The Cosmic Christ
A version of this material has appeared in The Conspiracy to Silence the Son of God, edited by Tal Brooke of Spiritual Counterfeits Project and published by Harvest House.
A New Christ
Orthodox Christology: One Person in Two Natures
Those raised on Disney, MTV, and Monday night football may find history a drag. Only nerds in libraries enjoy history, and only the nerd of nerds studies Church history. “Hey, what’s happenin’?” applies to the last few hours, and “church” means the beautiful facility built when whiz-kid Pastor What’s-His-Name started the fastest-growing Christian assembly in living memory. But history helps Christians stand for truth, for the issues of the past have come back to haunt us. The wise solutions of our forebears can help us still.
In the early centuries, the Church faced attacks on its central belief – the person of Christ. In the lovely town of Chalcedon on the Black Sea, in the balmy month of October, 451 A.D., the leading Christian teachers and pastors assembled to state with great clarity, against heretical and misinformed views, the Church’s doctrine of Christ. “One person in two natures” has ever since defined orthodox Christology. Jesus Christ is both truly God and truly man.
There is great mystery here. Who understands the mystery of the human person, let alone the person of God the Son in human form? This definition did not claim infinite knowledge. It simply laid down some essential points of reference as indicated in Scripture.
Christ is one real person, like God the Father and God the Holy Spirit. He is not made up of multiple personalities. Of course, like every other person, Christ is unique. His uniqueness consists in being both divine and human – having “two natures” – and the mystery of his person is that these two natures are both perfectly united and always distinct. The new view of Christ explodes this definition, disfiguring his person and work beyond recognition.
The New Christology: Two Persons, Two Natures
In the mirror, you see what you want to see…and then they bring out the snapshots. The photogenic few fight for the album, while the rest drift away.
The new spirituality tosses not only the photographs, but the camera in the garbage. The Bible shows us what we do not like to see about ourselves and what we need to see about Jesus. Aquarian devotion uses the Bible as a grotesque circus mirror, to flatter and bewitch. ln this make-believe world, spiritual information comes from within. The magic mirror on the wall tells you you are the fairest you can be.
The new Christ is but a reflection of this make-believe New Human. A relativized Bible and a congenial Bible study method let the reader interrogate the text and furnish new, personalized answers. Christ is “seen” with new eyes. Not the “one person with two natures,” Jesus is a human imbued with “Christ consciousness,” someone you can hope to be.
Shirley MacLaine reads the Bible and sees a Jesus “very much like metaphysical seekers in the New Age today.” Popular Christian novelist Madeleine L’Engle breaks the unity of Chalcedon: “Jesus of Nazareth lived for a brief life span, but Christ always was, is and will be.” New look Christology ditches the delicate unity of the divine with the human for a pagan notion of divinized humanity. Pagan witch Mary Daly affirms that “the idea of a unique divine incarnation in a male, the God man of the `hypostatic union’ [the Chalcedonian formula] is inherently sexist and oppressive. Christology is idolatry.” This is not simply word-shuffling. The implications are momentous for the future of the Christian faith. So we ask first, who is Christ according to the new spirituality, and then, who is Jesus?
Who Is Christ?
The new spirituality answers this question in a number of ways, from the least innocuous to the most shocking. All, though, are on the same continuum, and in splitting Christ from Jesus, they depersonalize Christ and relativize the incarnation.
Christ is The “Cosmic Christ”
The neo-pagan “Christian” theologian, Matthew Fox, promotes a brand of Christology that any religion (other than Christian orthodoxy) could buy. Though he tries to maintain some link with Christianity by using certain Christian terms, Jesus Christ is no longer the unique connection/mediator between God and man:
“Christ is not simply confined to the historical Jesus. Christ is the immanent Wisdom of God present in the whole cosmos. For Christians, Jesus is the paradigmatic manifestation of cosmic wisdom but he is only one such manifestation. This wisdom has been manifested in the Tao, the Buddha, the Great Spirit and the Goddess.”
