Thursday, January 15, 2009

Christian Witches

So I was reading a blog the other day and linked from a comment someone else made to another blog. I was very intrigued. I found something I had never heard of: Christian Witches. Sounds like an oxymoron to me.

How does one proclaim to be a Christian: living in the light worshiping God and also a witch: a worshipper of nature is basically what those who are Christian witches seem to profess to doing.

Jesus covers this in Luke 4; however, most who chose to worship other "idols" look at the bible as not being the inspired word of God, but look on it as a book written by fallible men doing the best they could. My thoughts on this are God is God and if He chose to publish His story He made history work out to have in the story what He wanted told.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

hi tina! vanessa here. just saw your blog for the first time today. and in reading backward thru time came upon this post of yours and thought i'd offer my 2-cents.

i'm one of those folks that doesn't believe the bible is the inerrant, literal word of God. i do believe it contains much truth and wisdom and a great many facts. but i do believe that the writers were human/fallible. and more importantly, that the editors and translators over the subsequent centuries were human/fallible and, sadly, often lead by a desire for power or to further an agenda. yes, i suppose that if God wanted to, he could interrupt all the fallible/corruptness through time to bring us a perfect document. but i find no reasonable reason to believe that God did this. he doesn't stop people from erring in other ways. instead he uses our mistakes to the advantage of his plan. so, i might accept the argument that even though the bible isn't perfect, that it still serves God's purposes. with the latter statement, it still falls on me (and every other reader) of the bible to use discernment in the reading of it. discernment can include looking for guidance from the holy spirit. looking for feedback from a number of other truth seekers. guidance from looking at God's continual working in and around us to corroborate or refute when encountering a gray area. etc. i think it is at once our duty to exercise this discernment while simultaneously being painfully aware that we too are human/fallible and will likely get things wrong too. but in the end, even this will get worked into God's ends.

now, for your other point. i think the term Christian Witch is confusing at best and inaccurate at worst. i know those who've argued that they're trying to reclaim a word that has been corrupted from it's original intent. but language changes and trying to reclaim an ancient meaning when the current meaning is so cememnted in people's heads, just seems a bad idea. but moving past language...God came to our world clothed in human-ness. it would not be abhorrent to worship God as Jesus, because Jesus is still God and we wouldn't be worshiping his skin & bones but the spirit of God within. likewise, i think some (but certainly not all, probably not even a majority) of the folks who claim the Christian Witch title believe that God clothes himself in creation and likewise worship the spirit of God that they see WITHIN creation rather than the corporeal/tangible creation itself.