Faithfullyliven:the podcast
Do you want to learn how to study the Bible? Do you wish you could understand the Bible better? Do you want to know how you can remain faithful to historic Christianity in our contemporary society? Let's take a journey to explore and learn how to be a faithful follower of Christ. Faithfullyliven, the podcast is here to uplift your soul and encourage you to live a life honoring to God
Faithfullyliven:the podcast
Should you believe in a zodiac sign or an Enneagram number? With Marcia Montenegro
Uncover the captivating journey of Marcia Montenegro, a former professional astrologer who found her true calling in Christianity. In this enlightening episode, Marcia reveals the allure of astrology and New Age beliefs, and how they promise but ultimately fail to deliver true spiritual progress. As she shares her conversion story, you'll hear about the profound experiences and divine interventions that led her away from the deceptive practices of her past and towards the transformative truth of Christ.
We also navigate the complexities of integrating faith with modern spiritual practices, examining how New Age influences, such as zodiac signs and the Enneagram, have permeated Christian communities. Marcia sheds light on the occult origins of the Enneagram and challenges its place within Christian self-identity. This episode also features a critical look at Richard Rohr's teachings on the universal Christ, questioning the impact of perennial wisdom on traditional faith interpretations. Don't forget to support our podcast by following and leaving a review.
The origin of the Enneagram - Claudio Naranjo speaks - June 2010
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wlO3KJWnNd8
Here are some articles that Marcia Montenegro has written
Astrology https://www.watchman.org/profiles/pdf/astrologyprofile.pdf
ASTROLOGY: WHAT IT REALLY IS http://www.christiananswersforthenewage.org/Articles_Astrolgy.html
Enneagram https://www.watchman.org/Enneagram.pdf
THE FICTIONS AND FACTS OF THE ENNEAGRAM http://www.christiananswersforthenewage.org/Articles_FictionFactsEnneagram.aspx
THE ENNEAGRAM HAS NO CHRISTIAN ORIGINS http://www.christiananswersforthenewage.org/Articles_Enneagram2.aspx
THE CHRISTIAN ENNEAGRAM AUTHORS: WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW AND WHY http://www.christiananswersforthenewage.org/Articles_ChristianEnneagramAuthors.aspx
And you can check out Marcia Montenegro & Christian Answers for the New Age
Website: http://www.christiananswersforthenewage.org/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/exastrologer
Do you want to learn how to study the Bible? Check out the YouTube channel Faithfullyliven youtube.com/@faithfullyliven
Do you want to read about how to live faithfully? Check out the blog http://lyfe102.org
Get a free Road Map to get started learning how to study the Bible https://mailchi.mp/88f9c9405da0/bible-study-road-map
Welcome to Faithfully Living, the podcast where we learn how to live for Christ in our daily lives. I am Dwan, your host, and I would like to invite you on a journey with me to explore where we strive to encourage you to live for Christ faithfully by offering guidance on how to study the Bible, how to understand the Bible better and how to remain faithful to historic Christianity in a contemporary society. In our world today, humanity does not have a problem about thinking about ourselves. We all long to establish some type of identity, who we are. How can we explain our personality to others? Today, we're going to talk about zodiac signs and the Enneagram. Both of these seem to provide people ways to describe who they are as a person, but should Christians use these descriptions provided by a zodiac sign or Enneagram to define who we are? I'm grateful to share this conversation that I had with marcia montenegro. This is a replay of a conversation that I had about zodiac signs and the enneagram, so I hope you enjoy it all right? So before I jump into my conversation with marcia, let me tell you a little bit about her. Before trusting christ, marcia montenegro was a professional astrologer and taught astrology for many years, as well as having been involved prior to that in Eastern and New Age practices for many years.
Speaker 1:Through her ministry, christian Answers for the New Age, marsha speaks around the country and on radio and writes on New Age and occult topics. She has a master's in religion from Southern Evangelical Seminary, which is in Charlotte, north Carolina, and serves as a missionary with Fellowship International Mission, which is in Allentown, pennsylvania. Based in Arlington, virginia, she is the mother of an adult son and author of Spellbound, the Paranormal Seduction of Today's Kids, which was published in 2006. And she's also the co-author of Richard War and the Enneagram Secret, which was published in 2020. All right, let's jump into my conversation with Marsha. Hi, marsha, thank you for coming on the show today.
Speaker 2:It's really nice to be on your program, Dwan. Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1:All right. So before we dive in the two topics that we're going to go over, could you tell us how you became a follower of Christ?
Speaker 2:Oh, ok. Well, yes, I was very involved in the New Age for many years and I was a professional astrologer, very active astrologerer, teaching it as well, and I really thought I was on a spiritual path. I thought that that I was progressing spiritually and that I would continue to progress spiritually. So this, this kind of feeling, actually is a very good feeling. You feel that you're doing things right, that you feel like you're learning things all the time and you feel that that helps you progress, and you know it's. It's sad to say, but you really do feel very, in most cases, optimistic about your spiritual progress. Um, which is sad because of course, you're you're not, you're not even believing in the right God and you know much less the right Jesus Christ, so you're completely wrong, but you just feel so good about what you're doing. So it's a real deception, but I understand the appeal of it and I understand how it feels to be on that path and why people like it, you know, and find it intriguing or find it. They find it satisfying in some way. So the Lord intervened I don't know how much detail you want me to give, but he intervened over a period of time and it, I guess, the best way to put it is supernaturally, because I wasn't being told anything by anybody, or I didn't come across something that I read that made me start to question what I believed. But it was just these impressions.