Rosemary Radford Ruether, an influential Christian feminist, thinks “Fox is basically on target in these affirmations.”
This perversion, of course, only happens in liberal churches, right? Wrong! Madeleine L’Engle in her book, The Irrational Season, calls Jesus “the man who housed” the Christ. Though she denied any New Age connections, L’Engle was associated with institutions similar to Matthew Fox’s Institute in Creation Spirituality, so there is little room for doubt as to the meaning of this phrase. Fox’s “Cosmic Christ” also appears in her writings. In her story, “Polly and the Episcopalian Priest,” Polly, who is posing as a goddess, is captured by an opposing tribe. The priest, a psychic healer, shows her the altar where he is going to kill her if the rains do not come. As she prepares to die at the hands of this pagan butcher: “She thought . . . of her own experience of the healer holding his hands over hers, as warmth flowed through them. There had been incredible power and beauty in the old man’s hands. Could he be a healer and yet with his healing hands take her blood to enhance his power? Could benign power and malign power work together? Mana power and taboo power were each an aspect of power itself . . . But there was [a ley line] between Polly and the healer. Surely the loving power of Christ had been in those delicate hands. . .”
As Scott and Smith, who researched L’Engle’s writings, rightly conclude: “Utter blasphemy! Christ’s power does not reside in the hands of a butcher.” Except, of course, if your notion of Christ is a “cosmic” pagan one, for then the yin and the yang belong together, nothing is ultimately good or bad, and the butcher can be Christ. Here the human and divine natures in the person of Jesus Christ are split. The divine is now called the Cosmic Christ, who is the Spirit in all religions. Jesus is a mere man who shares with others the divine Spirit. Christ and Christianity are no longer unique.
Christ is “Christ Consciousness” or the Higher Self
In its teachings about Jesus, Christian orthodoxy, according to this new spirituality, is not worth the paper it is written on. This goes especially for orthodoxy’s “elitist belief that only one man has ever been of `divine birth.'” The new spirituality is much more democratic, and thus bound to please the “me generation” of “boomer” seekers. It views the union of the divine (which they call Christ) with the human (Jesus) as a particular example of what happens to all spiritual people. Jesus is merely a paradigm of what should happen to every spiritual being. In espousing this, Fox is just as “New Age” in his thinking as Chris Griscom, Shirley MacLaine’s ex-guru. Says Griscom: “We don’t have to wait for some booming voice from a male god to say, `You are such and such.'” For inner peace, indeed, for ecstasy, all you need to do is to tune into your higher self. And the higher self will reply: `Clothe yourself in love; awaken, stimulate your life force, then you will have the courage to be who you are.'”
And who are you? “You are,” says Griscom, “your higher self,” a being of incredible power able “on this planet to…conquer death, make choices, get rid of sickness…come into harmony with other planets and other realities and other dimensionalities.” Griscom thus encourages her disciples: “You’re worthy! And you have all the knowing. You’ll never need anything but what’s inside you.” Armed with knowledge of the self, disciples will “walk this Earth as gods.”
From this perspective, everyone possesses “Christ consciousness.” Jesus found the Christ in himself. So should you. “I found God in myself and I loved her fiercely,” says Roman Catholic feminist theologian Carol Christ. This new “god” or “Christ” consciousness is flooding into liberal “Christian” writings. “Christian” systematic theologians, Smart and Konstantin speak of “a Divine Being who lies within and beyond the cosmos…but we also find the Divine within us, at the base of our consciousness. In searching inside ourselves through self-training we can find her in the Light which lights our consciousness.” This is not “a fresh view of Christianity.” It smells of ancient decadent paganism.
