By Pastor Larry DeBruyn and Sarah H. Leslie*
Humane theology was the foundation of Dr. George Tiller’s practice. It dictates that alleviating suffering is a Christian’s sacred responsibility. If God is in everything, and in everyone, then God is as much in the woman making a decision to terminate a pregnancy as in her Bible.
—Dr. Willie Parker, MD, Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice[1]
Because of his “oneness” worldview that God is “in” everyone and everything is “in” God, Dr. Willie Parker believes that God sanctions aborting-killing of babies. The Oprah Magazine quotes him as having written in his book,
Alleviating needless suffering is a Christian’s sacred responsibility. If God is in everything, and everyone, then God is as much in the woman making a decision to terminate a pregnancy as in her Bible.[2]
Having quoted Parker, it needs to be stated that while the “act” of abortion is outside of God’s love neither the aborted baby nor mother are outside of God’s love. In the traumatic aftermath of having aborted a baby, many women have found forgiveness in and through the Cross of Jesus Christ (Romans 3:23; 1 Timothy 1:12; 1 John 1:7-9). Further, we harbor no personal malice toward Dr. Parker nor do we wish for any harm to come to him because he is an abortion provider. God is his judge, and along with the rest of us, Jesus will judge all of us (John 5:25-29).
That having been said, we turn to Dr. Parker’s “counternarrative” in which he confesses,
As a Christian, I feel that it’s my job to help offer a counternarrative that God gave every woman gifts and the agency to realize those gifts, and that nothing about choosing to terminate a pregnancy or delay childbearing puts a woman outside of God’s love.[3]
Oprah Winfrey’s magazine touts Dr. Parker, noting that,
As a devout Christian and one of the only physicians performing the procedure in the Deep South, Parker refuses to cede the moral high ground, making an impassioned case rooted in science, history, and theology for the sanctity of a woman’s autonomy over her own body.
— The Oprah Magazine[4]
So in an attempt to attain the higher moral ground, Parker asserts his “counternarrative,” one he intends to either modify or replace the accepted Christian narrative—one based upon the Bible—that abortion on demand is a crime against God and humanity (Psalm 139:13-14; Jeremiah 1:4-5; Isaiah 49:1, 5; Luke 1:15; Exodus 20:13; 21:22-25). Now in his new narrative Dr. Parker suggests and claims that God, who is the author of reproductive life, morally approves of abortion. He does this because his worldview is oriented not according to the Christian faith, but according the New Age/New Spirituality “oneness” assumption that all persons are in God and God is in all persons. This writing does not concern all the points and counterpoints of the abortion issue, but rather seeks to address the premise upon which Dr. Parker attempts to create his “counternarrative” which, he claims from his Christian perspective, justifies abortion in the name of God.
Because he believes the mother is “in” God and God is “in” the mother (and presumably also “in” the unborn child), Parker’s new counternarrative, evidently, more or less, embraced by the Oprah establishment, announces abortion to be a sacred and divine right. This is a scary development for it transfers power over human life from God to women and their abortion-performing doctors, and this, no less, with God’s approval! Parker creates his counternarrative out of an ungodly assumption that no separation exists between the Holy God and humans, only a “union of oneness.” Of course, this is nothing other than repeating the premise of Satan’s lie to Eve, go ahead and eat what God forbids for “You surely will not die! ...You will be like God, knowing good and evil” (Genesis 3:4-5). So to keep the abortion industry alive even as babies die, Dr. Parker repeats the lie that because everyone’s “in” God and God is “in” everyone that everyone is “as God.” Like a broken record, we have heard this before.
