Thinking Christian

Here’s a good example of how not to marry science with a worldview: the so-called Evolutionary Manifesto. There are lessons here for Christians who want to understand origins both in relation to the teachings of science as well asto alternate religions.

This Evolutionary Manifesto is not the product of science, but of a New Age-oriented worldview; yet its author seems to accept evolutionary theory as fact. It’s a rather unique version of evolutionary theory, however:

At the heart of the evolutionary worldview is the fact that evolution has a trajectory—it heads in a particular direction.

No, that’s not at the heart of evolutionary theory, at least not as biology departments teach it. It’s the theory as it has been commonly misunderstood, though: a comic-book version of evolution.

I mean that quite literally. I can remember a couple of comic books I read as a kid (why this sticks in my memory I have no idea). In one of them, the bad guy had learned how to “speed up” evolution for himself, and he personally went through a progression: from shark to fish to some kind of mammal to ape to human – and then he went right on past human to the next step, which was stronger, smarter, better in all the ways humans would value. Sure, it’s a comic book, and it’s fair that it would call on us to suspend disbelief regarding one organism experiencing eons of evolutionary change. I don’t have a problem with that. What I do have a problem with is what it did count on us believing: that evolution’s next step of progress would be something super-human like that.

In another comic there were aliens posing as humans on earth. They looked exactly like us except that “a quirk of evolution” (I remember the phrase exactly) had caused them to have two right hands (that is, their left-hand thumbs were on the wrong side of the hand). That’s how Superboy was able to identify them as impostors and save the human race. (Today they wouldn’t last two days passing themselves off as teenagers. I mean, just imagine how they would tie their hands in knots while texting!)

In both of these comic-book depictions, there is indeed a trajectory, a “particular direction” that evolution inevitably follows, unless some “quirk” sidetracks it. Real evolution, however, knows nothing of long-term progress or direction. Its only trajectory is toward whatever turns out to have been successful for reproduction. Now, did the verb tenses in that last sentence seem awkward? That was intentional, indeed necessary, to state the case accurately. Evolution’s “plan,” as it were, is to go wherever it happens to have gone. Its direction is toward wherever it happens to have ended up. It knows of progress in no other terms except reproductive fitness. And all of these terms—progress, direction, plan—are anthropomorphisms. If we see any of these sorts of things in evolution, it is because we have projected our own ways of thinking upon a process that has no analogue to it at all.

Note well that this is not an Intelligent Design distortion of evolution. This is what the theory actually means. So the above-mentioned “Evolutionary Manifesto” has almost nothing to do with real evolutionary theory. In fact, as it goes on it relies on an ironic, rather comical turn toward Intelligent Design:

In this new phase evolution will be driven intentionally, by humanity. The evolutionary worldview that emerges from an understanding of our role in the new phase has the potential to transform the nature of human existence.

Victor Reppert (at whose blog I found the link to this Manifesto) noted,

I smell the naturalistic fallacy (illicit shift from “is” to “ought”).

That’s for sure. For example:

“It relies solely on scientific knowledge and reason to identify our critical role in future evolution.”

All of the above quotes come from just the first five paragraphs. The sixth displays all of these errors in one compact location:

It is as if evolution is a developmental process. Just as a human embryo is organized to develop through a number of stages to produce an adult, evolution tends to produce a particular sequence of outcomes of increasing complexity. Initially, evolution moves in this direction of its own accord. However, at a particular point evolution will continue to advance only if certain conditions are met: organisms must emerge that awaken to the possibility that they are living in the midst of a developmental process; they must realize that the continued success of the process depends on them; and they must commit to actively moving the process forward.

Somehow this sells anyway. I wonder how many misunderstand the truth? How many think the science of evolution is about that comic-book version of progress? How many buy into New-Age optimistic corruptions of evolutionary theory? (I assure you this is not the only place I’ve seen it.) How many recognize, on the other hand, that evolutionary theory provides no basis whatever to regard humans as more advanced or progressed than any other organism?

A close friend of the family brought this up: another video of Oprah Winfrey as theologian. The video begins with Oprah in dialogue with an unidentified woman representing Biblical Christianity (as far as I can tell). Note the use of language here. Oprah says,

There are many paths to what you call God. Her [another unidentified guest's] path might be something else, and when she gets there, she might call it The Light. Her loving and her kindness and her generosity, if it brings her to the same point it brings you, it doesn’t matter whether she called it God along the way or not.

Oprah thinks the discussion is about names. It doesn’t matter, she says, whether you call your ultimate destination God or The Light. There are millions of ways to live, she says, implying that any of a million names would identify the same goal.

I don’t believe Oprah would use language that way in other contexts. If her set was in Studio B, while a Beverly Hillbillies remake was being filmed in Studio C, she wouldn’t be so careless about what words signify: she wouldn’t insist that the walkways to Studio B and Studio C are different paths to the same goal. The studio names both mean something quite specific and not the same.

