The Jesus Seminar is an evangelical believer. Indeed, for "objectivity" there are even non-Christian fellows. But a number of the leaders are, of whom Robert Funk. According to another Seminar fellow, Marcus Borg, in a taped public debate at the University of Oregon, his colleague Funk has a past as an evangelical fundamentalist that he still is attempting to live down. According to Borg, as a youth, Funk dressed in a white suit and white shoes was pushed forward as a boy preacher. If anyone knows the hot-house atmosphere of certain milieu where children are used as cute "Christian" performers, one sympathizes with Funk. But escaping "out from fundamentalism," is anything but a cold objective affair. Funk has come a long way. He dedicates his book to Galileo "who altered our view of the heavens forever"; to Thomas Jefferson "who took scissors and paste to the gospels"; and to David Friedrich Strauss who "pioneered the quest for the historical Jesus."30 Certainly the great scientist Galileo got an undeserving shaft from the church of his day, but should the work of Jefferson and Strauss on the Bible to be seen as "science" in anywhere near the same sense? Would anyone today accept the subjective Bible-study methods of Jefferson? With regard to Strauss, as a so-called biblical scientist, he is a most complex figure. Strauss’s biographer documents that though held up as the great example of critical, dispassionate scholarship and the father of scientific research on the historical Jesus, Strauss was in deep fellowship with the occult.31 Though his father Johann Friedrich Strauss was an orthodox Christian pietist,32 early in his theological training David immersed himself in the mysticism of Jacob Bohme, and came to believe deeply in the supernatural, but "not...in any theistic sense, but rather as a belief in the pantheistic unity of the world."33 Strauss himself later recounts a meeting with a medium: I cannot in my whole life remember such a comparable moment. I was absolutely convinced that as soon as I laid my hand in hers [the medium’s] my whole thinking and being would lie open before her....it was as if someone pulled the ground away from under my feet and I were sinking into a bottomless abyss...she [the medium] praised my faith, and...[said] that I would never fall into unbelief.34 According to this seeress, the father of modern New Testament scholarship would always be a believer - in occult pantheism, something Strauss never repudiated. How can someone with such deep religious convictions of non-Christian nature, antipathetic to orthodoxy, make a believable claim to objectivity when dealing with a theistic document like the New Testament! Monists will always find theism unacceptable. With admirable consistency they will always eliminate any expressions of theism as a possible explanation of phenomena in the life of Jesus. Miracles, unique divine nature, atoning death for sin, God distinct from the creation He made, and inspired Scripture, to name just a few, are all elements intrinsic to a theistic world view which are "objectively" and "scientifically" screened out by monists as later additions to a Jesus they want to make much more amenable to their theology. At the end of the day, such a theological agenda determines from the start what Jesus can and cannot say. Monists can only produce a monistic Jesus. This might be good [monistic] theology but it is not science. ii) Marcus Borg The pantheistic monism of the father shows itself in the sons. Marcus Borg, another fellow of The Jesus Seminar and author of the recent book on Jesus, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time35 is also a deeply religious man. Raised an evangelical Lutheran, he now has discovered a new view of the Spirit and of Jesus. The Jesus he met again for the first time is not the Jesus of scriptural orthodoxy. Says New Testament scholar Borg, "Like Socrates, Jesus was a teacher of a subversive wisdom. Like Buddha, he had an Enlightenment experience. Like a shaman, he was a healer. Like Gandhi, he protested against a purity system."36 Borg is not merely comparing Jesus with elements in the lives of other holy men. Borg is recognizing the validity of other religious traditions. For Borg’s new view of the Spirit, according to a recent study of Borg’s development, is actually "rooted in the pantheism of Huston Smith."37 So we need to ask not merely who is Jesus. We need to ask who is Huston Smith. Huston Smith, born of missionary parents in China, is a well-known expert in comparative religions, deeply committed to monistic spirituality. Significantly associated with New Age and occult Theosophical thinkers, Smith is a sponsor of the Temple of Understanding, a organism of the Theosophical Society devoted to global syncretism which now has the privileged status of