Thinking Christian

Someone sent me a link to this YouTube video on “The Church of Oprah Exposed.” Oprah Winfrey has launched a series of webcasts in partnership with New Age author Eckhart Tolle, and claims viewership of 2 million people. I invite you–Christians, in particular–to view the YouTube video. I think it’s pretty persuasive, especially for those who begin with a Biblical mindset, but I’m not going to comment further on that here. Instead I’ve gone to Oprah’s website to see what she has to say for herself. (I’ll come back to the video in a bit also.)

Actually, the most telling reading on Oprah’s site was from Tolle. There is, for example, an excerpt from his book A New Earth. It gets off to a classic New Age beginning:

Is humanity ready for a transformation of consciousness, an inner flowering so radical and profound that compared to it the flowering of plants, no matter how beautiful, is only a pale reflection? Can human beings lose the density of their conditioned mind structures and become like crystals or precious stones, so to speak, transparent to the light of consciousness? Can they defy the gravitational pull of materialism and materiality and rise above identification with form that keeps the ego in place and condemns them to imprisonment within their own personality?

The possibility of such a transformation has been the central message of the great wisdom teachings of humankind. The messengers—Buddha, Jesus, and others, not all of them known—were humanity’s early flowers. They were precursors, rare and precious beings.

Regarding Tolle’s teachings,

This online class is not for or against any religion. It is intended to help all human beings, all over the world, bring about a shift in consciousness. Eckhart says, “How spiritual you are has nothing to do with what you believe but everything to do with your state of consciousness…. When I occasionally quote the words of Jesus or the Buddha…or from other teachings, I do so not in order to compare, but to draw your attention to the fact that in essence there is and always has been only one spiritual teaching, although it comes in many forms.

I do not accuse Tolle of willful deception. For all I know, he may be fully convinced this is true. Nevertheless this is entirely wrong. These sorts of things are commonly believed among adherents of new spirituality, but they are quite simply and thoroughly false.

In one aspect, the New Age is not wrong: in its calling persons to spirituality. I have written in support of that, as has Christian psychologist and author Henry Cloud. I fully endorse the search for something deeper, stronger, better than day-to-day material existence.

But this new spirituality is wrong–most obviously wrong, that is–in its claim that it supports, completes, and unites all the sages’ wisdom. This cannot be done, and I object in strongest terms to the distortion of Christianity–and of Jesus Christ himself–that this entails.

Jesus Christ did not say that spiritual fulfillment is about developing a new state of consciousness. He most decidedly did not say (as new spirituality proponents typically do) that it’s about recognizing one’s own divinity. He did not say, as Oprah did in the video linked above, that “There couldn’t possibly be one way;” that there are millions of paths to God. He did not say, as Oprah said in the video, “God, in the essence of all consciousness, isn’t something to believe, God is; and God is a feeling experience, not a believing experience… if God for you is still about a belief, then it’s not truly God.”

In fact, when Jesus rebuked his followers it was for their lack of belief. He said he was the one way to the Father. He said that spiritual fulfillment comes from recognizing we are not God, that we need God, and that we can only come to God through recognizing and believing who he is, how we fall short, and how he graciously draws us to himself anyway through Christ. Tolle cannot reconcile that with his supposedly all-inclusive teachings.

Supposedly all-inclusive, I emphasize. In another video Tolle says that “the moment you say that only my belief or our belief is true, and you deny other people’s beliefs, then you’ve adopted an ideology, and then religion becomes a closed door.” Mr. Tolle, I ask you this: do you believe that? Do you then deny what I wrote in the previous two paragraphs? You say you are not for or against any religion; but Christianity does claim to have an exclusive claim through Jesus Christ: are you not opposed to that exclusive claim?

Christianity’s scandal in today’s mindset, which I have fairly emblazoned in fire across this page, is its exclusivism, its claim that it is true and contradictory beliefs are false. For this I do not apologize. It is nothing more nor less than saying that what we believe is true, we believe is true. Tolle, for his part, is saying that if his way is true, then Christ’s claims are false. He excludes my religious beliefs. In fact all belief systems are exclusivistic. (Hindu teachers in Asia are appalled at Western versions of Eastern religions that claim to accept all truths as equal. They at least know better.)

Yet, oh, this new spirituality sounds so inviting! It sounds so marvelous that we could enter into a new form of consciousness and find the freedom we so desperately want! Indeed there is freedom to be sought and to be found, in Christ. There is light, and enlightenment, and spiritual guidance, and refreshment, and all the things the New Agers tell us they can provide. There is also one thing they cannot offer: truth. For their way is patently self-contradictory, and further, it requires us to believe that we are God ourselves, that we have it within ourselves to solve all our own eternal problems (really, now!) and that Christ’s life, his death on the cross, and his resurrection were just one among many of the universe’s nice ideas.