Speaker 2:I got First to go to a church. I felt very compelled to go to a church and I resisted that for months and I finally went to a church and in the service at the beginning I was sitting in the back because I was going to leave early they started the service, they played music, everyone stood up and a procession came from the back of the church, a young boy carrying a cross, and as he walked by me I felt this overwhelming waterfall of love falling on me. I knew it. Now, this is a thing. How did I know this? I don't know, but I knew it was from a personal God telling me he loved me, and I had never experienced anything like that at all. Um, and so I ended up staying for the service and I ended up going back and I was going there every week. But I was not thinking at all that I was going to become a Christian, I just was going there. It was sort of curiosity and kind of to see what would happen.
Speaker 2:And you know, I met a few people and then, while, and then within a few weeks, I was getting this impression God didn't like astrology. And then I got the impression he wanted me to give it up, which was really just. You know, I that I did not want to deal with that at all. I was not, I was not for that. I was like, no, this is going too far. You know, I'm I don't think I'm going to do that. So I really resisted it.
Speaker 2:But it was so clear that God wanted me to give this up. Now I didn't hear a voice or anything. That's why I say impression, because it's the best word I can come up with to describe it. Of course, now, looking back on it, I mean I think it was the Holy Spirit, but you know, at the time I wouldn't have thought that. So I did, I actually gave it up and I mean I wasn't even a Christian. And see, I think this is the part of my story that shows that this was all the Lord, that this was not me or anybody else, because I actually gave it up before I was a Christian oh so I mean I, you know who would, who would do that?
Speaker 2:I mean I, I was, I was an astrologer and I was, you know, I clients. And so, anyway, I I that my life really changed. I gave it up and I started reading um the bible. And it was while I was reading, uh, a passage in Matthew 8, that God opened my eyes and I saw who Christ was. And that was about a month after I gave astrology up. It was right before Christmas, and that's when I was born again, that's when I became a believer and I knew that I was a new person. I finally saw who Christ really was.
Speaker 2:I realized everything I had been doing was wrong. It was all all wrong, all you know, all going in the wrong direction. And I did find out several months later. A young Christian man had been praying for me with a group at his church. Church, it was in an office where I was working part-time and I was actually working there because I wasn't an astrologer.
Speaker 2:The person who hired me wanted me to give him insights on the employees based on their birth data, but it was secret. The people there did not know that. Only he knew it and I knew it. I don't think his secretary even knew it, so they just thought I was there for some kind of I don't know. You know, I was doing some kind of paperwork or something. So that's why I was in that office and that's where that young Christian man was who apparently felt led to pray for me with his young adult fellowship group at his church, and so they were praying for me all during that time. So that's that's kind of a summary of what happened. I did have um, I have it on my website, christiananswersforthenewageorg, and I've done some programs where the whole program is just me telling the story. You know 45 minutes or an hour of it. You know extended story of everything. So but that's it in a nutshell.
Speaker 1:So I'm glad you mentioned your ministry. Christian Answers for the New Age. Can you kind of tell us how that got started?
Speaker 2:Sure, yes. After I became a Christian, I was very concerned. What I was seeing around me in churches was that people Christians didn't really understand what the new age was. They had these kind of funny ideas about it. They tended to see it as this real extreme thing and actually at that time it was beginning to get more mainstream and so I was kind of alarmed because I felt, well, christians don't really understand what this is. I really feel I need to explain it to them and I really wanted to go out there and like, right away, start talking, which is probably good. God didn't let me do that because I mean, I was really a new believer and who knows how I would have said it or whatever. I made enough mistakes, as it was once I got started.
Speaker 2:But a few years later the Lord started opening doors for me to share my story and to talk about the new age, and I talked to youth groups and I talked a little bit in my church. I talked to youth groups and I talked a little bit at my church and eventually, after several years, that led to me feeling the Lord really wanted me to go full time with that. This was the encouragement of people in my church, my missions pastor and other people, and at first I resisted because full time ministry that was kind of scary idea for me, you know. So I wasn't really really on board with it right away at all and it took about a year for the Lord working on me to see that that's where he wanted me. So that led me to going with a mission agency, fellowship International Mission. So that led me to going with a mission agency, fellowship International Mission, which is based in Allentown, pennsylvania. I'm in Virginia but they're in Pennsylvania, and I served under that mission agency through that mission agency, basically as a missionary.
Speaker 2:But my ministry is Christian Answers for the New Age and I've been doing it full time since 1998. It's 24 years. Oh, wow, yeah, it's a long time. It full time since 1998. It's 24 years. Oh, wow, yeah, it's a long time. I can't believe it's 24 years. So that's how that got started and and the Lord has very graciously, um, sustained me and, you know, given me, uh, partners in the ministry and it's it's been very, very encouraging to see. You know that the Lord is faithful and you know what he calls you to. He will sustain you. You just have, you have to continue to trust in him, though, which is an ongoing right. Yeah, thank for all Christians yeah.
Speaker 1:So I'm glad you mentioned as you were. You were talking about how you started your ministry, how you saw that new age and kind of occultic practices were coming into the church. So I know Christians know they believe in their zodiac sign or they know their Enneagram number, ember, and these are not biblical. So kind of let's lay a foundation for like where these things came from and why believers shouldn't be utilizing these.
Speaker 2:Okay, yes, um. As far as astrology goes, uh, that is addressed in scripture. Now I do want to say so people know this there is no Hebrew word for astrology, because the word astrology is a more modern word, um, so that the way it's described in the bible, the Hebrew uses different terminology, like um, they'll say dividing up the sky, because that's what astrologers did, because they were, you know, measuring things and seeing where the planets were, although they thought they were stars, they didn't even know what a planet was then. Um, so, uh, like dividing up the sky, um, or bowing down to the host of heaven. So there's different language that's used in the Bible to describe the practice of astrology, but it's very much present. I think we see it really strongly in the book of Daniel, where the king has his advisors, which include the astrologers, who are sometimes called the chaldeans, and sometimes that refers to the astrologers, and so you've got them in daniel and you've got in isaiah 47. That chapter is a condemnation of babylon and it's sorcery and it includes the fact that it listens to astrologers. So God is condemning that and basically he says you know, the astrologers can't save you. So astrology is addressed specifically and in other ways.
