Spirit Wars In The Third Millennium
When
the moon is in the seventh house
And
Jupiter aligns with Mars
Then
peace will guide the planets
And
love will steer the stars
This
is the dawning of the age of Aquarius
(from
the musical HAIR, 1967)
The
musings of Aquarian gurus concerning a New Age can be dismissed as so
much astrological drivel. However, major changes are taking place that
will render America unrecognizable. An air of social revolution blows
across the bridge to the twenty-first century. But as with all past revolutions
the old order has to be brought to its knees before the new can take control.
Four components constitute our time:
1. Objective changes. As we enter the third millennium, we are entering the global community, which now includes the 1.2 billion population of China. The internet connects the planet in a world wide web. Ecology and economics have gone global. There is now, ominously, only one major power.
2. The destabilizing of the Judeo-Christian cultural consensus. As if recent history were following some set plan, we can observe an incredible assault, since the Sixties, upon the Judeo-Christian cultural consensus.
Some speak of the end of Christendom, others of the "Christian Interlude." According to astrology, the age of Pisces (the Fish - long a symbol of Christianity) will end around the turning of the millennium, followed by the Age of Aquarius, the goddess/water-bearer, who will finally quench our spiritual thirst. Scholars, Christian and otherwise now routinely call the years, B.C.E. (Before Common Era) and C.E. (Common Era). All reference to Christ has been eliminated
We live in a time of educational crisis,of the "dumbing down of America." Law enforcement documents an epidemic of child violence. The sexual liberation has unleashed the pandemic of sexually-transmitted diseases, divorce and abortion. Spiritual liberation has produced a pandemic of drug addiction. Pornography has emerged as a "major component of American culture." Our youth, the America of the Third Millennium, feel this destruction with full force. Meanwhile, patriarchy is fingered as the great evil. The foundation of Judeo-Christian culture based on the fatherly protection of the family must be rooted out of the body politic.
If patriarchy must go, then so must the great Patriarch, God the Father. The attack upon the Bible's God is followed by an attack against biblical Christians, pushed more and more to the margins of society.
Who would have imagined thirty years ago that America would become the world's leader in divorce, abortion, "family planning," drug addiction, homosexuality, the destabilizing notions of radical feminism, pornography and Eastern/pagan spirituality, producing a culture nose-diving to self destruction?
"Not to worry," declare the gurus. "Systems implode before putting themselves back together again in more elegant and constructive forms." According to revolutionary doctrine, destruction of the old must precede construction of the new.
3. Pagan reconstruction; A triumphant ideology dominates the centers of power, promoted as the only savior. Since the Sixties the East and the West have come together to form an all-inclusive community. Western democracy and technology have gone East, and Eastern spirituality has come West. Many leaders in environmental movements have turned to neo-paganism Vice President Gore pushes the envelope of religious syncretism to new levels, declaring: "We are not separate from the earth. God is not separate from the earth.") A professor of Religion states with approbation: "Paganism is fast developing as the new religion of the twenty-first century." The New Age displaces patriarchy/male headship with egalitarianism or matriarchy/female leadership. Gender differentiation is down-played in favor of sexual freedom and alternate life-styles. Homosexuality will be the sexuality of choice in the Age of Aquarius.
4.The inevitable war for the spirit and the soul of the nation.
Salem National News and Public Affairs Department (March 4, 1997).
This is no longer the Fifties, no longer a time when we can once more raise the sleeping giant of American Christianity. The soul of the nation is now in the hands of the pagans, promoting, with all the flashy skills of Hollywood technique, the pagan lie. Much of the population has been dumbed down, sound-bitten and video-clipped half to death, with little will to resist.
If Christians are going to fight the good fight of faith in our time, we had better become aware of the nature of the enemy. For on the other side of bridge into the twenty-first century are spirit wars for the Truth perhaps the most difficult the church has ever known.
Peter Jones is Professor
of New Testament at Westminster Theological Seminary, Escondido, author
of the new book Spirit Wars: Pagan Revival in Christian America(Wine
Press, 1997), and chairman of the Annual Cults Conference on "The
New Spirituality" to be held at WTS, September 16-17, 1997 You can
contact him at:
peter jones <perejone@owl.csusm.edu>
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