There Is a Reason
There Is a Reason
Before offering a brief critique of the New Spirituality, I must say there are some areas in which the Church must bear some of the blame for the discredit that has been brought to her by the New Spiritualists:
1. Churches that do justice to the message of Christ and his claim upon our lives are rare. “Churches,” said one critic to me, “are country clubs for the nice people… they are really not so nice to everyone else.” I have to admit that I’ve personally sat through some large gatherings of Christians after which I have walked out and wondered what I would have thought of Christianity if that was what I had heard before I came to Christ. For the most part there is a huge gap between the preaching and worship of today and what faith in Christ and the worship of God were intended to be.
I am afraid that the forms and the programs have commandeered the message of Jesus into a kind of show and entertainment mold, where the congregants are merely spectators who have come to watch a show. I have friends who stand outside the churches they attend during the music because it is too deafening inside to endure. But they enjoy the preaching side of it and so step into the church at that time. Others tell me that they have stopped going to church because there is absolutely no substance to anything that is being taught. Still others tell me that after they had stumbled and fallen into a lifestyle or found themselves in a situation they had never wanted to be in, they ended up in a church. Hoping for healing and a chance to rebuild, they instead were pummeled with more and more guilt. “Stumble here and you’ve had it,” said one to me. One said, “I know the Lord hates divorce. Every person who has experienced divorce hates it, too. But why does the church hate the divorced person?” A probing question that brings tears to the one who asks it and should to the one of whom it is asked.
The legalism of the Church has disenfranchised so many that the Church has found itself speaking to just the handful who still agree with its castigations and have lost the many who need its healing message of love. But let me add here that this is not so just in Christianity. In the culture in which I was raised, Hindu, Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, you name it, if you have a broken record, your name is sullied forever. So let’s not just blame Christianity. Growing up in a predominantly Hindu culture, I was taught that if a woman was even seen with a man, her name would be tarnished permanently and no proposal of marriage would be forthcoming. This attitude, by the way, is the same basis for so-called honor-killings in Islam.
How does the Church maintain its teaching while at the same time love the fallen in this changing world of ours? Love does have its boundaries, but it must have a long reach. Those who are hurting and faltering need the strong arm of God to hold them. The Church has to provide those arms. Jesus himself said, “It is not the healthy who need a doctor, but the sick. But go and learn what this means: ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ For I have not come to call the righteous, but sinners” (Matthew 9:12 NIV). If we are to reflect Christ to the world around us, we need to “learn what this means,” as Jesus said.
2. The Church has forgotten the teachings of quietness, solitude, and meditation that are part of our Judeo-Christian heritage and provide great strength to the soul. We have moved from silence to noise. We have moved from reflection to fast-moving programs. We have moved from quietness to the inability to remain focused on a thought for even a moment, so that the next item on the program has to begin as soon as the previous one has finished. There is no time in our services anymore for quietness and contemplation. We have moved from the progression of thought to a repetition of sounds. We have stolen the bridge between the head and the heart and gone to one of two extremes: either unable to engage the culture or reflecting the culture. Every need of the soul is met in the gospel, but like an intoxicated person, we swing between two walls without finding balance.
The New Spirituality compels us to examine how we do what we do. Our challenge is how to do it in form, without compromising the substance of what we believe. The need for community is a deep longing in the postmodern mind-set. How we build that community will shape the Church of the future. But while the New Spirituality points us to the weaknesses of the Church, the one thing in the Church’s defense is that its violations are violations of its message. The flaw in the New Spirituality is in the message itself.
3. The institutionalization of Christianity made it vulnerable to all of the abuses we now see.
4. The problem of pain has not always been honestly and meaningfully dealt with by Christians. So the New Spiritualists hide behind illusion or koans.
5. The judgmental attitude of the Christian is often harsh and legalistic, forgetting the implications of what is being said. The backlash is that the New Spirituality almost implicitly subscribes to an antinomianism—implying that there really is no moral law.
At the same time, there are fundamental errors in the New Spirituality that I shall point out here before I move to the Christ of history and what he really taught:
1. New Spiritualists misunderstand or misuse the laws of logic. For them to say that they have transcended reason or rationality is to fail to understand the laws of logic. It is one thing to say that reason alone cannot point you to God. That is not new. Blaise Pascal and numerous others pointed that out. But logic does not merely point to the truth; more important, it points to error. Something that is systemically contradictory cannot be true. Yes, there can be paradoxes. Yes, you can have two poles of an argument. But systemic contradiction, where the laws of logic foundationally destroy the base on which the infrastructure stands, simply cannot be defended by “transcending reason.” All spirituality has to transcend reason, but it dare not systemically violate it.
For example, Buddhism is atheistic. Some strands of Hinduism, but not all, are not: Which is it? God or no God? Judaism, Christianity, and Islam are monotheistic. To be consistent within itself, the New Spirituality will have to consider the monotheistic religions wrong. But in considering them wrong, they have to use the law of noncontradiction, which means they rely on logic to disavow another system of belief but “transcend logic” when they defend their own system. Gautama Buddha renounced some of the Vedas and the caste system. Was he right or wrong to do so? From the Hindu’s point of view, to deny the caste system is to deny karma.
Keep asking. To argue for the “now” in a chronological isolation, while borrowing from “ancient” wisdom and looking to enlightenment in the future, is to toy with time-laden terminology where each term has died the death of a thousand qualifications. Maybe that is why Redfield of The Celestine Prophecy coined the term “the longer now” to appreciate humanity across the ages… a clever qualification.
2. Advocates of the New Spirituality falsely absorb two different questions into one. By denying the right of the Christian to legislate on morality, they deny the Christian belief that life and sexuality are sacred. But since they give legitimacy to the destruction of life in the womb while espousing that all life is sacred, their own belief that all life is “sacred” is illegitimate.
3. In personalizing spirituality, they actually end up snuffing out the person. That is an unaffirmable position. To say, in effect, that “I” do not exist is a self-stultifying proposition.
4. They are ultimately unable to define evil, and the core of spirituality is crushed by the wheel of time and human character.
5. They have no transcendent basis for love because spirit in self-reference cannot define love. Love is an “ought.” Its prescription has to be from the very source of love. For that, only God is big enough as a person to define it. More to the point, love is not free. It has to have boundaries; otherwise, it is not love at all. It is the nature of love to bind itself.
6. In the process of exalting the individual and his or her right to make a spiritual choice, the New Spiritualists make individual intuition the ultimate test rather than the objectivity of testing truth claims when examining conflicting worldviews. That test itself is not intuitively sustainable.
7. The notion of erasing time and Tolle’s notion of the power of “now” play a dangerous game with the mind. Values past, present, and future are necessary to understand how we must think. I have often put it this way: The traditionalist lives for the past; the utopianist lives for the future; the existentialist lives for the present. When Jesus Christ took bread and broke it to share it with his disciples in what is called Holy Communion, he said, “Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup [in the present], you proclaim the Lord’s death [in the past] until he comes [in the future]” (1 Corinthians 11:26 NIV). The remarkable thing here is that he places importance on all three tenses of time, fusing them with meaning. It is so important that we invest value in time but live for eternity. Jesus and his Word constantly remind us to be delivered from the tyranny of the immediate.
8. No matter how loudly the New Spiritualists deny duality and try to argue for a monistic or single-entity framework, worship, prayer, and rituals all assume a distinction between the “I” and the “you.” Advaita, the idea of nondualism, dies on the altar of human hungers and relationships.