Well-Intended Goal, Misguided Process -- By: Timothy Paul Jones
Journal: Journal for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood
Volume: JBMW 16:2 (Fall 2011)
Article: Well-Intended Goal, Misguided Process
Author: Timothy Paul Jones
JBMW 16:2 (Fall 2011) p. 47
Well-Intended Goal, Misguided Process
A Review of Bruce Morton, Deceiving Winds: Christians Navigating the Storm of Mysticism, Leadership Struggles, and Sensational Worship. Nashville: Twenty-First Century Christian, 2009.
Associate Professor of Leadership and Family Ministry
The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary
Louisville, Kentucky
Bruce Morton is a deacon with responsibilities for preschool education at a church in Katy, Texas. He has earned the master’s degree from Harding University and studied medieval religion at Gettysburg Theological Seminary. Deceiving Winds is his first book.
The purpose of Deceiving Winds is to take a thematic look at key concerns in Paul’s letters that relate to leadership, worship, and gender issues. The author’s methodology is to show how the thoughts and practices of ancient cults have reappeared in present times (15). Morton’s proofs for these contemporary reappearances include websites dedicated to Artemis and Isis as well as contemporary texts that mention an “inner goddess” (16). Wicca, New Age spirituality, religious feminism, and certain strands of the “emerging church” are lumped together in a shared “message of mysticism,” which Morton links to ancient Ephesian goddess worship (16).
Therein lies one of the primary problems in this well-intentioned but misguided book: Throughout Deceiving Winds, the author leaps directly from the goddess cults of ancient Asia and Achaia to contemporary Wiccan practices and goddess worship. In the process, Morton seems to overlook the fact that, although contemporary goddess-worshipers may invoke the names of ancient deities, these present practices have little (if anything) to do with the rituals known to people in Paul’s world. Contemporary practices of Wicca and goddess worship derive primarily from the now-discredited works of Margaret Murray, Marija Gimbutas, and others—works that claimed to have reconstructed a long-lost goddess-centered past. Ancient paganism and contemporary claims of a goddess-centered past are equally false, but the history and practices associated with each falsehood differ at the most fundamental levels. Nevertheless, Morton moves between the two as if they are analogous or even identical (see, e.g., 36-37).
Other logical linkages throughout the book are equally tenuous: At one point, Morton begins with the church’s perennial need to focus on God the Father’s power before leaping to a critique of Rudolf Bultmann and then to an encouragement for Christians to center their lives on the resurrection of Jesus by “singing Anna Barbauld’s beautiful eighteenth century song Again the Lord of...
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