The word God as used by Christians also signifies something quite specific, and for most New Age-oriented persons, The Light also signifies something rather definite. Their meanings are not the same. If they were, then Oprah would be right; it wouldn’t matter what one called it. God in German is Gott; in Russian it’s БОГ (pronounced boge, I think—Holopupenko may correct me on that). Because they signify the same thing, the word choice in that case is irrelevant. God in Norwegian can mean simply “good.” It is the meaning that matters.

Oprah thinks all names for God (or whatever) ultimately mean the same thing. If she’s right, then the Christian’s word God and the New Ager’s The Light mean the same thing, regardless of the difference in their definitions. Thus the Ultimate is a personal impersonality, a being totally separate from His creation who is one and the same as creation. We are each one of us God, as error-prone as we are, yet God is also the holy, all-wise, and perfect One. God the One uniquely revealed by Jesus Christ, yet known and declared most fully by the likes of Eckhart Tolle.

This can only mean that Oprah’s conception of the Ultimate is massively self-contradictory nonsense.

Some claim to be comfortable with contradiction; they call it a sign of spiritual depth. If they are right, then they ought to be comfortable with contradictions to that very belief (the belief that being comfortable with contradictions shows spiritual depth). For example, they ought to be comfortable saying that those who are uncomfortable with such contradictions, who see it all as nonsense, are the deep ones. Was that confusing? Of course it was. Let me simplify it.

Some person S believes P, that being comfortable with contradictions is a sign of spirituality. S ought then be comfortable with the contradictory of P, and ought to be able to affirm not-P , which is, “Being comfortable with contradictions is not a sign of spiritual depth;” or possibly the contrary to P, “Not being comfortable with contradictions is a sign of spiritual depth.” The commitment to P implies a commitment to these other statements as well—unless there is some mysterious test by which some contradictions ought to be rejected while others about the whole nature of reality should be accepted.

Again: if comfort with contradictions is part of being spiritual, then the spiritual ought to be comfortable (for this is just yet one more contradiction) saying that Eckhart Tolle and Marianne Williamson and Oprah and all the New Age devotees are quite completely mistaken in everything they teach. They ought to be comfortable with the idea that, say, school shooters are expressing a valid spirituality. These are just a few more contradictory beliefs, after all.

If all paths lead to the same goal, then why shouldn’t all paths lead to the same goal?

Finally, to clean up a loose end from the video clip: Oprah wonders how there could possibly be only one way to God. Here is how, with a further explanation here.

Christ Church Unity, Kansas City, MO, says, “We honor all faiths.” This affirming and inclusive statement stands near the heart of a minor social movement: the Complaint Bracelet (”21 days to a complaint-free life”), invented by the church’s pastor, Rev. Will Bowen. Bown has been featured on The Today Show and Oprah, and, more than 5.5 million people have reportedly worn one of these bracelets. I found out about it from a friend of the family who is wearing one this week. Every time she catches herself complaining, she shifts the bracelet to her other wrist. The goal is to keep it on the same wrist for 21 days.

I can see some value in that, but more on that another day. Just now I want to think about this statement, which I ran across while researching the bracelet’s background. “We honor all faiths.” Why do they say that, and what could it possibly mean?

I would be interested to hear from someone in the Unity Movement on this. Their own online literature provides information, but also raises more questions.

First. why would they say it? They have their own doctrine. The name Jesus Christ features prominently in it, but their understanding of Christ diverges markedly from historic Christianity and from the Biblical understanding of who he is. Why would they want to honor all faiths when they have their own, which they apparently consider to be true?

And what does it mean? Could it mean, perhaps, that they honor persons of all faiths? Are they saying they acknowledge the universal brotherhood of humanity, all created in the image of God, or something of the sort? That would be a fine statement, but it’s not what it says; it says “we honor all faiths,” not “persons of all faiths.” The Unity movement’s website includes a diversity statement, but it’s about diversity within the Unity movement.

Could it mean that they honor all beliefs? That interpretation closer to what the words actually say, and it would be in keeping with the tenor of a tolerant, pluralistic world that sees truth in all religions. But this is problematic, for religions disagree. To genuinely honor historic Christianity as a belief, as trust in an actual person who lived in history and who had an actual identity, one must honor not only the Christian’s life of trust, but also the things Christians believe about the actual person of Christ. Likewise to honor Islam as a belief, one must not just honor the Muslim’s way of life, but also what Muslims believe regarding Muhammad and his writings.