I have great sympathy with the new spirituality’s rejection of modernist materialism. Thus far, so good. The rest, however, is rubbish.

Related: Knowing the True God

Posted by Tom Gilson under New Age | 9 Comments »

Several commenters have raised questions about God and spirituality from a New Age perspective in the past two weeks. Anna’s is the most trenchant:

Who is God? Good question. Who really knows? I believe God to be overall consciousness. Would love to hear your thoughts on this.

Bereket Teka had already offered an opinion:

Man is a thinking being, brought forth (or created) from a higher and supreme thinking being (God). As man can think and create his own reality, so can the “Universe” - which I prefer to claim it to be God, in his Omniscient presence in the universe. So, yes one can think and create his own reality - a reality that is governed by the highest thinking being and in accordance to the will and purpose of God.

I find that to be rather vague, and much too closely tied to the so-called “Law of Attraction” which claims we can create reality by our thinking. “Who is God?” remains a good question. We could back that up another step to “How could we even know the answer?”

Here’s what I find when I read New Age spirituality books: a whole lot of assertion, and little to support it. I’ve already expressed my strong doubts about Rhonda Byrne’s understanding of physics. She invents a whole new class of “energy” and makes unsupportable claims on its behalf. How does she know this energy exists? Her book, The Secret, is long on assertion and very short on solid evidence. Its appeal is to desire rather than to reason. As Henry Cloud has pointed out, that is not all wrong. Yet it is suspiciously convenient: believe that you are “God in a physical body,” and that “The earth turns on its orbit for You, The oceans ebb and flow for You,” and you can make your life anything you want it to be.

But I believe in the God of the Bible, about whom the same question is very frequently asked. How do we know this God is real? Proofs that can satisfy every mind do not exist, but in contrast to New Age spirituality, there is at least a plethora of strong evidence (see here and here for starters).

And who is this God of the Bible? He is actually the satisfaction of every true desire. New Age spirituality does not go wrong in seeking personal fulfillment. The true God is, however, the fulfillment of true desire, whereas much (most?) human desire is marred by counterfeit feelings and wishes. God is true love, true joy, true wisdom and knowledge, true mercy. These are commonly mentioned goods in the New Age literature, and yet books like The Secret settle for surface satisfaction. Why settle for money or comfort when you can have a forever relationship with the great and loving God of the universe? Why should we, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis, reject God’s offer of a holiday at the seashore because we’re so enamored of making mud pies in the slum?

He is also Creator, and he stands in a position of Other next to his creation. He is an absolutely intimately, lovingly, connected other; but his relationship to creation is not sameness but of connected love. The closest analogies to that in human experience might be that of artist to painting, composer to music, sculptor to sculpture; and yet also in a different way parent to child. The artistic creator is not the artistic creation, but is indelibly expressed throughout. The parent is not the child but loves her with an unmatched devotion. God as creator shares in and is the perfect expression of these.

He is also true personhood, the ultimate expression of a Self. Compared to this, New Age belief that “all is one, God is all, all is God,” falls far short. Christianity teaches a relationship with God in which love is celebrated, not obliterated by the annihilation of self as in New Age.

He is also true justice, based on true holiness. Holiness in this context means God is morally perfect. He cannot do wrong, because his nature is fully good, unmixed with evil, not marred by rebellion as ours is. His justice flows from this: where evil exists, it is inexorably dealt with, for he cannot condone evil

God is not, then, the fulfillment of false desires: the desire for independence from our Creator, the desire to harm self or others, the desire for power and prestige for their own sakes, the desire to control others, or desires for many other kinds of satisfaction outside the context for which they were created. We believe we can get what we want apart from God. That cannot be, though: he did not create us that way. Yet we proceed on that false basis and violate God’s holiness. We deserve his justice.

Yet he is also true mercy, through the work of Jesus Christ. Christ was in fact God in the flesh. In him we can see the fullness of God’s moral perfection; we see the character of God. Always loving, always teaching, sometimes rebuking, always standing for true worship of the true God; always standing against hypocrisy and perversion of religion; never compromising; so thoroughly unwilling to bend on these principles that he was killed by the enemies he made in the process. Even his death was in his plan, though. Through it he paid the penalty demanded by God’s justice for our rebellion, so that, justice being satisfied, God can express his mercy toward those who accept Christ’s work for them.

