Thinking Christian

Book Review

Rhonda Byrne’s The Secret, published over a year ago, still holds a spot on Barnes & Noble’s bestseller racks, and ranks second in book sales at Amazon.com. I finally read it yesterday. I’m getting ready to preview Henry Cloud’s soon-to-be-released DVD, The Secret Things of God, which he prepared in response to this book. (Dr. Cloud’s book of that same title is already available.) I’ll be viewing his DVD soon after I write this, and at some time soon I’ll post a review, but I can’t help jumping in with some of my own reactions first.

The Secret says we can all have a better life: better relationships, better health, better finances, better success, better everything. All it takes is better, more positive thinking, for “The Law of Attraction” guarantees we will attract whatever we think. If we expect bad things, we’ll attract them; if we count on good things coming our way, they assuredly will.

This is but one of eight spiritual guidance/self-help books currently in Amazon’s top 25. There’s a reason they sell so well: we all want better lives. We want more joy and success, less pain and loss. We (many of us) want more spiritual lives.

So I greet books like these with a sense of familiar recognition, a kind of appreciation for the desire that drives them. I wrote once before of one author’s view that materialism–the philosophy that denies any genuine spiritual reality behind the physical world–may be reaching its “expiration date.” Do you yearn for something spiritual to improve your life? I have the same longing, and I lament the loss of spirituality in our modern age.

So I wish Rhonda Byrne had really told us the true Secret for spirituality and joy, but sadly, she has not.

Like other New Agers at least as far back as Fritjof Capra, she tries to bridge the world of spirit and science through quantum mechanics (pp. 156-157):

“Let me explain how you are the most powerful transmission tower in the Universe. In simple terms, all energy vibrates at a frequency. Being energy, you also vibrate at a frequency, and what determines your frequency at any time is whatever you are thinking and feeling. All the things you want are made of energy, and they are vibrating too….

“Here is the ‘wow’ factor. When you think about what you want, and you emit that frequency, you cause the energy of what you want to vibrate at that frequency and you bring it to You! As you focus on what you want, you are changing the vibration of the atoms of that thing, and you are causing it to vibrate to You….

“When you think about and feel those good things that you want, you have immediately tuned yourself to that frequency, which then causes the energy of all those things to vibrate to you, and they appear in your life. The law of attraction says that like attracts like. You are an energy magnet, so you electrically energize everything to you and electrically energize yourself to everything you want.”

Her bridge won’t bear that weight. Clearly she wants to explain how the law of attraction works. There is no prayer-answering God in her worldview, so there has to be some other causal link between our minds and the things that happen to us. Her law of attraction does not say that if we are responsible, optimistic, and hard-working, we’ll see good things as the fruit of our good labors. Her law of attraction says that good things will come our way just by our expecting them, just by having a positive hope regarding what we want. There’s a great example of this right before that last quoted passage:

“I never studied science or physics at school, and yet when I read complex books on quantum physics I understood them perfectly because I wanted to understand them.”

You need not understand quantum mechanics as well as she thinks she does to know that the mysterious “frequency” of which she speaks must have (literally) unbelievable information-carrying capacity, as well as amazingly high power. It can read our thoughts to bring us a Mercedes instead of a lawn mower. Its power radiates outward to the drunk drivers of the world and lets their befuddled minds know to stay far from us–or maybe instead (she doesn’t quite say) it works on their cars to prevent them coming our way.

It’s a muddled mess, actually. Again, I can appreciate the desire to bring science and spirituality together into one happy household. We Christians know about seeking scientific evidences for God. We do not, however, try to make science actually do the spiritual work of our worldview. This seeking for support in quantum mechanics seems a desperate maneuver for legitimacy.

There is little warrant for this worldview, yet it attracts an awful of people. Maybe it’s because it lets us think so highly of ourselves:

“You are God in a physical body. You are Spirit in the flesh. You are Eternal Life expressing itself as You. You are a cosmic being. You are all power. You are all wisdom. You are all intelligence. You are perfection. You are magnificence. You are the creator, and you are creating the creation of You on this planet” (p. 164).

…

“The earth turns on its orbit for You, The oceans ebb and flow for You. The sun rises and sets for You. The stars come out for You. Every beautiful thing you see, every wondrous thing you experience, is all there, for You. Take a look around. None of it can exist, without You. No matter who you thought you were, now you know the Truth of Who You Really Are. You are the master of the Universe. You are the heir to the kingdom. You are the perfection of life. And now you know The Secret” (p. 183, the closing words of the book).