Speaker 2:Astrology is a form of divination, and divination itself is mentioned throughout the Bible. It's even in the New Testament, in Acts 16, where you have delphi, who was a uh, what we would we would call now maybe like a psychic, who you know, sat on this special place where there were all these gases, apparently, and went into these trances and then, you know, spoke out stuff, um, and this was very pagan, of course, and she was said to have the spirit of the python. So this slave girl was apparently kind of basically a fortune teller giving fortunes to people and follows Paul around and finally he turns to her and he actually cast a demon out of her. Now, that does not mean everyone who does divination is possessed, but I think what it shows us is that, at the root of this, satan is at the root of this. This is, this is something from Satan. It is not from God. That's what that tells us.
Speaker 2:So divination is condemned, and divination is when you are getting information from a supernatural source or and or reading a hidden meaning in something. So you look at tarot cards, for example, and you have all these pictures and you believe there's a message there. You believe there's a hidden meaning there. Or astrology, you're looking at the position of the planets and the sun and the moon and you're saying, well, you know venus is in libra and, um, you know the moon is in pisces and that means this, you know. So you're you're giving an interpretation that isn't apparent. That's not apparent to anybody. That's something you have to learn, special knowledge. It's secret knowledge. So that's where you come into the aspect of the occult. This is all part of the occult, and so astrology is a very occult based practice condemned by god.
Speaker 2:Now, I know it's so popular in the culture that and a lot of christians sometimes think that there could be something to it that maybe it's actually originally biblical, you know, and it got maybe twisted by paganism or something. But that's not true, because there's no validity to astrology, there's no scientific validity to it. Uh, the position of the planets in a certain zodiac sign even that isn't, isn't accurate, because the way we measure it isn't accurate anymore. And so even your so-called sun sign, for when you were born, has changed over the centuries, and it's changed enough that you're probably not the sun sign that you think you are. You're probably the sign before it in In many cases not all cases, but many cases. So there's been a shift in the actual position, the orientation of the earth towards these constellations, and so it gets really technical. But it's not accurate and when you think about it, why would the position of a planet have any meaning in your life and why would god want you to know the position of a planet in order to to understand yourself? I mean, really think about it makes no sense at all. I mean the, and then you have you have something called the gospel and the stars.
Speaker 2:I don't want to get into that, but there are people who have tried to correlate the 12 zodiac signs with the gospel and they've said that Adam and Eve were given the gospel through the zodiac. Of course, there's no biblical basis for this. All of the scriptures that are used for this have been refuted. I've done many, many Facebook posts on this and God would not do that because that goes against his nature. God doesn't ask us to look for hidden meanings, he doesn't give us hidden meanings and things, and he doesn't want us to look to creation for answers, and that would be looking to creation for the gospel. The gospel is special revelation and that comes through God's word. And Jesus came and gave the gospel, and we know it from God's word. And Jesus came and gave the gospel, and we know it from God's word. We don't look to creation to find a message from God. So right away you've got a problem there. People who say that are not understanding God's character. That goes against his nature.
Speaker 2:So there's nothing that supports the idea of astrology and the fact that you may think you, you fit your zodiac sign or you're at maybe you had your chart done by an astrologer and you thought it was accurate. Well, there are all kinds of factors that play into that, that make you think that there's confirmation bias and there's something called the barnum effect and the effect um, these are ways that things can sound very true, or aspects of them are true, and so you, you latch on to it and you start filtering things through it and it's really I mean, psychologists know about this, they know how it works to, um, trick you into believing it and they have done experiments where they you know they give, like a professor who gave supposedly something to all the people in his class that was about who they were, based on their birth date, and they all read it and he said Okay, how many of you think this, this is accurate? And most of them, you know so, 97 or 98% of them thought it was accurate. And then he had them pass it to the person sitting behind them and they saw it was the same thing. They all got the exact same thing. They all had the exact same thing, and I've seen this on YouTube.
Speaker 2:There's some duplications of this, not necessarily with astrology, but with other things, with personality tests and stuff. And then and he'll say the same thing to everybody and they'll all say, oh yeah, that's me. Oh, I can't believe how you you really pegged me, you know. So I watched a YouTube video of that not too long ago. So that is out there. We know that that's how it works and so it's very convincing. And we can be deceived. You know, we deceive ourselves. We don't really see ourselves the way we are. We kind of see ourselves the way we would like to see, like the way we'd like to be. We tend to, you know, want to see ourselves a little better than we probably are, and so we we buy into these things that that aren't accurate. So that's astrology and of course, it is an occult practice and it will lead people into deception and you know it will lead unbelievers further away from christ right, yeah, so I guess, transitioning to the enneagram, yes, finding, yes, true self, leading, leading to God.
Speaker 1:So where did the Enneagram come from?
Speaker 2:Yeah, the Enneagram is a little, actually a little more. The history of it is a little more complicated because it's not as obvious what it is, and it's presented in the church as a personality, you know tool, a personality assessment tool, um, and so it. It looks. For most people it looks kind of innocent or neutral anyway, and maybe astrology they would be like, oh no, I'm not going to have anything to do with that. I know that's wrong. But the enneagram, oh hey, it's just a psychological tool.
