THE CHURCH FATHERS said that "no heresy is to be overlooked" (see Petr.Ven. Sect. Sar. pr. 11 or some such place). And usually a church council examined the teachings in questions and determined their validity. But where does the modern evangelical church go to get a ruling on something like the Heaven's Gate teachings? The National Association of Christian Booksellers? Do we wait until Michael Card produces a theme album about it? Hardly.      We don't have the luxury to wait around to see what shakes down. We've got printing deadlines to meet. So we asked the closest thing we've got to a church council to discuss the issue – The Door's High Sheriffs.      Our crack Bible exegete John Bloom (aka Joe Bob Briggs) receives more heretical teachings in his weekly mail alone than the Watchman Fellowship sees in a lifetime. Door publisher Ole Anthony – though no Mike Warnke, of course – spent a number of years researching the occult and examining for more than 25 years cultic phenomenon from the viewpoint of the cross. Neither has ever heard of anything quite like the current outbreak of millennium-inspired madness epitomized by the Nike-clad heretics of Rancho Santa Fe, nor are they surprised by it.

BLOOM: Okay, we just had another mass cult suicide. It's almost a given of modern culture now, that periodically we have a mass cult suicide. What is it about the times we live in that make this part of our culture?
ANTHONY: This is the most pagan time in the history of the world. It is allegedly the most scientifically advanced, but spiritually it's the worst time. There's never been more darkness spiritually than there is now. There's a famine in the land, as Amos said, but it's not of bread. It's the famine of hearing the true word of God. And because everyone is so hungry for spiritual truth, they eat anything, including Do's recipe for disaster. They feed on it. It's what gives them identity and purpose.
BLOOM: Would you call this a Christian cult?
ANTHONY: They claimed it was very Christian. Do's exact words were that in the early seventies his "vehicle" was impregnated with the spirit of Christ and so he was Jesus Christ. That's what he taught his disciples. And his counterpart Ti was – in his words – the Father.
BLOOM: Whoa! Talk about your identity crisis.
ANTHONY: Do claimed that the woman was the father and he was the son. And he was the same son that had walked the earth 2000 years ago. He justified everything by scripture.
BLOOM: Thinking you're Christ has passed Napoleon as the delusion du jour.
ANTHONY: When I was a kid, anybody who'd say that would end up in the insane asylum. My mother worked at the Minnesota State Hospital and there were eight or 10 Jesus Christs there, but they were locked up. Now they're running around creating cults.
BLOOM: If he was insane, what are the odds of 39 people being insane?
ANTHONY: The followers weren't insane; they were babies. Just spiritual infants at best. But mainly they were just so hungry for a kind of spiritual food that they'd eat anything.
BLOOM: Yet they all had the best America has to offer. You looked at their backgrounds and their father would be head of the local power company. Many of them had private school education. Many of them grew up in the suburbs. If you were putting together a cross-section of American, there it was.
ANTHONY: Except it wasn't a cross-section – this was the upper middle class of American culture. They were the promise of tomorrow, the leaders of tomorrow's modern America. And that's what's so scary to me.
BLOOM: This is yet another movement that started in the 60's, but it seems to have lead to a place where there is no grounding, no idea of what's true and what's not true. In fact, most people now believe that anything can be true. Flying saucers are no longer part of the lunatic fringe.
ANTHONY: Everything is subjective truth – which is an oxymoron. Robert Bly's new book is called The Sibling Society. He said we now live in a society of teenagers. He's wrong. We're really an infant society spiritually. Everything is unbridled self-seeking. Even religion is a salvation of the isolated self. So that is just spiritual greed. That is the same thing as an infant that always has to be fed. There are no elders in our society to help us discover and test real truth. We have become a nation of infants, vulnerable to a false "father figure" like Do.
BLOOM: When you say "infant," you mean an infant looks to God just for "what can I get?"
ANTHONY: Right. Look at the massive increase of the "word/faith" movement's success theology, the name-it-claim-it, blab-it, grab-it theology. It's really sad.
BLOOM: So are you saying that Heaven's Gate was just another version of success theology?
ANTHONY: I blame the success/word of faith theology on Bill Bright. Because Bright and Campus Crusade invented four spiritual laws and the first one is "God loves you and has a WONDERFUL plan for your life." Well, once you take that as a premise for theology, you can go anywhere.
BLOOM: The community in San Diego seemed to represent many of the virtues of a traditional [first century] Christian community: they sacrificed for one another; they loved one another; and they worked for a common good. The same things we see in a monastery. Right?
ANTHONY: But with one major exception. They did not subject themselves to the testing of the outside world. The Heaven's Gate Folks had some form of community, but they never let what they were doing be publicly chastised or publicly tested. It was insular. They tried to go out and get converts every once in a while. That always failed because they couldn't find very many people who bought their goofy theology.
BLOOM: Most people would find it difficult to believe in the worship of a human being – even a sane human being.
ANTHONY: That's because they don't look at themselves right. Every time you give the right to your happiness to another person, then you are worshipping that person.
BLOOM: Like your boss?
ANTHONY: Your boss. Your wife. Your ex-wife. Your girlfriend. They worshipped Do totally. One little-known fact is that Do didn't live with them. Do lived across the Valley. He'd just come over and make periodic visits. And so because of his isolation, his lifestyle wasn't tested.
BLOOM: He was the Wizard of Oz behind the curtain.
ANTHONY: Exactly! He was like the televangelists behind their gated suburban enclaves. He was like the Pope behind the Vatican walls. There is no testing of what they say by their life.