Global Spirituality
This contention—that God is “in” everyone and everything—lies at the heart and soul of global spirituality’s emerging syncretism. For decades, it has been a central tenet of the New Age Movement which increasingly is asserting itself in the evangelical world. For example, speaking in A Course In Miracles the New Age “Jesus” said:
“God is All in all in a very literal sense. All being is in Him Who is all Being. You are therefore in Him since your being is His.... There is no separation of God and His creation.”[5]
Oprah Winfrey has believed in and supported oneness advocates for years. In 1992, The Oprah Winfrey Show promoted a book by Marianne Williamson, A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course In Miracles. Through the show’s promotion, A Course In Miracles along with Williamson, achieved celebrity status in American culture. A foundational lesson of the Course is, “God is in everything and everyone.” Like a mantra, this conceptual understanding of reality had resonated among and been repeated by New Age authors, promoters and celebrities over and over.[6] Now we have a Christian doctor, as well Christian authors like Wm. Paul Young and C. Baxter Kruger, repeating variations of the same old theme-mantra, “everything’s in God and God’s in everything.”[7] To understand the significance of this erroneous theology, see “The Truth” section at the end of this article.
A Deadly Shift
Dr. Parker applies New Age panentheism (God’s “in” everything) to morally justify God’s approval of abortion. As indicated by previous quotes in this article, while Dr. Parker talks about God being “in” the woman, he dehumanizes the unborn child as merely a “pregnancy,” like a tumor that needs to be excised. But it gets worse.
According to The Oprah Magazine, Dr. Parker had his “epiphany” after studying “progressive Christians to find answers to ethical dilemmas in his practice.”[8] He thereafter committed himself to “reproductive justice,” to both advocating and performing abortions. Dr. Parker makes the astonishing claim that,
The procedure room in an abortion clinic is as sacred as any other space to me.... God is meeting both of us where we are.[9]
Thus, Dr. Parker’s “counternarrative” attempts to contextualize abortion as a “sacred” act, endowing it with sacerdotal significance. So abortion is not only a woman’s right but also her rite. The “oneness-union” worldview obliterates all moral distinctions.[10]
Life in the Womb!
The pagan practice of bloody abortion always lurked in obscure feminist literature, but during the decade of the 1980s, the most outspoken abortion advocates were mostly staunch humanists. But Dr. Bernard Nathanson, then an atheist, had his own “epiphany” and recognized that he had been aborting babies whose lives were capable of being saved by the emerging medical science of neonatology. So he produced the film The Silent Scream which depicts an actual first-trimester abortion. With his consent and assistance I (Sarah) was able to show this film on a local TV station. In later public debates with abortionist doctors, I confronted them with their moral relativism as they tried to justify taking human life in the name of “compassion.” But like any humanist, most of them were steeped in situation ethics and made no pretense to possessing religious faith. But now, given his oneness assumption, Dr. Parker employs that religious paradigm to justify abortion in the name of God. It appears that this is where the belief that “love is God” leads. (While God is love, love is not God, 1 John 4:8, 16.) But this oneness concept of “love” now influences even the belief system of the contemporary evangelical church.
Medical Mysticism
Abortion has become so entrenched in the minds and hearts of most ideological liberals, social and political, that reason and science (i.e., knowing) have been cast aside. Yet with tremendous advances being made in neonatal technology, the barbarism of utilizing life-ending violence (abortion) to resolve a complex human problem becomes harder and harder to defend. So how might advocates of abortion continue to argue their case? Amazingly, they turn to religion!—not just any ole religion, but a new mystic religion in which Christianity and New Age Religion-New Spirituality cross-fertilize. Dr. Parker states: “I remain a follower of Jesus. And I believe that as an abortion provider I am doing God’s work.”[11] And of course “doing God’s work” depends upon the assumption that God is not separate from creation, but one with it and in it. In typical New Age fashion Parker reasons, “If God is in everything, and everyone, then God is as much in the woman making a decision to terminate a pregnancy as in her Bible.”[12]
When I was a right-to-life leader,[13] I (Sarah) encountered similar twisted logic like Parker’s, but perhaps on a lesser scale. One woman in particular, a professing evangelical, told me that she was engaging in a sacramental act of compassion by holding a woman’s hand and praying for the tiny baby during its dismemberment and evacuation from the womb (a D & E). Her perspective was a jolting “epiphany” causing me to realize how the human mind can deceive itself into justifying brutality in the name of compassion (See Jeremiah 17:9.). In the name of compassion, Dr. Parker also seeks justification for performing abortions by asserting the New Spirituality’s premise that God is “in” everything and everyone, even the abortion.
