Gretta Vosper - The Face Of Evil
Posted on 03/22/2008 6:56:04 AM PDT by mkleesma
That triumphal barnburner of an Easter hymn, Jesus Christ Has Risen Today – Hallelujah, this morning will rock the walls of Toronto's West Hill United Church as it will in most Christian churches across the country.
But at West Hill on the faith's holiest day, it will be done with a huge difference. The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”
Thus, it will be hope that is declared to be resurrected – an expression of renewal of optimism and the human spirit – but not Jesus, contrary to Christianity's central tenet about the return to life on Easter morning of the crucified divine son of God.
Generally speaking, no divine anybody makes an appearance in West Hill's Sunday service liturgy.
There is no authoritative Big-Godism, as Rev. Gretta Vosper, West Hill's minister for the past 10 years, puts it. No petitionary prayers (“Dear God, step into the world and do good things about global warming and the poor”). No miracles-performing magic Jesus given birth by a virgin and coming back to life. No references to salvation, Christianity's teaching of the final victory over death through belief in Jesus's death as an atonement for sin and the omnipotent love of God. For that matter, no omnipotent God, or god.
Ms. Vosper has written a book, published this week – With or Without God: Why the Way We Live is More Important than What We Believe – in which she argues that the Christian church, in the form in which it exists today, has outlived its viability and either it sheds its no-longer credible myths, doctrines and dogmas, or it's toast.
She is considered one of the bright, if unconventional, minds within the United Church, Canada's largest Protestant Christian denomination. She holds a master of divinity degree from Queen's University and was ordained in 1992. She founded and chairs the Toronto-based Canadian Centre for Progressive Christianity.
Other Christian clergy and theologians have talked about the need to dramatically reform the doctrines of a faith that, with the exception of its vibrancy in the United States, has lost huge numbers of adherents throughout the Western world it once dominated as Christendom. In Canada, where 75 per cent of the population self-identifies as Christian, only about 16 per cent attend weekly services.
Addressing those statistics, what Ms. Vosper proposes is not so much reform as a scorched-earth approach.
A number of leading theologians in Britain – where the decline in adherents is more dramatic than in Canada – are on the same path, people like Richard Holloway, former bishop of Edinburgh and primate of the Scottish Episcopal (Anglican) Church, who has likened the Christian church to a self-service cafeteria stacked with messy trays of leftover food urgently in need of being thrown out.
Like Bishop Holloway, Ms. Vosper does not want to dress up the theological detritus – her words – of the past two millennia with new language in the hope of making it more palatable. She wants to get rid of it, and build on its ashes a new spiritual movement that will have relevance in a tight-knit global world under threat of human destruction.
She says there's been virtually a consensus among scholars for the past 30 years that the Bible is not some divine emanation – or in Ms. Vosper acronym, TAWOGFAT, The Authoritative Word of God For All Time – but a human project filled with contradictions and the conflicting worldviews and political perspectives of its authors.
And yet, she says, the liberal Christian churches, including her own, won't acknowledge that it is a human project, that it's wrong in parts and that, in the 21st century, it's no more useful as a spiritual and religious guide than a number of other books.
She says now that the work of biblical scholars has become publicly accessible, the churches and their clergy are caught living a lie that few people will buy much longer. “I just don't think we can placate those in the pews long enough to transition into a kind of new community that doesn't keep people away.”
She wants salvation redefined to mean new life through removing the causes of suffering in the world. She wants the church to define resurrection as “starting over,” “new chances.” She wants an end to the image of God as an intervening all-powerful authority who must be appeased to avoid divine wrath; rather she would have congregations work together as communities to define God – or god – according to their own worked-out definitions of what is holy and sacred. She wants the eucharist – the symbolic eating and drinking of Jesus's body and blood to make the congregation part of Jesus's body – to be instead a symbolic experience of community love.
Theologians asked to comment on her book said they wouldn't until they've read it.
But one of her colleagues who knows her well, Rev. Rob Oliphant, the progressive pastor of Toronto's Eglinton St. George's United Church, said, “While I'm somewhat sympathetic to the aims of it all – getting rid of the nonsense and keeping the core faith – I think that there is something lacking in it all. Gone is metaphor, poetry, symbol, image, beauty, paradox.”
Ms. Vosper said she and her congregation have tried hard not to lose those elements in their search for the sacred and the transcendent in life.
She met with members of her congregation last Sunday to discuss what the impact might be of her book.
She said it would take only a single vote of a presbytery – a local governing body of the church – to bring her before the church courts if a complaint against her is made, and the courts could be interested in examining what it means to be in “essential agreement” with the church's statement of faith.
“I can find myself in there [the statements of faith] but there's whole parts of it where I go, ‘Oh my goodness, this is terrible.' If someone says to me, ‘Do you believe in God?' I can come up with an answer that would satisfy the courts of the United Church. But would it reflect what's stated in their statement of faith? I don't think so. But it wouldn't be very far from what my colleague down the street, and what his colleague down the street from him, would say. That's the problem.”
They just don’t read the Bible any more.
With all this woman’s desire to shed Christianity of its alleged obsolete ideas, I bet she is just full of praise and respect for Islam.
