Posted on 06/16/2015 11:58:25 AM PDT by ReformationFan
The attempt to change God the Father to God the Mother is full bore idolatry—a syncretism of the spirit of the age.
I remember some of the most emotionally powerful moments of worship that I have experienced occurred in a context where there was the least amount of belief. There was a time in my life when I regularly went to worship at Grace Cathedral in San Francisco, a beautiful church building that had this glorious liturgy. And it would be my habit to go there on Sunday morning and to sit in the pew and listen to the music and to work through the liturgy. And then when the pastor got up to preach I also would get up and walk out of the building because I knew what I was going to hear was not going to be faithful to God’s Word. I’m old, but I’m not old enough to remember when the Episcopal Church was a faithful church, generally speaking.
More recently, the Church of England has ordained their very first female Bishop, her name is Libby Lane. Not long after her installation as a bishop, she proposed some significant changes that would take away what yet remains the best part of the church of England: so much of the liturgy that is in the Book of Common Prayer. You see, that is why I loved that worship service, because that Book of Common Prayer was infused with Scripture and infused with sound doctrine even though the people saying it, the ones leading the liturgy, didn’t believe it. The actual words were the words of life.
But now comes Bishop Lane and she has some changes in mind for the Book of Common Prayer. It is not changing the doctrine of how we have peace with God, it is not changing the doctrine of man, it is not choosing Arminianism over Calvinism, she just wants “a few changes.” Instead of referring to God the way the Bible does, in masculine language, she would like to see it include some feminine language for who God is—referring to Him as Her, referring to our Heavenly Father as our Heavenly Mother.
Now the reasoning is pretty simple; her thought is that this would be more inclusive and make other people feel more welcome because, somehow, referring to God in the masculine is off-putting to a certain class of people. I agree. This class of people, however, are those who do not like God.
When we read through the historical accounts of the Old Testament, I’ve often argued that the most frequent sin that we see crop up among God’s people is idolatry. And that idolatry almost always takes the form of syncretism. That’s a big word but is really not that complicated of a concept. Syncretism is the blending together of two things. In this context, the blending together of the worship of the true and living God with the spirit of the age. With the children of Israel start worshiping Baal, they don’t say, “Yesterday we worshipped Yahweh, but this is not going well so let’s worship Baal instead.” Rather, what they did was that they would blend together the qualities, the characteristics, and the liturgies of Baal to mix them with the qualities and characteristics of the true and living God. Well, that should be instructive to us. The temptation isn’t going to be those who show up and say, “You know, that whole God thing, the whole Trinity thing, let’s try a whole different God.” Rather it is an attempt to redefine and reshape who we think God to be and to do so in a way that accommodates the broader unbelieving culture. That is exactly what we have in this proposal, in this suggestion.
If we can take the true and living God and we can reshape Him, remold Him, and in fact rename him, or put Him through the liturgical equivalent of the surgery of Bruce Jenner, we can turn Him into a Her, our God into a goddess. I wish Miss Lane would heed the wisdom of my favorite Anglican, C.S. Lewis. It was Lewis who told us that–recognizing that God in one sense transcends gender, God is not a man–God is so utterly masculine that all of us are feminine in comparison. Masculinity is essential to what God is. That is the reason that God is described to us as our Father, that is the reason His son is called the Son. There is a reality about who He is and we have to hold onto it and not accommodate or mold and shape God into our own image. We have to, being feminine, respond to His leadership. And when God says He is our Father, our calling is to say “Yes, Father” in return.
"Abba, Father" puts the lie to Bishop Libby. She should try to read the Bible sometime.
:D
Hoss
PFL
“Aslan is Tash”
This would fit in line with replacing a masculine Jesus with a female savior.
Some already look to her for salvation so the process is underway.
So women are Baal?
Hate to break it to ya, but fathers and sons imply mothers and daughters.
Even worse, half of creation is female, including human beings.
God is beyond sex. God is not male, and he’s not a father - God is God. As limited beings, we have limited language used in various ways for various reasons. But when addressing the infinite, we need to recognize we’ve reached the limits of our language and show a little humility.
