Leonard Sweet

Leonard Sweet is an intellectual Don in the Emerging Church movement. An ordained Methodist minister he is the E. Stanley Jones Professor of Evangelism at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He is also a visiting distinguished professor at George Fox University in Portland, Oregon. On his websites, he is described as a “scholar of American culture” who has authored over 60 books and 200 articles and has published over 1500 sermons. A “Phi Beta Kappa graduate,” he is a “frequent speaker at national and international conferences, state conventions, pastor’s schools, retreats” and “serves as a consultant to many of America’s denominational leaders and agencies.” Recently, Leonard Sweets influence has been raised to a whole new level through his involvement with the Global Church Network (GCN) – formally called Billion Soul Movement (see https://gcnw.tv/). GCN is the largest pastors’ network in the world and includes more than 2,600 Christian ministries and denominations and 700,000 churches. Sweet is one of three key leaders who head up the Global Church Divinity School.

Leonard Sweet takes New Age beliefs and dresses them up with Christian terms and concepts.

Sweet teaches the core New Age doctrine of “Immanence” i.e. God is in everyone and everything. In his book Quantum Spirituality: A Postmodern Apologetic he writes:

“Quantum spirituality bonds us to all creation as well as to other members of the human family. . . . This entails a radical doctrine of embodiment of God in the very substance of creation. . . . But a spirituality that is not in some way entheistic (whether pan- or trans-), that does not extend to the spirit-matter of the cosmos, is not Christian.” (p. 125)

 

And, in his book Nudge: Awakening Each Other to the God Who’s Already There, he states:

“An incarnational God means that God-stuff is found in the matter of the universe.” (p. 157)

 

Contrary to Sweet’s claim, the Bible clearly sets forth that God is a Person, separate and external to his creation. To believe that God is in everyone and everything leads directly to the original lie of the devil and the essence of New Age teaching that we are all god.

Sweet describes heretical Jesuit Catholic priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin as “Twentieth-century Christianity’s major voice.” (Quantum Spirituality p. 106) Teilhard de Chardin is generally regarded as the the “father” of the New Age Movement.

Here are some quotes of Teilhard de Chardin from his book Christianity and Evolution:

“What I am proposing to do is to narrow that gap between pantheism and Christianity by bringing out what one might call the Christian soul of pantheism or the pantheistic aspect of Christianity.” (p. 56) 

“The cross still stands . . . But this is on one condition, and one only, that it expand itself to the dimensions of a New Age, and cease to present itself to us as primarily (or even exclusively) the sign of a victory over sin”. (p. 219)

“I can be saved only by becoming one with the universe.” (p. 128)

“I believe that the Messiah whom we await, whom we all without any doubt await, is the universal Christ; that is to say, the Christ of evolution.” (p. 95)

“A general convergence of religions upon a universal Christ who fundamentally satisfies them all: that seems to me the only possible conversion of the world, and the only form in which a religion of the future can be conceived.” (p. 130)

 

In the acknowledgements section of Quantum Spirituality, Sweet expresses his deep gratitude and admiration to various “New Light leaders” whom he openly praises as “the most creative religious leaders in America today”, including Willis Harman, Matthew Fox, and M. Scott Peck. He writes:

“They are my personal role models (in an earlier day one could get away with “heroes”) of the true nature of the postmodern apologetic. More than anyone else, they have been my teachers on how to translate, without compromising content, the gospel into the indigenous context of the postmodern vernacular.” (p.viii)

 

All of these three men played an important role in establishing and furthering the New Age Movement:

