The Christian mysticism of Tony Campolo

Tony Campolo (president of the Evangelical Association for the Promotion of Education (EAPE) and professor emeritus of Sociology at Eastern University in St. Davids, Pennsylvania) whom many now call a ‘prophet’, has for many years been upheld as the voice of sound evangelicism particularly among the student population. Yet he questions Christ is the only way to God, for he writes in his book ‘Speaking My Mind’:

‘Beyond these models of reconciliation, a theology of mysticism provides some hope for common ground between Christianity and Islam. Both religions have within their histories examples of ecstatic union with God … I do not know what to make of the Muslim mystics, especially those who have come to be known as the Sufis. What do they experience in their mystical experiences? Could they have encountered the same God we do in our Christian mysticism?’

The answer to this question is these ministers do not encounter God. They cannot except through Jesus Christ, the only way, truth and life. The Sufi mystic’s experience, though a genuine experience is counterfeit. It is either psychological or physiological of the flesh and mind, or it is a genuine supernatural experience albeit leading to the god of this world, the prince of the power of the air, and not the one true God reached through Jesus Christ alone. Could it be the same ‘god’ though whom Campolo encounters in his Catholic/New Age mysticism? – yes, undoubtedly, as his god denies the real Jesus Christ and his work, and which god denies Christ, or leads to another Jesus, but that which belongs to the antichrist, the spirit of the present age?

Tony Campolo’s apostasy is all part of the end time great apostasy. He agrees with politicans and many church leaders, who are ecumencial to the point of, what’s the point in even believing anything at all, if really anything goes. Everything gets blurred and truth is relative instead of absolute. In a 1997 television interview with Charlie Rose, speaking of a Buddhist monk’s claim to know Jesus Christ, Tony Campolo said:

“I am saying that there is no salvation apart from Jesus, that’s my evangelical mindset. However, I’m not convinced that Jesus only lives in Christians.”

In 1988, Campolo speaking at Prestatyn said that Jesus is in everyone (Christian or not):

“One of the most startling discoveries of my life,” Campolo said, “was the realization that the Jesus that I love, the Jesus who died for me on Calvary, that Jesus, is waiting, mystically and wonderfully, in every person I meet. I find Jesus everywhere. The difference between a Christian and non-Christian is not that Jesus isn’t in the non-Christian–the difference is that the Jesus who is within him is a Jesus to whom he will not surrender his life. You say, “Are you saying that Jesus is present in everybody?” I am only telling you what it says in John 1:9; He is the light that lighteth every man, every woman that cometh into the world. The minute you start saying that God isn’t in some people, you’re on the verge of Fascism. Why? Erich Fromm saw that. The minute you can look at somebody and say God isn’t in him–he is only in Christians–that person is pure demon.”

This directly contradicts what Jesus said in the Bible, and also, whether Campolo realises it or not, in the spirit of the antichrist accuses Jesus and the Holy Spirit of being ‘pure demon’.   ‘Jesus answered and said to him, “If anyone loves Me, he will keep My word; and My Father will love him, and We will come to him and make Our abode with him. ‘  (John 14.23) and ”Behold, I stand at the door and knock; if anyone hears My voice and opens the door, I will come in to him and will dine with him, and he with Me. ‘   Note the future and conditional tense of both these scriptures. If  he loves me, if  he opens the door, if  he obeys my word…. then WE WILL come in and live. If we already were divine as Campolo claims, then there is no need for the condition ‘opening the door to Jesus’ and no need for the coming of the Holy Spirit, there’s no need to ’seek’ to gain a relationship with God, we only have to look deep within to the divine nature already imparted in us. There’s no need for the cross. All we need is mysticism and to get in touch with our divine nature – and this can in the name of Jesus, or equally without it as per the sufis.