Though it uses the names “Jesus” and “Christ,” such teaching is fundamentally anti-Christian, for it takes the focus off the unique person of Jesus Christ and elevates every seeking individual to christhood status. The New Testament would call it pagan blasphemy, the worship of the creature rather than the Creator. Moreover, pagan blasphemy is the ultimate expression of diabolical seduction, exchanging the truth of God for “the lie.” Little wonder such misrepresentation of the truth leads finally to the promotion of the Antichrist.
Christ is The Anti-Christ
Feminist witch Miriam Starhawk asserts that feminism is “the strongest mythogenic (myth-creating) force at work today.” Many in the West have failed to address this attack on Christianity; now, it is almost too late. An Anglican minister, William Oddie, in his book What Will Happen To God? discusses the effects of feminism on the Christian faith. His answer to the title’s question: “the substantial reconstruction of the Christian religion itself….Beliefs and values that have held sway for thousands of years will be questioned as never before.” While correct, this judgment expresses the understated reserve of an English gentleman with a stiff upper lip and a stiff collar to support it!
Radical Jewish feminist Naomi Goldenberg, now a witch, has an answer that chills the spine: “The feminist movement in Western culture is engaged in the slow execution of Christ and Jahweh….the gods who have stolen our [women’s] identity…We women are going to bring an end to God.”
She means, of course – speaking as a witch – the God of Scripture. For other gods are lurking in the shadows, particularly goddesses and the Antichrist, which have a strong likelihood of coming down to the same thing, if one is to judge by the goings-on at recent “Christian” feminist conferences. The goddess Sophia, worshipped by liberated women from mainline churches (most of these were not self-confessed witches), was the new “re-imagined” Christ. Communicants received pagan sacred elements of milk and honey. Christa, the goddess of feminist deconstruction, lesbian love and sinful play now often replaces Christ the lamb of God bearing the sins of the world in his body on the tree. This is a palace revolution of unprecedented proportions. This is Antichrist in the temple of God, one more notable expression of the “abomination of desolation.”
These “Christian” feminists seek to “re-imagine” Christianity by infusing “new” female-friendly notions of goddess worship and sexual liberation into biblical faith. Truly radical feminists know better and say so with candor and coherence: “The radical Christian vision is, and always was [they are doubtless thinking of Gnosticism] a reemergence of paganism. To be truly revolutionary, Christianity would have to dissolve itself…[and] its male-dominated…hierarchies,…renounce most of the Old Testament, most of the New,…throw out Genesis to return us radically to an image of God based on the pre-biblical universal perception of a Great Mother – a bisexual being, both male and female….But, as we said, if the Christian church ever changed itself this radically, it would become pagan.”
The Anti-Christ is a Woman
A “Christian” radical feminist hails this feminized understanding of Christianity as “the messianic appearing of the body of God.” This eschatological event comes about through the feminist revolutionary perception concerning the relation of the body to the spirit. Virginia Mollenkott speaks of “the New Humanity…of the Christ Herself.” What do these radicals mean? Some readers blanched when I suggested in a previous book that perhaps the Antichrist would be a woman. While no one knows for sure, I would hazard a further precision based on recent events – she/he could be an androgynous lesbian of diabolical spiritual power.