Jesus Christ is also the ultimate answer to “Who is God, and how would we know?” He said he was God in the flesh, and he backed it up through his perfection of life, his miracles, and ultimately his resurrection from the grave. Seeing his character, we know much about the character of God. Seeing his works, we have strong confidence that we are in touch with truth.

This God is not one we would have made up. He is not molded to our everyday surface wishes. He is a God whose awesome power, otherness, and justice are to be “feared:” to be held in absolute, terrific awe and reverence, knowing how much more infinitely great and good he is than us. He makes strong demands upon us: he demands that we live according to the plan for which he created us. He metes out justice where we fail to meet his demands. In his love, through Christ, he takes the payment of justice upon himself. Then he helps us meet those demands and we discover what they are, and discover more of what God is through them: His demand, ultimately, is that we live for the greatest and deepest possible love and joy.

The pantheistic “God” of New Age spirituality already seemed exceedingly unlikely. Now, in comparison to the true God, this false god also seems bland, pale, and boring.

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith & New Age | 3 Comments »

Dr. Henry Cloud’s DVD on The Secret Things of God has been available for just a few weeks now. It’s a teaching DVD, based on a book of the same name. It’s well worth viewing. It’s worthwhile on one important level, in that he’s an entertaining speaker–he has a sense of humor and a long list of great stories to tell. More importantly, he has unusual insight into what makes people tick.

I’ve worked with Dr. Cloud on many occasions. A Christian psychologist who has an outstanding grip on how to interpret modern psychology within a solid Biblical worldview framework, he has consulted with our mission agency regarding many team issues and personnel matters. He and John Townsend co-authored the multi-million selling Boundaries. Three of Cloud’s lesser-known books comprise a strong Biblical theology of personal growth character development, and leadership. They are, respectively, Changes That Heal, How People Grow (with John Townsend), and Integrity: The Courage to Meet the Demands of Reality. Working with him, I had the opportunity to develop a leadership assessment based partly on the Changes That Heal model, which for a while was a part of his Ultimate Leadership workshops.

The Secret Things of God is a response to Rhonda Byrne’s New Age bestseller, The Secret. Byrne claims to have discovered a revolutionary new way for all of us to get just what we want out of life: “The Law of Attraction.”

“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. Human beings manage their own magnetizing energy, because no one outside of them can think or feel for them, and it is thoughts and feelings that create our frequencies.”

I’ve already reviewed her book on this blog. Most of it is, to put it mildly, rampant nonsense; but that didn’t stop it from being a wild sales success. I had to wonder why so many people would go for it. When I had the opportunity to interview Dr. Cloud about it, that was the first question I asked him. (The interview was not taped, so his answers here are as I transcribed and later edited them.)

You would not be able to sell a book that says if you crack an egg on your head, you’ll become a happy person. There has to be enough truth, or viability to intersect with people’s experience so they don’t think it’s a total kook job. It’s a broadly documented position that how we think affects outcomes. We have research in performance, as in the sales industry, that Optimistic vs. Pessimistic thinking styles really make a difference. The dumb optimists blow the smart pessimists out of the water all the time.

In clinical syndromes, changing thinking is a huge part of overcoming even clinical problems. So we begin with why would people even be open to it? It begins with an idea people can resonate with, and it’s “Oh, it’s all in my head.”

But that begins to break down, in that we do not control external reality, as has been often documented. So how can you take a plausible, verifiable starting point and get them to buy into the whole package? That’s the question.

The book has two other “hooks:” everybody, at some time in their lives, has wondered is there something beyond the material world I can see, the transcendent metaphysical question. The Secret says it’s the Law of Attraction. It’s impersonal, it doesn’t ask anything of you, it leaves you alone, it does what it does–like gravity.

And then–this may be one of the strongest motivators–is the book promises to be able to render an effect in the areas of life you care most deeply about–relationships, feeling, success.

Other than it’s a New Age bestseller that you disagree with, what have you been seeing in people that led you to write The Secret Things of God?

There were a number of books immediately written to bash it, to show disagreements. That was not why I wrote my book. I was contacted by the publisher of The Secret (Simon and Schuster). They were originally thinking that it says a lot of the things that intersect with what the Bible says, and they asked me to write the Christian version of The Secret, and show where The Secret came from the Bible. I said there are some areas where The Secret comes from the Bible, but there are many areas where it diverges….

We have a culture like what Paul saw in Acts 17, a very spiritual culture. You don’t get much argument about, “is spirituality or metaphysics viable.” To me, it was just like when Paul went to Athens. They’re interested in spiritual matters. These books sell millions of copies. The Secret is like the monument to the unknown God. And Paul says this God can be known, he’s right around us, and not only that, there are laws and “secrets” in the Bible that govern how you feel, how you succeed. They’re built in by the Designer, and they’re not really secrets.