Beliefs have content, propositions some of which are regarded as right and others as wrong, some things to be believed and some things to be rejected. The content of a faith cannot be separated from the acts of a faith. If this church’s statement means they honor all beliefs, it must mean they honor the content of all beliefs. This is problematic, however. Is it possible to honor Jesus Christ the way historic Christianity has honored him, and at the same time to honor Muhammad as Muslims do? No; for Christians see Jesus as the Second Person of the Trinity, God in the flesh, born of a virgin, who died on the cross to redeem us of our sins, who rose again, and whose apostolic followers completed God’s authoritative revelation to us in the words of the Bible. Muslims say no to just about all of that, and they say that Muhammad said no. If you honor (support, give high regard to, or encourage) the Muslims’ belief about Jesus, you dishonor Christians’ beliefs. And vice versa.

More to the point, if you honor (support, give high regard to, or encourage) Unity’s beliefs about God, you dishonor Christians’ beliefs, for they too are not in agreement; Unity’s beliefs are much more in line with New Age pantheism than Biblical Christianity. To affirm the faith of Unity is to say that historic Christianity is really quite wrong about Jesus Christ, the central person of our faith. Is that the kind of thing they mean by honor for all faiths?

Maybe, though, they disagree that there actually is disagreement between faiths after all. Unity’s doctrinal statement says,

Unity honors the universal truths in all religions and respects each individual’s right to choose a spiritual path.

I think we’re coming closer to it here. Unity sees universal truth in all religions, and that is exactly what they honor. There’s our answer! But we must chase this down, too: Just what truths do all religious universally agree on? The nature of God (or the ultimate)? The nature of reality and its relation to God or the ultimate? Where the world came from, and where it is heading? The explanation of the human condition? The ideal spiritual state? The way to achieve that ideal spiritual state?

What looked like an answer leads to questions with no answers. I still don’t know what it means to honor all faiths….

They “respect each individual’s right to choose a spiritual path.” This, finally, does make sense. If there is one thing that virtually all religions agree on, it is that there is a spiritual path for individuals to walk. It seems Unity may be honoring something like the religious impulse. But hasn’t that religious impulse been directed into all kinds of violence? Timothy Keller has convincingly explained (mp3) how this religious impulse needs a proper grounding and channel of humility, found through the way of Jesus Christ, or else it turns deadly sour.

At any rate, it’s quite a long descent from “we honor all faiths” to acknowledging merely that humans everywhere have some kind of religious impulse. Examined closely, “we honor all faiths” seems not to mean much at all. So I return to my question, why would they say it?

I suggest two reasons. The first is that they haven’t examined it that closely, and/or they don’t expect anybody else to do so. Its meaninglessness matters little if it can give the right impression, produce the right effect.

That effect or impression is the second reason. In a world of relativism and pluralism, where tolerance is the one cardinal virtue, to be regarded as tolerant is better than to suggest that your beliefs are what you actually believe, and that you don’t believe what you don’t believe.

Dallas Willard writes in The Divine Conspiracy (p. 335),

“God,” Paul said, “makes clear the greatness of his love for us through the fact that Christ died for us while we were still rebelling against him” (Rom. 5:8).

The exclusiveness of the Christian revelation of God lies here. No one can have an adequate view of the heart and purposes of the God of the universe who does not understand that he permitted his son to die on the cross to reach out to all people, even people who hated him. That is who God is. But that is not just a “right answer” to a theological question. It is God looking at me from the cross with compassion and providing for me, with never-failing readiness to take my hand to walk on through life from wherever I may find myself at the time.

God’s deep, gracious love is proved in the price he paid in love on our behalf. Christ died for us. He died in love, to bring us to God, to break down the sin barrier between us and God.

One could go into explaining how the cross of Christ accomplished that: how sin separated us from God, earning us death, and how Christ paid that price for us. Let’s not dwell there this time, though. For now, let’s consider this fact in its simplicity: the price that God imposed, God paid. The price was death (Romans 3:23). God made the payment through the death of God the Son, Jesus Christ. He was the one the Father called his beloved, who often proclaimed his own eternal unity with the Father (John 10:30, John 17). He died by crucifixion, among the most torturous methods of execution ever practiced by a government on earth.

As Willard recalls the love of God that led God to do this for us, he throws in that terrible cultural hand grenade, the word exclusiveness. He had, to, though. It’s really quite inescapable. If the Christian message is at all true, then it is exclusively true. It cannot be one of several options. It is either exclusively true or it is thoroughly wrong.

Though this may be difficult, in an age when pluralism and inclusivism are considered among the chief virtues, I think anyone might be able to see this necessity. It is impossible to include Christianity—the kind of Christianity that centers on the life, death, and resurrection of Christ—in a list of ways to know God. Even if one doubts Jesus ever said what he did about being the only way to God (as in John 14:6, for example), it should be clear that he cannot be one of many items on a spiritual menu.