Speaker 2:You know, actually, it did not start that way at all. First of all, it's not ancient. Unfortunately, all the Enneagram books say it's ancient or they say that its origins are so murky, we don't really know when it started. But, you know, maybe Pythagoras started it, you know it was in ancient Greece or maybe so-and-so, and then they throw out all this stuff as possibilities, none of which are true. So there's this idea that it's ancient and there's an idea that it has Christian origins, which has also been promoted, sadly, by a lot of Christian books and a lot of Christian Enneagram teachers. This was something I was constantly when it started really getting into the church and getting hold like around 2018. And I was constantly posting. You know the Enneagram isn't ancient. The Enneagram has no Christian.
Speaker 2:I have an article on my website the Enneagram has no Christian origins. That's the article is. On that. I was just kind of standing. I felt like I was standing on a rooftop and screaming. Sometimes I was screaming into the wind Like is anybody hearing me? So I was extremely passionate about getting this out there because I just couldn't stand these falsehoods. You know just there's so much falsehood going on. Falsehoods, you know just there's so much falsehood going on.
Speaker 2:So it really started as a shape that we know it today, in 1916, which is only 106 years ago. Right, yeah, and it started by a man named George Gurdjieff. He was a spiritual. He was like a mystic and a spiritual teacher. He claimed to explore all these religions and he claimed to travel around and talk to different religious leaders and he had his own following, people who followed his teachings. He was teaching this very esoteric stuff, kind of like what you would hear today in the new age that you don't really know who you are, you don't really know reality. You're asleep, you have to wake, you have to have an awakening. You know. He called it awakening to the new man, and so he had a program for that and the Enneagram for him was a picture of the universe and he said this is, this is the universe. You can fit all the laws of the universe into the enneagram. It explains every. In other words, the enneagram explains everything.
Speaker 2:Now this is sort of an occult idea too, that you get a diagram or something and this is going to explain reality, because you know, you can start playing around with it and reading all kinds of things into it, which is what he did. He had the law of three and the law of seven. That, he said, were illustrated mathematically by the Enneagram and there are mathematical components to it. The Enneagram is, by the way, I should say is a nine pointed diagram, geometric figure, pointed diagram, geometric figure. So when you have nine points, you have nine is sort of like a quote-unquote magic number and and and numbers because of the way math works, and so you can have something called casting out nines, like eight and one is nine, seven and two is nine, um, and if you add things up to nine, well, I'm not going to get into that. Anyway, there's all kinds of things you can do with it mathematically. So he was doing stuff like that, and he had a pupil named Ouspensky and Ouspensky Gurdjieff didn't write anything about the Enneagram but Ouspensky did, and Ouspensky wrote about Gurdjieff's ideas and Ouspensky also had followers. And so there were people following Gurdjieff's teachings and Ouspensky's teachings who knew about the Enneagram. But it wasn't about a personality thing. It wasn't a personality thing. It was this cosmic tool, you know, for awakening to the new self or whatever. And so that's where it was and they both died in the late 1940s.
Speaker 2:Then along comes Oscar Hichazo in the 1960s. He's an occult teacher and he has a school in Chile, in Eureka, chile, and he starts teaching the Enneagram. There are different stories about how he came across it. There's quite a few stories about how he came across it. Some of them are very mystical, like an angel reveal it to him in this mystical thing. I did a Facebook post on that. I read a story that he ran into some followers of Gurdjieff in a cafe where he was working and that's how he found out about it. And then you, then you have the ideas. I've heard from more scholarly people that he probably read a book by Uspensky. He probably read one of Uspensky books which were available at the time and since he was interested in in occult kind of ideas. It's not too surprising he, because I think he studied the Kabbalah as well. So he studied a lot of different things like that, and that may be how he found out about it and he started teaching it at his school.
Speaker 2:But he kind of put his own stamp on it and he said these nine points were ego fixations, and an ego fixation is who you identify as, but it's not the real you You're identifying as that person because that is how you were conditioned to think and you were raised to believe certain things. You had certain experiences in your life and all of these conditioned you to believe certain things and then that made you who you think you are. But that's your false self, that's not your true self. And so you have to deconstruct this false self and find the true essence. He believed that everybody had a perfect, pure essence and we all have this pure essence self. You know, kind of I don't know if he used the word divine, but I I wouldn't be surprised if he did the idea would be that it's that it's divine and you have this pure self and that's your true self. And so so you go through the ego fixation to help you discover that and realize all these falsehoods about yourself. So that's how he taught it, and he had a pupil named Claudio Naranjo.
Speaker 2:Claudio Naranjo was a Chilean psychiatrist and in case anybody thinks that gives the Enneagram some validity, let me tell you what his specialty was. Naranjo's specialty was studying the effects of mind-altering drugs on the brain. So, yeah, yes, that was his thing. That was his thing, and he partook. He took the drugs himself for spiritual experiences. He was very into this. He was into shamanism. Um, he did a long, long interview that I watched um, I mean, it must have been about two hours long with a german filmmaker. A german guy interviewed him and the whole thing was about naranjo's absolute love for shamanism and how he feels that's the path he's the closest to.
Speaker 2:And shamanism is really sorcery. It involves the use of mind-altering drugs, usually for spirit contact or contact with the dead. The shaman is the mediator between the tribe and the spirits, and so the shaman is the mediator and the healer. So they did healing or they do healing. There's still shamans around. They do healing and a lot of it is done through, supposedly, this contact with a spirit world. It could be that they could be saying it's the ancestors, they could be saying it's some other kind of spirits, could be animal spirits, I mean all kinds of things, but the bottom line is it's the spirit world and the shaman's the mediator and brings the messages and the healing to the people. So that's what a shaman is and this is what Naranjo was fascinated with, and so that's where his interest was and he believed in spirit contact, as did Ichazo.
