Thinking Christian

Book Review

Richard Abanes takes a thorough and critical look at Eckhart Tolle’s latest book, in his 2008 Bethany House book, A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller. It’s a study primarily aimed (through most of its length) toward Christian believers, drawing on Christians’ shared trust in the Bible as a trustworthy revelation from God. As such it could well be an invaluable resource for Christians who may find Tolle attractive, like Kelly at the 2:41 point in this YouTube video. Abanes draws 80 discrete statements out of Tolle’s A New Earth and painstakingly shows how they all fall short of truth.

The first chapter differs from the rest in comparing Tolle with Tolle, rather than Tolle with Scripture, providing a point of contact with those who do not adhere to biblical authority. For example, Tolle says, “every belief is an obstacle.” Abanes asks rather sensibly whether that itself is a belief. Later he quotes Tolle,

To be in alignment with what is means to be in a relationship of inner nonresistance with what happens. It means not to label it mentally as good or bad. . . . The Master responds to falsehood and truth, good news and bad news, in exactly the same way: [By merely saying,] “is that so?”

As spiritual as that may sound, Abanes shows that Tolle’s

[B]ooks and lectures are filled with judgments about what is good, bad, right, wrong, true, and false (for example, wars, exclusive religious claims, the witch hunts of Europe, materialism, sickness, addiction).

It is indeed an old deception, wrapped up in soothing spiritual language and propelled by Oprah’s powerful marketing. If you have questions about Tolle, or if you know of someone who thinks it may be a nice addition to Christianity, this short book may provide your best, most accessible set of trustworthy answers.

A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller by Richard Abanes. Bloomington, MN: Bethany House Publishers, 2008. 173 pages plus endnotes. Amazon price US$9.59.

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There’s a growing realization that materialism and the rational, empirical worldview that comes with it has reached its expiration date.

So says Daniel Pinchbeck, in a NY Times Magazine article entitled “The Final Days” by Benjamin Anastas. Pinchbeck wrote an “alternative-culture bestselle4,” 2012, The Return of Quetzalcoatl. He is part of a movement that looks to the Mayan calendar as an indicator that the world will come to an end—or some kind of major spiritual revolution—on December 21, 2012. Anastas also quotes Chet Snow, who “tracks the impending consciousness shift on his Mass Dreams Newsletter, organizes annual crop-circle and sacred-site tours, and gathers [people] for conferences devoted to ancient mysteries and the paranormal.” Snow says,

The pillars of our expectations about the future in the West have started to crumble. Religion, politics, economics–none of it is working any more. So when you hear about the ancient Maya and this changeover in 2012 involving solar cycles and astronomical events, you say, ‘Huh, maybe I need to connect with that.’

We certainly need to connect with something. The Mayan calendar is hardly likely to be it, but Pinchbeck is right about one thing: materialist philosophy isn’t it either.

I’m about to crack open the book A New Earth, An Old Deception: Awakening to the Dangers of Eckhart Tolle’s #1 Bestseller by Richard Abanes. I already know Tolle has run afoul of the most basic reality of our relationship with God, which is that there is one God and we are not him. There is deadly spiritual danger in that error. Yet there’s also something below the surface there that I can appreciate. It’s his rejection of cold stone materialism; his refusal to accept that physical reality is all there is. In that much, at least Tolle is on the right track.

The Renaissance/Rock band Blackmore’s Night sings of what materialism has cost is, in “World of Stone:”

“Once a world of glittering hope
This world is not the world we knew
The only light left to shine
Is between me and you

“On our own In a World of Stone
We are not alone

“I had once believed in angels
They were everywhere I looked
A gentle hand guiding me
To give more than I took

“But I have died a thousand times
Watching all these angels fall
Their lonely eyes haunt me still
We will avenge them all

“On our own In a World of Stone
We are not alone”

To believe that secular materialists (represented by Dawkins, Dennett, Hitchens, Lewontin, Provine, and the like) is to consider our world has become one of stone. The angels have fallen, not as Lucifer fell but as snowflakes fall and die in a lake. They’re gone. Scientistic naturalism has driven out the spiritual, and for this we have died a thousand times. I think this is indeed where the roots of Western New Age religion lie. With the angels’ lonely eyes haunting us, many are willing to avenge their deaths by slaying materialism and even rationality, choosing to rely on Mayan calendars instead.

This is not a necessary war. There is a better way than Tolle’s out of a soulless universe, though I can understand his appeal to those who do not know that.

Part of the beauty of Christianity is that it offers the best of both worlds. Spirituality and rationality coexist, for there really is a God and a spiritual world, and God, the Logos (the Word, John 1:1), is also the author of rationality. There is a most interesting ambiguity in Romans 12:1: our devotion to God can be translated either as a spiritual or as a reasonable act of worship. Both meanings exist in the original Greek word, and both apply.

New Age philosophy is a search on the wrong path, fatally aimed toward considering humans equal with God; yet it is also partly based in a search for the right thing: for a sense of spirituality, of connection to the Source. The author of this spiritual yearning is God himself, who created us in his image for relationship with him. This is, in Blackmore’s Night’s words, “the world we knew,” or at least the one we deeply sense is right for us.

This post is adapted from one originally published July 4, 2007.

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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?

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.)

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