The "Energymatter" Jesus

An Excerpt from Tamara Hartzell's new online book:

"Reimagining" God: Turning the Light off to Look for "Truth" in the Corner of a Dark Round Room


Below is a relevant discussion of the "new gospel" taught by Leonard Sweet and other evangelical and New Age leaders. Today's excerpt is from Chapter 5, p. 136.

“Jesus of Nazareth [is] the culmination of energymatter”

"The purpose of the church is to give form to,
to put into form and shape,
the energymatter known as Jesus Christ"
Leonard Sweet*

"The Gospel According to" Anything and Everyone?

T

hose who are choosing to put their faith in Oneness and its panentheistic “God” and “truth” that are in everyone and everything will see nothing “superior” about the truth of God’s Word nor see any “advantage” to having God’s Word. Rather, they are attempting to “heal the divisions” between religions by looking for and creating “the kind of coherencies and larger frameworks” that unify the religions/faiths/cultures. Consequently, the “old” light of God’s written Word of truth is being replaced with the “new light” of the collective “divine cocreativity”—i.e., collective “storytelling”—of today’s emerging interfaith community. 

In this emerging faith “relationship, not believing” and likewise “connectness rather than correctness” have indeed become central. Since nothing is “false and wrong” in this new “light” of Oneness, the need for beliefs to be “correct and true” has been rendered irrelevant. And, of course, with a panentheistic interfaith “God” of Oneness everyone can look for “truth” wherever they choose to find it and even call it “Scripture” and “the Word” and “the Gospel” if they so desire.

“Look not to one source, but to all sources, and even to all of Life, for your definition and experience of the Divine. Reject nothing, but also include everything.

“Do not say that the truth is exclusively ‘here’ or exclusively ‘there,’ but, rather, that the truth is ‘neither here nor there,’ but every where.” (the seducing spirit calling itself “God;” bold & underline added)[i]

“‘No culture is so advanced and so superior that it can claim exclusive access or advantage to the truth of God, and none so marginal or inferior that it can be excluded.’” (Leonard Sweet quoting Lamin O. Sanneh; emphasis added)[ii]

“New Lights spend their lives looking for the kind of coherencies and larger frameworks people need for unifying human experience, listening for the drumbeat of the Word amid the downbeats of the world.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[iii]

“… Version 3.0 is the Third Testament, the Gospel According to … you.” (Leonard Sweet; last ellipsis dots in the original; emphasis added)[iv]

“New Light embodiment means to be ‘in connection’ and ‘in-formation’ with other faiths. To be in-formation means … to enlarge the community to include those whose conceptions of God differ from ours in form.…

“One can be a faithful disciple of Jesus Christ without denying the flickers of the sacred in followers of Yahweh, or Kali, or Krishna.

“A globalization of evangelism ‘in connection’ with others, and a globally ‘in-formed’ gospel, is capable of talking across the fence with Hindu, Buddhist, Sikh, Muslim … without assumption of superiority and power.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[v]

“Not only did God become incarnate at one time and in one place, thus becoming visible to the earth, but the gospel gets incarnated in every culture by design.…

“God’s presence is written in every handwriting. The world bears traces of the handwriting of the Word.…

“The early disciples treated with deep esteem those without faith and those with other faiths because God is active in their lives and we have something to learn from them.

“Early Christians drew upon ideas, phrases, metaphors, and customs of pagan cultures as ‘seeds’ of the divine Word that become enfleshed in Christ and in the church.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[vi]

“Franchise is another word for dis-incarnation. And too few of these franchise ‘projects’ approached other cultures with the gospel of love: ‘Jesus loves who and what you are, and wants to inhabit who you are and what you are in such a way that it … blesses the world with new understandings of who Jesus is.’” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[vii]

“God the Spirit and Sustainer wants to work through New Lights of the twenty-first century to produce the Third Testament--our ‘new account of everything old.’