There’s plenty of feel-good power there. I can appreciate the need for it: in a messed-up world of failures and loss, sometimes all we want is to feel better about ourselves, and to have things go our way a bit more than they do. But we are not God in a physical body. We are not all power. We are not all wisdom. We are not perfection. The oceans do not ebb and flow for us, and the world could exist without us, as it did for long eons before we were born.

There has to be a more honest, more realistic, and better way to find what we’re looking for in life. And there is. It is the open secret, the true mystery revealed, the genuine way to living the life we were designed to live. It’s not based on false science but on spiritual reality. Its good outcomes are not delivered through some concocted electrical frequency, but through a personal relationship with an all-powerful Person who loves us. There is hope, and there is reason to be optimistic and positive, and there is a God who really answers prayers. Pain, loss, and death are unavoidable, but there is also resurrection. There is abundant life and genuine spiritual beauty in the true God, revealed in His Son, Jesus Christ.

The Secret, by Rhonda Byrne. 2006:Atria Books/Beyond Words; 216 pages.

My guest column in the Newport News Daily Press appeared again today, under the headline “God answers it all.” It’s on Charles Colson’s provocative assertion that “Christianity is the explanation for everything.”

(The above link will disappear in 1-2 weeks, after which you may still access the article in PDF form here.)

Because of limited space, I could not address all the questions I knew my article would raise. My focus was not so much on whether Colson’s statement was true, but on what it means. To summarize: God, through His self-revelation, has given us a structure of knowledge and a background of information by which we must interpret and understand everything.

Whether this is true obviously matters, too, though; so I wrote:

This is but one brief illustration of what Colson was getting at….
But was his statement true? Is Christianity really the explanation for everything? Again, space will not allow me to address that question here the way it deserves (though I’m happy to do so at www.thinkingchristian.net).

Real Knowledge of God Makes All the Difference
The question surely comes down to this: did God create the universe, and did He reveal His ways to us through the Bible such that we can understand what He has said? Do we have real knowledge of the Person and purpose by which the world was made and we humans came to be the way we are? If so, that knowledge must make all the difference.

This does not mean that we do not live in a natural world where ordinary things happen in ordinary ways. It means rather that we have a different perspective on those ordinary things: they can often have extraordinary significance under God. Every choice matters.

It also does not mean that we ought actually to use the word “God” in every explanation, as for example (using Ohm’s Law for electricity),

Voltage equals current times resistance, because God made it that way (and we hope He doesn’t change His mind too often!).

No, for when we’re looking in the natural sphere, natural explanations are generally quite sufficient for the purpose. In the background, though, we can bear in mind that all this came from a Person who created a world where we can count on natural events happening predictably in natural ways. Francis Collins, Director of the Human Genome Project, provides a great example of that mindset:

As a scientist who is also a believer, virtually everything that we uncover day after day about the human genome and how it works is also a glimpse of God’s mind. My work is a celebration of our understanding of nature, but more importantly a celebration of what God has done.

Open For Questions
Again, though, do we really have knowledge of God and His purposes? The controversy on this is undeniable. My position is that God has given us considerable and very sufficient evidence that He is real, through the record of the Bible, through His work in history, through what He has created, and through His work in the lives of many, many followers.

There’s a space limitation here in this blog, too, but in the right-hand column of this web page you’ll see a link for “Evidences,” which will refer you to much additional information on this (or just click here). There is also another set of evidence-oriented blog entries you can reach from the right-hand column here, the former home page of this blog.

And to save you the trouble of searching for specifics, the comments section below is open for your questions.

(Thanks to Mark D. Roberts for the Francis Collins link.)

“Christians feel guilty about the Crusades, so much so that the very term has become politically incorrect, and the irreligious bring them up often. There are certainly events in the Crusades that no Christian could possibly defend, but they were preceded by Jihad, and the unwillingness of Muslims to admit any error is revealing. Islam spread by conquest and most of the territory they conquered had been Christian.”

[From One Eternal Day: Jihad and Crusade]

Robert Spencer writes of religion and slavery in world history, including:

[T]he pressure to end [slavery] moved from Christendom into Islam, not the other way around. There was no Muslim Clarkson, Wilberforce, or Garrison. In fact, when the British government in the nineteenth century adopted the view of Wilberforce and the other abolitionists as its own and thereupon began to put pressure on pro-slavery regimes, the Sultan of Morocco was incredulous precisely because of the audacity of the innovation that the British were proposing: “The traffic in slaves,” he noted, “is a matter on which all sects and nations have agreed from the time of the sons of Adam . . . up to this day.”

