Beyond the
Self
God has set eternity in the hearts of men.
— Ecclesiastes 3:11
The Tower of Babel, described in the Old Testament (Genesis 11:1-9), was probably a cosmic temple connected with the occult religion of astrology, as was the Babylonian ziggurat built later on the same site.1
This towering structure, symbolizing humanity's innate desire for transcendence and a groping toward heaven, drew God's attention. When he came down to check out the scene, however, the Lord was not pleased. He associated the effort with vain human imagination: the desire to be divine and worship the self.
The Almighty's reaction was to confound the people's language, and as he did so, he declared: "This is only the beginning of what they will do; and now nothing they have imagined they can do will be impossible to them" (Genesis 11:6, AMPLIFIED).
Thus, since the beginning humanity has sought to organize itself around an instrument of its own creation. This search for self-realization has ascended to the pinnacle of self-idolatry — and has been flattened beneath the righteous hammer blows of a Higher God.
The tower and the city, suggests William H. Willimon, were misguided efforts to achieve unity on human terms
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rather than God's terms, "trying to attain a spurious oneness derived from human self-sufficiency and autonomy. It didn't work then and it doesn't work now."2
Yet, as the wisdom of Ecclesiastes declares, "God has set eternity in the hearts of men"; and this yearning for transcendence has gripped humanity since our first parents "walked with God" (Genesis 3:8).
In our day, Allan Bloom found evidence of this longing for the transcendent dimension on our university campuses. Richard John Neuhaus bemoans the "naked public square," where the force of transcendent authority is absent from public life and "then there are no rules rooted in ultimacies that can protect the poor, the powerless and the marginal."3 Charles Colson declares, "We desperately long to know the Power beyond us and discover a transcendent purpose for living."4 And Anglican theologian John Stott proclaims that "without transcendence, the person shrivels . . . .Ecclesiastes demonstrates the meaninglessness of a life that is imprisoned within time and space."5
But there are vast differences between the "transcendent purpose" enlivened by the historic Judeo-Christian Scriptures and the spiritual awakening and God-vision of Eastern and New Age mysticism.
"Who is God?" asks United Nations meditation chaplain Sri Chinmoy. "God is man's eternal cry for the highest Transcendental Supreme," he answers. "And where is God? God is in man's soulful smile and our soul's smile. Where smiles loom large in our existence, there alone we see God's very presence."6
The closest place to look for grace, says New Age-allied psychiatrist Scott Peck, is within oneself: "If you desire wisdom greater than your own, you can find it inside you . . . . To put it plainly, our unconscious is God . . . [T]he goal of spiritual growth [is] . . . . the attainment of godhead by the conscious self. It is for the individual to become totally, wholly God."7
New Age luminary Marilyn Ferguson has lyric praise for the movement's desire for transcendence, new meaning, and hope. To her, "God is experienced as flow, wholeness, the infinite kaleidoscope of life and death, Ultimate Cause, the ground of being, what [New Age philosopher-guru] Alan Watts
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called 'the silence out of which all sound comes.' God is the consciousness that manifests as lila, the play of the universe. God is the organizing matrix we can experience but not tell, that which enlivens matter."8
These ideas, she explains, "are part of all traditions of direct knowing: the glimpse of the true nature of reality . . . connection with the source that generates the world of appearances, reunion with all living things."9
In an early manuscript of a new book she and her husband, Ray Gottlieb, were writing, Ferguson described the "wiser Self":
This is the fearless, ageless thread of awareness that seems to run through all our experiences. It functions even when the personality is in fugue state (amnesia). It even seems to be relatively independent of the physical body, judging from the growing body of near-death experiences. Indeed, it seems as if it cannot die because it was never born.
In those rare instances when our hopes and fears and pretenses are pulled away, when time itself is not an issue, we [see] in others a nameless core of wisdom that bears a striking family resemblance to our own best self.10
That is New Age transcendence, and it bears a striking resemblance to the Taoist way to transcend the tangible. In The Wandering Taoist, Deng Ming-Dao describes his master, monk Kwan Saihung, doing "inner-gazing" meditation: "His body expanded in a silent explosion. His perfect mechanism unwound and shot itself in a thousand directions. The body was gone, but an intention still lingered. A memory, distant and shimmering — a strange streak of individualism still floating in space. The streak dissipated. Beyond stars, planets and dimensions, beyond any kaleidoscope of reality, piercing infinite layers. Gone. There was only Nothingness."11
To achieve a state of "void unity," the occult mystic in effect retraces the steps of God, "taking his creation apart brick by brick in order to first uncover, then vanish into, its foundation," comments new religions expert Brooks Alexander. The mystic merges with it "to the dissolution of identity and individuality."12
In New Age and Eastern worldviews, intuition and mystical experience become the supreme way of knowing God, or
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Ultimate Reality, which is an immanent, impersonal Absolute — even Nothingness — rather than a personal Creator. Reason and observation "can be superceded by direct Knowing, of Reality itself and of our profound interrelatedness with all that is."13
Carl Raschke notes that while the ancient gnostics conceived of man as a spark of divine fire trapped in matter, these latter-day Gnostics "patter about the transcendental 'consciousness' that is blocked by man's robot-like actions."14 The cure, in this view, is to unleash the mind's power and inject a megadose of infinite awareness. But this leads to a mindless indifference to the problems of society, Raschke avers. The "New Narcissism" invites a solipsistic worldview and flourishes wherever there is a death of common purpose, a dread of the future, and mad rush for personal legitimacy in a psychic war of all against all. The Gnostic does not reach out but tucks himself away like a mollusk against the battering tides of history. He finds happiness as he luxuriates in the glow of his own consciousness, which may however turn out to be reflected light from the fire that is burning his own house down."15
Long ago, the saying of Jesus that "the kingdom of God is within your midst," was erroneously translated "the kingdom of God is in you" (Luke 17:21), and this error still abounds. This interpretation is essentially a revolt against God, for it implies that if we truly understand who we are, we will realize that we are one with the soul of the universe, that each of us is God. That is pantheism. But Jesus was a theist, though he certainly taught that the immanent God — the Holy Spirit within — sustains us.
