Leonard Sweet and Frank Viola have collaborated on what they are calling "A Jesus Manifesto: a Magna Carta for restoring the supremacy of Jesus Christ"
It's kind of rambly and could be a marketing ploy to get people to read their new books, but they also have some very good thoughts...
7. Jesus Christ was not a social activist nor a moral philosopher. To
pitch him that way is to drain his glory and dilute his excellence.
Justice apart from Christ is a dead thing. The only battering ram that
can storm the gates of hell is not the cry of Justice, but the name of
Jesus. Jesus Christ is the embodiment of Justice, Peace, Holiness,
Righteousness. He is the sum of all spiritual things, the “strange
attractor” of the cosmos. When Jesus becomes an abstraction, faith
loses its reproductive power. Jesus did not come to make bad people
good. He came to make dead people live.
read the whole manifesto here.
It's encouraging to read the comments about Sweet. Hopefully he is having second thoughts about his book, "Quantum Spirituality and a Christ Consciousness" where Sweet thanks interspiritualists/universalists such as Matthew Fox (author of The Coming of the Cosmic Christ), Episcopalian priest/mystic Morton Kelsey, Willis Harman (author of Global Mind Change) and Ken Wilber (one of the major intellectuals in the New Age movement) for helping him to find what he calls "New Light." In the preface of the same book, Sweet disseminates line after line of suggestions that the "old teachings" of Christianity must be replaced with new teachings of "the New Light." And yet these new teachings, he believes, will draw from "ancient teachings" (the Desert Fathers). This "New Light movement," Sweet says, is a "radical faith commitment that is willing to dance to a new rhythm." Throughout the book, Sweet favorably uses terms like Christ consciousness and higher self and in no uncertain terms promotes New Age theology.
Posted by: John Galbraith | June 24, 2009 at 03:20 PM