A Billy Graham impersonator
chides Oprah’s New Agers
By John H. Adams, The Layman, November 12, 2008
CHARLOTTE – Friday, Nov. 6, was Billy Graham’s 90th birthday, so Erwin Lutzer, the senior pastor of The Moody Church in Chicago, introduced the famous evangelist to the audience at the National Conference on Christian Apologetics.
Erwin Lutzer Well, almost.
Lutzer explained his fascination with the world’s most famous preacher: “My generation was into Elvis and I was into Billy Graham.” Obviously having often practiced, Lutzer impersonated Graham with precise elocution and a dollop of Southernese.
“Write to me,” he said, “at Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota. That’s Billy Graham, Minneapolis, Minnesota.” The crowd roared with its appreciation for a first-rate impersonation and a reminder that Graham was so famous that his name was his address.
But Lutzer dealt with more serious matters as well – including Oprah Winfrey and her engagement with the “new spirituality.” “To be critical of Oprah in some sense is to be critical of the ‘divine,’” he said, forewarning himself while recognizing Winfrey’s daily audience of 20 million to 30 million people.
But he built his case for challenging Winfrey’s promoting New Age religion by noting the company she keeps and their writings. They include:
- Eckhart Tolle, a German-Canadian, the author of A New Earth, an Oprah’s Book Club selection, which she featured in a 10-week seminar with Tolle.
- Marianne Williamson, a spiritual activist who promotes a grassroots campaign for a U.S. Department of Peace. She is the author of The Age of Miracles and appears on a weekly satellite radio show, “Ophrah and Friends.” Williamson is a minister in the Unity Church.
- The late Dr. Helen Schucman, the author of A Course in Miracles, a book she dictated in response to an “inner voice.”
The three make references to Christ and Christianity, but their theology is pantheistic, with “mistakes” but not sin, reincarnational and mind over matter, Lutzer said.
He said the third chapter of Genesis clearly lays out the origins of New Age cultism through the “four lies of Satan”:
- “Has God said …?”
- “You surely will not die.”
- “Your eyes will be opened.”
- “You will be like God.”
“The phrase for you to underline is, ‘You will be like God.’ If everything is God and God is everything, then they could proclaim their own deity. Pantheism is the interpretation of this verse to make the lie believable.”
He said Tolle defined God as “not personal, not sovereign, not holy, only in the sense you are holy. God is consciousness, the essence of who you are.”
Your eyes will be opened. “Now conversion is redefined,” Lutzer said. “You always have the opposite. Heaven is not a location. It exists in our own minds. How do you convert? There is an awakening, a detachment.”
He added, “Mary Ann Williamson says, ‘Chant these words: “I am the holy son of God Himself.”’ When you say this, you are released from the bondage of this world, and you are converted. Lucifer’s big thing was, ‘I shall be like the Most High.’”
Lutzer says Tolle describes Jesus as “an archetype for every man that ever lived. Jesus speaks of the innermost ‘I am.’ Salvation comes from one’s self. The journey to the cross should be the last useless journey.”
Paraphrasing from C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters, he said Satan “likes to bring people to the place where people will believe that belief in us is belief in God.”
The New Agers redefine death because “once you assert that you are God, what are you going to do with this painful thing called death?” he asked. “Death does not exist. What about sickness? It doesn’t exist.”
Lutzer’s response: “Optimism can’t really solve problems. ‘I think I can’ won’t get you up the hill.”
“When you have the new spirituality you know that these lies will be there, because they were there in the Garden of Eden,” he said. “Learn to discern. Christians are buying these kinds of books to get deeper in their walk.”
He compared that to emptying a bottle of clear water and filling it with poison.