ELCA 'Star,' Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, Believes and Teaches Wiccan Goddess is Another 'Aspect' of Christian God

12/6/2013

ELCA pastor and author Nadia Bolz-Weber is held in high esteem among the leadership of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America. She is asked to speak at many large denominational gatherings and high-profile ELCA services indicating how she is revered in the denomination. The ELCA's Metropolitan New York Synod posted on Facebook that “Pastor Nadia is the closest thing the ELCA has to a rock star.”

Rev. Bolz-Weber was involved in Wicca before going to an ELCA seminary to become a pastor.

On a Bolz-Weber book publicity tour, Nadia read to the audience from her memoir about this time of her life saying, “I had never stopped believing in God, not really. But I did have to go hang out with His aunt for awhile. She is called the goddess. My first experience with Wicca . . .”

The ELCA 'rock star' goes on -

“The goddess we spoke of never felt to me like a substitute for God but simply another aspect of the divine, like God's aunt or something. When I tell other Christians of my time with the goddess I think they expect me to characterize it as a period in my life when I was misguided and that now thankfully I have come back to both Jesus and my senses. But it's not like that. I can't imagine that the God of the universe is limited to our ideas of God. I can't image that God doesn't reveal Godself in countless ways outside of the simple system of Christianity. And in a way I need a god who is bigger and more nimble and more mysterious than what I could understand or contrive.”

“In fact, I felt guided by god the whole time I sojourned outside of the church. The divine source of my life and my identity perhaps knew that I needed to bask in the female face of god for a good long while outside the church before I could ever return to it whole and able to see the divine feminine in my own traditional.” (see here)

Wicca is a religion of witches, witchcraft and pentagrams. The Christian Bible is not God's Word, according to this idolatrous religion, and they do not worship the Triune God: Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Wiccan deity is completely different from the God of the Bible. Yet the ELCA's “rock star” believes that the goddess worshipped by witches is just another dimension or persona of the God of the Bible. The female side of Him. Christians know Jesus as God's Son, but according to Bolz-Weber, the Wiccan goddess is his close relative. Another aspect of God. Like the fourth member of the Trinity?

This is heresy.

Bolz-Weber is a heretic. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America lifts up this pastor as a leading teacher in the denomination. How could they do this? It's easy really; this is an acceptable teaching in the ELCA. The current issue of the official magazine of the ELCA, The Lutheran, states this clearly:

“And sometimes we’d wonder just what God was up to in this religiously plural world. Perhaps — here’s a specifically Christian way of putting it — our learning from our neighbors of other faiths might just be giving us glimpses into dimensions of Christ’s lordship, and the saving activity of God the Trinity, that we hadn’t been expecting.” (read here)

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Read more about the life and teachings of ELCA pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber (click here and scroll down).

15 Comments

Didaskalos link

12/6/2013 11:50:28 am

Bolz-Weber: "I can't image that God doesn't reveal Godself in countless ways outside of the simple system of Christianity."

But of course. How quaint is the biblical depiction of the Trinity to the faddish ELCA. The womyn of the ELCA have compiled an ever-expanding list of "god" personae: Sophia, Asherah (supposedly the Canaanite name for the Holy Spirit), Christ/a, Mother God, you name it. Former ELCA presiding bishop Mark Hanson chimes in by writing that Christians, Jews, and Muslims all worship one God.

And how world-pleasingly latitudinarian is Bolz-Weber's feminist-uber-alles avoidance of odious masculine pronouns like "Himself." She shares that pronoun paranoia with Hanson. Pastor Eric writes on the Sheep Dog's Spot: "The prize for not using a pronoun for God has to go to Bishop Mark Hanson, who recently said in a statement to the ELCA News Service, 'You can bet your life that God will be faithful to God's promise, because God bet the life of Jesus on God's faithfulness...' It seem to me that Bishop Hanson should use a pronoun when Bishop Hanson speaks about God or Bishop Hanson might confuse Bishop Hanson's listeners."

Can't you just picture Hanson and Bolz-Weber linking arms and singing lustily Joe Long's "Non-Confrontational Hymn of the Republic"?

"Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of Godself -
Emanating from penumbras there wherein the Godself dwellth -
S/he is sending forth suggestions we should socialize the wealth -

Godself is marching on!