As an official movement, Marilyn Ferguson’s book The Aquarian Conspiracy: Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (1980) openly introduced and launched the New Age ideology within American culture (The Beatles, Timothy Leary and others had already introduced eastern mystical-hallucinogenic spirituality to America.).[14] Although some evangelicals have dismissed the New Age Movement’s influence upon culture and church to be passé, Dr. Parker’s quote, which prefaces this article, demonstrates that this spirituality remains influential.
Fifteen years ago I (Sarah) worked with Warren B. Smith to publish his book, Reinventing Jesus Christ: The New Gospel (2002).[15] In this groundbreaking book, Smith described how prominent New Age leaders, including Marianne Williamson, Neale Donald Walsch, Barbara Marx Hubbard, Oprah Winfrey, and others engaged in political/religious ventures in which they advocated radical change in American values.[16] The religious tenet which bound them all together was the seminal idea that God’s “in” everyone, that hubristically human beings are both the “Creator and the Created.”[17] This belief possesses astounding implications.
Everyone and Everything Chooses Death
About death Walsch’s channeled “God” offered these reassuring and soothing words:
Every aspect of divinity has co-creative control over its destiny. Therefore, you cannot kill a mosquito against its will. At some level, the mosquito has chosen that. All of the change in the universe occurs with the consent of the universe itself, in its various forms. The universe cannot disagree with itself. That is impossible.[18]
Such logic might be employed to imply that the unborn, like a slapped-dead mosquito, will “choose” their own abortion. Outrageously this suggests that the tiny unborn baby is pro “choice”! Yet Walsch’s “God” hopes you are naïve enough to believe that “you will not choose to terminate any particular incarnation, nor change any life energy from one form to another, without the most sacred justification.”[19] There it is—“sacred justification.” Is it possible that someone could become inured to such horrific logic to call abortion sacred? In this context, we again point to how Dr. Willie Parker’s employs the word “sacred” to justify abortion:
Human theology was the foundation of Dr. George Tiller’s practice. It dictates that alleviating needless suffering is a Christian’s sacred responsibility. If God is in everything, and everyone, then God is as much in the woman making a decision to terminate a pregnancy as in her Bible.[20]
Another leading New Age religionist, Barbara Marx Hubbard, also had conversations with a “Christ” who openly spoke about his “selection process,” a time in the future during which all “cancer in the body” (i.e., human society) must be cut out.[21] Such logic could easily be used to justify abortion, and indeed in the country of Iceland it already is. Approximately seventy-five percent of that nation’s women undergo prenatal screening to see if the fetuses they carry in their wombs test positive for Down’s syndrome.[22] If they do, many are therefore aborted. Needless to say, Down’s syndrome children are disappearing from the nation’s population. Thus selective abortion fits into the “final solution” paradigm for the planned “selection process” advocated by Hubbard’s “planetary Christ.”[25]
Hubbard merely continued the thinking of the esoteric eugenics of Margaret Sanger, founder of Planned Parenthood and its abortion industry. Sanger particularly focused her attention on the “unfit” and “feebleminded” and those she considered to be of “inferior” races, especially “Negroes”.[24] Sterilization, birth control and abortion became her methods to stop “uncontrolled fertility” of the unfit.[25] In fact, the more extreme views of Sanger and her radical cohorts influenced the Hitler regime in its genocidal extermination of Jews, Gypsies, mentally ill, handicapped, and other people groups.[26] In Conversations with God Walsch's “God” asserted that,
The mistakes Hitler made did no harm or damage to those whose deaths he caused. Those souls were released form their earthly bondage, like butterflies emerging from a cocoon.[27]
To this point Walsch’s “God” teaches, as other oneness-universalists believe, that “Hitler went to heaven.”[28] (At this juncture we can be reminded of the series of articles, thirteen in all, which appeared on Herescope dealing with the subject of Universalism; that everybody’s going to heaven and nobody’s going to hell.[29])
Oneness universalism creates a perfect platform upon which situational ethics and moral relativism can thrive. No matter how distorted the logic and reasoning, anything goes in the name of “love” and “compassion.” Parker wrote:
As a Christian, I feel that it’s my job to help offer a counternarrative: that God gave every woman gifts and the agency to realize those gifts, and that nothing about choosing to terminate a pregnancy or to delay childbearing puts a woman outside of God’s love.[30]
What do all of these New Age leaders have in common? Over the past several decades many of them have formed political and religious alliances with Oprah Winfrey. It should come as no surprise that Oprah would champion the rise of a novel pro-abortion counternarrative claiming to be “Christian” and “compassionate” yet all the while killing babies. As Parker boldly proclaims, “I remain a follower of Jesus. And I believe that as an abortion provider I am doing God’s work.”[31]
Given the evangelical world’s slide into panentheistic oneness-universalism, it is entirely possible that the new counternarrative proposed by Dr. Willie Parker will find a comfortable niche within much of American Christianity. As noted previously, this is already coming into the evangelical church world. Wm. Paul Young and C. Baxter Kruger are repeating variations of the same old theme-mantra, “everything’s in God and God’s in everything.”[32]
The Truth:
Because “they
did not like to retain God in their knowledge, God gave them over to a
reprobate mind, to do those things which are not convenient... without natural affection...