Speaker 2:Ichazo did spirit contact as well and Naranjo called his spirits higher authorities and Naranjo called his spirits higher authorities and he believed, you know, in getting messages from them and contacting them. So this is where Naranjo was spiritually and mentally. He was into this whole spirit contact thing. He basically was kind of a new ager. He basically was kind of a new ager and he was teaching Enneagram that the nine points there, which came to be called types, the nine types also represented this, this self that you had to uncover. You had to dismantle to discover this true essence. Very similar to Ichazo, to discover this true essence. Very similar to Ichazo. He probably added more layers, psychological layers, to it and it was introduced to the New Age via Helen Palmer, a psychic, and it got into the New Age big, big time. She wrote on it.
Speaker 2:A lot of New Agers picked up on it, started teaching it and using it. Um, it also got into the catholic church, uh, through a jesuit priest named bob oaks. Uh, and he learned it from naranjo and he took it to a seminary in chicago and so some catholic priests learned, learned it. It was never endorsed or promoted by the Catholic Church and in fact, the first warnings against the Enneagram came from Roman Catholics who had encountered it, including one who had been teaching it. A Jesuit named Mitch Pacwa learned the Enneagram when Bob Oaks took it to Loyola and he started teaching it and using it. And then he started investigating it and discovered wait a minute, this isn't, this isn't, this isn't a good thing. This doesn't have any origins in in psychology, it doesn't have any Christian basis or anything. He just, you know, so just started denouncing it. Now, the reason I'm bringing up the catholic angle is because there are still catholics out there who use it and there's some books by catholics on the enneagram. Um, but also I want to bring it up because one of the people who learned it, apparently at loyola or in connection with that, was richard war, and he's somebody I have to talk about in a minute, because he plays a major role in this Enneagram business in the church. So the Enneagram that was how it took shape.
Speaker 2:Now, claudio Naranjo admitted in a video that he got most of the information on the nine types from automatic writing, and automatic writing is a form of spirit contact. So he claims that is where a lot of the information came from. Um, you know, from his higher authorities and um, he apparently thinks that's a really cool thing and you can tell the video he thinks that, and the people that are sitting there thinking it's a new age program. So you know, they're all on the same page with it. Um, this video is still on youtube and I've posted it many times. I have links to it, I think, in some of my enneagram articles. Other people have started incorporating it now when they wanted to expose the enneagram.
Speaker 2:So this, so what you're dealing with here, really is a tool based on occult beliefs that comes primarily from two men who did spirit contact, and the ideas in it are completely anti-Christian the idea of finding a true self, a pure essence. This is how New Agers talk about it. They'll talk about the essence and the pure self. Um, this, of course, is not a christian concept. We don't have a purse, pure self or pure essence. You know we have a fallen self that needs to be regenerated through faith in christ. And then we have the new self in christ, which is a a you you know from the new birth, from faith in Christ. It's a supernatural act of God, it's not something we've done, and the new self is being sanctified by the Holy Spirit as we grow in Christ, which is our, you know, lifelong process, constantly growing in Christ, and that's all. The Holy Spirit has a big role in that. So this is not like a self-improvement program or something that we discover through a chart or a diagram on how we can improve ourselves.
Speaker 2:But the way it got into the church was through Richard Rohr, because he wrote a book on the Enneagram and around 1990, 1991, then, I think, for a while, maybe just some Catholics maybe used it because he is a, I should say Richard Rohr is a Franciscan friar, so he is a Roman Catholic, and it didn't really get much beyond that until maybe around 2000, 2009 or so 2010, because of richard roars association with what's called what used to be called the emergence. They're now basically progressives. The emergence were a movement in the 90s in the church where the idea was to reach out to the unchurched generation. So you did church differently, you know, you made church kind of like a coffee house, or you know you preached in casual, in jeans and a black turtleneck or something, and at first it was kind of a matter of style and things like that. But some of these emergent leaders were questioning a lot of the basic doctrines of Christianity and basically drifted away from from basic sound doctrine and they became progressives and they started promoting Enneagram at their conferences. And I believe it's because of Richard Warr's influence. I believe you know, I can't I don't know for sure, but I believe that's how they knew about it, right, and so they I guess you know he was a good salesman for it and they bought into it and they started promoting it. And I noticed that and that's when I wrote my first article on the Enneagram, which was 2011. And that article is still on my website. And then I just, you know, know, didn't really think about it very much until 20. Well, actually I started noticing in 2013-2014, richard Ward getting more of an influence in the church through these progressives and I started warning about Richard Ward and I think I can't remember now, but I think maybe that's why I started in 2014 warning about the Enneagram, again because of Richard Rohr's association with it.
Speaker 2:I noticed in 2016 this is the really landmark year when the Road Back to you came out by Suzanne Stabile and Ian Cron, and it came from IVP Interversity Press, which had always been perceived as an evangelical publisher and had published a lot of very good Christian material. They came out with this book, the Road Back to you, which was about the Enneagram and using the Enneagram. Frankly, I was quite shocked. First, I was shocked by the title, because I thought the title did not sound like a Christian book. I'm like the road back to you. Maybe I'm reading it wrong. It's like this is a mistake. They made a horrendous typo in their title, but no, no, they didn't. And the really crucial thing to know here is that Suzanne Stabile was mentored by Richard Rohr for many years and Ian Cron is an associate of Richard Rohr. They both have spoken at his center. He runs a center and a living school in Albuquerque, new Mexico, and they have spoken there. In fact, I talk about Suzanne Stabile in my 2011 article on the Enneagram because I discovered that she was this supposed evangelical, or at least a Christian, doing the Enneagram. So I wrote about her and I wrote about her association with Richard Rohr too. So I was alarmed and I started warning about it.
