Iliff School of Theology in Denver, Colorado
Iliff School of Theology commencement ceremony
Do not be deceived. Test every spirit. Stop failing to discern, judge wisely and rightly divide, understand, and know the Word of God.
Evil knows its time is running out. The Great Falling Away before the son of perdition appears has not only begun, it is well along and celebrating like an Indy racing car once the green flag drops.
Recognize the truth versus the lies and sunning deceptions of Satan. Knowing that the Evil One is the most cunning, seductive, and masterful being in the universe to make death, horror, lies, and eternal suffering sound so lovely and appealing to the overwhelming majority in the fleshly realm not employing the ability of their spiritual selves to recognize goodness and righteousness from darkness, eternal death, lies, and evil.
Wake up! Wake up now. What are you waiting for?
Do you not know that we live in a time when the vast majority of those graduating from seminaries, and theological institutions do not believe in the Word of God? That they spent their time being taught to remove their faith, to debate and deny what is in the Scriptures? That they do not believe in the resurrection of the Lord Jesus Christ, the virgin birth, the miracles performed by Jesus, or that Jesus is truly fully God and was also truly fully man for a time on this earth?
Do you realize the pastor at the pulpit of your church may be among this lot?
What to do? Well, do not live in fear. Do not be troubled. Not if putting o and keeping on the full armour of God and discerning the Word wisely. Knowing our God is Sovereign and His plan, His whole Word will be revealed. Do not misunderstand how evil can grow and consume while this occurs.
The darkness, the overwhelming majority of those souls walking upright are the walking dead. At enmity with God. God is not their enemy but they have made God their enemy in these last of the last days.
We are living the words of Romans 1. To be my redundant self.
Paganism is thriving. It’s now called relativism, New Age practices, and beliefs, feminism, environmentalism, and political correctness, and it has permeated every institution. Every institution. The legions of those enslaved to Satan and doing his bidding speak louder and imagine they can remove the light of the world, that they can remove God, remove Christ, remove the Holy Spirit, remove the inerrant living Word of God.
And the silence, the ignorance, the arrogance, the ever-increasing Great Falling Away may make it appear as if evil is winning or will win.
It’s going to continue to appear so. Getting worse, so much worse as the days move forward.
Do not become weakened, dismayed, afraid, or worse — among those falling away not firmly rooted in the faith, not truly transformed by the Supernatural power of the Spirit of God.
The darkness may not recognize the Light, or the Way, or the Truth and are the walking dead without Life in them. They may appear to be winning as they dominate.
But their time is short and their apparent dominance an illusion.
The Lord will meet out just judgment upon every single individual that served Satan rather than served the Lord Jesus Christ.
It all works out in the end.
Do not be deceived by the seductive allure of evil, the cunning words, its appearance. It’s seeming to be right when it is deadly, eternally wrong. And every person ensnared in its sticky seductive web will perish. They will burn in hell for eternity.
The church has been invaded by the Enemy, by Satan and his legions of minions. Because the door has been left open and that Old Dragon, the father of lies, the Evil One, and his message have been invited in. His ministers are being trained, and have been trained for years now to go out and lead millions astray.
Nothing has changed since the Garden of Eden.
Are you as Adam, as Eve? Or are you an imitator of the Lord Jesus Christ fully, wholly His, and in the Word enduring, growing, maturing spiritually?
Become strong enough in the faith to fight, to endure, to not waver or fall until that end.
Ken Pullen
Monday, June 6th, 2022
Paganism Casts Its Spell Over Methodist Seminary
APOSTASY, BIBLICAL BEASTS, FALSE PRIESTS, IDOLATRY, NATURE WORSHIP, NEW PAGANISM, Other Writers, PANTHEISM, RELATIVISM, SERPENT POWER
June 6, 2022
Reprinted with permission from PatriotandLiberty
“I will punish Bel in Babylon. I will make him spew out what he swallowed. The nations will no longer stream to him; even the wall of Babylon will fall. Come out of her, My people! Save your lives, each of you, from the fierce anger of the LORD. ” Jeremiah 51:44-45
The Lord’s people are to come out of her, meaning come out of the Babylonian world system whose author is Satan, Powers, and Principalities. The Babylonian world system is of evil spirits. Upon it falls the fierce anger of the Lord. And it is this system that is finding a home in Iliff. ~Linda Kimball
by ELLIE GARDEY, The American Spectator, 4/6/22
Iliff School of Theology epitomizes the West’s spiral into relativism.
