Ever find yourself procrastinating work by doing a “What cheese am I” test on BuzzFeed? You are not alone. The truth is, who nowadays hasn’t done a BuzzFeed quiz to find out what “FRIENDS” character they are, or what Disney prince or princess they would be, or what Harry Potter house you would be in only to discover that the explanations at the bottom of the result completely matches you? This occurrence is called the “Barnum Effect” and partially explains why we resonate so much with these tests. I recently did a “which onion are you?” quiz and honestly, the answer was moving (I got shallots FYI). This, although fun, is nothing serious but these types of tests are everywhere and jokes aside people take Personality tests very seriously. While studying in California, as part of my studies I had to do the DISC test, and among friends, back in 2014, the Meyers-Briggs test was all the rave.

Massive corporations have started doing these tests with employees to help with team dynamics and to up productivity. To a lot of individuals outside of the Christian tradition, there is a longing to understand why they exist and what their purpose is and the hope is that if they can understand themselves, then perhaps they can figure this out. For “believers” within this tradition, the appeal is to better understand the gifts God has given them and to better understand their “created uniqueness”, some see it as an affirmation of how beautifully complex the creation of mankind is. 

Personality tests, sometimes, however rather becomes permission to be their worst self. People through these tests find out what their weaknesses are and rather than seeing that as an opportunity to change (through prayer and the guidance of the Spirit), they express it as permission to be that very weakness. God calls us unto holiness, not to a place of self-actualisation through self-knowledge. 

These personally tests however aren’t new, or rather the desire to better understand oneself through these tests aren’t new. Astrology, for instance, was satisfying this need for a long time, then there was an attempt to take the religious aspect out of it and approach astrology from a phycological angle through Astropsychology. The occult world has been doing this for a long time, and one of these methodologies have crept into the Evangelical church and is deceiving many. 

The Truth about the Enneagram

The Enneagram is an absolute “pet peeve” of mine. It is what I have called the “Millennial’s Astrology” and I have a good reason to call it this. It is everywhere and even major evangelical leaders have publicly endorsed it, including some of my pastors in California. They all have the same reason for why they do the Enneagram and insists that it is nothing more than a personality test to aid them in their walk with God, and to the few that actually read books all resound Richard Rohr’s claim that it goes back to the “desert Fathers” (whom none of them ever know who they actually were), but the truth just is that it doesn’t. Some say that there is so much debate around where it comes from that it doesn’t matter and remains a helpful tool, but this argument for the contested origins come from the very same people who are trying to sell books to the evangelicals in the first place. We know where it comes from. 

It was first introduced to the Catholic community around the 1970s through people like Robert Ochs who taught it at the Jesuit School of Theology in Chicago. Ochs learnt it from Claudio Naranjo at the Esalen Institute which existed to teach alternative education through the merging of western and eastern philosophy. It was at Esalen where Noranjo took the Enneagram teachings of Oscar Ichazo and merged them with western psychology. Noranjo was taught the Enneagram by Ichazo when he visited Santiago, Chile with a group of around 50. Ichazo was an occultist who practised esoteric spirituality and also practised Zen, Sufism, the Kabbalah and the teachings of Georges I. Gurdjieff (the Father of the Enneagram). Ichazo spent years in the East studying the higher yogas, Buddhism, Confucianism, alchemy, and I Ching and after himself spending a reported 7 days in a state of ecstasy decided to start a school to teach what he had learnt and established the “Arica institute” where Noranjo studied the Enneagram.

Ichazo taught that every person is born a pure “essence” but between the age of 4 and 6 choose one of 9 personalities (the enneagram). He taught that to return to one's essence you have to act opposite to your personality’s ego through special practices such as meditation or the Buddhist Mudras. Ichazo claimed to have been taught the connection between personality and the Enneagram while in a trance under the influence of Archangel Gabriel, the “Green Qu’Tub Spirit” or Metatron. Some of the training at the Arica institute was to prepare you to connect to your “Green Qu’Tub Spirit” (Sufi mystical term for spiritual master). 

And this brings us to Georges I. Gurdjieff someone who Ichazo studied thoroughly. Gurdjieff was an Armenian who was fascinated by various supernatural phenomena such as communicating the dead, magic, fortune-telling, and secret societies possessing great knowledge. According to Gurdjieff, his studies took him to Central Asia, Tibet, India, Egypt, Uzbekistan, Mecca and Medina. He also claimed that he was allowed into a monastery of a secret society that dates back to ancient Babylon, the Sarmoung Brotherhood and this is where he learnt his esoteric knowledge. Gurdjieff was the first to teach the Enneagram as part of his occult teaching and reportedly taught “All knowledge can be included in the enneagram and with the help of the enneagram it can be interpreted. And in this connection only what a man can put into the enneagram does he actually know, that is, understand. What he cannot put into the enneagram makes books and libraries entirely unnecessary. Everything can be included and read in the enneagram.”. So the Enneagram was taught as this sacred spiritual tool to your true self, or your true essence. 