…

There is evidence that slavery still continues beneath the surface in some majority-Muslim countries as well—notably Saudi Arabia, which only abolished slavery in 1962, Yemen and Oman, both of which ended legal slavery in 1970, and Niger, which didn’t abolish slavery until 2004. In Niger, the ban is widely ignored, and as many as one million people remain in bondage. Slaves are bred, often raped, and generally treated like animals.

Some of the evidence that Islamic slavery still goes on consists of a spate of slavery cases involving Muslims in the United States.

[From FIRST THINGS: On the Square » Blog Archive » Slavery, Christianity, and Islam]
The entire article provides important historical and religious perspective on a practice that most tragically has not yet ended.

Updates have been posted on one of the best online theism/atheism debates: God or Blind Nature? Philosophers Debate the Evidence

I missed some of this as it was going on. Thanks go to Fides Quarens Intellectum for the reminder. Not sure when I’ll get a chance to read this, though, since I’m in the middle of a couple very busy weeks at work.

Joe Carter ends a detailed and eye-opening correction to the myth of Galileo, and concludes with:

I suspect that there are many more lessons that can be gleaned from this story. But I find that the real moral is not so much in the story itself but in the fact that the story even needs to be told in the first place. While I first heard the story of Galileo in elementary school, it wasn’t until long, long after I had graduated from college that I finally learned the truth. No doubt some people are just now hearing about it for the first time. How is that possible?

[From the evangelical outpost: The Myth of Galileo: A Story With A (Mostly) Valuable Lesson]

Christians often pray, “God, let us see you work in power.” We may not understand what it is we ask. God does His best work following a death.

I approach this topic very cautiously, for though there is something important to say here, there is a danger of trivializing it. I just spent several hours with a very good friend whose mother passed away a few weeks ago. Her passing was very difficult. The pain of my own mother’s death, almost a year and a half ago, is still very real, though not as fresh and strong as my friend’s grief is today. Death is not what God originally intended. It means something is wrong with the world. It is an enemy. In Christ’s resurrection, death was dealt a mortal blow; but it still kicks in its final throes. It is the last enemy yet to be defeated, at the end of the age.

Imagine being one of Christ’s followers in the day when He was taken to trial, to torture, and then to execution. He had told them often in advance that this had to happen. They did not understand; they fought the idea. Nothing, not even His frequent warnings, could prepare them for the loss, the injustice, the massive dashing of their hopes and dreams. Peter denied Him, others deserted Him. The women, more than the men, stayed with Him to the end; yet even for them, what a horrific end it seemed to be. This man had brought them unparalleled hope, healing, and love. He was the one who had words of eternal life. He had proved his supernatural power through repeated miracles. Then He was gone. I don’t know if any other death in history could have produced so much shock and grief.

We experience the grief of loved ones dying. We each face our own end. Further, we all experience loss and disappointment: being turned down by someone we love, being rejected by family members, losing jobs or opportunities, suffering injury or disease. These are lesser deaths.

Yet just as Christ’s death brought unparalleled pain, surely His rising brought His followers unparalleled joy! What could compare to Mary’s elation when she saw Him alive that Sunday morning, or the other disciples’ relief and happiness when He appeared among them? How often and with what unrestrainable smiles do you suppose they spoke of that among themselves, the rest of their lives? What could have been a happier moment than seeing Him alive? And what could have been a greater display of God’s power?

We pray for God to work in power, not always remembering that this is when we see Him most at work: when we most need Him. God does His best work following a death, even if it’s of a death of the lesser, figurative sort.

In 2001 my wife and I realized we ought to leave our positions at the headquarters of Campus Crusade for Christ. I was getting what I call “headquarters disease.” I was a Human Resources director, with national responsibilities, but I was getting disconnected from the field and from the reason I was doing what I was doing. When someone called me on the phone, it felt like an interruption, a bother to me. That was obviously wrong, and we decided the cure had to include leaving headquarters and going back to front-line ministry work.

We ended up in southeast Virginia–and it didn’t turn out to be what we had expected. We experienced some very deep disappointments, unfulfilled expectations, and very difficult conflict (this was with persons who are not now part of the ministry). I was certainly part of the problem; some real changes were needed in my own heart.