Campolo goes even further than just saying the divine dwells within all man. He claims man is divine, one of the oldest lies dating back to the Garden of Eden. In Campolo’s book Partly Right, he says:

‘We affirm our divinity by doing what is worthy of gods, and we affirm our humanity by taking risks only available to mortals. God had to become one of us before He could become heroic … Robert Schuller affirms our divinity, yet does not deny our humanity … isn’t that what the gospel is? Isn’t God’s message to sinful humanity that He sees in each of us a divine nature of such worth that He sacrificed His own Son so that our divine potentialities might be realized? … The hymn writer who taught us to sing “Amazing Grace” was all too ready to call himself a “wretch” … Forgetting our divinity and over-identifying with our [Freudian] anal humanity [Freud is responsible for a host of maladies that plague our contemporary society] … Erich Fromm, one of the most popular psychoanalysts of our time, recognized the diabolical social consequences that can come about when a person loses sight of his/her own divinity …”

If Tony Campolo does not see himself as a wretch, he’s not only proud and deluded (for did not the apostle Paul also claim to be ‘the chief of sinners’?) but he does not know the amazing grace that John Newton sang about, and that Bible-believing Christians have clung to for centuries. Oh, in myself nothing good dwells, but thanks be to God in Jesus Christ! This is what the true evangelical knows and boasts about! For,

‘When I survey the wondrous cross
On which the Prince of glory died,
My richest gain I count but loss,
And pour contempt on all my pride.

Forbid it, Lord, that I should boast,
Save in the death of Christ my God!
All the vain things that charm me most,
I sacrifice them to His blood.

See from His head, His hands, His feet,
Sorrow and love flow mingled down!
Did e’er such love and sorrow meet,
Or thorns compose so rich a crown?

His dying crimson, like a robe,
Spreads o’er His body on the tree;
Then I am dead to all the globe,
And all the globe is dead to me.

Were the whole realm of nature mine,
That were a present far too small;
Love so amazing, so divine,
Demands my soul, my life, my all.’

It is amazing grace indeed. Yet in Campolo’s mysticism there is no real sin (apart from social injustice, it seems), so no need for such a hefty penalty and the ugly and distasteful sacrifice as was offered on the cross. Mysticism does not need the cross. God can be found in other ways, says Tony, far more pleasant. Mysticism can bypass grace, forgiveness, repentence, scripture. God is in us, and we are in God, he says. Let us experience Him.

In his book A Reasonable Faith: Responding to Secularism, Campolo says that people can ‘experience’ Jesus without even being aware of it, under differant god’s names. What Tony Campolo is actually saying is, all religions lead to God, it does not matter what you call Him or whether you call on the name of Jesus or not – you can still experience Him if you’re a true mystic, and He will live in you as he does everyone. This is heretical and contradicts Jesus being the only way, truth, and life, and the ‘only name under heaven by which men can be saved.’  Campolo says:

“Many people have experienced the humanizing influence of Jesus through “I-Thou” encounters without being aware that they are experiencing Jesus. Their “I Thou” encounters revealed a presence that was totally other than the cultural deity they had come to know by that name . . . He is so different from the God of the theologians and philosophers.”

Tony Campolo’s God is not found in and through the name of Jesus Christ only. Although He is an intensely intimate God, He is found not through scripture BUT found in mysticism in sensuary experiences and deep revelations - with good deeds thrown in. It seems to not matter that these mystical experiences contradict the Bible. Note also how theology is undermined, claiming that his  mystical experiences are on a higher level than sound reason. While it is true many theologians don’t know God – and isn’t indeed, Campolo one of them? - all  theologians and all thinkers cannot be cast aside. Study of the Word of God is essential, it is the plumbline we hold all Christian teaching up to.