BLOOM: The scary thing to me is that there are probably people who are saying to themselves, "They committed suicide and maybe they are on the spaceship. Someone is probably thinking right now, "Well, it could be true."
ANTHONY: One of Do's statements was that if all that you knew or had ever seen was the television show Star Trek, that would be enough. I thought it was appropriate that a few days after they had all committed suicide, Gene Roddenberry's [creator of Star Trek] ashes were sent up in a spaceship along with Timothy Leary's for a space burial. We live in the most ludicrous age that has ever existed.
BLOOM: Does it disturb you that all these cults exist?
ANTHONY: Sure. I'd rather they not exist. But it doesn't surprise me. I think we're gonna see more and more and more of them as we near the end of the millennium because for some reason these man-made mileposts are all-important to them. These are the triple-zero people. If a zero has a meaning and double zeros has big meaning, the triple zeros, in the year 2000, must have stupendous meaning...Well, these are the same people who stop the car so they can watch the odometer turn to 10,000. Time is made up. It's an invention of man.
BLOOM: So you expect a big explosion of cult activity in the next three years?
ANTHONY: It's already started. The Watchman Fellowship – one of the cult-watching groups that we share information with – lists 24 UFO cults alone. They are monitoring something on the order of 900 cults. It's estimated there are 2,500 cults in America – where there is some type of mind control that is traditionally associated with cultic activity.
BLOOM: What do you think the early church fathers would have chosen to do about this?
ANTHONY: Nothing.
BLOOM: Nothing?
ANTHONY: Nothing. There were just as many cults then.
BLOOM: Of course there's always been heresy...
ANTHONY: Except that it's never there when the church is persecuted. Christianity Today interviewed a leader of the underground church in China who had been exiled recently. The interviewer asked him about denominations. He said, "Where there is persecution there are no denominations. There is only the preaching of the cross."
BLOOM: But as soon as the persecution ends, success theology quickly follows.
ANTHONY: If you really look at the meaning of heresy, it's telling lies about God. But the real issue of heresy is the salvation of the isolated self. Witness Do and Ti. And that's the beginning of all heresy. You lose the idea of community.
BLOOM: When you say "salvation of the isolated self," it sounds like you're proposing a Hillary Clinton type idea – "it takes a village."
ANTHONY: It does take a community. In that regard, Do got it partially right. We are living in the last days. In the first century Christian church, the church had to have at least 10, but no more than 20 people. And they met in homes, and when they got more than 20, then they moved to the next house. And there was no question who your community was, or who your brothers were. A speaker in the first century spoke from a place called the "bema" – the low place. He was physically lower than the people who were in the group. It's the whole idea that the minister is a servant and that you have a small group of people where everything is tested. In contrast, Do elevated himself as a special messenger, on a different plane.
BLOOM: What created the early church community? Happenstance?
ANTHONY: No. The community was created by the cross.
BLOOM: But that's too vague.
ANTHONY: If the cross is preached – the cross being the death of self-interest – then a mystery happens and the church is always a mystery. I'm not talking about what Bo and Peep taught. I'm talking about laying down your life, your interests for the sake of the greater good. Suicide, in many ways, is the greatest form of pride.
BLOOM: You're saying that if that is preached, a community forms. But I see guys preaching on street corners all the time where nothing forms.
ANTHONY: Because they're empty words. They haven't been lived by the speaker.
BLOOM: There must have been some element of truth at some point even in what Heaven's Gate was teaching, because a community did form there. A misguided community – and yet it formed.
ANTHONY: There are communities everywhere that are formed on the basis of some mutuality of interest. Obviously that's why man has gotten together over the years and formed everything from villages to Sao Paulo. Some of these places soon will have 35 million people in them, yet there's still a need for community – yet they hate it. So there's always this tension. It's this tension which defines which direction it will go.
BLOOM: Speaking of tension, what do you think about Do's views of sex, that in order to get around the issue of sex drive and the desire to create a family...
ANTHONY: ...you castrate it?
BLOOM: Christianity has a long history of castration or abstinence or some sort of mortification of the flesh. What do you think of the actual mortification of the flesh?
ANTHONY: That's you becoming your own god. I think that's what the scriptures talk about when Paul said "abstain from youthful lusts." The word abstain is better translated "be fed up" with youthful lusts. See the fruit of it, see the end result of it.
BLOOM: Why do you think flying saucers are such an attractive metaphor? As you pointed out, there are at least 24 active flying saucer cults.
ANTHONY: I think it's because it's something that doesn't really require faith, real faith. It requires a hope or a "maybe" or a "something" and it has a shape that can be understood and it doesn't require that you see all things as parables.
BLOOM: I would say you have just described most people's conception of God.
ANTHONY: That's true. But God is spirit – and those who worship Him must worship Him "in spirit and in truth." It's impossible to describe spirit. That's why Jesus said all things are in parables. But Do was a literalist. He believed in a literal heaven in space, a literal kingdom.
BLOOM: A person who believes in a flying saucer would say they're making a leap of faith. They're believing in some life that can't be seen on earth – so all the things you could say about the orthodox conception of the unseen and unheard God could also be said about people who come from alien civilizations.
ANTHONY: That's what Do did. He said that the kingdom of God is really this next evolutionary level. He literalized the parable. Do and Ti supposedly were the Two Witnesses in the book of Revelation, but they really only had one witness to their theology – their own overactive imaginations.
BLOOM: I'll bet a large percentage of the population believes in the probability of extraterrestrial beings.
ANTHONY: The kingdom of God is not ruled by the majority. It's just more proof that we live in the most pagan society that's ever existed.

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