Who knowing the judgment of God, that they which commit such things are
worthy of death, not only do the same, but have pleasure in them that
do them.”[33]
—Emphasis added, The Apostle Paul, Romans 1:26-31
—Emphasis added, The Apostle Paul, Romans 1:26-31
The Truth about Oneness
We should note that God does not reveal that He is in everyone and everything (Romans 8:9; 1 Kings 8:27). To believe that God is everything is pantheism. God is not the mosquito that bites me on a camping trip. Neither is God in everything, which is panentheism. God does not permeate the big landscape rock that decorates my neighbor’s front yard. The Creator is holy and personal. He is separate from His creation because He existed before creation. As reflected in the image which He created humans to be, God is also personality. In that God is both transcendent and immanent He is both far from and near to His creation. So for Christians to remain Christian, they must never substitute or exchange “the truth of God for a lie” and worship and serve “the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever. Amen.” (Romans 1:25; See verses 18-25.). It is pagan and idolatrous to believe God is or that He permeates nature. No. God is separate from His creation and His creation is separate from Him (Genesis 1:1-31). This explains why the prophet Moses wrote creation account, to separate Israel’s God from the gods and cosmogonies of the surrounding pagan nations.
The Bible Does not Teach Oneness
Ephesians 4 verse 6 is often cited to support teaching that God is “one” with, in, by and through creation. Paul wrote that there is “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Ephesians 4:6). However, the context of Ephesians 4 does not support an oneness or monistic worldview. Paul was not affirming either God’s immanence “in” or omnipresence throughout the universe. What he did state was not truth about the cosmos, but truth regarding the church, the Body of Christ (vv. 1-16). In chapter 4 Paul teaches that being a UNITY (vv. 1-6) and consisting of DIVERSITY (vv. 7-13a), the church ought to grow together into MATURITY (vv. 13b-16). The basis for such unity amidst diversity is that throughout the universal church there is “One God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (v. 6b, KJV). Being in the Father and Son, and united by the Spirit, the Body of Christ is permeated of the “one God and Father of all, who is above all, and through all, and in you all” (Ephesians 4:6b, NKJV; Compare John 17:20-23.). In this majestic statement, Paul affirms God’s presence and lordship of the Triune God (one Spirit . . . one Lord . . one Father) over the church. Though God is present in the farthest and darkest recesses of the universe (Psalm 139:7), Paul was not stating that in this context. He is teaching that though God is universally present throughout the cosmos, He is particularly present in and throughout the believing and regenerate church.
Endnotes
1. Emphasis added. Dr. Willie Parker, MD, Life’s Work: A Moral Argument for Choice (New York, NY: Atria Books, 2017): 208. George Tiller was a notorious doctor from Wichita, Kansas, who gained national attention for performing late-term (third trimester) abortions in his clinics. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Tiller.
2. Natalie Beach, “Parker’s Choice: How a doctor’s Christianity led him to perform abortions,” The Oprah Magazine, May 2017: 110. See also, http://www.oprah.com/book/may-2017-reading-room-lifes-work#ixzz4tVtbZ6W7.