Speaker 2:And the following year the sacred Enneagram came out by Chris Horowitz from Zondervan. So here you've got another big publisher, and Zondervan of course, publishes a lot of Bibles and you know, people know it, I think mainly for that. But they're a big Christian publisher, or perceived that way. And even if they're owned by secular houses because I think at some point I can't remember where these places were, you know, bought out or came under the ownership of a secular they were still still presented as publishers of Christian material and Christian writers still, you know, wrote books that were published by them. So that was, that was the perception that they were for the Christian market. And so the sacred enneagram comes out. Now Chris Horace, who wrote that book was also mentored by Richard Ward. So you've got the first two books in the church written by people mentored by and associated with Richard Ward.
Speaker 2:Okay, so here's where I have to stop it, because people are thinking okay, richard Ward is a Franciscan friar, maybe that's, you know, maybe that's good, Maybe it's bad, but you know what's the big deal? Why do you keep saying his name? Here's why Richard Rohr is completely heretical. You cannot call him a Christian, richard Rohr. You know, and I say this with, I can prove this a thousand times over with his own words Richard Ward teaches a completely different Jesus.
Speaker 2:He teaches that the first incarnation of Christ, okay, separates Jesus and Christ. First of all, the first incarnation of Christ was creation. The second incarnation was Jesus, okay, so, yeah, wrap your head around that. It's like. It's like, yeah, you know, everybody goes wait a minute, what, what did you say? This is what he teaches. So, here you go, you've got right away, you've got. Oh man, that's really wild. You know, that's not biblical. So jesus, yes, jesus was the second incarnation of this christ that he calls the universal Christ. But then, after the resurrection, the universal Christ is, is out there as it's like this power, this, this energy flow that's pulling all creation towards a point of perfection. Jesus sort of pointed to the universal Christ. And, yeah, he points to the universal Christ. But you're not. It's not about believing in Jesus, it's about the universal Christ. Yeah, and also, just to add, you know, insult to injury.
Speaker 2:Jesus did not die for sins on the cross, according to Richard Rohr, because God is not concerned about personal sins. He's concerned about corporate sins. You know pollution companies, that that pollute companies that you know aren't just to people. You know the whole social justice kind of thing although I don't think he uses that term, but he's's, you know, his whole thing is. You know, corporate sin and and all these evil things that governments do and corporations do. That's what God is concerned with. And so Jesus did not die for sins. He was a victim of the Roman Empire because he was. You know, he challenged. He challenged people in power and they didn't like that, and so that's one reason that he was killed. Also, because it shows his love. It shows that the cross is like an example for war, of what he calls the cruciform shape of reality, that it's all about suffering. It's through suffering that you come to truth. And I mean you know this is just one of his many philosophies. He can go on and on on that track for a while. He's very prolific.
Speaker 2:Richard Roar has written many, many books.
Speaker 2:He has a blog, cacorg. You can find all kinds If you want to look up atonement on his blog and see what he says about the atonement you can read it for yourself or what he says about the universal Christ and what he says about Jesus. He's very prolific, I mean. So nobody has any excuse for not knowing what Richard Rohr believes, because it only takes five or 10 minutes of your time and you can find out his ideas and you can find out that they are not biblical very fast on three of his books on my website, including the universal Christ, which is probably the most important book to know about, because that is where he talks about who Jesus and the universal Christ are and you and you can really see what his, his beliefs are there.
Speaker 2:But he's done a lot of also videos, a lot of talks on YouTube, a lot of interviews I've I have listened to. I mean, honestly, I'm I'm sure I've listened to at least 200 hours of Richard Rohr at least. Probably over the years, maybe even more, um. So there's a lot out there, a lot of material. Now this is the man whose influence has brought the Enneagram into the church. Is he a?
Speaker 2:pre-annualist yes, and I'm glad you asked that because I had I hadn't brought that up. He is because a lot of people, um wonder well, where is what is richard war? He's, these beliefs aren't even roman catholic beliefs, and they're not, of course they're. They're not even. You can't even just call them that. Um, he is a follower of what's called perennial wisdom or the perennial philosophy, and he has that on his blog too. He's very open about that.
Speaker 2:And the perennial philosophy and I am not an expert on it this is something I heard about years ago but I didn't explore. I kind of knew vaguely what it was. I knew it was out there. It sounded very new age to me, vaguely what it was. I knew it was out there. It sounded very new age to me, and yet I knew it was something different from the new age, but I didn't really explore it. But I started exploring it because of Richard Rohr and the Enneagram, and so I've done a lot of reading on it since and learned some things.
Speaker 2:And this is basically this philosophy. I think it really started in the 1800s, possibly the late 1700s, and it's kind of a movement. It's like these different people who have these ideas that all the world's religions come from the same source. They all go back to the same truth, to the same God and even though they look very different outwardly, in essence they're the same. They're the same God and even though they look very different outwardly, in essence they're the same. They're the same thing. They have the same message. But you have to uncover that message. You have to go on this journey to kind of this inner journey to uncover the perennial message. So it's not really like a religion where you go somewhere and you learn about it and you say, oh, okay, I agree with that, you know. I mean, yeah, you can read about it and say, yeah, I agree with that. But then you kind of have to go on your own to this kind of personal discovery of it. That's my understanding of how it works and kind of like, when you see it, you've kind of awakened to this truth of perennial wisdom and you see it and it's like, oh, wow, now I see what's behind all religions.
Speaker 2:In fact, there's a book of essays on perennial wisdom by followers of that that I read. I read some of this book. It's called the Underlying Religion underlying religion, and so anybody who really wants to read it from a primary source, read it by people who believe it themselves, which I realize is probably not most people, but cookie people have to read it, um, and so it's very eye-opening. You know, I read some of the essays by the more well-known people who promoted this philosophy, um and it, and so it was kind of it was overseas a lot.