Let us consider what it would mean if he were. Suppose Eckhart Tolle and Oprah and the Bahá’ís and all the other inclusivists are right. Suppose Christianity is one of many paths to God, to enlightenment, fulfillment, Nirvana, or whatever the real goal is.

Then the universe offers us many ways to reach our best destiny. Whatever reality is at its core, there’s something about it that gives humans a real place, a real direction, a real destiny. Somehow in some personal or impersonal (and therefore metaphoric) way, the universe has us in mind, and it offers us all kinds of ways to flourish for now and for beyond. We just have to pick one of those ways off the universe’s spiritual menu. Let’s see, will I have the t-bone or the tofu?

Reality isn’t too picky. It’s nice to us, in a way. It wants us to be free to choose. You can follow any number of paths, many of which really are rather nice ideas. Experiencing the Now (per Tolle) is a nice idea. New Age spirituality of all kinds fits well into the “nice” category. The Secret says everything will go well if you’ll just think more positively. Those are a couple of attractive options. Let’s just make sure we include Jesus. The cross of Christ is another nice thing on the spiritual menu. Wasn’t that sweet of God the Father to offer his own Son’s torture and death as one of our options?

No!

When Jesus faced the cross it was in agony, with sweat dripping as blood. This was even before he was arrested—he knew what was coming! Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

His friends and followers deserted him–as he knew they would do. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

He was cruelly tortured and mocked. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

He hung on that infamously cruel cross, dying in excruciating pain while they laughed at him. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

He was stabbed in the side, so that water and blood flowed out. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

His body was wrapped up, entombed in the dark. Was that one of the universe’s nice ideas for us?

There is nothing nice about the cross. It is unthinkable that this was an item on some spiritual menu, one choice among many, something we could feel free to pass over in favor of positive thinking (or any other supposed path to God). 

Christ’s resurrection makes manifest the glory of both his death and his life. It redeems the loss of his death. It makes its greatness even greater. But it does not make it nice. And it hardly supports anyone’s view that Christ is just one of many enlightened ones!

C.S. Lewis said in another context,

But let us not come with any patronising nonsense about his being a great human teacher. He has not left that open to us. He did not intend to.

Neither did he leave open the possibility that he might be just one of many spiritual options. He did not intend to.

I lived in Southern California for 13 years, where it was a regular occurrence to run into New Age spirituality almost anywhere I went. My wife and I were talking a walk in the hills above Anaheim one day, and were intrigued to hear the sound of a drum and voices, out of sight among the trees ahead of us. I thought maybe it was a Boy Scout group. Our path took us right by the source, and I was wrong: it was 13 people in a circle chanting praises to earth, air, fire, and water. We vacationed in places like Carmel, California, and Sedona, Arizona, both of which are hotbeds of this kind of spirituality. We passed more than one ritual fire circle along a trail above our campsite in Sedona, and the town itself is full of interesting places like this Center for the New Age. Of course we had friends who were avid followers of New Age.

Here in southeastern Virginia it’s been different. The dominant employers here are the military (all five services including the Coast Guard, plus whatever they do at Camp Peary) and shipbuilding. We have the Jefferson Lab accelerator facility, and lots of historical tourism and research revolving around Jamestown, Williamsburg, and Yorktown. California is, well, California; and this has been different, either because of the forms of industry, or because things are generally more conservative here on the East Coast. I have had very little contact with the New Spirituality lately.

New Age Resurgence?
Until the last year or so, that is. One reason for that change has been the way Oprah Winfrey has been promoting Eckhart Tolle. Tolle has one book ranked at #2 at Amazon today, and another ranked at #20; and he and Oprah claim viewership in the millions for their combined advocacy for the message of “A New Earth” and “The Power of Now.” One of the most common search phrases by which visitors have been finding this blog lately is “the church of Oprah.”

Contradictory Beliefs
Part of the New Age message is that many paths lead to one goal, even if these paths are in many ways contradictory. This morning I heard a talk by Ravi Zacharias that is very germane to this topic. He was born and raised in a high-caste family in India, but now travels and speaks as a leading Christian thinker. The talk I’m referring to here is on pantheism and its contradictions: the contradictions really do matter, in spite of suppositions that there is an “Eastern” sort of logic in which they are of no consequence.

His website’s design does not permit me to give you the URL for the page where his talk is linked. You would need to begin at the Just Thinking page, and navigate through the archives to “Secularism and the Illusion of Neutrality, Part 3.” I trust, though, that they will not begrudge my providing you some shortcuts. You can:

Download the mp3 directly here, or
Listen online with RealAudio here.

His main point is that even in Eastern religions, with which he is very familiar, contradictory statements cannot both be true at the same time in the same relationship. That’s the dry version. You’ll his telling of it to be far more entertaining than that!

(I strongly recommend all of Zacharias’s talks, so once you listen to this one, I suggest you go back for more; even subscribe to his podcast.)

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

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.

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.