Faith is taking center stage in the 2020 Democrat presidential primaries as candidates attempt to gain the attention of religious voters. But more and more, the specific faith beliefs they’re espousing don’t line up with traditional views of the Bible or who Jesus was — and is. In fact, they’re New Age.
Marianne Williamson has been the most searched candidate name on Google. The self-described New Age guru turned politician has what could be described as heretical views on Christianity and Jesus.
Williamson is not a newcomer to faith and is not using it for political reasons. She’s written about it for decades and has a long record of what she believes unlike most of her competitors for whom faith only comes up during election time. Williamson has written specifically about Jesus in the past, but her version isn’t something that Christians would recognize.
According to Williamson, salvation is not a personal decision of each person but a “a shift in self-perception.” That’s how she describes the relationship between God and man.
Her views are outlined in the 1996 book, “A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of a Course in Miracles.”
To Williamson, everyone has potential to be a god. She — like many New Age thinkers — believes in personal deification, a status only attainable by those who have searched deep within themselves.
Jesus, she told Beliefnet in 2016, is the perfect example of someone who has attained such a level of awareness. He’s not the son of God, but only someone who attained deity through his own actions of “self-awareness.”
“Jesus was a human being who, while on earth, completely self-actualized and fulfilled in all ways the potential glory that lies within us all,” Williamson explained. “He became one with the Essence and Christ Spirit that is in all of us. In that sense, he is our evolutionary elder brother. He demonstrated our destiny.”
Further degrading God to nothing more than a spiritual life coach, Williamson said Jesus “displayed for all to see the destination of this journey that we are on.” She added, “The only thing lacking in any situation is our own awareness of love, and Jesus realized and taught that.”
In essence, the author believes the only thing that separates Jesus — the Son of God — from each of us is he successfully realized his own deity.
All of this, of course, is an aberration from Scripture.
Last week, YouTuber Steven Bancarz, who became a Christian several years ago after abandoning his own New Age beliefs, uploaded a video warning viewers to be wary of Williamson’s interpretation of Jesus. He’s not alone in point out her “crazy” views.
Bancarz pointed to Jesus’ words in Matthew 24:4, when he explained to his disciples there will come a time when many will claim to be the Messiah. “They will deceive many,” he warned his followers.
Later on in that same chapter, Jesus predicted there will be “many false prophets” who will mislead people and “false messiahs and false prophets” who “will rise up and perform great signs and wonders to as to deceive, if possible, even God’s chosen ones.”
“It’s entirely possible that Jesus is warning us not about false impostors but about a false doctrine of man’s deity that causes false teachers to lead people astray by claiming to be Christ,” Bancarz said.
The YouTube commentator went on to argue most New Age thinkers believe they have achieved some level of christhood. For example, guru Deepak Chopra has said he believes Jesus was actually a “universal spirit” leading the way for others to attain their own deification. And in 2009, he (Metro Voice is an Amazon Affiliate and you can see the book here:) released a book, “The Third Jesus,” in which he made the case that Jesus is nothing more than “a state of being in the world, a state of consciousness.”
Similarly, New Age thinker Eckhart Tolle has said he doesn’t believe in God in the traditional sense, but instead sees the Almighty as an essence that simply exists and can be accessed by anyone.
Bancarz said New Agers believe “all is God and God is all.”
“And to live from this state of mind is to embody the consciousness that Christ had, and to step into your Christ-self, since you have your own indwelling divinity that makes you Christ,” he added, continuing his definition of New Age thinking.
So while Williamson may believe — as Christians do — that Jesus roamed the earth and had a ministry here, there is a wide chasm separating her understandings of the Son of God from the picture of the Savior depicted in the Bible.
True believers have a duty to guard their hearts against what might sound like true faith but is really a stealthy perversion of truth.
–Metro Voice and wire services