We can see from the above that there is absolutely no basis for the Enneagram being rooted in Christianity and in fact, it is completely rooted in the occult mystical practices, we know this because the earliest mention of the word Enneagram is in the writings of the Russian occultist P. D. Ouspensky who attributes it to his teacher, Gurdjieff. The modern Enneagram that is practised is thus the version of it that comes from Oscar Ichazo and if there are any doubts about his occult practices you can read his own words here.

I refer to the Enneagram as the Millennial’s Astrology because it functions precisely the same way. You are either born a certain star sign or you are a specific Enneagram archetype and depending on which you are, determines certain personality traits that are somehow rooted in a cosmic nature. Certain star signs don’t get along with other star signs and perhaps is best not to marry them, I have heard people very into the Enneagram utilise the same language: “This guy asked me out but he is a type 8 personality and I am a type 4, and we know they don’t get along” and in fact, there exists a version of the enneagram that connects Astrology called Enneastrology. But the occult usage of the Enneagram doesn’t end there. The Enneagram is partnered with various occult practices and beliefs such as Metatron’s cube (the same Metatron who supposedly taught Ichazo the Enneagram), sacred geometry, the “flower of life”, Neo-gnosticism, the Kabbalah, divination and numerology (see images below). 

Some of the more alarming Enneagram practices I have seen in the Christian communities are the Enneagram’s teaching on sin. It teaches that sin is a character limitation of your personality type and the remedy for it is to follow the teachings of your Enneagram. In a sort of Evangelical Gnosticism, sin becomes a matter of greater knowledge, instead of reforming our will. Instead of confession and repentance, it becomes the teachings of the Enneagram that deals with the sin in our lives.

The Enneagram is and always has been a mixture of esoteric “wisdom” and various eastern mysticism so when it gets packaged as a Christian tool the lines between the occult and orthodoxy gets blurred. 

Now I have heard very good-willed Christians tell me that it all doesn’t matter because they are able to incorporate the Enneagram into their faith well as it has been Christianised, but the problem lies in that there are also people who have Christianised Astrology and good-willed Christians who practice witchcraft but we certainly aren’t condoning those practices, why should we with the Enneagram? Much like Astrology which has been known to open doors to demonic oppression, I have come to learn of people who have needed to go through deliverance themselves and during the deliverance discovered the Enneagram to be the open door that caused it. When the enemy tries to corrupt Christians it is usually with something small, something you are willing to compromise on, but after a while, you start noticing that something just isn’t the same, you aren’t as passionate as you used to be, you aren’t praying as you used to or perhaps you have started to question aspects of your faith you would never have. The corruption of the saints always starts with something small (Ss 2:15). as Screwtape writes to Wormwood in C.S. Lewis’s “Screwtape Letters”:

“Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one- the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts...” 

So Should Christians use it?

Something which functions more like an Evangelical Gnosticism that was given by something that sounds like a demon is probably something to stay away from, no matter how useful, but in the incredible freedom we have, you will have to follow your convictions. Just know that like sacrificial meat, if it causes your brothers to stumble or to start delving deeper into the New Age beliefs it’s probably best to abandon (Romans 14:14-23). If the Enneagram was indeed just a test I might have left it to disappear over time as all the other tests have, but the Enneagram doesn’t claim to be that, it claims to be a blueprint to your true self, it claims to be spirituality.

1 Corinthians 2:15 “The spiritual person judges/discerns all things”

So what should be the Christian perspective on our identity and its formation?

Its a lot harder than the Enneagram because it's not methodological, and the reason there isn’t a method is because it's supposed to come from a place of relationship with God. There is no method, there is faith in Jesus. Our identity and personalities are revealed, understood and shaped as we walk with the indwelling Spirit and our hearts of stone gets turned into hearts of flesh (Ezekiel 36:26). In light of faith, where do we find identity?

We can only understand ourselves from the perspective of who we are in contexts of God. Creator - Created/ Father-Son. This is both our anthropological starting point and the beginning of our interaction with God. In the prayer of Jesus, it starts with “Our Father in heaven” so that our spirits can both look up and engage with the divine from the perspective that we are sons and daughters in light of God being a father.

In Exodus 3:11 Moses asks God who is he, what his worth is and in response to that questions, God responds that He is with him.

In Genesis 39:2 Joseph is at the slave market and gets called a successful man because God was with him.

Our worth and identity come not from the perception of others or the perception of self. It comes from the fact that God is with us.