For a while it was, well, really awful. We had uprooted our family from one city, and now we were seriously wondering whether we were going to stay in this new one for long. We were living in an apartment we had rented as a base for living while we hunted for a home to buy. It would have been easy, in one sense, just to leave. It would have been terribly wrenching in another sense.

My wife was feeling it as badly as I was. One day she went for a drive down a street that we had visited more than once before, that we thought would be a particularly nice place to live. There were only a few houses on the cul-de-sac at the end of the street. None of them, unfortunately, were for sale. She prayed that day in a kind of desperation for answers and for hope “God, we don’t know if we’re supposed to be here. If you want us to stay, would you please, please, please open up a house on this cul-de-sac suitable for us to live in!”

Two days later I was with several co-workers driving north toward a conference in Gettysburg. We hadn’t even crossed the county line when my cell phone rang. My wife said, “The real estate agent has a house for us to look at.” I said, “Come on, you know I can’t look at any houses until after the conference!” She said, “It’s on the street we want, Tom.” I said, “Oh!” (Brilliant, no?) “I guess you’d better go look at it!”

She checked it out that same morning. It was listed for well below market price, and it fit our desired description almost exactly. The seller accepted our bid with a contingency clause, such that we could pull out of it if I disagreed when I came home. That house is where we’re living now. God was starting to do some of his best work, giving us hope and direction in the midst of what seemed like a deathly situation.

Relationships at work did not improve just then; in fact, for a while the situation continued to get worse. It became clear that I was not going to thrive in that position, and that we would have to make a change. We had no clue what that could mean. We had bought the house, we were not interested in moving (nor did we believe God wanted us to move), and yet there was no other position on the horizon for us locally. Around that time we also took a very severe financial loss, and my father-in-law died a very difficult death. Things were not getting easier.

And then another job with our organization opened up, virtually out of nowhere right near home. It was going to be what I would have considered to be my dream job, working with some of my favorite people in the organization. (And the office was walking distance from Starbucks!) It started out looking great, but even that dream died, too, when for reasons too complicated to explain, there just wasn’t a lot of work to do. The income was there, but the projects weren’t. Another dream seemed to have been spiked.

But God was doing some of his best work still. I was starting to recognize what I had learned from the rough relationships I had just been in–some extremely important personal leadership and character lessons. I can’t go into them here without sharing more openly than I should about the whole situation. Suffice it to say that I couldn’t be doing what I am now without having been through all of that. I am stronger than I was; and I am unreservedly grateful to God for it all.

Now let me back up a moment to another dream. I had always wanted to write–I just never had a clue how to get published. Now I was in a situation that afforded me time to think, study, and write–and now, too, there was blogging. That was the beginning of this whole adventure; and the dream has borne fruit in being published several times beyond the blog (see “Clips” above). I can’t imagine how this door would have opened without being in a situation that seemed like a dream that died.

And since then, the job projects and opportunities have opened up as well, just as I had thought and hoped they would two years earlier. (The story on that transition is as amazing as others I’ve told here, but to go into it all would make this long post really long.) I believe this new set of responsibilities and opportunities was in the plan all along–but that God also had a plan to fulfill a lifelong dream and vision (writing) along the way.

This has been bought the short version of a long story. I could tell much more about this and other things like it, and so could any follower of Christ. The Bible is full of such tales–Joseph, Moses, and many more. We all have dreams, hopes, plans, relationships; and some of those dreams, hopes, plans, and relationships die.

I look back over the past few years and I see both deaths and resurrections. The resurrections are where God’s hand is most clearly visible. They are where God has been most glorified. They wouldn’t have happened–couldn’t have happened–without the deaths. These experiences are miniatures of his final work yet to come, when both death and resurrection (for His followers) are not metaphorical but very real. Christ was first. He opened the door, so that any who are willing to follow may walk through after Him.

For a follower of Christ, no death, whether figurative or literal, is final. It’s God’s preparation for His best work.

Part of a Series: What Christ Does For Us

• Part 1: Our Roots In God’s Plan
• Part 2: Broken Roots
• Part 3: The Extent of Brokenness
• Part 4: Restorations
• Part 5: Who Christ Is
• Part 6: Among Us, Loving Us
• Part 7: Showing How to Live
• Part 8: Death and Resurrection
• Part 9: The Cross, Again
• Part 10: Resurrection, Again
• Part 11: Life in Christ

Related: How To Keep Your New Year’s Resolutions. This post elicited a short question, to which I’m writing a very long answer in the form of this series.