Saturday, August 7, 2010

It's pronounced "heresy"

Doing a last update on the cloud of gnats calling themselves the, "Freedom for Christian Women Coalition" I ran across an explanation for something I had been wondering about but hadn't yet looked up. One of the supporters of this demand for an apology is also a listed blogger for CBE's blog but also for their newsletter. She uses the neologism, "godde" and this is her explanation:



Why godde and not God? godde is combination of God and goddess to show that the Divine transcends gender: godde is neither male nor female and both male and female since godde created both men and women in the image of godde. I believe that godde is Mother as well as Father. Instead of using the standard Lord that’s used to translate Yahweh in the Hebrew Scriptures, I use Sophia-Yahweh or Sophia. I will lean more towards feminine references to godde on my blog as masculine references are just about all you hear in church and society to refer to godde. I use exclusively feminine pronouns for godde for this reason as well. You’ll be seeing Sophia and Mother a lot on this blog, and I hope it doesn’t offend you. I hope it will help you to see godde in new ways and start to walk on new paths with this godde who cries out like a woman in labor to bring forth her people and nurses them at her own breast (Deut. 32:18, Psalm 22:10; 131:2; Isaiah 42:14; 49:15; 66:13).


I was recently queried on whether or not I was being too strong and perhaps I should consider calling them merely, "unfaithful". Well, that is certainly one word for it. However, calling what we have here in this example merely "unfaithful" is a bit like saying Judas was simply misguided about where to go for some extra pocket money. Here, in a CBE-published author, we have the open syncretism of paganism and Christianity. We have the hermaphroditic gawdy-godde. And when our authoress writes, "I will lean more towards feminine references to Godde on my blog as masculine references are just about all you hear in church and society to refer to Godde." you'll forgive me if all I can hear is an echo of a seminary professor, a vocal defender of religious feminism who, when questioned about why he taught "Egalitarianism" in all his classes responded, "Because you get the other side in every other class."

Offended? That's one way to put it.

nb: Once again, I have removed capitalization of the false deity the quoted author serves.

4 comments:

Kamilla said...

FYI: the link to Atteberry's website on CBE's blog is still active as of today.

Bill M said...

I first encountered this new thing this Summer in an article in one of our denominational newsletters. It was written by a young woman working overseas for our relief services and community development organization. My wife asked what it meant, and I said I didn't know, but I could guess that it was some kind of mash-up of "god" and "goddess", in an attempt to blend masculine and feminine. A little web-hopping the next day and I found http://www.godde.com/ which confirmed my guess, plus added some other background. You might be interested to read it (if you've not seen it already).

BTW - I've appreciated your comments on Touchstone's Mere Comments over the years on the egalitarian controversy, and just today followed back from there to your blog here.

Kamilla said...

Bill,

Thanks for the link - I hadn't seen it. Remarkably icky, isn't it?

And that you very much for the encouragement.

Kamilla

Bill M said...

I guess I just found it puzzling. I'm out of the loop of academia these days, so this one just came out of nowhere for me.

I wonder... are there similar movements in other languages? What do they do with Spanish, for instance? (My cat, she is so offended to be always known as "el gato"!)

El Dios + la diosa = ?

Ah well, back to my happy ignorance of things too high for me to attain... :)