She, he, it, they, you and meeeeee!
She, he, it, they, you and meeeeee!
She, he, it, they, you and meeeeee!
Godself is all of us!

I have seen Godself's reflection in Mohammed's Thousand Names,
And the Buddhist and the Hindu Godselves really are the same -
So don't try to be Godselfish and put down your old King James -
Godself is marching on..."

Clerically garbed bishop or tank-topped pastor, a wolf is a wolf is a wolf.

Kathy

12/7/2013 03:31:58 am

Nice, Didaskalos, and everything you say is true. (Personally, I just can't stand the tattoos. Such a bad influence on our kids.) But... a real prob with Nadia is that there is some truth in what she is saying.

Some folks tend to forget that there is a lot of the "feminine" in Christianity: Mary and countless saints. And, yes, God does reveal Himself outside of Christianity. That's no secret.

It's interesting that muscle-bound, truck-driver-tattooed, 6'1" Nadia cares about "the feminine." Strange. The ELCA-ites are a bit confused.

btw -- I did read something that tops Bishop Hanson's pronoun-free writing: Andrea Walker, when she was pastor at St. John's in Summit, NJ, wrote an entire meditation without using the words "he" or "him" once.

Richard

1/25/2014 09:00:42 am

Actually LOL singing that but in reality, if they could get away with those lyrics, they would. Sad.

Campanarius link

12/9/2013 07:01:41 am

Is this disgusting? Certainly. But is this really shocking? No. For as much as the ELCA and internet celebrate her, the reality is that she is pretty typical ELCA. She really fits right into the mould that the ELCA desires. The things that she is saying and doing fall perfectly in line with what they teach at their colleges and seminaries. I know this because I attended an ELCA college that got into a twist if you used masculine pro-nouns or believed that only those who have faith in Jesus Christ will go to heaven. I can recall a professor calling one young woman stupid in front of the entire class for saying that she believed in a literal six day creation. Bolz-Weber is a product of this environment, she is quite ordinary in the ELCA. If it looks like a duck, quacks like a duck, and walks like a duck - it's a duck. She's your typical liberal theologian who embraces Diversity, Justice, and Universalism. She rejects the authority of Scripture, which I'm sure began with influence from Higher-Criticism and its proponents, and she has just enough of a dark past to be moderately interesting as a human being. Tattoo's aren't much to be worked up over, they're pretty common, even among young clergy in the conservative Lutheran denominations. They just don't make a spectacle of themselves on account of their skin decor or use it as a marketing tool to be considered edgy or contemporary before the laity. Bolz-Weber truly is the perfect storm of ordinary ELCA. She represents the new standard for clergy in America's largest Lutheran body. It's about her, it's about worldly things, and none of it is about Christ crucified and salvation by faith alone in Him alone.

Carl W Baggett Jr

12/10/2013 03:01:33 pm

Where is Saint Nicholas when we need him?

Eric Tritten link

12/13/2013 04:01:21 am

I keep holding out hope that these are the extreme fringe of the ELCA, but I keep seeing things like these statements from Pr. Bolz-Webber and stories about HerChurch in San Francisco, CA http://www.herchurch.org/. Where is the outrage? Where is the call for repentance within the ELCA? One must conclude that the denomination endorses these beliefs and actions. To paraphrase a Baptist leader said, they have lost Evangelical because they have no sin and therefore have no need for the Gospel, they've lost Lutheran because they approve all the things the Formula of Concord condemns, they've lost Church because they no longer teach the Word or administer the Sacraments rightly, which leaves them being a very American religious group. It's so sad.

Myron Hayes

12/17/2013 11:01:27 am

"Common sense, disregarding the discomfort, or even the horror, which the idea of turning all our theological language into the feminine gender arouses in most Christians, will ask 'Why not? Since God is in fact not a biological being and has no sex, what can it matter whether we say "He" or "She," "Father" or "Mother," "Son" or "Daughter?"'

"But Christians think that God Himself has taught us how to speak of Him. To say that it does not matter is to say either that all the masculine imagery is not inspired, is merely human in origin, or else that, though inspired, it is quite arbitrary and unessential.... It is also surely based on a shallow view of imagery. Without drawing upon religion, we know from our poetical experience that image and apprehension cleave closer together that common sense is here prepared to admit...."

