Thinking Christian

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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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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