Authority
Authority
This is a key issue with the New Spiritualist: What or who will be my authority? To move the final authority to a subjective, albeit an intuitive flash of enlightenment, an awful lot must be explained away. It is impossible to grant that right to each person.
One of my friends tells this story of a doctor trying to talk his patient in a psychiatric ward out of believing that he is Moses. But the patient is adamant that he is Moses. Finally, the doctor asks in frustration, “Who told you that you are Moses?”
“God did,” comes the confident reply.
“I did not!” comes an indignant voice from the next bed.
Seriously, how does one know when people like Donald Walsch or Deepak Chopra speak with such authority whether they are speaking for God or whether they are themselves divine, or neither? Their own lives are clearly and indisputably flawed, by their own admission. So where does their moral authority come from? They have every right to debate, dialogue, dispute, argue, whatever. But when they speak with self-referencing conviction, as if they have the consummate answer, you have to ask, “Says who?” It is not enough to brush it off as one of them does by saying, “My children know that I’m a work in progress,” or write it off by creating “Three Maharishis” in order to cover up the shortcomings of his mentor.
Jesus asks of his accusers, “Which of you convicts Me of sin?” (John 8:46 NKJV). Pilate said of him, “I find no fault in this Man” (Luke 23:4 NKJV). The dying thief on the cross next to him said, “This Man has done nothing wrong” (Luke 23:41 NKJV). The purity of Jesus’ life and his unassailable example to us have won the adulation of millions, including Gandhi and Buddhist thinkers. The historian Lecky attested that he was unique and without parallel in history.1
Over the fifteen hundred years of recorded history in the Holy Bible, more than forty different authors either pointed to Jesus’ coming or lived and walked with him, and speak of him as the One with authority. He warned against legalism that was content to administer harsh applications of the law. He showed the shortcomings of a religion that was empty, nothing but dogma. He avoided the political limelight. He never charged his audience for speaking. He lifted up the broken. He conversed with the rejects of society. He held the little ones in his arms and asked us to become like them in their propensity to trust him. In his defining conversation with another teacher who came to him with honest questions, he said that the answer to knowing God ultimately lay in a new birth that only the Holy Spirit of God could bring about. Mystified, the teacher asked how a grown man could enter the womb again. Jesus presented a “koan” of his own, if you will: “The wind blows wherever it pleases. You hear its sound, but you cannot tell where it comes from or where it is going. So it is with everyone born of the Spirit” (John 3:8 NIV).
This new birth that Jesus talked about is not self-caused or self-induced or self-engendered. Nor is it by the will of any human teacher or by anyone’s recommendation. You can do nothing to earn it and nothing to make it happen. You cannot make yourself worthy of it or give yourself rights to it. New birth comes from God, who alone puts right what is ultimately wrong with the world—our broken souls. No amount of meditation or silence or retreat from the world will accomplish that. Only God in his grace is big enough. The only reasonable conclusion to any self-examination is that we cannot mend our world on our own, we cannot mend our broken spirits; we need someone from the outside to enter our world and our lives and set things right. We need a Savior.
The big question of authority is on the authority of the Scriptures. Many capable scholars have addressed this. I have included a bibliography at the end of this book for anyone who wants to do further reading on the authority of the Scriptures. One of the most capable critics of the Bible is Bart Ehrman, who studied under one of the most knowledgeable Greek scholars of recent times, Bruce Metzger, of Princeton. I would strongly recommend Ben Witherington’s outstanding response to Ehrman, as well as the interaction on the subject between Ehrman and N. T. Wright.2
This is what I believe it boils down to: If you are determined to find flaws in the Bible, you will find them, especially in a book that has been around for so many centuries, was written by such diverse authors over a great period of time, and has been translated into so many versions and languages. So it is with the texts on almost any subject. It can be done. Ideas are easy to quibble over, debate, dissect, and reject. One has to start by looking at the big picture, at the overall truth that is being asserted. Then one puts the main ideas of the argument to the tests that I mentioned earlier, and sees how they have been borne out in life, in history, and in personal application.
When Deepak Chopra opines that John 14:6—where Jesus says, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me”—is nothing more than Jesus attaining God-consciousness, one who is serious in the quest must ask, “Really? Would the disciples have laid down their lives to support Jesus’ claim that he had attained a certain status if all humanity can also attain such status on their own?” What would be the reason for that? There would be nothing unique in that, nothing worth dying for. Is this not a sham and a shame to make such a pathetic distortion of the facts when it is clear why he died and that his claim to be uniquely God was understood by his persecutors? Did they all get it wrong—Jesus, his disciples, his persecutors, Pilate, the millions throughout history who have believed—and Chopra get it right? Is this not the ultimate hubris? The big picture presented in the text within its context is indisputable.