"The innovators are really implying that sex is something superficial, irrelevant to the spiritual life. To say that men and women are equally eligible for a certain profession is to say that for the purposes of that profession their sex is irrelevant. We are, within that context, treating both as neuters. As the State grows more like a hive or an ant-hill it needs an increasing number of workers who can be treated as neuters. This may be inevitable for our secular life. But in our Christian life we must return to reality. There we are not homogeneous units, but different and complementary organs of mystical body...."

"Only one wearing the masculine uniform can (provisionally, and till the Parousia) represent the Lord to the Church: for we are all, corporately and individually, feminine to Him.... A given man... may make a bad male partner in a dance. The cure for that is that men should more diligently attend dancing classes; not that the ballroom should henceforward ignore distinctions of sex and treat all dancers as neuter. That would, of course be eminently sensible, civilized, and enlightened, but, once more, 'not near so much like a Ball.'"

"And this parallel between the Church and the Ball is not so fanciful as some would think. The Church ought to be more like a Ball than it is like a factory or a political party....The factory and the political party are artificial creations.... In them we are not dealing with human beings in their concrete entirety--only with 'hands' or voters. I am not of course using 'artificial' in any derogatory sense. Such artifices are necessary: but because they are our artifices we are free to shuffle, scrap and experiment as we please. But the Ball exists to stylize something which is natural and which concerns human beings in their entirety--namely, courtship. We cannot shuffle, or tamper so much. With the Church, we are farther in: for there we are dealing with male and female not merely as facts of nature but as the live and awful shadows of realities utterly beyond our control and largely beyond our direct knowledge."

(Excerpts from "Priestesses in the Church?" by C. S. Lewis. Reprinted in GOD IN THE DOCK, Eerdmans Publishing, 1970)

12/17/2013 12:38:51 pm

"Priestesses in the Church?" is posted in its entirety at http://www.acahome.org/anglican_documents/cs_lewis_priestess.html

A.G.Mickelson

1/24/2014 12:06:50 pm

Beware of false speech even at church Be a individual E.L.C. A is falling into a trap Of false-hoods

Linda

3/12/2014 02:42:50 pm

I Timothy 4:1-2 "Now the Spirit expressly says that in latter times some will depart from the faith, giving heed to deceiving spirits and doctrines of demons, speaking lies in hypocrisy, having their conscience seared with a hot iron:"
This "pastor" is the fulfillment of this prophecy. And those who follow her do so because of their lack of basic Bible knowledge.

The Reverend D. Mitchell Evans

9/25/2017 04:22:15 pm

Thank you. Absolutely. False teacher.

Joe B.

3/15/2014 04:22:22 am

I'm very troubled by the filters the ELCA is putting on our current pastoral search. The candidates we have interviewed all seem more concerned with promoting "new theology" than teaching the actual text of the Bible. The candidates we have been given are folks who have had crazy lives who are now on second "Carriers" as ELCA Pastors. Do you know of any pastors, who love the word of God, the teachings of Martin Luther, who even (dare I say it ) agree with Calvinist doctrines, who want to pastor a church that loves God, HIs Son and HIs Word? This Church is in a semi-rural community that is a great place to raise kids. But we are not even given the names of candidates who who have small children and 30 years of their career left. Can you help us out?

Dan Skogen

3/15/2014 05:28:43 am

Joe,

Unfortunately there are few pastors as you describe left in the ELCA. But I'd recommend contacting Lutheran CORE, they may be able to help you find someone. I'd also encourage you to talk to your fellow congregation members about changing your church affiliation from the ELCA to an orthodox Lutheran church.

9/25/2017 04:24:18 pm

The ELCA and other mainline liberal expressions are dabbling in one world religion which is not only heretical but lead to destruction.

V. Rev. David L. Rogers

2/14/2019 03:26:24 pm

I left this completely apostate so-called 'church' in 2001 and have not missed it ten minutes since.

And to imagine that they had such-and-such problems with ME!! Too damned orthodox and historic Christian humanist to suit them!

I refuse to even speak to anyone who retains association with this accursed outfit. For those who know better and remain in it do serve it, and serve to perpetuate its existence.

May the ELCA and all in fellowship with it be accursed!

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ELCA 'Star,' Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber, Believes and Teaches Wiccan Goddess is Another 'Aspect' of Christian God

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