I am not out on a lonely limb. Already in the nineteenth century Mother Ann Lee, founder of the Shakers, and Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science believed that at the second coming the Messiah would be female. This is at least what very influential modern lesbian witch theologians also think. One, Mary Daly, with two doctorates in theology and Professor of theology at the Jesuit Boston College, writes: “I suggest that the mechanism of reversal has been at the root of the idea that the `Antichrist’ must be something `evil’. What if this is not the case at all? What if the idea has arisen out of the male’s unconscious dread that women will rise up and assert the power robbed from us?…The Antichrist dreaded by the Patriarchs may be the surge of consciousness, the spiritual awakening, that can bring us beyond Christolatry into a fuller stage of conscious participation in the living God. Seen from this perspective the Antichrist and the Second Coming of Women are synonymous. This Second Coming is not a return of Christ but a new arrival of female presence, once strong and powerful, but enchained since the dawn of patriarchy….The Second Coming, then, means that the prophetic dimension in the symbol of the great Goddess… is the key to salvation from servitude to structures that obstruct human becoming…”
Readers will forgive me for providing such a long quote, but seeing and reading is believing. This is a type of Christology few were expecting. The earth, in crisis due to the fruits of patriarchy sown by the male Gods, the Father and Christ, will be saved by the return of the goddess. This fits perfectly with New Age speculation concerning the coming (some say present) Age of Aquarius, with its “yin, feminine energy.” We are witnessing the end of the Age of Pisces, the age of the Fish (Christianity), and of masculine, yang energy. In astrology Aquarius is pictured as “the water-carrier.” Behold the goddess, the Great Mother/Creatrix who appears in ancient mythology as “the divine potter, the carrier of the heavenly water jar.” So the “dawning of the Age of Aquarius” is accompanied by the appearance of goddess morning star.
Such soft feminist rehabilitation of the serpent’s lie is simply a new vaguely “christianized” version of what New Agers and their precursors have been saying for some time – the welcoming of Satan as the bringer of wisdom, the bringer of poisoned water for the spiritually-thirsty Aquarian believers. The line from this “Christian” devotion to Sophia to the diabolical and the occult is direct and rapid. David Spangler, a contemporary spokesman of the New Age, and wise teacher of contemporary mainline Presbyterians, described the New Age as an age of “Luciferic Initiation.”
“Lucifer works within each of us to bring us wholeness as we move into the New Age…Lucifer comes to give us the final…Luciferic initiations…that many people in the days ahead will be facing, for it is an initiation into the New Age”….Christ is the same force as Lucifer….Lucifer prepares man for Christ-consciousness.
In one chilling example from the sixties, Charles Manson led his followers in the massacre of Sharon Tate and her friends believing that everything he did was “good,” an expression of karma. Thus his followers saw him both as Satan and Christ. The ultimate identification of Christ with Satan is a natural outcome of monism, where both good and evil are equally part of the whole, for everything belongs together in the monistic circle of existence.
If Christ is the mystic presence of the divine, what does the new spirituality have to say about the man, Jesus?
Who Is Jesus?
In the hallowed halls of New Testament learning it is often held as an unquestioned truth that Jesus did not proclaim himself as the Messiah and the Son of God, the divine savior who was to die for the sins of the world. This is considered a later addition imposed upon Jesus by the orthodox wing of the church. A logical question follows: Who is Jesus?
Jesus is Not Unique
The new answer, given by contemporary Bible scholars, in the context of the rehabilitation of ancient Gnostic heresy, is: Jesus is “Sophia’s most trusted envoy,” “Miriam’s Child,” “Sophia’s Prophet,” “Very Goddess and Very Man,” “an epiphany of God, a “disclosure”…of God,” but “…there have been many figures in every culture who experience the `other world'” [emphasis mine]. Jesus is interesting – he was a prophet, “a charismatic healer, unconventional sage, and founder of an alternative community….he is clearly one of the most remarkable figures who ever lived” – but he is not unique. Certainly Jesus was a “spirit-possessed” revolutionary, but not in the classic, orthodox sense of the God incarnate Messiah. “What he was like reminds us that there have been figures in every culture who experienced the “other world.”
In February, 1994, the “Jesus Summit” satellite hook-up took this Jesus to the masses. Scores of sites around the country showed a conversation between Bible scholars Marcus Borg, Burton Mack and John Crossan, all authors of recent books on Jesus, written from the perspective of the Jesus Seminar. The interviewers asked if authentic faith is still possible in light of recent “Jesus” scholarship. Their authors simply redefined “faith” based on the new political, sexual and spiritual agenda.
