Ride on to Die!

The Holiest of Weeks, and the devil never rests...

1/ Lowly He Comes (Matthew 21:4-5)

All this was done that it might be fulfilled which was spoken by the prophet, saying:

    “Tell the daughter of Zion,
    ‘Behold, your King is coming to you,
    Lowly, and sitting on a donkey,
    A colt, the foal of a donkey.’ ”

This reminds us of the hymn, which puts us on the side of the Palm Sunday road, palms in hand, encouraging Jesus to keep going, to the cross, to victory, to death, to the Father:

   Ride on, ride on in majesty!
   In lowly pomp ride on to die.
   O Christ, your triumphs now begin o'er captive death and conquered sin.

   Ride on, ride on in majesty!
   Your last and fiercest strife is nigh.
   The Father on his sapphire throne awaits his own anointed Son.

2/ Devotional Tools for Holy Week

A little article with links I wrote for the Lutheran Witness online.

(I’m also talking about these events on What-Not, the Podcast.)

3/ Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal

This article isn’t for everyone, but you should give it a try. Peter Jones, back in 2000, connects the dots between our current sexual revolution and pagan (gnostic) spirituality. (St. Paul was onto this in Romans 1:18-27, and Isaiah before that in 56:3-5.)

What is particularly interesting is the data on the eunuch priests who would dress as women to serve in the goddess temples. This helps me to understand the spiritual forces behind our current transgender movement.

Find the articles here: Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal, and be sure to download the PDF. There is a lot of great stuff in the 155 footnotes.

As in ancient Gnosticism, the patriarchal God of Scripture is eliminated from respectable “cutting-edge” theology, and even from polite campus speech in some evangelical schools, all in the name of Christ. Such a trade-off prevents many well-meaning Christians from seeing the essential goal of the sexual revolution as the subtle destruction of a theistic worldview. In the place of sexual differentiation, we are offered monistic, egalitarian androgyny as a physical, social and spiritual ideal. Thus many, espousing gender liberation in the name of Christ and the Gospel, only, too late, discover a culture “liberated” from the God who, in Christ, both created and redeemed the world. What is often not seen in the debate on sexuality is that we are also in the presence of two “Gospels”: the one, pagan, preaches redemption as liberation from the Creator and repudiation of creation’s structures; the other, Christian, proclaims redemption as reconciliation with the Creator, and the proclamation of creation’s goodness. In a pagan world, a truncated Gospel of personal salvation will no longer do. Sexuality within the context of creation must be announced as an essential part of the Christian message of reconciliation with God and glad submission to his good will. (468)

HT Pr Andrew Packer for sending this article.

I included a lot more quotations as an appendix, just keep scrolling.

4/ Male and Female He Made Them: A Brief Look at Transgenderism

Speaking of Pr Packer, here’s a video of Pr Packer talking about applying Law and Gospel to the Transgender Movement. This is a must-watch (perhaps not for the children, but for the rest of us).

(Here’s a link to Pr Packer’s bibliography.)

5/ Declare His Wonderful Deeds

Luther on 1 Peter 2:10

That you may declare the wonderful deeds of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light.

A priest must be God’s messenger and must have a command from God to proclaim His Word. You must, says Peter, exercise the chief function of a priest, that is, to proclaim the wonderful deed God has performed for you to bring you out of darkness into the light. And your preaching should be done in such a way that one brother proclaims the mighty deed of God to the other, how you have been delivered through Him from sin, hell, death, and all misfortune, and have been called to eternal life. Thus you should also teach other people how they, too, come into such light. For you must bend every effort to realize what God has done for you. Then let it be your chief work to proclaim this publicly and to call everyone into the light into which you have been called. Where you find people who do not know this, you should instruct and also teach them as you have learned, namely, how one must be saved through the power and strength of God and come out of darkness into the light. (LW 30:64-65)

6/ Jacob Wrestling with Jesus

Philip, a Worldwide Bible Class attendee, drew this really cool picture of Jacob wrestling with Jesus.

Join us for Worldwide Bible Class today. We’ll talk about the events of Holy Week.

7/ #BOXOLOGY

Here’s a new idea for YouTube series, I reach into my box of notes and see what’s there. This week I grabbed a note about how Luther sees world history as a story of two brothers: the justified and the self-justified.

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Remember to go to Holy Week services this week and, read old theology books. (If you don't have a pastor or congregation, click here. If you don't have old theology books, click here.) 

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Thank you, again, for your time and attention, and for your prayers. Please keep in touch. 

