Is the Enneagram Christian? Fast Facts to Consider and Share!

Apologetics

Is the Enneagram Christian? Fast Facts to Consider and Share!

Published by

meridith black

on

March 8, 2024

< 2 minutes (2010 clip)

Honest question:

If restaurants & grocery stores recall food for the possibility of food poisoning, why don’t Christian publishers humbly recall books they’ve printed which promote poisonous teaching contrary to historic, biblical Christianity?

📙For example, why would two respected Christian publishing companies (Zondervan and IVP) choose to print literature promoting verifiably non-Christian programming? Given that it would be wrong to presume motives, let’s tackle the toxic facts about the Enneagram with the hope that our friends will recognize the real concerns (even though they are overlooked by these publishers).

First of all—Rohr, Stabile, Heuertz, McCord, and others have made the claims that the Enneagram is both Christian and Ancient (*Cron acknowledges a concerning past exists for the enneagram but promotes it via pragmatism).

Is this true? Is the Enneagram both Christian and Ancient? Upon examining these assertions, we find the following information to be historically reliable:

✔️The Enneagram shape was created around 1916 by esoteric teacher George Gurdjieff as a way to get information from the Universe.
🔍1916 debunks ancient attestation.
🔍The view that God is contained within the universe as an impersonal “force” or “flow” is more in-line with Gnosticism and pantheism (not Christianity).

Christianity acknowledges only one God, who is the good and personal Creator of the universe. And while God sustains the universe (Hebrews 1:1-4), He is not contained within it, nor subject to change by it. God is self-sufficient (Isaiah 46:9; Acts 17:24-30) as well as unchanging (immutable: Malachi 3:6 Ja 1:17).
🔍Divination, seeking guidance from spirits, is forbidden in Christianity (Deut 18).

✔️The personality types were added by Chilean New Age Psychiatrist, Claudio Naranjo, around 1969.

✔️Naranjo confessed in the interview shared above that he derived the Enneatypes predominantly via spirit contact (automatic writing/divination). Automatic writing asserts that a spirit moves a person’s hand when writing. This is opposed to how the Holy Spirit helped the biblical writers pen the Scriptures (2 Peter 1:20-21)—given the Holy Spirit engages their minds, not by-passing their minds.

✔️Richard Rohr claims that Jesus and the Christ are two separate entities.
🔍”Christ” is Greek for “Messiah.” Per Christianity, Jesus is the promised Messiah who makes atonement for the sins of the world (Is 53; 1 Cor 25; 2 Cor 5; 1 Jn 2, 5).

✔️Rohr also claims that “Christ” was first incarnated into creation at the Big Bang.
🔍Christianity claims that Jesus is the word which was in the beginning with God and is God, and the one who created the universe (Jn 1:1-18; Col 1:16; 1 Cor 8:6). The first incarnation was Jesus putting on humanity around 5 BC (Is 7:14; Jn 1:24; Gal 4:4).

✔️Rohr claims everyone and everything is “in Christ” due to his belief that the Christ entity incarnated into all creation at the Big Bang. The “True Self,” “Authentic Self,” and “Divine Self” terminology stems from this view of oneism (Pantheism and Panentheism), NOT Christianity.
🔍Christianity claims we all fall short of the glory of God because of sin (Isaiah 59:2; Ro 3:23; 6:23; 5:12). This is our “old self” (Eph 4).
🔍Christianity claims that our salvation can only come from our Creator (Eph 2).
🔍Christianity claims Jesus came to take our sins upon Himself as an act of love. God did what only God could do, on our behalf (1 Pe 2:24; 2 Cor 5).

“Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits to see whether they are from God, for many false prophets have gone out into the world. ²By this you know the Spirit of God: every spirit that confesses that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh is from God, ³and every spirit that does not confess Jesus is not from God. This is the spirit of the antichrist, which you heard was coming and now is in the world already.”
1 John 4:1-3

Conclusion:

-The New Age presents a different Jesus and a different gospel (2 Cor 11:4).
-The Enneagram was birthed from the New Age in the 20th century.
-Slapping Scripture upon this shape does not change its identity…no more than “standing in a garage makes one a car” (Chesterton).

Friends, let’s genuinely pray for these publishers. It’s too important not to!