3. Parker, Life’s Work: 69.
4. Beach, “Parker’s Choice.”
5. New Age “Jesus,” A Course In Miracles: 119, 147, quoted by Warren B. Smith, False Christ Coming: Does Anybody Care? What New Age Leaders Really Have in Store for America, The Church, and the World (Magalia, CA: Mountain Stream Press, 2011): 21.
6. See Herescope post “God’s Relationship to Everything,” January 30, 2008 (http://herescope.blogspot.com/2008/01/god-i.html). See Warren B. Smith, A Wonderful Deception: The Further New Age Implications of the Emerging Purpose Drive Movement (Magalia, CA: Mountain Stream Press, 2011): 153.
7. Pastor Larry DeBruyn, “NATURALISM: Undercurrent in Evangelicalism,” Herescope, August 20, 2017 (http://herescope.blogspot.com/2017/08/naturalism-undercurrent-in.html). Note the quotes: Young—“Being always transcends appearance—that which only seems to be.... That is why Elousia is such a wonderful name. God who is the ground of all being, dwells in, around, and through all things—ultimately emerging as the real—and any appearances that mask that reality will fall away”; Kruger—“this is the symbol [diagram of the Trinity, ed.] for the Three-Person Oneness of God. Inside of this moving divine dance of relationship, everything was created: every human being, every plant, every subatomic particle, everything. God loves His creation and our participation in it.” See recent article posting by Warren B. Smith, “Wm. Paul Young Teaches New Age Lie About Separation on TBN,” Lighthouse Trails, September 23, 2017 (http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/blog/?p=23824).
8. Beach, “Parker’s Choice.”
9. Ibid. Emphasis added.
10. “How to go ‘ecosexual’ and embrace your love for Mother Nature,” Fox News, August 23, 2017 (http://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/2017/08/23/how-to-go-ecosexual-and-embrace-your-love-for-mother-nature.html). The ideology “ecosexuality” could in the name of oneness be used to justify any and all sexual deviations and perversions. It all part of Mother Nature, isn’t it?
11. Parker, Life’s Work: 2.
12. Ibid: 69.
13. See Randall Balmer, Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory: A Journey into the Evangelical Subculture in America (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2000): 147-155, 163-165. Balmer documents that indeed, Sarah Leslie was in zealously involved in the pro-life movement during the late 1980s in Iowa. Pages in this book testify to Sarah’s life both before and after her conversion to vital Christianity. Also see her testimony at "Sarah Leslie: Right to Life," Verax Institute (https://vimeo.com/200384740/dad4a2a2aa). See also the accounts in the 2001 Discernment Newsletter (Issue #12, Vol. 5) article by Lynn and Sarah Leslie, "How Can There Be Revival Without Repentance?" (http://www.discernment-ministries.org/Newsletters/NL2001SepOct.pdf)
14. For this history, read Sarah Leslie’s account in her article “Esoteric Evolution” in the Verax Magazine, November 2016, (http://veraxinstitut.ch/flip/VMe-20161101/files/assets/basic-html/page-4.html). See also our earlier article "Altered States: A Different Gate: The sober Christian in a spiritually inebriated age," Herescope, April 28, 2011 (http://herescope.blogspot.com/2011/04/altered-states-different-gate.html).
15. Warren Smith, Reinventing Jesus Christ: The New Gospel (Ravenna, OH: Conscience Press, 2002). See online copy at, http://www.spiritual-research-network.com/f/Reinventing_Jesus_Christ.pdf. See also Warren B. Smith's False Christ Coming: Does Anybody Care? What New Age Leaders Really Have in Store for America, The Church, and the World (Magalia, CA: Mountain Stream Press, 2011) at http://www.spiritual-research-network.com/warren-smith-articles-books.html.
16. In 2011 Reinventing Jesus Christ was updated and expanded by Warren. See Warren B. Smith, False Christ Coming: Does Anybody Care? What New Age Leaders Really Have in Store for America, The Church, and the World (Magalia, CA: Mountain Stream Press, 2011). This edition includes additional and disturbing facts related to the issues discussed in this article.
17. Smith, False Christ Coming: 41. Here Warren quotes Neale Donald Walsch’s book, Conversations with God, Book 3, page 350. Walsh's books are dictations of conversations he had with a voice calling itself "God."