A more recent declaration of the Jesus Seminar denounces the virgin birth as “sexist” and as “another example of the subjugation of women.” In its role as an unbiased [!] scientific think tank, the Seminar calls upon the church to revamp its thinking about Jesus as “an illegitimate child,” and bring into its confession that Jesus was “a son of an unknown and a son of God or a son of nobody.”
Francis Watson, the British New Testament scholar who adopts the Gnostic reversal exegesis of Genesis 1-3, argues that in the Gospel of John the divine logos unites with the man Jesus at his baptism. Watson admits that his interpretation is close to “the gnosticizing view that the heavenly Christ descended into Jesus at his baptism, and then abandoned Jesus again before his death.” Watson finds a parallel to what he is proposing as the original Christology of the Gospel of John in the Gnostic Second Treatise of the Great Seth: “I visited a bodily dwelling. I cast out the one who was in it first, and I went in…And I am the one who was in it, not resembling him who was in it first. For he was an earthly man, but I, I am from above the heavens…I revealed that I am a stranger to the regions below.”
American New Testament scholarship now contends that the true Jesus is most likely the Jesus of the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas. In this gospel, the christological concerns of the canonical Gospels are considered “secondary, if not misguided.” For Jesus did not come talking about himself, but really showed that he was no different than any of his disciples. The new radical Q scholarship agrees with Thomas, in three signifcant areas:
1. the person of Jesus – Jesus did not proclaim himself as the Messiah and the Son of God, the divine savior who was to die for the sins of the world;
2. the work of Jesus – the Jesus of Q is but a teacher of wisdom, a sort of proto-Gnostic guru;
3. the nature of the church – the Q people did not focus “on the person of Jesus or his life and destiny. [Rather] they were engrossed with the social program that was called for by his teachings,” including radical poverty, the life-style of the wandering beggar, an attitude of political subversion, and needless to say, an egalitarian, anti-patriarchal feminism. Speaking of the “Q community,” Burton Mack goes on to make the most radical of statements: “The remarkable thing about the people of Q is that they were not Christians. They did not think of Jesus as a messiah or the Christ….They did not regard his death as a…saving event….they did not imagine that he had been raised from the dead….they did not gather to worship in his name….The people of Q were Jesus people, not Christians [emphasis mine].
Publicity for Burton L. Mack’s volume, The Lost Gospel: The Book of Q and Christian Origins trumpets that The Book of Q “Pre-dat[es] the New Testament by generations,” that the New Testament “presents a fictionalized life of Jesus,” and that Jesus’ disciples “did not think of him as the Son of God…but…as a wise, anti-establishment …counterculture…teacher.”
If Jesus is not unique, he is interchangeable with other holy men, and with all Gnostic believers. This explains the disinterest in Jesus as a person, and in the Gospels that describe the earthly Jesus.
Jesus is a human shell for the cosmic Christ, just like the various bodies that our “Higher Self” occupies and then discards through multiple reincarnations. The uniqueness and dignity of his human person and historical work of Jesus, like that of all other persons, is lost in the amorphous being, Christ, who inhabits all things, but has no personal identity.
Jesus is Not the Lamb of God
For two thousand years the church has preached the gospel of Jesus, the Lamb of God. Paul considered this gospel “of first importance.” the very basis of the truth in which the church stands. The new spirituality begs to differ.
Cross Out the Cross:
For Paul the “wisdom of God” was “Jesus Christ crucified,” weakness to unbelieving Jews and foolishness to unbelieving Greeks. This “wisdom” is roundly rejected by all sectors of the new spirituality, from liberal Bible scholars to New Age gurus and radical feminists, many of them claiming to be Christians:
Bible scholars:
Marcus Borg, once an orthodox believer, speaks for the Bible scholars. The cross is only “an extraordinary rich image” of dying to self – it is not the act of God on my behalf. So where does the theology of Christ’s death originate? The early church, looking back saw Jesus’ death as “part of the`plan of God’….the Servant of God who gave his life for the many,…God’s only son who had been sent into the world for this purpose.” Based on the new criteria of authenticity, honed down by the Jesus Seminar, Borg is able to affirm that for Jesus, “his death was not his primary intention.” His intention was to affect “the transformation of his own culture.” And just as the Gnostic Gospel of Thomas grants Jesus’ death no importance, so the hypothetical Q contains nothing “to suggest that Jesus’ death had a positive or redemptive significance.” Naturally, neither the artificially created Q nor Thomas leave room for the resurrection of Jesus.
