Last week
we noted that there is a new spirituality emerging in our Western world, a way
of looking at reality that is different from and hostile to Christianity. Many
are unaware of it and wonder why we should trouble ourselves learning about it.
But, in the words of Dr. Peter Jones in an address I heard last month in
It has
emerged following the collapse of what some call the secular dream. Secularism,
as we have seen, is a way of looking at life without God in the picture. It
denies the need for God and explains all there is in terms of reason and
science. It has unlimited confidence, what is more, in man’s ability to make
the world a better place. Given enough time, education, medicine, science and
technology, secularism says, can create paradise.
This was
the outlook that gradually displaced the Christian worldview in Western
civilization and which dominated the twentieth century until the 1960’s and
70’s. But then the bubble burst. The horrific wars of the century and the
worldwide spread of disease, poverty and violence shattered confidence in
science, technology, medicine and education. Thinking people saw that ultimate
explanations for life weren’t to be found in reason and human achievement, or
in a mechanistic universe governed by physical laws that humans could control.
There had to be another way of looking at life, another story to provide
explanations.
Rather than
returning to the biblical story, people looked in another direction. They
didn’t look to God, or to nature, science or reason, but within themselves. As
Robert Webber puts it, “Rejecting the God who calls us to become what he
created us to be, the new spirituality looks for God within the self, as if God
and the self are one” (The Divine Embrace,
106, 107).
Behind this
new approach is an understanding that all things are really part of a universal
essence which can be called, if you insist on giving it a label, “God”. Trees,
fish, birds, mountains, humans – all are simply different manifestations of
“God” and the answers to life are found in connecting with that divine essence.
For us as humans this means looking within ourselves through various techniques
that enable us to reach a state of higher consciousness – a state where we
connect with our true self and with the universal essence.
In effect, Robert
Webber tells us, this new spirituality is a combination of New Age thought,
Eastern religions, and the psychology of the self. It draws its views of a
universal essence from the New Age (revived ancient Gnosticism), its techniques
of escape to higher consciousness from Eastern religions, and its inward
journey into the self from modern psychology.
Interestingly,
it can happily co-exist within a secularized world. It doesn’t have to deny
science and reason; it just denies they can provide ultimate answers. “This new
spirituality,” Webber writes, “is content to be an intensely personal
expression within a secular world living side by side with the secularist and
usually agreeing with the relativistic ethic of the secular mind” (Ibid., 106).
It is this
fact that gives it the potential to be such a unifying force. It doesn’t reject
science and reason; nor does it call itself a religion. It is a new awareness,
a new way of looking at and relating to reality that provides an umbrella for a
variety life-views and religious faiths. Already it is providing a meeting
ground for New Age spiritualists, Eastern gurus and a variety of other mystics.
Clearly,
however, it is antithetical to what we hold to as Christians. In spite of that,
many believers are attracted by its experience of mystery and the resemblance
of its techniques to older forms of Christian devotion. That’s what makes it important
to explore it further.