Speaker 2:There was, like some hindu followers and muslim followers, um, of perennial wisdom, and jewish followers, and there are people who call themselves christians, who are followers to the perennial wisdom and they continue to identify with their religion. So, you know, the hindu will still say I'm a hindu and the jew will still say, well, I'm a jew, I'm even a rabbi. There's even rabbis who believe this. But they might say they might use the phrase tradition, so they might say, um, I follow the hindu tradition, um. Or they might say I am a christian in the christian wisdom tradition, so they might use the word with the word wisdom is used a lot with this um, so that's what it is, and they. It's not quite the same as saying, well, all it. It's. In a way, it's the same as saying all roads lead to god, but it's more specific than that.
Speaker 1:It's much more specific that's what I was thinking about, yeah yeah, it's a more specific kind of philosophy.
Speaker 2:It's very compatible with the new age. But they do not. Perennial wisdom followers do not believe in blending religions. They don't believe let's get rid of the religions and we'll just have one religion, since they're all the same. They don't believe in that at all because they believe the different religious paths are there for a reason and for a purpose and different people need different religions to follow. So they do not believe in blending the religions or doing away with that which might be a new. I'm not saying new agers believe it. Some new agers might believe that. But you know, perennial wisdom people definitely don't believe that. They're against that.
Speaker 2:And there's two major schools of thought in perennial wisdom. People definitely don't believe that, they're against that. And there's two major schools of thought in perennial wisdom thinking. One is that we evolve, mankind is evolving to this higher consciousness over time. And then another school doesn't believe that and rejects it and in fact thinks that that's not even perennial wisdom. If you believe that, you're not really following perennial wisdom. So these are two different schools of thinking and the evolutionary school is probably the one maybe we're more familiar with.
Speaker 2:This is one a man named Ken Wilber follows. Ken Wilber is a huge influence he's not a Christian on Richard Rohr. Richard Rohr has quoted Ken Wilber and definitely follows some of Ken Wilber's ideas. I won't get into those ideas but he follows some of them and of course I've looked into Ken Wilber and Ken Wilber also has been an influence on the emergence and the progressives. In fact, rob Bell in Velvet Elvis, his first big book. In one of his footnotes he tells his readers to set three months aside and read a book by Ken Wilber Ken Wilber's book, a Theory of Everything.
Speaker 1:Oh, wow.
Speaker 2:Yeah, ken Wilber is a follower of perennial wisdom. He calls it integral. He uses the word integral, integral philosophy, integral, christianity, integral, and so. So he's integrating all the views, because you know, that's a perennial view, the one truth at the bottom of everything. So he uses the word integral and that's his thing, that's his platform. He's written a lot of books too.
Speaker 2:Um, I I've read most of the theory of everything and and what I came away with with it was that it was basically very buddhist in outlook. I used to be into buddhism, tibetan buddhism and zen buddhism when I was in the new age, and I think that he's very influenced by buddhism, but I don't think he would call himself a Buddhist. I used to call him a Buddhist New Ager, but he's really a perennial follower with kind of a Buddhist orientation, I would say. So this is the man who's influenced some of the emergence, like Rob Bell, and influenced Richard Rohr, and then you have people influenced by Richard Rohr writing the Enneagram books for the church. The Road Back to you is probably the most popular Enneagram book in the church and I've forgotten how many copies it sold.
Speaker 2:I'm terrible with numbers, but it has sold a lot, and Sacred Enneagram sold 100,000 copies, I think by the first two years it was out. Sold 100,000 copies, I think by the first two years it was out, something like that. And these books continue to sell. So you have a tool there that's not based on psychology, not based on any valid studies at all. In fact, any kind of studies done on it have been done by new agers and they haven't been peer reviewed and there's no evidence that they're they're credible at all. You know they. They try to make it sound scientific but it's not. So there's no scientific basis for the Enneagram and there's certainly no spiritual, no Christian basis for it. You basically have a fraudulent tool from the new age in the church that's flourishing in the church.
Speaker 1:Yeah oh wow. This is looking. It's making people, you know, look within themselves, I guess to make them feel better, or try to explain what they are, instead of sticking to what you know. God's word says that you know, we're all sinners in need of a savior yes, it's the, the.
Speaker 2:I think the um, self-interest is very, is naturally very strong for us. That's just that's. That's a human thing, that we're interested in ourselves and knowing ourselves. So you know, you can see that with all these little silly personality things you know, like what flower are you, or what animal are you, or if you were a car, what car would you be? You know which are, you know, okay, you do it for kind of a fun thing, you don't take it seriously. But I mean the fact that people are, you know, like to do those kinds of things where we're, naturally we want to know about ourselves and that's a natural interest.
Speaker 2:But of course, first of all, the Enneagram can't really tell you about yourself because it's not valid. So it's got what it tells you and what you think it's telling you is all false. And so you're going to put yourself in this false category. It can't tell you anything you don't already know. And then, um, I can't tell you anything you don't already know, uh, and then you, you, yes, you are, get more self-oriented. And you know people who have gotten into the Enneagram and then later rejected it have said, yeah, I was so caught up in the Enneagram, you know I was reading these books. I was reading about my husband's number, I was reading about my children's number. You know I wanted to know my best friend's number and you know I was trying to figure everybody out. You know she's a seven and now he's a four and that means this and that. And you can hear it on the podcast that promote the Enneagram They'll talk about their number and they'll have somebody on and they'll say so, what's your number?
