The Road Back to Jesus (Part 3: A Word of Caution)

For a book sitting in the top five of both the “Christian Spiritual Growth” and “Christian Self-help” categories on Amazon, I found The Road Back to You: An Enneagram Journey to Self-Discovery to be startlingly lacking in Biblical content. The book is widely considered the foremost source on the Enneagram and Christianity. Yet, the author, Ian Morgan Cron, fails to make any sort of case for the Gospel. He recognizes the poverty of the human condition and mentions grace and growth and God, but actual scriptural references are scant. Instead, Cron includes a plethora of quotations from sources as wide as Anne Rice, Muhammad Ali, and Peter Pan.

This book is full of therapeutic language despite claiming a psychological basis and presents the Enneagram as an incredibly complex methodology while providing nothing but anecdotal evidence for its validity. Again, you can still enjoy the Enneagram as a personality test without placing too much weight upon the specifics. You don’t have to make it out to be the most transformative journey in your life, but this is not the sort of lighthearted self-exploration that Ian Morgan Cron and his co-author Stabile admonish in The Road Back to You. 

Ian Morgan Cron insists that the Enneagram is NOT “the be-all and end-all of Christian spirituality” and reminds readers that it is nothing but a useful tool to aid you on your journey heavenward. He also mentions that the book is full of useful information so long as the reader doesn’t “waste [their] time trying to accomplish any of it apart from the transformative power of God’s grace.” To that I shout a hearty, “I agree!” Yet, in the next breath, Cron urges readers to “simply give God consent to do for you what you’ve never been able to do for yourself, namely, bring meaningful and lasting change to your life.”

Since when does our all-powerful God need our permission to work in our lives? Unfortunately, the errors in the author’s thinking go beyond decision theology, altering the fiber of the gospel by dismantling the relationship between law, gospel, sin, and grace.

The Enneagram is unique because it provides a look into the darker parts of human nature, but, according to The Road Back to You, the source of pain in our lives is not the result of rebellion against God or the fall into sin.  Instead, mankind’s problem is that we’ve lost connection with our God-given identity, that we don’t know ourselves well enough to be right with God. Sin, as presented in this book, is nothing more than an inconvenience to our own happiness.

The Road Back to You smells faintly of the sort of progressive Christianity that seeks to push us away from hard truth and toward “spiritual ideas.”  The book’s indifference toward and avoidance of hard truth is startling. Cron is uncontroversial enough to avoid mentioning Jesus at all. This version of the gospel reminds us to “maintain a compassionate stance toward yourself as God does” while failing to mention that the robe of righteousness we are wearing is not our own. 

Come back tomorrow for more insights into Cron’s book!

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Join the Conversation:

• What is the conscientious Christian to do? Is it best to leave the Enneagram behind? Should we avoid reading books antithetically labeled “Christian self-help” altogether? Leave your thoughts below!
• What do you look for when browsing the “Christian” book section? How can we weed out the bad from the good?