Rick Warren and Leonard Sweet Together at Saddleback Church

[ObjectsAppearCloser]

Rick Warren and Leonard Sweet Together at Saddleback Church
Published February 9th, 2008 by Editor in Rick Warren, Emerging Church, General News, New Evangelicalism
From the Lighthouse is reporting today:

In less than two weeks, Rick Warren will team up with Leonard Sweet at the 2008 Saddleback Small Groups Conference. The following is our November 2007 report on this event. If you want to get a glimpse of a Purpose Driven Christianity, study the beliefs and writings of Leonard Sweet. In 1994 when Warren and Sweet did the Tides of Changes audio project, they made it very clear that they resonated with each other’s vision for the future…

http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com ... more=1&c=1

[chatty-kathi]

From the article, in a book Leonard Sweet wrote, 'Quantum Spirituality':

...Sweet has now placed the book on his website at www.leonardsweet.com in a format easy to download, which, of course, shows that he still promotes its message.

The acknowledgments section of Quantum Spirituality shows very clearly Sweet's spiritual sympathies. In it, Sweet thanks interspiritualists/universalists such as Matthew Fox (author of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ), Episcopalian priest/mystic Morton Kelsey, Willis Harman (author of Global Mind Change) and Ken Wilber (one of the major intellectuals in the New Age movement) for helping him to find what he calls "New Light." Sweet adds that he trusts "the Spirit that led the author of The Cloud of Unknowing."

In the preface of the same book, Sweet disseminates line after line of suggestions that the "old teachings" of Christianity must be replaced with new teachings of "the New Light." And yet these new teachings, he believes, will draw from "ancient teachings" (the Desert Fathers). This "New Light movement," Sweet says, is a "radical faith commitment that is willing to dance to a new rhythm.

Throughout the book, Sweet favorably uses terms like Christ consciousness and higher self and in no uncertain terms promotes New Age ideology: "[Quantum spirituality is] a structure of human becoming, a channeling of Christ energies through mindbody experience."

Sweet also tells his readers that humanity and creation are united as one and we must realize it. Once humanity comes to this realization, Sweet says:

Then, and only then, will a New Light movement of "world-making" faith have helped to create the world that is to, and may yet, be. Then, and only then, will earthlings have uncovered the meaning ... of the last words [Thomas Merton] uttered: "We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. And what we have to recover is our original unity."

Leonard Sweet is what could be called an Alice Bailey Christian because his views on the role of mysticism in the church are evident. He states:

Mysticism, once cast to the sidelines of the Christian tradition, is now situated in postmodernist culture near the center.... In the words of one of the greatest theologians of the twentieth century, Jesuit philosopher of religion/dogmatist Karl Rahner, "The Christian of tomorrow will be a mystic, one who has experienced something, or he will be nothing." [Mysticism] is metaphysics arrived at through mindbody experiences. Mysticism begins in experience; it ends in theology.

This is why it is so important to look beyond what someone says, because they have redefined so many words and applied new meaning to them. By looking further into who Rick Warren endorses and quotes, it becomes crystal clear that this is no longer traditional Christianity but a New Age worldview.

[InHim]

lets remember the reason we do not accept the achiest, or scientific rationalist assertion that their critique of reality is valid, that is that all facts must be repeatable under controlled conditions.

Not total experience by the way, but just the total of our own personal experience which is not exhaustive. That means, that a ball will always bounce when dropped on the floor, because, well, every time we have done that, the ball bounced back. But is that absolute truth? Will the ball always, everywhere, in all situations, bounce back? The only way to know that based on impiricism is to have experience of all actions in all places that a ball is bounced, and to then assume that the impression that our eyes give us is a true representation of the facts.

We experience a rose as red, but know through the study of optics and prisms that the light spectrim, the visible part we can percieve with our eyes anyway, contains all the colors, and that the rose is actually not red becuase that is the part of the color spectrim that is reflected back to our eyes. So our physical senses are a marvelous medium, but hardly the tools to learn the true nature of reality.

It turns out, short of trying to understand the world through our limited experience, through our senses of the world, and our limited opportunity to experience all situations in which that event will occur, that the only thing we can be sure of, is our experience of our selves: I think, therefore, I am.

And that is the realm that the Bible says God makes Jesus known to us. The Holy Spirit makes Jesus known to us at the most basic level of our experience, the level of our experience of ourselves. Who knows the thoughts of a man except the spirit of the man that is in him? It is a revelation by the Holy Spirit to our spirit, and this we call regeneration or the new birth.

Jesus said, flesh and blood have not revealed to you who I am, but my Father has done so, by the Holy Spirit.

Yes, there is something besides intellect and mental assent to dogmatic creeds mandated by social authoritarian structures that constitutes the experience of the Christian faith, and it is not subjective. There is a spiritual rebirth, an internal witness with our inner regenerated spirit by which we respond "Abba, Father".

But the emergent church seeks to start with experience through our senses, then derive or develop a contemporary theology that fits with the "post-modern" times we live in.

They seek experiential knowledge of something beyond themselves, but they base it within the operation of the physical senses that are limited to the physical world. Darkened rooms, incence, chanting, all produce a feeling of something, but true Christian faith starts with a revelation of Jesus Christ, then the operation of faith in Jesus Christ as our saviour and door to the Father, even in spite of our physical feelings. An exemple if Paul and Silas praising God at midnight in the Philippian jail. They were responding to revelation knowledge, and choosing to put their hope and confidence in that, rather than their circumstances.

The first Methodists were originally known as Christians who based their salvation on the inner knowing that they were indeed saved. They claimed they could know that they knew and experienced the inner witness of the Holy Spirit. The revelation of the Glory of God in the face of Christ, in whom the fullness of deity dwells in bodily form, and we who by faith in that revelation become partakers of the Divine Nature.