a Non-Governmental Organization in the United Nations. Smith was a faculty member with well-known New Ager and Assistant Secretary-General of the U.N., Robert Mueller, the Dalai Lama and Marilyn Ferguson, author of the book, The Aquarian Conspiracy, at an interfaith gathering in Malta in 1985, and in the same year gave a lecture at the Theosophical Society’s "Blavatsky Lodge" in Sydney, Australia on the subject, "Is a New World Religion Coming?38 Huston Smith believes that there is, by the work of the "spirit" "an invisible geometry...working to shape (the great religious traditions of the world) into a single truth." Needless to say, this syncretistic view of the Spirit when employed by Marcus Borg will only consider believable a Jesus-guru who can blend into other religious systems. It will reject as unacceptable and thus inauthentic the exclusive claims of the Jesus of orthodox confession. In his personal testimony Borg states quite honestly: "I do not believe that Christianity is the only way of salvation, or that the Bible is the revealed will of God, or that Jesus was the unique Son of God." Christianity is only one of many "mediators of the sacred."39 One certainly has to respect Borg’s belief system, but it is just that - belief. When one comes "out from fundamentalism," as Borg has also done, if one is aware of the spiritual domain, and evangelicals are, one goes somewhere else, and it appears one often goes into some form of spiritual pagan monism. Is this why a Seminar member states with touching naivete that it is becoming more and more difficult to imagine a Jesus who reflected on his own death? The reason is because the belief-system of many modern Bible scholars, not the facts of the matter, has changed. So, at the end of the day, when all the science has been paraded, and all the claims of could dispassionate scholarship touted aloud, one still cannot help but think that The Jesus Seminar is one more ideologically-loaded attempt to serve the revival of pantheistic spirituality in our time. Behind the science lies spiritual apostasy. iii) James M. Robinson D. F. Strauss is really the grandfather of critical New Testament scholarship. Rudolf Bultmann is the father. Bultmann believed the key to understanding the New Testament was the [monistic] existentialism of Martin Heidegger.40 Bultmann saw in the ancient heresy of Gnosticism, (which has been demonstrated to be very close to modern existentialism)41 the source of early Christian theology in the New Testament. Robinson was a student of Bultmann. As a measure of James Robinson’s importance in New Testament scholarship, Robert Funk calls him "the Secretary of State of the biblical guild...(an) academic counterpart...(to) Henry Kissinger."42 Robinson, a fellow of The Jesus Seminar was raised on the Westminster Confession of Faith by his father, the highly respected southern Presbyterian theologian William C. Robinson. He was an evangelical minister in the old PCUS. By his own account, "We [Robinson and his brother William] began with his [their father’s] theology, soaked up in family prayers, Bible reading and the recitation of the Psalms."43 Retired Presbyterian Church, US missionary to Brazil, Frederic R. Dinkins tells of his providential meeting with James Robinson in 1946 at a youth camp which turned Dinkins’ life around:
Soon after this encounter Dinkins went to Brazil where he worked for thirty-ive years. Robinson went to Germany to study under Bultmann. During his successful academic career Robinson has been committed to application and extension of Bultmann’s teaching.45 From that deeply orthodox beginning, Robinson states, "I have moved steadily to the left ever since."46 Robinson’s work has been guided by a clearly defined program: the "Dismantling and Reassembling of the Categories of New Testament Scholarship,"47 and the promotion of Gnosticism as a valid expression of early Christianity. One category successfully dismantled is that of heresy and orthodoxy.48 In 1985, as president of the prestigious Society of Biblical Literature, Robinson issued a programmatic statement for the twenty-first century. He called upon his fellow bible scholars to deconstruct their discipline in order to "lay bare [its]...biblicistic presuppositions." The Bible would no longer serve as the ultimate source of authority and as the definition of true Christianity.49 Robinson dismisses the church fathers who opposed Gnosticism "myopic heresy hunters" because he believes the future lies with inclusion. Gnosticism (heresy) and Orthodoxy are two valid "trajectories" of early Christianity. The program is apparently working. What was a marginal position just a generation ago, is now touted as majority consensus. Robinson encourages modern theology to extract values from both trajectories in order to produce a