This God is with us or worded differently God is in relationship with us is where we start to gather our identity from. It was St Thomas Aquinas who defined the trinity as Subsistent relationship. God as Trinity is based on whom the 3 persons of the trinity are respectively in relation to one another. St Augustine put it this way: "They [the three divine persons] are each in each and all in each, and each in all and all in all, and all are one”. Likewise, we have been called into this relationship with the trinity as Christ now hosts humanity in his Hypostatic union and we host the Holy Spirit inside ourselves. Therefore as the Sons and Daughters of God, our identity is no longer drawn based on that which we have assumed onto ourselves but to better understand ourselves we are to look at what has been given to us concerning this “perichoresis” as the Church fathers called it.

"The crucial point, in a word, is that the relation to God, and to others in God, that establishes the individual substance in being is generous. The relation itself makes and lets me in my substantial being be. This “letting be” implies a kind of primordial, ontological “circumincession,” or “perichoresis,” of giving and receiving between the other and myself. What I am in my original constitution as a person has always already been given to me by God and received by me in and as my response to God’s gift to me of myself “― David L. Schindler.

This ontology of who we are concerning God is important in light of all the different things that contribute to our assumed identity in the modern world. I believe there to be 5 approaches to identity that I think is worth looking at:

1. God: who we are concerning God

2. Universal: the aspects that apply to everyone's identity such as gender (although in neoliberalism this is being challenged).

3. Individual: “Self-Expression” “I am who I say I am.”

4. Malleable: that which is shaped by our environment and culture. The shaping within Christian culture has been called Liturgical formation.

5. Fluidity: our assumed identity changes over time, the extreme end of this is in neoliberalism’s perspective that gender is fluid and can change daily if needed.

There is a Cistercian saying I heard that says: “The Soul isn’t in any one part, but in the whole” and while this ontology of subsistent relationship doesn’t explain the human condition as a whole, it is, however, a Spiritual path to a greater understanding of ourselves in contrast to the spiritual path the Enneagram provides.

This mystical ontology begins not with “who am I”, but begins with “who are you, Lord”. It is the divine alterity that is absolute and our human identity that is dependant on it. In the first paragraph of John Calvin’s “Institutes,” he says this:

“Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and ourselves… no one can look upon himself without immediately turning his thoughts to the contemplation of God, in whom he “lives and moves”… Again, it is certain that man never achieves a clear knowledge of himself unless he first looked upon God’s face, and then descends from contemplating him to scrutinise himself”.

To understand yourself as a Christian you have to embrace a counter-cultural non-humanistic narrative that is found throughout the new testament, you need to die to yourself. You cannot understand yourself or should I say understand your identity without losing it in who God is. 

John 3:30 says it this way:” He must increase, but I must decrease”.

It seems that as our autonomy decreases in light of God, our “self” increases as we fully grasp who we are concerning God. The same can be said the other way. As we become absolute in our life, our sense of ‘self’ decreases. That's why in the modern-day ‘selfie culture’ the more our humanism increases the more there seems to be a lack of identity and it is this unstable foundation of “self” that is leading to so much of the degradation of society. “Those who lose their life for my sake will find it” (Matt 16:25).

In contrast to the Enneagram as a path to your true essence, you can understand this view as relational essentialism in which my ontology or my “who I am” is an expression of my deepest relation and who I become is the end product of what I place in a position of importance in my life. The Christian view would be that I am who I am in light of God and what He created me to be, and what I will become needs to be shaped by the guidance of the Spirit and His word, thus God is both my prime relation and my prime significance. 

It is this path of relationship that is our path to our true selves. Our Method is relationship and our goal is union with God. The incredible thing about this is that from the moment you grasp who you are in God you find yourself transcending your subjective self to be empowered to walk as Christ walked and to announce His kingdom is at hand. The shame is that for so many Christians their “personality” has become their excuse to ignore the great commission. There are so many things Millennials have found their identity in rather than God, it’s one thing to have something be a part of who you are, but don’t make it your whole.

These tests can be helpful, however, they are not supposed to shape your identity, it is merely there to help you understand yourself and that understanding changes over time.

We worship a God who has intimately known us since he formed us in our mother's wombs, he knows every hair on our heads and he knows exactly who you will become. Walk with Him, live life in union with Him. That is who you are. The beloved of God.

If you are interested in reading more on Christian new age I recommend the Pontifical Council’s report on it titled “Jesus Christ the Bearer of the water of life”

and if you were interested in finding out which onion you are, you can do so here

Israel Fouché

A son, friend and lover of grace, Israel is a graduate from Bethel church in Redding, California and member of the Community of St Anselm under the Archbishop of Canterbury. He is passionate about teaching people about the healing power of God and demonstrating the love of the father through it. He has taken a message of Good hope to various nations and is now based in South Africa where he is the site pastor for Father’s House Cape Town.

follow him on Instagram @israelfouche