What’s Wrong With a “Female Adam” Anyway?
By Dwayna Litz
April 19, 2007
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]
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
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.
© 2006 Dwayna Litz
www.ltwinternational.org or www.lightingtheway.blogspot.com
After months of sitting under the teaching of Pastor John MacArthur, Dwayna Litz founded Lighting The Way Ministry. This ministry works with churches in Southern CA in evangelizing the area through prayer walking, feeding the neighborhood weekly, donating clothing to the homeless, bringing Bible studies to them, writing tracts for the New Age environment, taking people to church and to church events, and providing Biblical answers to their objections to Christianity in love and gentleness.
Other articles by Dwayna Litz:
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