Regarding the DVD, after the book came out and did well, Fox said they wanted to distribute a DVD short film on it, and what I decided to do with that was not to take a particularly sectarian approach, but to communicate that these laws are transcendent, whether you believe in them or not, whether you believe in a designer or not.

So I went and interviewed experts in all walks of life who have experience in the validity of these principles, whether or not they’re Christians…. The research validates God’s ways. “If you don’t believe me, believe the works I do.” “If you hold to my teachings, you’ll know the truth and the truth will set me free.” My point in this was God has given us his ways, try these teachings, find out, and you’ll find out God’s ways are true and it’s not stuff a bunch of guys made up.

You cover a number of principles on the DVD for “unlocking the treasures reserved for us.” Is one of them more urgent than any other in today’s culture? If you had to limit your message to just one of the points, which would it be?

There actually is. The problem is, it’s paradoxical; so people do not experience it as the most urgent. What I talk about in the book is there’s a secret that unlocks the others, the meta-secret, which is trust. For life to be in concert with its design, and for you to grow and your life to enlarge, and for you to get better, you must open yourself up to power sources and information sources outside yourself. And no matter what anybody is doing, if they are living the closed-circle individualistic “I’m-going-to-do-it-my-own-way” kind of life, no matter what it ultimately implodes.

But that doesn’t give people the answer they want. For example, I knew a guy who was starting a new company in an industry where he had been very successful. He went to someone else who had started another company in the same industry. He asked for advice, and the answer he was given was, “I put together a group of very wise people who would support me, give me good feedback, hold me accountable; and you need a support system where you get truth spoken into your life first.” The first guy was upset. He wanted practical stuff, tactical advice. And he went off and started doing his plan basically wise unto himself. Within a couple years was bankrupt. He had made millions and millions when he had the right structure around him, but not when he went off to do things on his own.

God says you have to open up and trust Him and some other people first, and if you can get into those two relationships, that’s the meta-secret. Because from there you can find anything you need. But if you have a broken “trust muscle,” you’re like a baby who can’t take in the milk.

We tend to want to go for the results first. I tell my own story about how nothing worked until Matthew 6:33 hit me: “Seek first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness, and then all these things will be added unto you.” Trust comes before the results, and we want the results first.

Just a brief reaction to this: among some Christian circles, psychology is very suspect. For Dr. Cloud to say there may be something of interest in The Secret is even more risky–in some circles. Note carefully what he has said though: not so much that the book has much by way of right answers, but that it has a good question: “Are there spiritual answers to how I can live a satisfying life?” Certainly much of the “secret” is pantheistic and wrong. There’s a kernel of truth, though, in its insistence that our thinking deeply affects our lives. Take that kernel to Scripture and you end up answering many people’s most urgently felt question.

Again, I strongly recommend Dr. Cloud to you, including this latest from him.

Posted by Tom Gilson under 21st Century Faith & New Age | 7 Comments »

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.

Posted by Tom Gilson under New Age | 17 Comments »

Update, February 18 2008: Somebody at a closed forum at toysoldiersunite has opened up a discussion about this post. I welcome the visitors, but hey, I’m curious what you’re saying! I’d appreciate it if someone would let me know what’s going on there. Thanks.

You can’t help but smile when you read a Manifesto that begins,

Hello, my name is Dr. Phineas Waldolf Steel™ and I’m crazy. At least that’s what they tell me. It’s a real load off my mind too. I mean you can get away with pretty much anything if you’re bonkers.

Dr. Steel is definitely one interesting character. He has a website and apparently a company called World Domination Toys, and his two chief goals in life seem to be to have fun and to become World Emperor. A correspondent directed me to his website with questions about what he’s teaching there.

I don’t know how well-known he is. He might be just a local phenomenon in his home state of California (where else?), or he might have quite a following (did I mention he’s a musician?). I’ve been unable to track down information on his popularity, so I don’t know how to gauge how many people are paying any attention to him. (I may end up regretting giving him publicity!)

For all his affecting of goggles (apparently he’s never seen without them) and his plans to rule the world, though, Dr. Steel raises some interesting issues, and someone actually did put a question to me. He represents a fascinating eclectic, commercialized form of New Age thinking.

And besides, after all the time I’ve spent on The Golden Compass, I’m ready to work on Something Completely Different. Dr. Steel certainly qualifies. Continue Reading »

Posted by Tom Gilson under New Age | 45 Comments »