New Age gurus:
The Voice (supposedly Jesus) who possessed Dr. Helen Schucman, a Jewish atheist and psychologist in 1965, explained, in its A Course in Miracles, “evil is an illusion, and sin is the illusion that separates us from our own innate divinity, our own godhood.” This Jesus soothingly intones, “Forget your dreams of sin and guilt and come with me,” and then goes on, quite naturally, to deny the reality of the cross. Schucman’s disciple, Marianne Williamson, also a Jewess involved in promoting this new-style Christianity, even in the Clinton White House, assures her many readers: “There is no place for hell in a world whose loveliness can yet be so intense and so inclusive it is but a step from there to heaven.” Elizabeth Clare Prophet, leader of the Church Universal and Triumphant considers the idea of blood-sacrifice an “erroneous doctrine” of dubious pagan origin. Matthew Fox sees Jesus’ death as a symbol of Mother Earth dying each day as a constantly sacrificed pascal lamb.
What utter confusion between the once for all dealing with sin in Christ’s death and resurrection and the pagan cyclical notion of the rites of Spring! In similar vein, the New Age spiritualizes and explains away the resurrection and the ascension of Christ. Bultmann, the father of modern New Testament criticism, claimed that Jesus was raised in the faith of the disciples. The mystical intellectual Joseph Campbell, guru of T.V. personality Bill Moyers, explains the ascension as the moment when Christ “has gone inward…to the kingdom of heaven within.” New Ager, John White believes that “The institutional Christian churches tell us that Jesus was the only Son of God, that he incarnated as a human in order to die on the Cross in a substitutionary act as a penalty for our sins, and thereby save the world. But that is a sad caricature, a pale reflection of the true story….Jesus did not save people: he freed them – from the bondage of the ego. The significance of the incarnation and resurrection is not that Jesus was a human like us but rather that we are gods like him…”
Radical lesbian feminist Virginia Ramey Mollenkott recently re-imagined the future church’s message: “…we would avoid the androcentric language (Father, Son, etc) and the dominant submission theology…, I can no longer worship in a theological context that depicts God as an abusive parent and Jesus as the obedient trusting child.”
Dolores Williams, Professor at Union Theological Seminary, offered a classic of theological precision when she said: “I don’t think we need a theory of atonement at all….I don’t think we need folks hanging on crosses and blood dripping and weird stuff.” In An Acceptable Time, Madeleine L’Engle compares those who believe in the substitutionary atonement of Christ to murderous savages who slaughter human beings to satisfy Mother Earth.
From these seemingly unrelated quarters comes the same message. Individual and planetary redemption do not depend on the objective work of God in the historical death of Jesus that removes the objective stain and guilt of sin. Redemption is a human work, the inner capacity to realize one’s divine nature and limitless potential. Such realization includes the rejection of any “externally imposed” creational structures and Scriptural laws. Liberation consists in knowing that these things are without meaning. Knowing oneself to be god is power knowledge – the power of the human god unto human salvation! This is the saving gnosis of which the ancient Gnostics constantly spoke. For them too, Christ is not a savior, bearing in his body the curse of our sin. Christ is rather the revealer of knowledge, whispering to us to look inside.
These ideas are not fruitful insights into the original Gospel. They are another gospel, mutually exclusive of the New Testament’s Gospel. Two gospels, according to Paul, are an oxymoron. One eliminates the other. Which one should the church choose? The gospel of Q, of the Jesus Seminar and the Gnostic texts or the gospel of the apostles and the historic creeds?
