Universalist and homosexual-affirming Emergent teacher Rob Bell is now joining with Oprah Winfrey. The Christian Post reports:
Oprah Winfrey will be touring the U.S. this fall to help “lead people to an empathy space… a gratitude space” in an effort to find their calling and fulfill their greatest potential. Helping Winfrey in the tour hitting cities on both coasts will be influential and controversial Christian author Rob Bell, and other “handpicked thought leaders and pop culture icons.” (source)
Last year, Rob Bell appeared on Winfrey’s “Super Soul Sunday” program to discuss his book What We Talk About When We Talk About God. It is evident that Bell’s teachings more closely resemble New Age than Christianity when Oprah wrote of Bell’s ideas the following:
The ideas Rob sets forth in his books, Love Wins and What We Talk About When We Talk About God, opened my heart and my mind. People like him are the reason I set out to build OWN in the first place: to be able to gather a global community of like-minded seekers. (source)
What kind of ideas is Bell putting forward? Bell states in his latest book What We Talk About When We Talk About God:
I’ve written this book about that word, then, because there’s something in the air, we’re in the midst of a massive rethink, a movement is gaining momentum, a moment in history is in the making: There is a growing sense among a growing number of people that when it comes to God, we’re at the end of one era and the start of another, an entire mode of understanding and talking about God dying as something new is being birthed. (source)
This kind of language resembles New Age ideas. But this New Age connection with Emergence can be more clearly documented. In fact, on page 192 of Velvet Elvis, Bell wrote,
For a mind-blowing introduction to emergence theory and divine creativity, set aside three months and read Ken Wilber’s A Brief History of Everything.
On page 38 and 39 of the same book endorsed by Bell, New Ager and Buddhist Ken Wilber speaks about God being within everybody when he says, “[A] Kosmic consciousness that is Spirit awakened to its own true nature.” More on this in my book Hath God Said? Emergent Church Theology. Brian McLaren has stated that Wilber’s ideas were an inspiration for Emergent:
In this chapter I am trying (with Ken Wilber’s help) to make clear that I believe there is something above and beyond the current alternatives of modern fundamentalism/absolutism and pluralistic relativism. . . . This ‘above and beyond’ is, I believe the way of Jesus, which is the way of love and embrace. It integrates what has gone before so that something new can emerge. (Brian McLaren, A Generous Orthodoxy, 287)
In addition to this, Bell’s universalism and acceptance of homosexuality makes him a prime candidate to be handpicked by Oprah as one of her thought leaders. Oprah’s occult and New Age beliefs have been clearly documented. Here is an excerpt from Good Fight Ministries:
Oprah claims that once she broke into the other side, she encountered the sense of empowerment she sought for. This insidious pursuit of empowerment has led to selling her soul to demonic spirits for ingenious perpetration and temporal gain. Blatantly honest about her reliance on the spirit realm, Winfrey has said:
“I ask God for grace, and the power of the spirits….Calling on you. Calling on you…I really believe I can call her up. Her and so many others. I’m counting on them” (Oprah Winfrey, Journey to Beloved, p. 54, Hyperion Books, 1998) . . .
What is Oprah’s purpose? She reveals the focus of her work to be geared for the directing of the masses. She states:
“The gist being how do people lead their lives? How can we help them do it better? In every aspect of their lives, how can we lead them to their truth? First we must be led to our own. Who are we? What do we stand for? What do we believe?” (Beloved 1998 p. 135) (source)
“Lead them to their truth”? Notice Oprah has a postmodern view of truth very similar to that of Bell. “True for you, but not true for me,” says the open-minded tolerance of subjective relativism. Similarly, Bell has made statements in Velvet Elvis when he says that just taking the Bible for what it plainly says is “warped and toxic” (p. 53) and, “Everybody’s interpretation is essentially his or her own opinion. Nobody is objective.” (p. 53)
Oprah has previously denied that Jesus is the only way to be saved. See the video below:
Oprah’s spirituality and New Age agenda is totally bankrupt and without hope when it comes to salvation and the exclusivity of Jesus Christ, the risen Lord and Savior. The only saving truth is the Gospel of Jesus Christ. He said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me” (John 14:6). “For there is one God, and one mediator between God and men, the man Christ Jesus” (1 Timothy 2:5) and “Neither is there salvation in any other: for there is none other name under heaven given among men, whereby we must be saved” (Acts 4:12).
Do not be deceived! Oprah is not a Christian like she claims to be. She believes in another Jesus: the New Age Christ consciousness that is in everybody. Below is a transcript of Oprah’s New Earth Online Class show with Eckhart Tolle which further demonstrates her New Age beliefs:
OPRAH WINFREY (HOST): And something about that didn’t feel right in my spirit because I believe that God is love and that God is in all things. And so that’s when the search for something more than doctrine started to stir within me. And I love this quote that Eckhart has, this is one of my favorite quotes in Chapter 1, where he says, “Man made ‘God’ in his own image. The eternal, the infinite, and unnamable was reduced to a mental idol that you had to believe in and worship as ‘my god’ or ‘our god.'”
OPRAH WINFREY (HOST): Now I think that’s very eloquently put by Eckhart Tolle in Chapter 1. But that is exactly what I was feeling when I was, you know, sitting in church that Sunday listening to the preacher. And you know, it’s been a journey to get to the place where I understand, as I said on the preshow here, that what I believe is that Jesus came to show us Christ consciousness.