Campolo is beginning to sound too much like the heretical ecumenical apostles of the New Apostolic Reformation with the new prophets’ mouthpiece who despise critical thinking and have prophesied civil war in the church between those that use their ‘grey matter’ (their brains) against the blues (those that rely on divine revelation and experiences over the Word of God. Blues should not think, they should submit without question and accept without question the words of their divines. Touch not their anointed…don’t dare to criticise! Don’t analyse, go with the flow! And so like good little blues, they don’t question, they don’t test and weigh and thus get seduced by garbage.). This civil war is not just a war of words but is prophesied to be a real war. Note the militaristic speech of prayer, prophecy, and spiritual warfare, and then look deeper and see how it has been led and evolved from the top downwards - now do you know where the dominionists led by C Peter Wagner are planning on going? They’d have killed the Bereans, (those who were called noble minded by the apostle Paul for checking out what he said against scripture to see if it were true or not before accepting it.)  Indeed this movement plans to kill the Bereans in the future that oppose them, but that’s another matter. (Think this is far fetched? Actually read what these people say and teach before you rubbish this conclusion, and study the lengths the powers that be will go to bring about the aberrant Bob Jones’ prophecies. Bob Jones is the one that prophesied about the greys and blues civil war. Rick Joyner and others also echo this.) So the word of God is trodden on and despised by ‘new’ Christianity that claims itself superior. The ‘new wineskin’ is superior to the old, they claim, away with that dusty old book!

The word of God is life to our souls. It’s not study or meditation on the word alone, but the acting on the word that counts. The wise theologian’s heard is not just full of knowledge. But Campolo’s is an experience led sensory Christianity embracing ‘intimacy’ (defined as experiences and feelings),that has little regard for reading, let alone studying or obeying the Word of God.

‘The Christian of the Future will be a mystic or he or she will not exist at all’  is the first quote in Campolo’s book ‘God of Intimacy and Action’.   It goes on to say:

‘This book is about spirituality. It is about how ordinary people can mystically experience God in the depths of their beings and the ways in which such experiences transform them. When we were drawing up plans to write this book, Mary was concerned that the words mystic  and mystical  would present difficulties for some readers. She worried that some might think that we were into a kind of New Age religiosity, even though she knew from her studies and personal experience that certain forms of mysticism have always been, and still are, a vital part of Christianity. We finally decided to use the term “mystical Christianity”  to distinguish the kind of spirituality we are advocating from other forms known in the Christian community.’

Campolo writes very favourably of all the Roman Catholic mystics. It does not seem to matter they were all heretics. He also promotes Pierre Teilhard de Chardin and doesn’t let on that Teilhard’s Christ is not the Christ of the Bible but the cosmic Christ of New Age spirituality.

“If the Shalom of God and the peaceable kingdom of Isaiah 11 are to become real, then new ways of thinking must be established. With some help from St. Francis and Teilhard de Chardin, we just might make it,” said Tony Campolo in How to Rescue the Earth Without Worshiping Nature.

Tony Campolo’s gospel is one of social action and mysticism. Social action, again, bypasses the cross and the gospel of grace. Campolo calls himself an evangelical, yet I call him a Roman Catholic. Not only is he singing Rome’s interfaith one world religion tune but he preaches a mixture of mysticism and works straight out of Rome’s abyss. When talking about evangelism he says:

“How do we convert people? Get them to do Christian things before getting them to become a Christian. Challenge them to get involved in social work, to preach the Gospel to the poor. Truth must be communicated in the concept of action. …. Preach about the needs of the poor, get people to commit themselves to Christ by helping the poor. You’re a Christian when your heart is broken by the things that break the heart of Jesus.  The greatest need of a person is to love. Loving is what it is all about.”

This is not Christian evangelism. I’m all for social action. I’m all for helping the poor. I’m all for being compassionate and loving folk. BUT this is not what makes a Christian. For don’t even many heathens look after the poor? A Christian is a Christian because he has repented and come through the cross to the Father, and confesses only Christ. For this, he’ll be fed to the lions for.

Tony Campolo’s religion is not persecuted, though it does become the persecutor of the faithful. Christians in Rome were persecuted not because they loved God and followed Jesus but because they refused to worship Roman gods too, and had the audacity to claim their Jesus Christ was the only way, and the only name under Heaven by which man might be saved.