Enneagram Theology

Is it Christian?

Rhenn Cherry

• Publisher: Resource Publications
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781666715958
  9781666715965
• eBook ISBN:
  9781666715972
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Biblical Studies

The enneagram has become popular among evangelical Christians as a spiritualized personality typology that claims to help people better understand themselves and others. Several influential evangelical Christian leadership ministries have promoted the enneagram as a tool in forming and maintaining effective ministry teams, and the personality typology is now taught and embraced at several Christian universities. But uncertainty exists about the appropriateness of referring to the Enneagram as a Christian tool. Are pastors and Christian institutional leaders aware of the theology associated with the Enneagram? Enneagram Theology: Is It Christian? provides a biblical critique of the Enneagram's underlying theology and exposes not only its foundational theological contradictions with orthodox evangelical theology but also some potential dangers to the church.

1

Background, Important Terms, and Influential Relationships

The term Enneagram comes from a combination of the Greek words εννεα, meaning “nine,” and γραμμα, meaning “that which is written or drawn.”1 The Enneagram symbol consists of a circle with nine points located on the circle’s circumference.2 Explaining the origin of the Enneagram, however, is not so straightforward. There is no general agreement on the source or date of origin of the Enneagram symbol, but possible dates of origin range from Babylonian times to as late as the sixteenth century.3 Some credit the Sufi Muslims of Central Asia with developing the Enneagram symbol between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.4 But there is little dispute that the Enneagram symbol was introduced to the Western world in the early 1900s by G. I. Gurdjieff, who became familiar with it while in Afghanistan.5 Gurdjieff used the Enneagram to teach his students mysterious “esoteric subjects,” which apparently did not include any psychological or personality typology.6

During the 1950s and 1960s, a Bolivian named Oscar Ichazo developed an application of the Enneagram symbol in relation to human personality, claiming to have learned it from Afghani Sufi masters before he came upon Gurdjieff’s writings on the subject.7 Ichazo’s work with the Enneagram symbol was part of a larger body of work he called “protoanalysis,” which focused on the human being as a whole.8 His teaching was a mixture of methods aimed at achieving higher levels of consciousness and “full enlightenment,” which included studying astrological signs, mantras, and physical organs and systems of the human body.9 Claudio Naranjo, a Fulbright scholar and Gestalt psychiatrist, studied protoanalysis with Ichazo and brought it to the United States in the early 1970s. Naranjo wanted to utilize the term “protoanalysis” to describe his own work and teaching on personality typology, but because Ichazo had trademarked the term, Naranjo instead coined the term “Ennea-types.”10

In the 1960s, Naranjo studied under Fritz Perls to learn Gestalt therapy, “an experiential therapy stressing awareness and integration [which] grew as a reaction against analytic therapy.”11 Naranjo eventually combined Perls’s psychiatry with Ichazo’s protoanalysis and overlaid the nine Ennea-types onto the Enneagram symbol. Ichazo’s protoanalysis and Naranjo’s Ennea-types combined with Perls’s Gestalt psychiatry to form the foundation for most modern Enneagram psychological profiling systems and tests.12 Naranjo began teaching the Ennea-types at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California, in the early 1970s.13 One of Naranjo’s students, an American Jesuit priest named Robert Ochs, began adapting his own hand-written notes on the Ennea-types to meet Catholic spiritual formation and counseling needs for seminarians and laypeople.14 By 1974, Enneagram materials for use at Jesuit retreats had developed into one-page sketches of the nine different personality types. Those pages became the foundational ideas of a Jesuit seminarian, Don Riso, and a Franciscan priest, Richard Rohr. Riso would go on to write the formative work Personality Types in 1987, and Rohr wrote Discovering the Enneagram in 1989.15 Both men and their works are considered seminal in the further development of Enneagram books, seminars, and personality tests.16

Enneagram Theology: Is It Christian? will focus on the theological and Enneagram works of Richard Rohr and the works of three Enneagram authors whom Rohr has influenced.17 Rohr has personally mentored Ian Cron, Suzanne Stabile, and Christopher Heuertz, who have each published their own Enneagram works that are popular among evangelicals.18 Like Rohr, these three Enneagram authors have developed large followings as best-selling authors and speakers, and their impact in the evang...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: Background, Important Terms, and Influential Relationships
• Chapter 2: Panentheism, Multiple Incarnations, and Universal Salvation
• Chapter 3: The Good True Self and Multiple Paths to God
• Chapter 4: The Influence of Enneagram Authors on Evangelicalism
• Chapter 5: Implications and Warnings for the Church
• Bibliography