Iliff School of Theology is an official theological school and approved seminary of the United Methodist Church that in 2017 received $806,763 from the denomination to train future ordinands. The school was founded in 1892 as part of Colorado Seminary (now the University of Denver) by Episcopal Methodists and became its own institution in 1903.
Today, the school shies away from an explicit relationship with Christianity. On the “about” section of Iliff’s website, the school avoids calling itself “Christian” and doesn’t mention Jesus or God. Instead, their webpage reads, “Related to the United Methodist Church, Iliff serves more than 30 denominations and faith traditions.”
Iliff is what happens when a historically Christian institution discovers that it is embarrassed by its Christianity. As teaching Christianity as truth is not an option in that view, Iliff sells itself as a neutral arbiter of transformative debate and dialogue for students of every faith background. Students who step into Iliff Hall and pay $19,824 each year in pursuit of a master’s degree can expect to break down everything they ever thought they believed and challenge their every preconception — including the existence of the divinity behind the theology that they ostensibly came to study.
“Iliff is a great place to question and learn about the issues that have faced the world,” the “about” section of the school’s website continues. “At Iliff, we recognize that dialogue is important, no matter how complicated or uncomfortable that may feel.”
Gianna Elvia, who graduated in 2019, says that her professors created a “safe space” for questioning “almost everything.” Those professors, she said, pushed her to “re-examine” her beliefs. Another student, Tiffanie Lyon, a Methodist pastor who graduated in 2020, reported that Iliff “challenged” and “enriched” her Christian perspective, which she called a “double blessing.”
Tom Wolfe, the president of Iliff, who has been an ordained Methodist elder for over forty years, said in 2020 that the school’s focus is “engaging the moral discourse in the context of multiple cultural constructions of human meaning.”
Here’s where it becomes stranger than fiction: Iliff takes Wolfe’s mandate seriously. The school gives alternative “constructions of human meaning” the same weight as Christianity.
The school employs as an admissions representative a Norse Heathen named Alexandra Ravenscroft, who is the head clergy, or Gudellri, of her pagan organization, Forn Sidr of America. Ravenscroft joined Iliff in 2021. In her job at Iliff, she recruits and develops relationships with potential students.
Ravenscroft says she grew up in a conservative Christian family but at the age of seventeen began experimenting with paganism. First, it was Wicca, which incorporates Celtic mythology and occultist beliefs. Next, it was Roman Polytheism, the religion of ancient Rome, which includes gods such as Jupiter, Juno, Neptune, Minerva, Mars, Venus, Apollo, and so on. She followed that with Tibetan Esotericism while attending “Tibetan-inspired” Naropa University, a Colorado college founded by a Buddhist. It was after those explorations that she settled on Norse Paganism.
Forn Sidr of America says of Ravenscroft:
Alexandra was called to Heathenry unexpectedly by Odin and her Dísir (female ancestors) during a ritual, drawn to the Norse worldview for its views on personal sovereignty and identity. Her current practice focuses upon reparative ancestral work, transitional work, death work, spirit relationships, landvaettir, space cleansing, banishment, Spacecraft, Seidr, and transformative mysticism. She maintains close relationships with Hel, Freya, her Dísir, and others.
Imagine how much the leadership of a Christian school must hate Christianity to hire a pagan priestess to recruit its students. And she is indeed a priestess: her specialties include “facilitating spiritual rites, ceremonies, and services.”
Ravenscroft is not alone in bringing paganism to Iliff. The school actively promotes other students and alumni who are pagans.
Student David Dashifen Kees, a Wicca priest who identifies as a “nonbinary transperson” and uses “they” and “them” as his pronouns, says in a feature of himself promoted by Iliff and marketed towards potential students that he knew there was a place for him at Iliff after he sat next to someone on a plane who was also a pagan and who had graduated from the school.
Iliff’s mandate to “challenge everything” applies to pagans as well as Christians. Kees says that he was surprised by how much he was challenged in his own faith at Iliff. “Studying the great theological debates of the last few thousand years or discussing the intersection between race and racism and religion,” he said, “has forced me to examine and re-examine parts of myself that I thought were built on firmer spiritual foundations.”