new formulation of Christianity for today.50 Robinson’s 1985 manifesto explodes the constraining limits of the orthodox biblical canon. Gall and Honey In November, 1995 at the annual meeting of the Society of Biblical Literature, victory was declared. Leading New Testament scholars rejoiced that the heretical Gnostic Gospel of Thomas had finally made it into the club, and that now we could disband the club. By club they meant the New Testament canon of Holy Scripture. They were referring to the elevation of Thomas alongside the four canonical Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. These backsliders from Christianity seem to be succeeding where their ancient spiritual cousins failed. In a second century list of New Testament books to be received as canonical, it is stated that the books of the heretical Gnostics have no place in the Bible because one cannot mix "gall with honey."51 James Robinson declared the elevation of the noxious Thomas into the life-giving Gospels as "the coming of age of American New Testament scholarship." Into the sweet-smelling bread of life is injected the wormwood of death-dealing heresy. How ironic. The great contribution of the sons of Christian America at the end of the twentieth century is not the extension of the Gospel to every corner of the culture and the world, but the introduction of pagan heresy into the Church’s Scriptures, destroying the both integrity of the canon of and the theological coherence of the Christian faith. Then we have to ask what this will mean for the coming of age of American society at large? V. The Unpardonable Sin - Calling a Spade a Spade We live in a day of open apostasy. Time does not permit to describe the advance of apostasy in the World Council of Churches, in the Inter-Faith movement spreading like wild-fire even in unsuspecting evangelical churches throughout the world, in the Parliament of the World’s Religions, in the United Nations and the many global agencies that espouse this new syncretistic form of spirituality.52 What is both odd and strangely logical is that the leadership of this apostasy comes from Christian America. The coming of age of American New Testament scholarship as it introduces apostasy into the Church’s scriptures is just one aspect of the coming of age of American spirituality as it become the world leader in an egalitarian, pan-sexual and pantheistic religion that has nothing to do with America’s Christian spiritual roots. The New Age movement, growing out of the Sixties revolution on American campuses, is the great contribution of the USA to the modern spiritual revival. In various forms, it has become as American as apple pie, and its noxious fruit has been exported throughout the globe. So the words of Jesus, inevitably considered inauthentic by The Jesus Seminar, certainly call for an answer: "What shall it profit a man [or a nation] if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" (Matthew 16:26). In the history of the Church, this has happened before. In the first three centuries so called "Christian Gnosticism" was a radically pagan re-interpretation of Christianity that was not simply an alternate and valid expression of the faith but, behind the subterfuge, was in fact was its very antithesis. As noted above, the early Church fought against it, just as inspired Scripture prophesied its coming. The danger was not attacks from the outside, but apostasy from those within. Paul warned Timothy to 1) be on his guard against those who would apostatize from the faith - those who would "go out from us," 2) to denounce error and, 3) to teach sound doctrine.53 In the theistic world of the Bible where there is both truth and error, right and wrong, speaking the truth involved saying what the truth is not. In our day of diversity and tolerance, where God the Creator has been dethroned, denouncing error has become the ultimate unpardonable sin. Principal opposition to anything that others hold dear makes you a bigot and a hate monger. So why do it? When Gnosticism became a massive challenge to orthodoxy, the church fathers of the succeeding centuries heeded Paul’s advice. They labored to acquaint themselves with these "doctrines of demons," warn the faithful, and set alongside error the great truths of the Gospel. One of them, Hippolytus (170-236 AD) stated his reasons. He sought to oppose error not only to arm the church against false teaching but also to "win those who are themselves teaching heresy." He believed that "by proclaiming the folly of those who are persuaded by (these heterodox tenets), we shall prevail on them to retrace their course to the serene haven of the truth."54 VI. Evangelizing Apostates The present situation raises many pressing questions with regard to evangelism in our time. How does one evangelize an "over-evangelized" culture. Perhaps there are some in "Generation X" who have never heard the Gospel, but even they only need to surf through the channels to hear a more or less complete declaration of the Gospel message. so we ask, how does the freshness of the good news reach those who have heard it all? What makes the Good News both good and news in a culture that has knowingly turned away from the God of the Bible, either through boredom, familiarity, contempt or rebellion? What is the message of the Lord to an apostate nation? Do questions like, "Why should I let you into my heaven?," make any sense to postmodern mystics who have been imagining for some time, with the help of John Lennon, that there is no heaven, and reject out of hand the very notions of sin and its eternal consequences, Hell? A further question should preoccupy us. To what extent are we, as a church and a denomination, capable of presenting the Gospel in a challenging way to those who have adopted, in larger or smaller doses, the "new" pagan spirituality? These people are movers and shakers of the baby-boom generation, now pushing fifty, and occupying many of the cutting-edge positions in modern society, people who know the Gospel but are expanding it to include the "new spirituality." No doubt many of these questions require a considerable amount of reflection, because before we come up with the answers we need to be sure we have heard the question. Fortunately God understands apostasy. It is one of the major themes of the Old Testament revelation. Calling to apostate Israel to forsake her "adultery with wood and stone," the Lord, with long-suffering also invites this wayward nation and especially those who once professed faith to recognize their sin, and to turn and repent.55 Never a popular message, it is positively hate speech in an age of political correctness. This same call, which is a call to personal and societal sanity, needs to be heard again, as the modern nation most blessed by the good things of the Gospel careens out of control, seduced by an illusion that can only lead to destruction. Dr. Jones is a PCA minister in South Coast Presbytery and with Professor Mark Futato offers two weekend seminars for churches, Christians at Risk in the New Age and God and Sexuality in the Twenty-first Century. He is author of the best-selling The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back (P&R), and its sequel, Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America (Main Entry Editions, 1-800-574-2978. Peter Jones This article is excerpted and modified from a fuller article to appear in SCP Journal, Vol. 20/3 and 4, 1996. NOTES 1. Harvey, Graham, and Hardman, Charlotte, Paganism Today: Wiccans, Druids, the Goddess and Ancient earth Traditions for the Twenty-first Century (London: Thorsons, 1996), ix. 2. Donna Steichen, Ungodly Rage, (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1993), 71. 3. Ibid., 21. 4. Ibid., 13. 5. Ibid., 21. 6. Steichen, Ungodly Rage, 32. 7. Ruether, Women-Church: Theology and Practice of Feminist Liturgical Communities (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1985), 223. This very title, Women-Church is at odds with the biblical notion of a community that is inclusive of those from every nation and tongue and includes both males and females. 8. Ibid. 9. Miriam Starhawk, Yoga Journal (May-June, 1986), 59, cited in Ruth Tucker, Another Gospel: Alternative Religions and the New Age Movement (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1989), 340. 10. Ibid., 145. 11. A transcript from tapes of the addresses given at the RE-Imagining Conference in Minneapolis, 1993, published by Good News: A Forum for Scriptural Christianity within the United Methodist Church, January, 1994, 13. 12. In particular, The Presbyterian Layman (PCUSA) and Good News (United Methodist). 13. Steichen, Ungodly Rage. 14. Berit Kjos, "An Unholy Renaissance of Sacred Sexuality," Southern California Christian Times, July, 1994, 9. 15. James R. Edwards, "Earthquake in the Mainline," Christianity Today, November 14, 1994, 39. This is a profound analysis of the heretical opinions voiced at the conference. 16. See World, September, 1993. 17. See Nancy Wilson, A Lesbian Ecu-Terrorist Outs the Bible for the Queer Millennium (San Francisco: Harper, San Francisco, 1996). 18. Books for the Nineties [A Catalog] (San Francisco: Harper, San Francisco, 1996), 10. 19. V. Mollenkott, Sensuous Spirituality: Out From Fundamentalism (New York: Crossroads, 1992), 16. 20. V. Mollenkott, ibid., 16. 21. Mollenkott, ibid., 27. 22. Virginia Mollenkott, 42. 23. Mollenkott, ibid., 49. 24. Ibid., 118. 25. Ibid., 139. 26. Ibid., 100. 27 Mollenkott, ibid., 167. 28. Transcript of tapes of the RE-Imagining Conference, published by Good News, January, 1994, 11. 