18. Ibid: quoting Walsch’s Friendship with God, page 371.
19. Ibid: quoting Walsch’s Conversations With God, Book 1, pages 96-97.
20. Emphasis added. Parker, Life’s Work: 208.
21. See Smith, False Christ Coming, pages 28-29, for discussion the “selection” process set forth in Barbara Marx Hubbard’s book, The Revelation: A Message of Hope for the New Millennium (Novato, Ca: Nataraj Publishing, 1995).
22. Julian Quinones and Arijeta Lajka, “What kind of society do you want to live in? Inside the country where Down syndrome is disappearing,” CBS News, August 14, 2017 (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/down-syndrome-iceland/).
23. “Final Solution” is Hitler’s term.
24. Elasah Drogin, Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society (New Hope, KY; Catholics United for Life, 1989): 25, citing Linda Gordon, Woman’s Body, Woman’s Right: A Social History of Birth Control in America (New York, NY: Grossman Publishers, 1976): 333. Drogin wrote: “Sanger described her plan to stop the growth of the blacks in the United States in a private letter to Clarence Gamble dated October 19, 1939. She spoke of a project that would ‘hire three or four colored ministers, preferably with social-service backgrounds, and with engaging personalities’ to travel through the South and propagandize for birth control. ‘The most successful educational approach to the Negro is through a religious appeal. We do not want word to go out that we want to exterminate the Negro population....’”
25. Margaret Sanger, The Pivot of Civilization: p. 88. Now available on Amazon.com via CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
26. Read more in Elasah Drogin’s 1989 book Margaret Sanger: Father of Modern Society. See also Richard J. Evans' trilogy of scholarly books on the Third Reich (Penguin Press) that extensively documents the rise of “racial hygiene” and “racial science”.
27. Smith, False Christ Coming: 44, quoting Walsch’s Conversations with God, Book 2, Book 2, page 42.
28. Ibid: 44, quoting Walsch’s Conversations With God, Book 1, page 61. Italics in original.
29. Here are links to all 13 parts:
Part 1: Truths We Believe About God
Part 2: Doing the Universalist Twist
Part 3: OUR Way or THE Way?
Part 4: An Imaginary Cosmic Reality
Part 5: Universalism & Trinitization
Part 6: A Catena: The Chain of “All”
Part 7: A Catena: Universalism's Troubles With “All”
Part 8: A Catena: Universalism's “World” and “Everyone”
Part 9: A Catena: The “Catenization” of Universalism
Part 10: Pretending Evil Doesn't Exist
Part 11: Evangelical Anarchy & Chaos
Part 12: NATURALISM: Undercurrent in Evangelicalism
Part 13: UNIVERSALISM: The Emerging Evangelical Metanarrative
30. Parker, Life’s Work: 69.
31. Ibid: 2.
32. See footnote 7. Pastor Larry DeBruyn, “NATURALISM: Undercurrent in Evangelicalism,” Herescope, August 20, 2017 (http://herescope.blogspot.com/2017/08/naturalism-undercurrent-in.html).
33. The compound word “without natural affection” (Greek, astorgos) consists of the alpha privative (a = “no”) plus a derivative of the verb stergo to “cherish affectionately, especially of parents for their children. The resultant idea meaning of atorgos is “inhuman,” “inhumane” or “without family love.” From the word storgos the name for the bird “stork” derives. See W.E. Vine, Merrill F. Unger, William White, Jr., An Expository Dictionary of Biblical Words (Nashville, TN: Thomas Nelson Publishers, 1984): 29. See also 2 Timothy 3:1-5.
*Warren B. Smith contributed to this article by first calling this issue to our attention and then providing helpful support, thoughts, suggestions and comments throughout the writing process. For further reading see Smith's latest article "Wm. Paul Young Teaches New Age Lie About Separation on TBN" at http://www.lighthousetrailsresearch.com/blog/?p=23824. See also his Reinventing Jesus Christ book now posted at Chris Lawson's Spiritual Research Network website: http://www.spiritual-research-network.com/f/reinventing-jesus-christ.pdf