  • Willis Harman (1918-1997) is listed as one of the most influential Aquarian/New Age conspirators in Marilyn Ferguson’s The Aquarian Conspiracy. Harman was a social scientist/futurist with the Stanford Research Institute and one of the chief architects of New Age thinking. He wrote the book Global Mind Change: The New Age Revolution in the Way We Think. A review by The San Francisco Chronicle on the front cover of the book reads: “There never has been a more lucid interpretation of New Age consciousness and what it promises for the future than the works of Willis Harman.”
  • Matthew Fox (1940- ) was a former Catholic priest who was dismissed from the Catholic church for openly professing New Age teachings. Fox teaches that all of creation is the “Cosmic Christ”—therefore the Cosmic Christ is in everyone and everything. In his book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, Fox writes: “Divinity is found in all creatures” and “We are all royal persons, creative, godly, divine, persons of beauty and of grace. We are all Cosmic Christs, ‘other Christs.’ But what good is this if we don’t know it.” Leonard Sweet credits Fox in a footnote in Quantum Spirituality for inspiring Sweet’s own description of the “cosmic body of Christ” and refers readers of Quantum Spirituality to Fox’s New Age book The Coming of the Cosmic Christ.
  • Scott Peck (1936-2005) was a psychiatrist and best-selling author of The Road Less Travelled. In a subsection of his book titled “The Evolution of Consciousness,” Peck describes God as being “intimately associated with us—so intimately that He is part of us.” He also writes: “If you want to know the closest place to look for grace, it is within yourself. If you desire wisdom greater than your own, you can find it inside you … To put it plainly, our unconscious is God. God within us. We were part of God all the time.”

 

Another New Age teacher that Sweet acknowledges in Quantum Spirituality is David Spangler whom he says helped him develop his “new cell understanding of New Light leadership” (p.312).

As to this concept of “new cell” David Spangler wrote

“If we want to possess a magic crystal for our New Age work, we need look no further than our own bodies and the cells that make them up.” 

(Reimagination of the World: A Critique of the New Age, Science, and Popular Culture p. 62)

 

A pioneering spokesperson for the New Age, in his book The Revelation: The Birth of the New Age – a compilation of channelled transmissions that Spangler received from his spirit-guide “John.” – he writes 

“As the energies of the Cosmic Christ become increasingly manifest within the etheric life of Earth, many individuals will begin to respond with the realization that the Christ dwells within them. They will feel his presence moving within and through them and will begin to awaken to their heritage of Christhood and Oneness with God, the Beloved.” ( p. 177)

 

Finally, just like the present cohort of New Age leaders do, Sweet tries to use Quantum Physics to ‘prove’ that God indwells his creation. In his book Soul Tsunami, he writes:

“The coming together of the new biology and the new physics is providing the basic metaphors for this new global civilization that esteems and encourages whole-brain experiences, full-life expectations, personalized expressions, and a globalized consciousness.” (p121)

 

From his interpretation of quantum physics, he asserts that all things are composed of energy and that this quantum energy must be God, hence God is embodied in all things. The Bible strikes down this metaphor emphatically:

Romans 1:25

They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is forever praised.

 

The Bible clearly spells out that God (who is Spirit) created a physical realm that is separate and distinct from Him. And our unique Creator God made the physical world with spiritual creatures housed in physical bodies (man and woman) that he imparted life to; life which is not the substance of who He is and yet enabled them to be conscious of Him and know Him. They were made in the “image of God” in his “likeness” but were not God in and of themselves, specifically being made lesser beings (Genesis 1:26-27, Psalm 8:5, Hebrews 2: 7). Sadly, most people reject the true knowledge of God and become enslaved to Satan through lies and deceit. And some will, therefore, fall under the spell of Leonard Sweet who claims to be a ‘Christian’ and a teacher of (unfolding) ‘truth’, and who elevates himself – and those who listen to him – to the seductive and deceitful status of being ‘god’. Romans 1:21 describes teachers such as Sweet, who is presented as an intellectual of the highest order, in these terms: “their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened”.

2 Timothy 4:2-5

“For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead, to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn their ears away from the truth and turn aside to myths.”

Matthew 15:7-9

“(Jesus said) You hypocrites! Isaiah was right when he prophesied about you: “‘These people honor me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me. They worship me in vain; their teachings are but rules taught by men.'””

 

(Adapted from Leonard Sweet—A More Magnificent Way of Seeing Christ? by Warren B. Smith)