Jesus Is a Guru
It is no co-incidence that we hear so much about the rediscovery of the goddess Sophia/Wisdom while New Testament studies emphasize exclusively Jesus as a wisdom [sophia] teacher? Female, mainline feminists meet (mostly) male mainline New Testament scholars at this new confessional intersection: Jesus is “Sophia’s Most Trusted Envoy.”
The modern approach is to see “Jesus as Sage,” not a teacher of dogma or morals, but “of a way or path, specifically a way of transformation….similar to the other great sages…includ(ing) Lao Tzu…and the Buddha.” The work of Jesus according to the Jesus Seminar is to be a teacher of wisdom.
In this new perspective, Jesus is “a renewal movement founder…(who) points us to human community and history, to an alternative culture which seeks to make the world more compassionate.” This compassion emanates not from the wisdom of the Gospel of the crucified Christ but from wisdom found within the self. The newly-discovered Jesus is not the preacher of the Cross and the final revelation of the God of Old Testament Scripture but Sophia’s most trusted envoy – which ultimately makes Jesus, the true founder of Christianity, a pagan worshipper of the goddess.
New Testament scholars thus open the door of the church to the spirituality now prevalent in radical feminism and New Age religion. In present-day New Age thinking the female principle holds the key to salvation. James Lovelock, a New Age spokesman, calls for a return to goddess spirituality to save the earth from ecological disaster and avoid the destruction to which the Semitic/Christian God will inevitably lead. Shirley Maclaine dedicates her book Going Within to “women and men who seek the spiritual feminine in themselves.” So the common lines reappear after fifteen centuries. The Jewish feminist theologian, Rita Gross, advocates borrowing from Hindu goddess traditions to affect the “second coming of the goddess.” Since the goddess increasingly symbolizes an amalgam of all peoples and faiths, Jesus will doubtless be heralded as the great Christian prophet of inter-faith communion. The Jesus of history, envoy of Sophia, has prophetically shown us the way of the “Cosmic Christ,” the unifying spirit of a new religious world order.
The pieces fit. Philosophical deconstruction eliminates rational [left brain masculine] thought, leaving intuition and personal taste. Radical New Testament scholarship reconstructs Jesus, envoy of Sophia as a blue-print for a compassionate, tolerant, politically-correct, multi-cultural, multi-sexual, feminist egalitarian society, liberated from notions of sin, guilt and the New Testament theology of the Cross. Radical religious feminism worships the goddess Sophia, rejecting all hints of orthodox Christianity. Both scholarship and feminism restore Gnostic teaching on the same theme. At the same time, New Age thinking awaits a global transformation based upon the rediscovery of the feminine, right brain “yin” intuition of the Age of Aquarius. It decries rational, male-inspired, “yang” “theories of the atonement” of the Age of Pisces. These disparate movements come together in the confession of a brand new “Christology,” (really quite old), which replaces the historic confession of the crucified Jesus as the true wisdom of God.
A new “christ” consciousness appears, calling for new birth. But receiving Jesus as Savior no longer means regeneration by the work of Christ on the Cross, an act of God that reconciles the world to Himself. Believers experience rebirth when they comes to see that all wisdom is contained within the self. A Christ is preached, and spiritual revival flowers.
According to modern guru, Carolyn Anderson: “Right now a transformation is occurring in the hearts and minds of countless people on earth. The process begins with the individual, with the willingness of those of us who are consciously awakening to know ourselves by exploring the depths of our essence…the integrating our humanity with our divinity…, the healing of the planet resides in the ‘wholing’ of humanity.”
The rebirth produces no Christians, ready to die for their Savior, Jesus of Nazareth. This New Age Great Awakening bears children in the image of its gods, pagan idols set on the thrones of hearts: the gods within.