Is A New Earth Okay For Christians?

Last spring when Oprah hosted the ten weeks of webinars with Eckhart Tolle, many people the world over were blessed, crediting the message of living in the now with changing their lives.  However, Evangelic Christians showed up on the message boards at Oprah's website,  totally up in arms about the whole thing....many of them ready to wage an online jihad of words against the infidels.  Ironically, many (most) most of them had not even read the book!!! 

There were a few voices of reason from the Christian side of things....including a guy known as Student 99.  I am going to copy and paste one of his posts...the post Oprah read during one of the first few webinars entitled, Why A New Earth Is Okay For Conservative Christians

I have seen many, many posts by concerned Christians wondering whether this book is a threat to their faith. As a Christian, I don't think it is, and here is why.

Most Christians understand the concepts from the Bible of surrendering their lives to God, of living a loving life, and living in the peace that passes understanding. Christians can quote Jesus' sayings, such as "be perfect, as your father in heaven is perfect," or "judge (condemn) not, that you be not judged (condemned)," or "you must die to live," or "deny yourself, take up your cross and follow me."

Unfortunately, not all Christians have succeeded in following up the talk with the walk. This is because these quotes point to an internal transformation, which some Christians have not yet fully experienced.

That is why I strongly recommend this book. It provides very powerful tools for being able to successfully follow Jesus' teachings, rather than just quoting them. The book doesn't ask anyone to change their religion of choice, but it does help tremendously in successfully applying faith.

In a nutshell the book shows how to apply forgiveness to every person, and every situation. It shows how to shine the light of awareness on our unconscious hatred of this moment, and thereby "overcome the cares of this world." If you want to go deeper than knowing about God, at the level of thoughts, and experience God at the level of knowing, I welcome you to join us in reading A New Earth.

Blessings, Student 99

The above link takes you to Student 99's profile page on Oprah.com.  There you will find with other posts he's written from an open minded  Christian viewpoint. 

But while Student 99 strongly recommends A New Earth, Greg Boyd has some rather strong cautions and takes issue with a lot of Eckhart's "theology". 

More tomorrow......