“New Lights’ mission in life, if they choose to accept it, is to continue the work of Scripture.…

“… Philip Hefner captures wonderfully our simultaneous status as dependent creatures and free agents in his recommendation that human beings be thought of as ‘created co-creators.’” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[viii]

“Community is the highest collective form of divine cocreativity.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[ix]

“What if we were to think connectness rather than correctness?” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[x]

[But Scripture says:]

“All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness.” (2 Timothy 3:16)

“I charge thee therefore before God, and the Lord Jesus Christ, who shall judge the quick and the dead at his appearing and his kingdom; preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all longsuffering and doctrine. For the time will come when they will not endure sound doctrine; but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables.” (2 Timothy 4:1-4)

“For we have not followed cunningly devised fables, when we made known unto you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but were eyewitnesses of his majesty.… We have also a more sure word of prophecy; whereunto ye do well that ye take heed, as unto a light that shineth in a dark place, until the day dawn, and the day star arise in your hearts: Knowing this first, that no prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost.” (2 Peter 1:16, 19-21)

“Even the Spirit of truth; whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not, neither knoweth him: but ye know him; for he dwelleth with you, and shall be in you.” (John 14:17)

“For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus, whom we have not preached, or if ye receive another spirit, which ye have not received, or another gospel, which ye have not accepted, ye might well bear with him.” (2 Corinthians 11:4)

Reimagining Jesus
In today’s shifting Christianity, people believe they can just correct Scripture by “rethinking” and “reimagining” and “rewriting” it, so why would they see a need to be corrected by Scripture? Besides, “Yea, hath God said …?” Likewise, people believe they can just “rethink” and “reimagine” God and His Son in the attempt to fit them within the different religious/cultural contexts, so why would they see a need for the doctrine of Scripture that gives “the doctrine of Christ” by which we have “both the Father and the Son” (2 John 1:9)? Besides, a corner stone simply doesn’t work in the circle of relationship of Oneness. Hence the pursuit of “new understandings of who Jesus is” in a “Gospel”/“Third Testament” that is “globally ‘in-formed’” by other faiths/religions/cultures.

It is not at all surprising that people in this emerging faith of Oneness want “the Word” “made flesh differently”—or “reincarnated.” That is, after all, the point. Without “another Jesus” that is different from the Lord Jesus Christ they cannot “heal the divisions” between religions. So this emerging faith must change the Son of God—with the help of man’s powerful imagination, of course. Sweet, who has actually been praised as “[o]ne of the church’s most important and provocative thinkers,”[xi] has written:

“There is no matter without spirit. There is no flesh without word. The height dimension of faith teaches us that without the Word made flesh, there is no Word made power. In every epoch, however, the Word is made flesh differently. Energymatter is a dynamic process … Logos materializes in Pathos in forms fundamental to, shapes revelatory of, the age.” (emphasis added, except to Logos and Pathos)[xii]

“Early Christians drew upon ideas, phrases, metaphors, and customs of pagan cultures as ‘seeds’ of the divine Word that become enfleshed in Christ and in the church.” (emphasis added)[xiii]

“According to the Oxford English Dictionary, to inform means ‘to give form to, put into form and shape.’ The purpose of the church is to give form to, to put into form and shape, the energymatter known as Jesus Christ. New Light leaders, therefore, are in-formational connectors helping the body of Christ to become an in-formed church, an in-formational community. Informational communities exercise both informative and performative functions. The informative function is to impart ideas and to communicate concepts necessary for the life of the individual and the community.…

“New Light leadership helps patches of information become cloaks of knowledge. Information brokering is central to creating community in postmodern culture, not to mention achieving synergic states of group consciousness.…

“A major New Light undertaking is the designing of newstream communities that can be ‘in connection’ and ‘in-formation’ with the spirit of Christ. Christ will be embodied for the postmodern church in information.