He found himself grappling with “the startling lack of diversity in some Pagan groups”:
As an intentionally Eurocentric religious path, it means that we have always struggled with race and racism, but in the last few years, some of our symbols have been used by white supremacist organizations to promote their work. This only exacerbates the situation. Furthermore, the language and ritual structure of many traditions is explicitly linked to a gender binary, something that has caused strife within the trans* community within Wicca.
Tearing down anything anyone thought they ever believed seems to be the mandate of Iliff.
Kees was elected last fall to the student Senate, which has five members. He was not the only pagan. A person who goes by the name Kyndyl Greyland, uses “they/them” pronouns, and works at “Wyte Ravyn Church, an inclusive Wiccan Church,” was also elected.
Another non-Christian who has graced the halls of Iliff is Kirt Hodges, who graduated in 2018. When he arrived at Iliff, he had a “leadership role” with “an Earth-based spiritual community.” During his time there, however, he began dabbling in Unitarian Universalism before eventually adopting that as his “home” after a class challenged him to consider the importance of “traditional institutionalization.” Unitarian Universalism does not have a particular set of beliefs and encourages its members to develop their own theology.
Hodges says on a webpage oriented to recruiting students that for non-Christians at Iliff, “100% of the time there is a place for you that will ultimately enrich the class.”
Iliff faculty members have even taught classes on paganism. In the spring of 2020, students were given the opportunity to take “Social Justice in Western Earth-Honoring Traditions.” The course description says:
In this course we explore primarily modern, Western earth-honoring traditions as they intersect with social and ecological justice. The course materials and discussions consider the ways these Western earth-honoring traditions, such as goddess spirituality/Wicca, polytheism/animism, eco-womanism, creation spirituality and deep ecology: 1) provide unique resources for the pursuit of justice and, 2) both critique and reinscribe systems of social inequality and violence. Students will explore the ways in which their own religious, a-religious and spiritual perspectives might more effectively empower them and their communities to create justice with both human and other-than-human communities.
Even the most progressive of Christian students who attend Iliff are surprised by the presence of these non-Christians at their seminary.
“I did not expect the diversity that Iliff has,” said Sam Fisher, a United Methodist pastor who graduated from Iliff with a Master of Divinity degree last year. “One cannot overestimate what it is like to sit in a Bible class with people who have never read or heard many of the stories.”
While Iliff has many classes that teach explicitly Christian and Methodist subjects, such as “Intro to the History of Christianity,” “New Testament Greek Exegesis,” and “Intro to the New Testament,” it has many others whose religion seems to be twenty-first-century American wokeism. Classes for the spring 2022 semester also include “Exploring Womanist Perspectives: A Practice in Solidarity,” “Earth Activism,” “Justice and Spiritual Care,” “Decolonizing Congregational Leadership,” and “Race, Religion and Constructive Theologies.”
Another class, from 2018, was titled “Queer Spirituality in the Visual Arts” and included topics such as “Queer Tarot,” “Sacred bodies of People of Color,” “Lesbian feminist art,” “Contemporary images of a queer Christ,” and “Use of traditional techniques/imagery to express queer sacred reality.”
Some students have made wokeism a religion unto itself. Student Isabela Leonor Rosales says in a promotional video for Iliff, “I fell in love with the study of religion because it was so much more than Bible. It was also a different lens to approach social justice issues and in a way that really meshed with my values.”
Iliff’s mandate to question everything is really a cover for relativism. The true dogma of Iliff is the belief that there are no moral truths or absolute facts — including the veracity of Christianity.
But humans wither under relativism. Eventually, a person must grasp onto something — we’re not made to be in a state of constant questioning, as some answers must be settled and some conclusions must be drawn.
At Iliff, many are embracing wokeism as a substitution for Christianity. But for many, wokeism is not enough to satisfy the enduring human need for worship and ritual which has shaped all of known human history. Thus, Iliff and the United Methodist Church’s crisis in confidence in teaching the faith leads people to flail about in even wackier spiritual and political directions.
Similarly, our society cannot survive without a god to turn to and without answers to any of the important questions in life. The infiltration of paganism at a Methodist theological school is just one bizarre example of the dangerous beliefs that are rushing to fill the West’s moral void. We should pray that they don’t soon take hold over us.
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