Probably, God Is A Woman
FoxNews.com reported today that Cybill Shepherd, the actress of Moonlighting fame, has “developed quite the hybrid of religious convictions.”
“I’m a Christian Pagan Buddhist Goddess worshiper, but I’m also a feminist. I think the ultimate glass ceiling is God, in another words, if we think God is a man, then we make man a God, and I studied and learned that there is a whole other history of the worshiping of the great mother. I really think that probably God is a woman, [and] that helped me to break through that celestial glass ceiling.”
Ms. Shepherd’s religious smorgasbord of a worldview is quintessentially postmodern. Even though she is 59 years old, her description of her “faith” is an excellent example of the worldview most American young adults have adopted. George Barna’s research reports that about 80% of teens and young adults are more likely to develop their own personal set of beliefs than accept those of a church or denomination. They eschew labels they deem restrictive, especially those that imply some set of moral absolutes, such as “Christian”. This is the legacy of moral relativism, which is itself the legacy of evolutionary indoctrination. The thinking goes that if we have evolved from the simple to the complex, then we shall continue to evolve to ever-increasing heights of complexity, knowledge, and enlightenment. This applies to matters of faith and religion just as much as to all other aspects of the human experience, all programmed into us, not by God, but by evolution for the sole purpose of the advancement and betterment of the species. All you have to do is watch one program on The History Channel or Discovery Channel on the topic of faith or religion, and within five minutes you will see what I am talking about.
To the person who accepts an evolutionary worldview (but does not reject religion altogether, as an atheist would, for example), faith and religion are tools at humanity’s disposal to better themselves, and not so much a means to either connect with a supernatural being or receive a moral code to govern one’s behavior. All religions are human in origin, and therefore contain elements of truth, virtue, and superstition. Ultimately, they are simply a vehicle through which humanity has expressed the higher ideals that will propel its evolution.
Understanding this worldview helps us make sense of Ms. Shepherd’s statement, because we can better understand her perspective. Humanity must continue to evolve. Therefore, humanity’s faith must evolve as well. That is why it is not a problem to add, remove, modify, and combine elements of many different religions to produce a faith that is better. After all, isn’t that how we got here in the first place? Reading between the lines of Shepherd’s statement, we can see that she may or may not actually believe that God is a woman, or that God even exists as an objective reality. For her, neither of those things is really the point. The point is that she has adopted a belief system that empowers her as a woman, allowing her to “break through the celestial glass ceiling” and, thus, advance beyond the primitive notion that God is a man, and all the oppressive misogyny that goes along with it.
The biblical worldview is completely incompatible with this line of thinking, and not because the Bible insists on describing God with male terminology. If the God of the Bible exists as an objective reality, then there is no truth or knowledge to be invented or discovered in the sense the evolutionary worldview thinks of it. Rather, all truth and all knowledge are possessed by, and therefore revealed by, God Himself. To what other source can a person logically go to gain greater wisdom, enlightenment, or understanding than to God, who possesses all knowledge, who made everything, and who has always been there? The Bible teaches that while knowledge certainly increases on the earth (Daniel 12:4, Ecc. 12:12), humanity is not evolving to a higher existence or ideal. On the contrary, man was created in perfection, and fell into sin resulting in death, disease, pain, and suffering. (Genesis 3, Romans 5:12) If anything, humanity is devolving to unfathomable depths of moral depravity. The higher existence to aspire to is the one in which we are reconciled to God, as He originally intended, not one of ever-increasing self-actualization. This is the purpose of faith, to bring us to the God that exists, not to invent a god that best suits our evolutionary agenda.
Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.
Faith is our connection to the unseen, supernatural (meaning “above nature” and not “imaginary” or “unreal”) world in which God operates. The point of faith is to get to God; to know Him, understand Him, and experience a relationship with Him. The evolutionary worldview separates faith from God, making it a human construct for human purposes, but Hebrews 11:1 shows us clearly that the object of our faith matters. If our faith is in faith, or more directly, in ourselves and our ability to construct a workable belief system, then does our hope have any substance? On what foundation is such faith based? However, if our faith is in God, then the substance, the foundation, of our hope is real, powerful, and eternal.
Hebrews 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please Him
Where Cybill Shepherd’s worldview differs most acutely from a biblical worldview is in the object, point, or purpose of faith. The follower of Jesus Christ understands that the point is to please God, and this is not a limitation about which one ought to become bitter. Rather, to please God is to draw near to Him, and the nearer one draws to God, the better he will become in every sense of the word. We are not trying to break through a glass ceiling and push God out of the way so that we can evolve to a place of ultimate empowerment. That is what Satan tried to do, which should give a clear indication of the spiritual origin of the worldview we are discussing here. Rather, we endeavor to increase in authentic faith in Jesus Christ, until, as Ephesians 4:13 says, “we reach unity in faith and in the knowledge of the Son of God and become mature, attaining to the whole measure of the fullness of Christ.”
I suppose you could call that “spiritual evolution.”
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