“The following are five gross premises of embodiment … that build anew the body of Christ for the postmodern era -- being ‘in connection’ and ‘in-formation’ with: (1) other Christians, (2) all creation, (3) one’s ancestors and ancestral memories, (4) other faiths, (5) technology.” (emphasis added)[xiv]

It is the true Lord Jesus Christ Who is the only way to the true God. A false “Jesus,” not to mention a “Jesus” that is made-up by man, can only lead to a false “God.” And yet in today’s emerging faith of Oneness and its unifying mission to create a new kind of “Gospel”/“Testament” through a new kind of “body” of a new kind of “Christ” no one will think twice about today’s new “understandings” of who “Jesus” is. Moreover, the panentheistic “God” of Oneness is in everyone regardless of their beliefs and religion, so “people may genuinely encounter God … without explicitly knowing about Jesus of Nazareth.”[xv] Since people in this emerging faith don’t even need to know Jesus, it clearly won’t matter what anyone believes about Jesus. And thus a false “Jesus,” “another Jesus,” becomes irrelevant as well.

So according to these pagan (“quantum”) “reimaginings,” “Jesus of Nazareth [is] the culmination of energymatter”[xvi] and “[t]he purpose of the church is … to put into form and shape, the energymatter known as Jesus Christ.” “Energymatter is a dynamic process,” so “[i]n every epoch … the Word is made flesh differently … in forms fundamental to, shapes revelatory of, the age.” Thus “the gospel gets incarnated in every culture” and “ideas, phrases, metaphors, and customs of pagan cultures” are seen “as ‘seeds’ of the divine Word that become enfleshed in Christ and in the church.” And therefore:

“New Lights’ mission in life, if they choose to accept it, is to continue the work of Scripture.…

“The challenge of the church in the twenty-first century is to become … a seedbed in which the texts and traditions of the faith recreate themselves in and through the body until its molecular imagination is awakened by a living God.

“Every believer, every body of Christ is called to become the Third Testament.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[xvii]

“Authenticity in postmodern culture must reflect this integration and wholeness.…

“All religions have something to do with the whole, the totality. Parts have no existence apart from wholes.… This is the essence of sin: Mistaking the part for the whole, or separating the part from the whole.…

“New Light leadership is fundamentally gathering communities together and building them up into a true body of Christ.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[xviii]

“In fact, the genius of authentic Christianity is its ability to integrate ‘pagan customs’ with Christian faith and practice.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[xix]

“The body of Christ is less an aggregate of persons than an aggregate of cultures; the body of Christ is an ark of cultural organisms, each one contributing something unique and indispensable to the body.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[xx]

“Theologian/feminist critic Sallie McFague has argued persuasively for seeing Earth, in a very real sense, as much as a part of the body of Christ as humans.… The world of nature has an identity and purpose apart from human benefit. But we constitute together a cosmic body of Christ.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[xxi]

“[N]ewstream communities will develop ritualized systems of relationship between the human journey and the nature of things. In the modern era worship was demystified and denatured. Postmoderns are driven by desire to explore and celebrate an ever-deepening intimacy with the Great Mystery that is the universe. Liturgies of the earth--fire, land, wind, and water--can restore the biological and physical rhythms of the planet to our computer-programmed consciousness. Outdoor earth rituals can also provide worshipers with experiences of connectedness to all earthlings: What the Sioux Indians call the creeping people, the standing people, the flying people, and the swimming people. All earthlings must be incorporated into the body of Christ in more ways than just through the ‘blessing of the animals.’ We must find ritual ways to make earthlings’ presence felt, their participation solicited, their voices heard, if the ideal of ecological worship is to be realized.” (Leonard Sweet; emphasis added)[xxii]

