LTRP Note: Last week, we posted an article titled “Sojourners Founder Jim Wallis’ Revolutionary Anti-Christian “Gospel” (and Will Christian Leaders Stand with Wallis?).” As more and more talk arises about a “spiritual revolution” or awakening, believers should be asking, is this a revolution from God? Or is this coming global “revolution” part of the great falling away of which the Bible speaks? Consider the following article by Warren B. Smith, and next time you hear a Christian leader talking about revolution, ask yourself, “Whose revolution is this?”
by Warren Smith
(from A “Wonderful” Deception)
The “spiritual revolution” I referenced in my 1995 journal article [“M. Scott Peck: Community and the Cosmic Christ,” SCP Journal, 19:2-3 (1995)”] … is indeed the same New Age “revolution” attempting to transfix and transform the church today. We should be very concerned when self-professing Evangelical leaders with New Age sympathies talk about starting a “spiritual revolution.”
In chapter four [of A “Wonderful” Deception], I describe how New Age sympathizer Ken Blanchard recounted at a 2003 Lead Like Jesus conference that Rick Warren had turned to him and stated: “You know, Ken, let’s start a revolution.”1Five years later Blanchard was calling his Lead Like Jesus conference a Lead Like Jesus “Revolution.”2 In his book The Secret Message of Jesus, Brian McLaren’s second suggested metaphor after “God’s Dream” is “revolution of God.”3 And McLaren’s book Everything Must Change is even subtitled Jesus, Global Crises, and a Revolution of Hope. Erwin McManus, another emerging church leader, calls for an “Evolution of a Revolution” in his Rick Warren endorsed book The Unstoppable Force.4 It is noteworthy that New Age leader Neale Donald Walsch has also talked of an “evolution revolution”5 that will be an “unstoppable force.”6 Organized Christianity and the New Age are overlapping and blending so much that soon—very soon—there will be no distinguishing the two as they blend right into the New Spirituality of the New World Religion.
Overlapping terms like “revolution,” “reformation,” “as above, so below,” “God’s Dream,” “Cosmic Christ,” “Oneness,” and “God in everything” are being used to transition what was once considered traditional Christianity into the New Spirituality of a New Age. New Age leader Marianne Williamson has stated that the New Age/New Spirituality “revolution” is “a global phenomenon that will change the cellular structure of the human race.” In her 2004 book The Gift of Change, she writes:
An underground revolution is sweeping the hearts and minds of the people of the world, and it is happening despite the wars and terror that confront us. This revolution is a fundamental change of worldview, and it carries with it the potential to reorganize the structure of human civilization. It brings a basic shift in the thoughts that dominate the world. It wages a peace that will end all war. It is a global phenomenon that will change the cellular structure of the human race.7
An underground “revolution” that will be a “global phenomenon” bringing peace to the world? A “revolution” that will “change the cellular structure of the human race”? David Spangler describes the cell as the basic metaphor of the New Age, while Leonard Sweet thanks Spangler for helping him to formulate the “new cell theory” of his quantum spirituality. In the meantime, Rick Warren and Brian McLaren describe a spiritual “revolution” that could change history(8) and change everything.(9) New Age leaders Marianne Williamson and Neale Donald Walsch also talk of a spiritual “revolution” that could change history and “change everything.”10
On the surface, this talk of a revolutionary world peace that will change everything sounds admirable. However, this “peace” is based on deceptive New Age principles, not on a sound biblical foundation. Christian leaders seem to be taking the church—into a quantum spirituality of a New Age/New Spirituality—into a New Worldview—into the coming New World Religion.
WHOSE REVOLUTION
QUOTES BY “REVOLUTIONARIES”
“The Evolution of a Revolution”
—Erwin McManus, Unstoppable Force (p. 102)
“If you ever get a chance to hang out with Mack, you will soon learn that he’s hoping for a revolution.”
—William Paul Young, The Shack (p. 248)
“The time has come for a new kind of conversation, a new kind of Christianity, a new kind of revolution.”
—Shane Claiborne, Irresistible Revolution (p. 29)
“An underground revolution is sweeping the hearts and minds of the people of the world. . . . This revolution is a fundamental change of worldview.”
—Marianne Williamson, The Gift of Change, (p. 279)
“The world is undergoing an extraordinary revolution, an intellectual rebellion against the exclusionary belief structure that has dominated Western thought for centuries.”
—Willis Harman, The Global Mind Change, back cover
“The translucent revolution is about human consciousness and could lay the foundation for an evolutionary leap in human life unlike anything we have known.”
—Barbara Marx Hubbard, Translucent Revolution (p. 419)
“[I]gniting a revolution of hope that can change everything. Beginning with you. Beginning now.”
—Brian McLaren, Everything Must Change, back cover
“You know, Ken, let’s start a revolution.”
—Rick Warren to Ken Blanchard
Lead Like Jesus Conference, Birmingham, Alabama, 2003
(The article above is from chapter 10 of A “Wonderful” Deception.)
Notes:
1. Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality, p. 324.
2. Ibid., p. 125.
3. Ibid.
4. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life, op. cit, p. 88.
5. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Christianity and Evolution (New York, NY: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc., 1971), p. 56.
6. One example of where Rick Warren says this is at the Pew Forum of Religion on May 23, 2005, “Myths of the Modern Megachurch,” http://pewforum.org/events/index.php?EventID=80. Rick Warren: “You know, 500 years ago, the first Reformation with Luther and then Calvin, was about beliefs. I think a new reformation is going to be about behavior. The first Reformation was about creeds; I think this one will be about deeds. I think the first one was about what the church believes; I think this one will be about what the church does.”
7. Robert H. Schuller, Hour of Power, “God’s Word: Rebuild, Renew, Restore.”
8. “Myths of the Modern Megachurch,” Pew Forum on Religion.
9. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled (New York, NY: Simon & Schuster, 1978), p. 281.
10. Ibid.