And yeah, half the human race does, in fact, matter.
Sheesh.
God is describe in scripture as if he were male.
Jesus called God his father.
It seems odd to ascribe any generative gender to an Entity credited with creation ex nihilo, but that’s just reason talking.
But gender is “fluid.” Male today could be female tomorrow, and who-knows-what the next day. No more gender references on birth certificates, soon to be followed by no more designation as father or mother. We’ll devolve into being just vague anthropological units.
So wouldn’t it be more accurate for this goober to reference “God the…whatever”?
Christ said that only those who do the will of the FATHER in heaven will enter the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 7:21). Committing the crime of false prophesy, calling Him a liar, saying He didn’t say something He said or that He said something He didn’t say, is the definition of being a false prophet. And false prophets don’t come to a good end according to Christ (Matt. 7:23).
Whenever ANY denomination has become so apostate and falsely prophetic that it begins ordaining women, that denomination is in a race to see how quickly it can become completely depraved. Just follow those apostate denominations, and inevitably they’ll begin embracing baby murder, homosexuality and every other abomination under the sun soon thereafter.
Yes He did. Jesus also told parables that are not meant to be taken literally, and also used the common Jewish terms to be understood.
Nevertheless, God is infinite. He is not literally the father, because one cannot be a father without a mother. In fact, if you think about it, a father literally MEANS there is a mother. So logically if God acts as a father, then the same God acts as a mother.
But to call God father and then dismiss the mother is to just break the metaphor - and disregard the evidence that perhaps, just perhaps, Jesus actually implied God the mother BY saying God the father BECAUSE the two are inseparable.
I mean, it’s not like any books from that time acknowledging the divine feminine have been thrown aside as “heretical,” right?
No doubt; Mariolatry is an awful thing. Can’t stand the blasphemy that it is.
Hoss
Check the Hebrew and Greek words for God.....all masculine.
+1
A once fine faithful faith has devolved into the worship of the unknown /non existent god....
“Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name.[a] 10 Your kingdom come, your will be done,[b] on earth as it is in heaven. ......"
So how is God Our Father?
God is a single Father..
…Eph 1; 5He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, 6to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
Gal:4;…5He predestined us to adoption as sons through Jesus Christ to Himself, according to the kind intention of His will, 6to the praise of the glory of His grace, which He freely bestowed on us in the Beloved.
If you choose to see no plainly stated allegories and metaphors in your own chosen Bible quotes, I certainly won’t stand in your way. Though I must say, seeing someone who chooses a screen name that describes herself as a mom arguing against God-as-mother is depressing.
Believe what you want. As I said, God is infinite. If you’re happy squashing infinitude into fatherhood, go for it.
A gal shouldn’t have a bishopric, period:
“A bishop then must be blameless, the husband of one wife, vigilant, sober, of good behaviour, given to hospitality, apt to teach;”- 1st Timothy 3:2
The same scripture calls bats, birds. The same scripture has rules about eating four-legged flying beasts even though none exits. I’m told that in those cases the words should be seen as alegorical but somehow, in other places, words are inerrant. I doubt that.
Leviticus 11:13–19
These are the birds [05775 Pwe ‘owph] you are to detest and not eat because they are detestable: the eagle, the vulture, the black vulture, the red kite, any kind of black kite, any kind of raven, the horned owl, the screech owl, the gull, any kind of hawk, the little owl, the cormorant, the great owl, the white owl, the desert owl, the osprey, the stork, any kind of heron, the hoopoe and the bat.
The Hebrew word for bird is actually owph which means “fowl/winged creature.”1 The word owph simply means “to fly” or “has a wing.” So, the word includes birds, bats, and even flying insects. The alleged problem appears due to translation of owph as bird. Birds are included in the word owph, but owph is not limited to birds. This shows that translators aren’t always perfect when handling the inerrant Word of God.
https://answersingenesis.org/birds/bats-of-a-feather/
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