Suffice it to say that in today’s emerging faith that is unarguably a “make-it-up-as-you-go-along process,”[xxiii] it will obviously be irrelevant that the “new understandings of who Jesus is” do not line up with the truth of Who the Lord Jesus Christ is and what He did for us—i.e., the true Gospel of Christ—as recorded in God’s Word of truth! Rather, it all merely becomes a “Third Testament.” And a cosmic “Third Testament” that is made up in and through a cosmic “body” of a cosmic “Christ” will indeed produce “new understandings of who Jesus is.” It will conveniently provide countless variations of “the Gospel According to …”

This phrase sounds familiar. In fact, today’s shifting Christianity, which has long since abandoned looking in the obvious place for the truth about God and His Son, should be quite familiar with all the never-ending absurd “reimaginings” associated with it. After all, according to the new way of thinking:

“The truth of thought is not dependent on its source: It’s the same truth whether from the mouth of Jesus or the ass of Balaam. Truth as words is no different whether from the utterances of Paul or the udders of a cow. It matters not.” (Leonard Sweet)[xxiv][emphasis added]

“Look not to one source, but to all sources, and even to all of Life, for your definition and experience of the Divine. Reject nothing, but also include everything.

“Do not say that the truth is exclusively ‘here’ or exclusively ‘there,’ but, rather, that the truth is ‘neither here nor there,’ but every where.” (the seducing spirit calling itself “God”)[xxv][emphasis added]

Incidentally, ideas that are pagan, and concepts of “God” and of “Jesus”/“Christ” that are different from the Christian truth of Who God is and Who the Lord Jesus Christ is, are only “necessary for the life of the individual and the community” in a community of Oneness. And a community of Oneness is a community that only has “life” if the divisive belief in the Lord Jesus Christ is “healed.” Thus, contrary to becoming “cloaks of knowledge,” this emerging faith actually cloaks knowledge on purpose. And at the same time, what better way to “heal” this divisive belief than with the pagan idea of a “God” and “Christ” that are immanent in everyone and everything? This way, it can “build anew the body of Christ”—not to mention “the kingdom of God”—in its creation and formation of a storytelling interfaith community that “include[s] those whose conceptions of God differ from ours in form.”

"For other foundation can no man lay than that is laid,
which is Jesus Christ."

I Corinthians 3:11

ENDNOTES:

[i].“God,” as quoted by Neale Donald Walsch, Tomorrow’s God, p. 208.

[ii].Leonard Sweet, So Beautiful, p. 287; quoting Lamin O. Sanneh, Whose Religion Is Christianity? (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2003), p. 106.

[iii].Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality, p. 51.

[iv].Leonard Sweet, So Beautiful, p. 37.

[v].Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality, pp. 130-131.

[vi].Leonard Sweet, So Beautiful, pp. 165-167.

[vii].Ibid., p. 158.

[viii].Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality, pp. 255-256.

[ix].Ibid., p. 163.

[x].Leonard Sweet, So Beautiful, p. 139.

[xi].Sermons.com, Leonard Sweet, http://www.sermons.com/leonardSweet.asp; emphasis added.

[xii].Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality, p. 101.

[xiii].Leonard Sweet, So Beautiful, pp. 166-167.

[xiv].Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality, pp. 121-123.

[xv].Ibid., p. 274.

[xvi].Ibid., p. 65.

[xvii].Ibid., pp. 255-256.

[xviii].Ibid., pp. 114-115.

[xix].Leonard Sweet, So Beautiful, p. 155.

[xx].Ibid., p. 165.

[xxi].Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality, p. 124.

[xxii].Ibid., p. 142.

[xxiii].Leonard Sweet, So Beautiful, p. 204.

[xxiv].Ibid., p. 114.

[xxv].“God,” as quoted by Neale Donald Walsch, Tomorrow’s God, p. 208.

*Leonard Sweet, Quantum Spirituality, p. 65 and 121-123. 

Republished with permission of the author. Several headings, the Bible verse at the end, and bold and color emphases were added to this text to enhance its re-posting. See also: The Mission of Creating "the Third Testament". Next subsection in Chapter 5 is titled "Dialoguing to the consensus/connectness/Oneness of today's new "truth"