Speaker 2:And then the person will go on and on why are there seven? And that's why they do this and why they do that. So it really, yeah, it gets this. You get into this really quicksand of the self and you just start sinking into the self. This is exactly what happens in astrology, you know.
Speaker 2:You get so into who you are in astrology, especially if you have your chart done. So you know your sun sign, your rising sign, your moon sign, all the signs your planets are in and what house they're in, and you can really get into it. Then you know like, oh wow, my son is in the seventh house and it's in Sagittarius and my moon is in, you know, virgo, and it means this and this is, and I'm, you know, aries rising or whatever, and you you start like seeing yourself this way and you filter everything through it and it just it becomes kind of a a, a central way that you're looking at yourself and how you're doing things and I think, more than maybe you realize, it influences you. More than you realize because you don't really want to admit it's influencing you that much.
Speaker 1:Right, you're spending so much time studying it yes, yes, and reading it.
Speaker 2:And I, you know, I've read things for people who got into it. Oh, I read this book so many times it's it's all battered. You know this book is battered. I've read it, you know, five or six times. This is something some christian said, actually about a book by on the enneagram, by don riso and riso and Russ Hudson, who are new agers. This was a Christian. Wow, this book just really opened her eyes and she read it five or six times. And and then another Christian who'd been a path, who was a pastor at the time, borrowed it from her she was a sister-in-law, borrowed it from her and he got into the Enneagram and is promoting it and wrote a book.
Speaker 2:I'll say who it is. I can't remember his name, but his book is called. It's terrible because I was actually on a debate with him on a show called Unbelievable and the book is called the Enneagram Goes to Church. I think it came out about a year ago. So I'm terrible with names. I'm sorry, I don't remember. It's okay, that's fine. All these names are going through my head and I'm like no, I don't think that's it. I don't think it's it. I'm bound to say the wrong name, so I better not say anything. It's a pretty basic name. It's not a hard name to remember, but I can't remember it.
Speaker 1:We see how it's taking our focus off of God and who he is Right.
Speaker 2:Not to mention that the Bible tells us that we are being conformed into the image of Christ, right, so Christ is our model. It's not we're supposed to be a good seven or a better four. You know, we're supposed to be conformed to the image of Christ. That's the sanctification process. So Christ is our model. We look to Christ. We look to God's word. You know, god's word is telling us how to live as a Christian in this world, and that's what most, most of the letters from, like you know, most of the epistles, are about that, or many of them are. And so we have, we have. It's not like God has left us in the dark about what to do, you know. You know God's given us what we need. It's sufficient. It's sufficient Not only what we need to know, like just to know things but he's given us the Holy spirit to enable us to live according to his word. Even though we mess up, we are able to yield to the holy spirit if we want to right. And so this we have this wonderful resource. With god's word, we have the holy spirit. You know, we have everything we need to grow as a christian as god wants us to grow.
Speaker 2:The enneagram it just is just going to take away from it and it will even damage it. It will even damage it and it is I believe it is damaging the church. It's already caused a lot of people have left their church over this, because their church, when given the facts, would just ignore the facts or reject them or say, no, we're going to use it anyway as a tool, it's okay. We're going to use it anyway as a tool, it's okay, we're going to use it the right way, or something like that. You know, they rationalized it and these people said I can't stay under leadership that's going to keep using something they know is false.
Speaker 1:Right.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so it's sad, but that's in a way, you know, the way I thought about it is that it has revealed who's really who really wants to follow the facts and the truth and and who's willing to compromise and rationalize, and maybe that's a good thing to know who those people are.
Speaker 1:Right, yeah, so it's so important, you know, to study the Bible and to get into god's word, to have the holy spirit help us discern what is right and wrong. Well, thank you, marcia, for being on the show today. Your, your tips were very helpful, and how helping us learn more about how these things can get in divert us from, you know, actually studying god's word and what God actually says in his word.
Speaker 2:Well, thank you for having me on and doing this program, Duann. I'm really glad that you're helping people to see you know what the problems are with these areas and how they are really not supported in scripture and scripture, how scripture is so much better than these man-based pagan tools. All right, Thank you, Thank you.
Speaker 1:So you know, God is the ultimate good, he's our standard for right and wrong, and the Bible is God's revelation of himself to us. So we should be filtering our thinking and our morals through the Bible. Since Genesis 3, humanity has been facing the same lies that Satan told Adam and Eve back in the garden. No, satan hasn't created any new lies, he's just changed the way he's presented it to us. And it's important for us, as Christians, to be discerning about who we are, our identity, which should be in Christ. So our discernment is going to come from the Holy Spirit and God's word. So that's why it's so vitally important for us, as believers, to do our best to study and try to understand God's word to help us know God. And when we hear or see something false, the Holy Spirit is going to prompt us to know from God's word what is true and right. So I always like to point to Acts 17, 11, which talks about the Bereans, and it says and the people of Berea were more open-minded than those in Thessalonica and they listened eagerly to Paul's message. They searched the scriptures day after day to see if Paul and Silas were teaching the truth. And I think this is something we, as believers should be doing also.
Speaker 1:So, no matter what great teacher or minister or pastor that we hear, we can listen to their sermons and listen to do their Bible studies, but we always need to compare what they say to what the word of God says. So we need to do our own study about those things that we are learning. So it's important, as believers, that we don't focus on ourselves, but we focus on God, how we can glorify him and then how we can love others, that we may point others to Christ. So I hope this episode was helpful to you to see how we shouldn't be focusing on ourselves or how to define ourselves so much as how we can conform more to the image of God as we live out our lives to glorify him and to love others. So I hope this episode was helpful to you. Until next time, remember God is always good and he's always faithful. Thank you for listening to the podcast. Do me a favor by following the podcast and leaving a review to help spread the word. I look forward to hearing from you.