OPRAH WINFREY (HOST): That Jesus came to show us the way of the heart and that what Jesus was saying that to show us the higher consciousness that we’re all talking about here. Jesus came to say, “Look I’m going to live in the body, in the human body, and I’m going to show you how it’s done.” These are some principles and some laws that you can use to live by to know that way. And when I started to recognize that, that Jesus didn’t come—in my belief, even as a Christian, I don’t believe that Jesus came to start Christianity. . .
OPRAH WINFREY (HOST): And how do you advise people to reconcile this with their religious beliefs?
ECKHART TOLLE (AUTHOR A NEW EARTH: AWAKENING TO YOUR LIFE’S PURPOSE): Well, religion can be an open doorway into spirituality, and religion can be a closed door. It prevents you from going deeper. So that I love reading the New Testament, and I also read the Old Testament. Sometimes there’s some incredible jewels in there. And when I went through this inner transformation, and for the first time accidentally I picked up a copy of the New Testament at my mother’s place.
And I started reading, and I immediately recognized the deep truths that is there, and I realized the truth that is deeper, that is expressed in what Jesus said, is much deeper than what you, how the church interprets it. There’s a depth to it. And it reflects your own depth when you read it. So there’s no conflict between this teaching, which is purely spiritual, and any religion.
Because if you go deep enough in your religion, then you all get to the same place. It’s a question of going deeper, so there’s no conflict here. The important thing is that religion doesn’t become an ideology—so, “I believe this.” And the moment you say “only my belief” or “our belief” is true, and you deny other people’s beliefs, then you’ve adopted an ideology. And then religion becomes a closed door. But, potentially, religion can also be an open door.
OPRAH WINFREY (HOST): Well, let me share this with you too, Kelly. There’s another book by a woman named Elizabeth Lesser, it’s called The Seeker’s Guide, where she talks about the new spirituality versus the old. So I just wanted to—this is on page 51 and 52 of Elizabeth Lesser’s book called The Seeker’s Guide.
And she talks about old spirituality versus the new spirituality, and she says the old was—the old way is—the hierarchy has the authority. Church authorities tell you how to worship in church and how to behave outside of church. The new spirituality is that you are your own best authority as you work to know and love yourself, you discover how to live a more spiritual life.
The old is, “God and the path to worship him have already been defined, and all you need to do is follow the directions.” The new is being able to listen within for your own definition of spirituality, your deeper longings are under search. And the old says exact here what Eckhart was saying. That there’s only one path. It’s the right way and all other ways are wrong. And the spirituality says that many paths lead to spiritual freedom and peace.
You have a rich array of gems from which to draw illumination. The world’s religious traditional, mythology, psychology, healing methods, scientific wisdom, your own experience and thatyou can begin to string a necklace all your own. Then she lists, you know, other old and new. And so it’s really a question of what you were saying to us earlier that this material strikes a chord within you.
Something in you opens up and wants, you know, feels alive and is awakened to that. And yet there is the ideology that says what to you? What is the conflict for you?
KELLY (ILLINOIS): Just thoughts on the afterlife, things like that. You know, you—in a lot of books such as Tolle’s, we get teachings from Buddhism or Hinduism, and those thoughts don’t go along with, you know, what I was raised to believe as a Christian. So that’s been the biggest thing that I’ve struggled with, I think, so…
OPRAH WINFREY (HOST): Well, I am a Christian who believes that there are certainlymany more paths to God other than Christianity.
KELLY (ILLINOIS): Right.
OPRAH WINFREY (HOST): I’m a free-thinking Christian who believes that, who believes in my way, but I don’t believe that it’s the only way, with 6 billion people here on the planet.
Are these the new ways in which we are to talk about God to which Rob Bell refers. Not only does Oprah teach doctrines of devils, but she also summons them. In another video below, also from Good Fight, actor Denzel Washington and Oprah Winfrey talk about how they summon demonic spirits:
Good Fight continues:
Craftily scheming to pinpoint how people live their lives, the heavy guns of her work are aimed directly at the mainstream public, at you. Jesus said: “I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life, and that no man comes to the Father but through Me.” Contrary to Jesus Christ, Oprah wants to lead people away from the central truths – which she claims are her roots – to false hopes which will not grant entrance into heaven. Oprah believes in using her life as a puppet for Satan’s ruthless assault on mankind, and is subsequently leading people into the fires of hell empowered by demonic forces. In fact, Oprah takes her marching orders for her entertainment empire directly from the spirit world. Time magazine wrote of these spirit guides:
“Oprah Winfrey calls these her ‘go there’ moments, spiritual episodes of divine guidance that far transcend the chatty exchanges with her studio audiences- Sometimes the epiphanies carry the voices of Negro slaves-Joe and Emily and Dara; Sue and Bess and Sara. Winfrey says that she has come to know each of them personally and calls them in at will to guide her in her work. The spirits began visiting her a few years ago…”(“Daring To Go There” by Ron Stodghill, Time Magazine, June 24, 2001) (source)
What exactly is emerging? The true colors of Emergence are bleeding together with that of the New Age movement, evidenced by Oprah handpicking Rob Bell as one of her thought leaders for her New Age agenda.
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