29. Robert W. Funk, Roy W. Hoover and The Jesus Seminar, The Five Gospels: The Search for the Authentic Words of Jesus (New York: Macmillan, 1993). 30. Ibid., dedication page. 31. The following information is drawn from Horton Harris, David Friedrich Strauss and His Theology (Cambridge: The University Press, 1973). 32. Ibid., 2. 33. Ibid., 13. 34. Strauss’ Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Zeller, 1876-78, cited in Harris, ibid., 16. 35. Marcus Borg, Meeting Jesus Again for the First Time (San Francisco: Harper, San Francisco, 1993). 36. Marcus Borg, "Me and Jesus: The Journey Home," The Fourth R (July/August, 1993), 9. 37. Scott McKnight, "Who is Jesus: An Introduction to Jesus Studies," Jesus Under Fire: Modern Scholarship Re-invents the Historical Jesus, ed. Michael J. Wilkin and J. P. Moreland (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1995), 70, n.22. Professor McKnight here mentions a master’s thesis written under his direction at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School by Dana K. Ostby, "The Historical Jesus and the Supernatural World: A Shift in the Modern Critical Worldview with Special Emphasis on the Writings of Marcus Borg," 1991, which traces Borg’s theological development. 38. Alan Morrison, The Serpent and the Cross: Religious Corruption in an Evil Age (Birmingham, UK: K&M Books, 1994), 568. Huston Smith has published with the Theosophical Publishing House of Wheaton, Illinois [Huston Smith, Beyond the Post-Modern Mind (Wheaton, Ill: Theosophical Publishing House, 1989)]. Readers will recall that the Theosophical Society was founded towards the end of the nineteenth century by the spiritualist Helena Blavatsky, and later propagated by Annie Besant, and that both women are now considered foremothers of the New Age. An authority on the history of the occult calls the Theosophical Society "the very pillar of the late nineteenth century revival of the occult," according to James Webb, The Occult Establishment (La Salle, Ill: Open Court, 1976), 25 and 553. 39. Borg, "Me and Jesus," 9. 40. Specifically, Bultmann felt he could not understand the New Testament without the help of philosophy, and the philosophy in vogue in the 20s and 30s was the pagan philosophy of monistic existentialism, especially associated with Martin Heidegger. Bultmann acknowledged his great debt to Heidegger, but it was the pagan thinking of Heidegger and others that helped produce the ideological underpinning of National Socialism (see William E. Hughes, "The People versus Martin Heidegger," First Things, 38 (December, 1993), 34-38). Though Bultmann refused any association with Nazism, existentialism seems to have oriented him towards the importance of Gnosticism, an ancient cousin of existentialism - see the essay by Jonas, "Epilogue: Gnosticism, Existentialism and Nihilism," The Gnostic Religion, 320-340. Note also that in the Introduction to their book Trajectories Through Early Christianity (Philadelphia: Fortress,1971), 1, Robinson and Helmut Koester claim to be involved in the "indigenization of the Bultmann tradition on American soil." 41. See Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion (Boston: Beacon Press, 1958), 320-340. 42. Robert Funk, "Three Tributes to James M. Robinson," Foundations and Facets 5:2 (Polebridge Press, June, 1989),6. 43. James M. Robinson, "How My Mind Has Changed (Or Remained the Same)." Society of Biblical Literature Seminar Papers Series, ed. K. H. Richards (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1985), 482. 44. From a letter to the present author, dated Friday, 25 November, 1994. 45. Ibid., 481. In recounting his thoughts as a young scholar, choosing between the conservative Oscar Cullmann and radical Rudolf Bultmann, he states: "...with Cullmann one had nowhere to go, whereas with Bultmann one had the agenda for a meaningful lifetime of research." 46. James M. Robinson, "How My Mind Has Changed," 482. 47. Robinson, Trajectories, 1-19. 48. They build on the work of Walter Bauer, with the telling title Orthodoxy and Heresy in Earliest Christianity (1934). 49. James M. Robinson, "How My Mind Has Changed," 495. This might be considered one of the first attempts to apply practical deconstructionism to the Bible. 50. Robinson, "How My Mind Has Changed," 486. 51. The Muratorian Canon, line 67. 52. See the excellent book by Herbert J. Pollitt, The Inter-Faith Movement: The New Age Enters the Church (Edinburgh: Banner of Truth, 1996. See also Peter Jones, The Gnostic Empire Strikes Back (Phillipsburg, NJ: P&R, 1992), and my forth-coming book Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America (Escondido, CA: Main Entry Editions, October/November, 1996). 53. 1 Timothy 4:1-10. 54. Hippolytus, The Refutation of All Heresies, 4.45. 55. Jeremiah 3:9.
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