Lord's Blessings, Pastor Wolfmueller

2 Corinthians 1:3-4

www.wolfmueller.co

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From the website:

• The Passion of Jesus (drawn from all four Gospels)

• Fasting: Two Ways

• Against a Minimalistic Theological Aesthetic

• The Four Winds that Blow in the Human Heart (Martin Luther’s Map of Human Emotions)

• Vain Rage

• Luthardt on the Ancient Memory of the Fall

Books | Everbook | YouTube | website | certificates | Devotions | Logos Software

A/ Androgyny: The Pagan Sexual Ideal, More Quotations

The clearest textual testimony in ancient times [of eunuch (transexual) priests] comes from nineteenth century BC Mesopotamia. Androgynous priests were associated with the worship of the goddess Istar from the Sumerian age (1800 BC). Their condition was due to their “devotion to Istar who herself had ‘transformed their masculinity into femininity.'” They functioned as occult shamans, who released the sick from the power of the demons just as, according to the cult myth, they had saved Istar from the devil’s lair. “…as human beings,” says a contemporary scholar, “…they seem to have engendered demonic abhorrence in others; …the fearful respect they provoked is to be sought in their otherness, their position between myth and reality, and their divine-demonic ability to transgress boundaries.” (449)

Emily Culpepper, an Ex-Southern Baptist, now a lesbian pagan witch, teaching at the University of Redlands in Southern California … sees gays and lesbians, in her words, as “shamans for a future age.” She reserves a spiritual role for homosexuals, for a shaman is “…a charged, potent, awe-inspiring, and even fear-inspiring person who takes true risks by crossing over into other worlds.” A fuller definition leaves little to the imagination: “The power and effectiveness of shamans-witches, sibyls, Druids-emerges from their ability to communicate with the non-human: extra-terrestrial and subterranean forces, and the spirit-world of the dead.” (455-456)

Though promoted as an issue of civil rights, the homosexual/androgynous revival is not merely contemporary civics or chic theory. The close connection between pagan esoteric spirituality and androgynous sexuality, evident across time and space, demands that we not ignore the spiritual dimensions underlying the contemporary scene. Barbara Marx Hubbard’s spirit guide says that sexual identity confusion is a good thing; in the new age, “Your adolescence will be a joy. You will be androgynous.”

In the light of the above evidence, is should not be surprising to note that the revival of pagan religion in our day is accompanied by a powerful reappearance of pagan sexuality. In other words, homosexuality may be less a modern question of biological destiny or civil rights than a necessary practical outworking of age-old pagan spirituality. It is becoming more and more manifest that a particular religious commitment is always accompanied by a particular sexual theory and practice. But this is not to suggest some scarlet, conspiratorial thread connecting the dots. The connection is logical, theological, and inevitable. A monistic view of existence will work itself out in all the domains of human life, and especially in the domain of sexuality. (457)

The androgynous being thus sums up the very goal of the mystical, monistic quest, whether ancient or modern: “in mystical love and at death one completely integrates the spirit world: all contraries are collapsed. The distinctions between the sexes are erased: the two merge into an androgynous whole. In short, at the center one knows oneself, is known, and knows the nature of reality.” (460)

As in classic monistic spirituality, they have, on the physical plane, joined the opposites, proving and experiencing that there are no distinctions. Just as the distinctions inherent in heterosexuality point to the fundamental theistic notion of the Creator/creature distinction, so androgyny in its various forms eradicates distinction and elevates the spiritual blending of all things, including the idolatrous confusion of the human with the divine. This seems to be the very same logic that brings Paul to a similar conclusion already in Romans 1:18-27. (463-464)

We surely must conclude that sexual perversion and, in particular, the elimination of sexual distinctions, is not an incidental footnote of pagan religious history, of mere passing interest, but represents one of its fundamental ideological commitments. That the pagan priesthood would be so identified, across space and time, with the blurring of sexual identity via homosexual androgyny indicates, beyond a doubt, the enormous priority paganism has given, and continues to give, to the undermining of God-ordained monogamous heterosexuality, and the enthusiastic promotion of androgyny in its varied forms. (464)

Jones concludes:

As in ancient Gnosticism, the patriarchal God of Scripture is eliminated from respectable “cutting-edge” theology, and even from polite campus speech in some evangelical schools, all in the name of Christ. Such a trade-off prevents many well-meaning Christians from seeing the essential goal of the sexual revolution as the subtle destruction of a theistic worldview. In the place of sexual differentiation, we are offered monistic, egalitarian androgyny as a physical, social and spiritual ideal. Thus many, espousing gender liberation in the name of Christ and the Gospel, only, too late, discover a culture “liberated” from the God who, in Christ, both created and redeemed the world. What is often not seen in the debate on sexuality is that we are also in the presence of two “Gospels”: the one, pagan, preaches redemption as liberation from the Creator and repudiation of creation’s structures; the other, Christian, proclaims redemption as reconciliation with the Creator, and the proclamation of creation’s goodness. In a pagan world, a truncated Gospel of personal salvation will no longer do. Sexuality within the context of creation must be announced as an essential part of the Christian message of reconciliation with God and glad submission to his good will. (468)