" ...that ye be not shaken in mind or be troubled, neither by spirit, nor by word, nor by letter from us, as that THE DAY OF CHRIST IS AT HAND.(caps are mine not the Bible's) Let no man( or woman in this case)deceive you by any means: for that day shall not come except THERE COME A FALLING AWAY first, and that man of sin be revealed, the son of perdition:
who opposeth and exalteth himself above all that is called G!D, or that is worshipped: so that he as G!D sitteth in the temple of G!D showing himself that he is G!D. 2 Thess 2:2-4
I suppose I'm a bit eccentric but since "Easter"( Ishtar) is the very Babylonian worship of the goddess of fertility( read Alexander Hislop's, The Two Babylons, Dave Hunt's book, Woman Rides the Beast, and by all means-ALL of the Bible), I try to call this time simply the blessed Day of Christ crucified and resurrected....no more Easter Bunny words from me, no more colored eggs,...as for this woman she should heed the words of the Bible in leading a flock astray...better a millstone be wrapped around her neck and tossed into the sea...she needs prayer as does all of her followers.
These stories of the falling away is extremely sad as the latter days are coming to fruition but I also must rejoice through the worlds perdition and fall into iniquity that the time of Yeshua the King of Kings, Emmanuel, the SAVIOUR is at hand, blessed be He....even so come Lord Jesus.
Colossians 1:24-28
------
“Can the papyrus grow up without a marsh? Can the reeds flourish without water? While it is yet green and not cut down, it withers before any other plant. So are the paths of all who forget God; and the hope of the hypocrite shall perish, whose confidence shall be cut off, and whose trust is a spider’s web.
Job 8:11-14
What’s wrong with a praise band? David had one.
Gretta Vosper - The Face Of Evil
Nina, if I posted what I really thought initially, you’d think differently about me;)
We’re pretty much in the same boat!
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“I’m pretty sure my own religious views would count as heresy in your eyes.”
Don’t worry that was my own particular opinion. I apologize, I’m not in the best of moods at the moment.
Call it a kneejerk reaction, not one I’d actually advocate following through on.
The words “Jesus Christ” will be excised from what the congregation sings and replaced with “Glorious hope.”
Without Jesus Christ, there is no 'glorious hope,' just erroneous, vain wishful thinking. As the apostle Paul wrote in 1 Cor 15:14-21
14 And if Christ has not been raised, then our preaching is in vain and your faith is in vain. 15 We are even found to be misrepresenting God, because we testified about God that he raised Christ, whom he did not raise if it is true that the dead are not raised. 16 For if the dead are not raised, not even Christ has been raised. 17 And if Christ has not been raised, your faith is futile and you are still in your sins. 18 Then those also who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. 19 If in Christ we have hope in this life only, we are of all people most to be pitied.20 But in fact Christ has been raised from the dead, the firstfruits of those who have fallen asleep. 21 For as by a man came death, by a man has come also the resurrection of the dead.
Anyone who is embarrassed by the resurrection of Jesus Christ should at least exhibit 'truth in advertising' and not bear the name 'Christian.' As Paul noted, denying the resurrection misrepresents God. These may be 'nice' folks, but in truth they are in rebellion against their Creator and dead in their trespasses and sin.
Hey, Satan is *good* at what he does. Modern man tends to underestimate him, when they don’t deny him entirely.
“The order of apostasy is:”
There it is.
I walked in to a “penance service” at Holy Apostles in Boise last Wednesday. Supposed to be a Catholic church, but built like a theater in the half-round. There was a drum set, a teenager playing an electric guitar, a piano, and a singer.
The priest came out of some room to my right and confronted me for shaking my head. He asked if I didn’t like “the risen Christ.” Well, I had been lost in thought and was shaking my head about the music, anyway, so I didn’t responed very effectively.
Still, when he understood that I thought the music was inappropriate for a Catholic church, he walked away shaking *his* head in scorn.
Now that’s just wrong. If I am mistaken, he should have tried to correct me. But that’s the way it is in this diocese. Once a priest discovers that you’re not buying his 60s hippy-dippy church-of-do-your-own-thing crapola, they just shun you.
I think maybe I’ll try to find out what the Catholic Church last had to say on “Risen Christ” statues instead of Crucifixes, and on music in the Church, and, if I can run this miscreant to ground (finding a priest in the Boise diocese is next to impossible), try to discuss it with him.
When she was ordained in 1992, during the public ceremony she was examined by her bishop. And then the prayer of consecration were said with words like these:
“God and Father of all, we praise you for your infinite love in calling us to be a holy people in the kingdom of your Son Jesus our Lord, who is the image of your eternal and invisible glory, the firstborn among many brethren, and the head of the Church. We thank you that by his death he has overcome death, and, having ascended into heaven, has poured his gifts abundantly upon your people, making some apostles, some prophets, some evangelists, some pastors and teachers, to equip the saints for the work of ministry and the building up of his body.
(with the bishop's and attending clergy hands laid upon her)Therefore, Father, through Jesus Christ your Son, give
your Holy Spirit to N.; fill her with grace and power, and
make her a priest in your Church.”
So what do you suppose happened? Did she commit perjury before God? - did she loose her faith somewhere along the line? or is she under the influence of someone or something?
Well, many Lutheran churches (around my home anyway) don’t have steeples, they have bell towers.
Looks like a small tower on a castle.
In my Lutheran Church growing up, that was our standard greeting on Easter Morning. My Catholic Bride didn't know what the heck to say our first Easter together when all morning every time she ran into one of my family they kept saying "HE IS RISEN!"
Sadly most Christian "leaders" are heading in this direction where their view of Christianity will merge with the rest of the religions of the world into one world-wide religion.
A major sign of the beginning of the end and proves that the Bible is true and that Jesus Christ is coming back soon.
She just gave me a big ole smile. She got it.
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