THE GREAT SHIFT

It’s great to be back in New Zealand again! Our months in America were a refreshing blessing, but there is no place like home. And there is no place like Grace Theological College. It’s been a joy to reconnect with the Board, faculty members and students, and above all, to take up the task of teaching.

The new term signals the need to begin writing weekly Insights again. Thanks to all who expressed their appreciation of the Insights from America that I wrote last year. It was a way of passing on to you some of the blessings God showered on us during our months with friends in Alabama.

The blessing didn’t stop there, either. The month of January that I spent in California – after Nola and John had returned to New Zealand on Christmas Eve – had its share of highlights as well. But rather than rehearse these, I want to take the following weeks to share some of the insights that I gained over that month in California as I read in the area of contemporary spirituality. In particular, I would like to distil for you some of the wisdom of the late Dr. Robert Webber, a teacher for many years at Wheaton College, on the subject of the new spirituality emerging in our Western civilization. Dr. Webber writes about this in his book The Divine Embrace.

In the last years of his life Robert Webber became acutely aware of the emergence of a new spirituality in the West. In the space of five decades he saw the landscape of our culture change “from a fairly dominant presence of the Christian narrative to a culture that houses two new conflicting stories: that of secular perspective and that of the New Age point of view, the latter being the resurgence of Gnosticism” (The Divine Embrace, p. 102). When Webber speaks of a “Christian narrative” he means the Christian understanding of history, or the Christian worldview. Every worldview, he holds, is connected with a story – a story that shapes our understanding of existence and reality. Up until the 1950’s, the dominant worldview in the West was Christian. It held that the world had been created by a self-existent, personal, Triune God, that the first humans had rebelled against his loving rule and plunged the world into strife, and that God had sent his Son to redeem fallen humanity, recreate humankind in his image, and restore his vision for the world. That was the narrative that framed the way people thought.

But that way of thinking changed in a relatively short period of time. Two influences, says Webber, contributed to that change – the emergence of a secular way of looking at life, and then secularism’s “step-child,” New Age philosophy and spirituality. Both of these invaders bear looking at in a little more detail.

The term “secularism” comes from a Latin word (saeculum) which means “the present world.” Secularism is a philosophy of life that holds that this present world is all that there is. It developed gradually after the Enlightenment and its rise can be explained, Webber writes, “in the shifts in thought that took place in cosmology, science, epistemology, and psychology between 1700 and 1950. In this 250-year period the Western world shifted from a God-centred story of the world to a man-centred story, where humanity, not God, is the focus.” (Ibid., 103).

Put simply, Newtonian physics with its universal laws and mechanistic universe, the Darwinian theory of evolution with its explanation of origins, the psychology of Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud with its emphasis on the actualization of self, and the exaltation of reason and observation as a means of discovering truth, created a situation where God wasn’t needed. Secularism, or life without God, had been birthed.

If secularism moved our culture away from the Christian narrative, New Age spirituality filled the vacuum that it created. That’s what we will explore next week.