Dr. Oz
Many Americans and many Christians have encountered Dr. Mehmet Oz, the popular surgeon-turned-celebrity, via his own daytime program and his appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show. This past April, the United States Senate confirmed Dr. Oz to lead the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services. This is a consequential move because Dr. Oz now manages health insurance programs that serve approximately half of the country.
As part of his responsibility, Dr. Oz influences health care choices available to the American people. Consistent with that responsibility, he has offered several policy arguments and recommendations. For example, he contends that expanding Medicaid eligibility without improving resources for doctors makes medical care options thinner for the program’s core patients. While this policy claim may be rooted in sound analysis rather than celebrity, Christians should observe that a recent article in the Christian Post provokes tough questions about whether his deep-seated understanding of medicine, health, and healing may inflict harm on Americans’ health and spiritual well-being.
This is a crucially important issue, since the available evidence shows that his knowledge of medicine may be grounded in the occult and in other spiritually dangerous ideas. If so, this raises the question of whether his policy objectives are tied to an ambiguous foundation that prevents understanding. His apparent belief in occult practices remains an issue even though Article VI of the U. S. Constitution specifies that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
The Christian Post reports that Jenn Nizza, a podcaster and ex-psychic turned Christian, along with her guest, Christian apologist Marcia Montenegro, maintain that Dr. Oz is “deeply influenced by mysticism and occult practices.” This conclusion follows Dr. Oz’s admission that he is a follower of Emanuel Swedenborg, an 18th-century mystic whose teachings denied the Trinity, claimed illness stemmed from “bad thoughts,” and are tied to the “New Thought movement,” which teaches that your mind creates reality. In addition, Dr. Oz has apparently endorsed transcendental meditation, a practice tied to Hindu spirituality.
Taken together, this information suggests that Dr. Oz's reality and medical recommendations may be influenced by Gnosticism. Gnosticism is a problematic term to define fully, but in essence, the Gnostics did not arise from a single group or movement. To be clear, “some researchers argue that the term gnostic should be restricted to the sects or schools that called themselves by that name, others extend the category to include additional religious movements that allegedly shared various distinctive features.”
Still other analysts contend that Gnosticism constitutes a world religion that existed from antiquity to early modern times. Evidently, some Gnostics distinguish “between an inferior creator of the world … and a more transcendent god or order of being.” Another Gnostic theme suggests that there is a special class or race of humans that is descended from the transcendent realm and is destined to achieve some form of salvation grounded in the achievement of special knowledge.
On this account, salvation comes from a higher form of knowledge that allows followers to engage in practices and beliefs enabling them to reawaken special knowledge that apparently has been well hidden. Gnosticism emerged as Enlightenment thinkers, including Emanuel Swedenborg, distanced themselves from traditional Christian faiths and reinterpreted them as thoughtful abstractions. This move emphasized the saving power of human effort unaided by the Augustinian notion of total depravity. Instead, religious reformers labored to produce a new morality governed by the prospect of self-discipline and self-effort.”
Historically, such moves led to Enlightenment deism, which relegated God to simply being the First Cause in the universe. At the same time, due to the rise of secularism, a movement that began within the church, traditional theology was transformed into a form of mushy infidelity.
Such developments prompted many Americans to pursue living “their best life now.” The decline in traditional Christian beliefs reflects the claim that human suffering amounts to an unthinkable cruelty, which contradicts the thesis that all order finds its source in our wills. This move spurred a further flight from Christian tradition set down by the apostles and the pursuit of essentially human abstractions as a substitute for sound doctrine.
Fleeing from Christian doctrine, many Christians were spurred to advance magical/pagan thinking, which allowed them to devour Oprah Winfrey’s discovery of The Secret. This book swells with incredible, life-transforming revelations tied to the desperate search for human flourishing. The question for Christian believers is whether Dr. Mehmet Oz’s underlying beliefs and his Swedenborgian framework will have a benign or malign influence on America’s health care and on the spiritual lives of the American people.
This is a tricky question to answer. Given this query, eternal vigilance is warranted, particularly for Christian believers who have endeavored to make disciples consistent with the command of the Lord Jesus Christ and in conjunction with Jen Wilkin & J. T. English’s book, You Are a Theologian.
Eternal vigilance is also warranted by all those who have accepted the biblical reality of Jesus’ final charge to those who believe: “Go into all the world and proclaim the gospel to the whole Creation. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved, but whoever does not believe will be condemned. And these signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will cast out demons, they will speak in new tongues, they will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly poison, it will not hurt them; they will lay their hands on the sick, and they will recover.” (Mark 16:15-18, ESV)