We read periodically of the return of the wolf to Europe--once feared extinct, now running hunting packs throughout northern Europe and Spain. But metaphorical wolves are also returning to re-establish a once long thought extinct pagan culture in Europe and the West.
The following is a call-to-action from an officer in the Anglican Church of New Zealand.
The newly appointed vicar of Auckland's Anglican church St Matthew-in-the-City has called on the church to approve same-sex marriages and ordination of gay vicars. Reverend Dr Helen Jacobi, in her sermon on Sunday, spoke to the church's two-yearly General Synod, being held this week.Ms Jacobi officiates at a congregation in Auckland which has long prided itself on capturing the wisdom of the world and baptising it with Christian platitudes. The worship of Human Comfort has been its real religion for decades.
Rev Jacobi said the Synod had a clear choice, "they can and try and keep the church locked in the 1950s or the 1850s, thinking they can stop the movement for justice and inclusion of our lesbian and gay sisters and brothers which our hearts yearn to see. Or they can come out from behind their fears and prejudices and welcome all equally behind the altar, in the pulpit, and at the altar to be married.''
Rev Jacobi said Ms Matthew's had long had its doors wide open, and "we are richer for it. We call today on our leaders to step up, to be without fear and to allow the voice of the Shepherd to call them forward. The time of waiting is over, we will wait no longer.'' [NZ Herald]
As we read her sermon, er . . . press release, it is helpful to filter her "wisdom" through the following prism:
Many in our churches continue to avoid the issue of gender because, they say, it is not a "confessional issue." All I can say is that gender is the major issue in the "confession" of neo-paganism. We can no longer keep silent. We must present the Bible's view of gender as an essential part of the coherence of the Bible's entire world-view, over again the "coherence" of the feministic, pagan agenda.
Let's be realistic. The pagan agenda has taken over our culture. Feminists and intellectual neo-pagans in control of the Academy and the media are working to eliminate any vestiges of patriarchy and normative heterosexuality. At the same time, they are seeking to institutionalize "pan-sexuality" for the coming brave new world, where all gender choices are normative. At a popular level, on virtually every other page of the wildly successful novel, The Da Vinci Code the author, Dan Brown, speaks of the "divine feminine" as the hope of humanity. In this view of things, "patriarchy" [responsible male leadership, reflecting God's creation of order and distinction] is the demonic centre of an odious power-obsessed hierarchy that places the male over the female, mind over body, heaven over earth, the transcendent creator God over the created world. It must be replaced with a profoundly pagan, feministic, pantheistic sense of divinity as the life-force within all things, a world of the yin and the yang where nothing is ultimately right or wrong.
These two mutually-exclusive, all-inclusive programs of the pagan and the biblical world-view are presently locked in deadly confrontation. In this clash, gender, whether exclusive heterosexuality or liberated pan-sexuality, has a leading, integral, and logical part in the whole web of ideas. [Dr Peter Jones, Professor of New Testament, Westminster Seminary in Escondido, cited in J. Ligon Duncan & Susan Hunt, Women's Ministry in the Local Church (Wheaton: Crossway Books, 2006), p.129.]
Ms Jacobi is a poster-child for the pan-genderism of the new paganism. She has all the sartorial hallmarks of a wolf in sheep's clothing.
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