"I surely would not want to be God as Shirley MacLaine claims, if God is simply what I am," quips Raschke. And J. Gordon Melton paraphrases the title of the J.B. Phillips classic, "The New Age God is too small."
Paradoxically, the New Age attempts to reach out to God and finds Him within. But in this inward redirection, the seeker finds no ultimate transcendent reality. The God within is not the transcendent God of the universe who stands outside of — apart from — his creation and guides it, even intervening in human history. The God within is only my own shadow, and that is small indeed — even if my shadow is
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merged with the collective shadows of all other mortals, past and present.
True transcendence moves beyond the realm of creation to communion — not union — with the uncreated and living God. The Fall (sin) broke the relationship between God and humanity (we will return to this theme in the final two chapters); but the incarnation of Jesus restored communion between holy God and sinful man, mediated through Christ's atoning death on the cross and his resurrection from the grave.
Historic Christian theism emphatically denies any vision of self-bestowed divinity. Only the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God and Father of the Lord Jesus Christ is big enough to deliver salvation and regeneration on a cosmic scale.
In an unpublished critique of the New Age movement, Melton gives further insight into how Christian faith differs from the mystical New Age search for transcendence:
Christianity, in contrast, offers the God of the Scriptures, a very personal deity, whose basic characteristic is a loving relatedness, within Himself as Trinity and toward humanity through creative action . . . .
As Christians, we invite people to a personal relationship with a loving, caring God, and that relationship takes precedence over any mystical appropriation of the unity of existence. Within the Christian tradition, mystical experience has an important place, but is always judged by its relation to the God of the Scriptures.16
God is the transcendent Creator of the cosmos, but separate from it. He "spoke" the world into existence by creating it ex nihilo — out of nothing — rather than by making it out of himself by extending his essence.17
"Man and the cosmos are in no sense parts of God," declares Carl F. H. Henry, author of the six-volume God, Revelation and Authority. "The whole creation is judged by the Creator. If deep down in my inner being I find God, then it is not possible to find that man is in any sense a sinner."18
In other words, it is not possible to believe in our own godhood and at the same time accept God's forgiveness for our sin of pride.
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Shedding light on the issue from a different angle, Mark Albrecht cites an essay by Tim Dailey that points out that karma, "the law of action and reaction, differs significantly from the biblical concept of sin . . . . [T]here is no Transcendent God of the universe (existing outside yourself) to transgress against. It has been written: 'Karma is the Master Law of the Universe but there is no Lawgiver.' "19 There is no one to judge if there is no one at all. And if there is no objective revelation from a higher divine authority, then only human subjectivity — the divine within — is the matrix of truth and meaning.
Yet, in an odd sort of twist, many New Agers end up seeking counsel from mediums, gurus, and outside "spirit guides." That irony was not lost on F. LaGard Smith in his critique of Shirley MacLaine, Out on a Broken Limb: "It is an inconsistency that the Christian avoids by looking only to Jesus Christ for spiritual guidance. In looking for truth and meaning, Ms. MacLaine turned to the very source of her emptiness — herself."20
Christians look for the wisdom from above (James 3:17) rather than the wisdom within. God comes from the outside in, not the inside out. New Agers, however, "went inside, and like the rest of us, found themselves wanting. Divinity is a burden that humanity simply cannot bear."21
This sets off what Brooks Alexander calls a "spiral of error": "[A]ny quest for an integrating vision of reality that begins without access to the living God will likewise end without knowledge of Him. Any search for ultimates that refuses 'the God who is there' and takes humanity as its starting point will end with humanity as its ultimate. Any quest for unity that starts from just the data of consciousness will end with a rearrangement and reinterpretation of that same data."22
The apostle Paul, in his letter to the Romans, succinctly puts his finger on the problem: They "changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshiped and served the creature [the creation] more than the Creator" (Romans 1:25, KJV).
The Judeo-Christian God is intensely personal. That is a major distinction from the impersonal, universal force that is the deity of the New Age. A personal God is necessary for transformation. Self-empowerment is not the same as personal
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transformation, and an impersonal force cannot transform persons any more than it can produce ethics or love. Love and moral attributes are personal and do not derive from impersonal matter or energy. Human beings, made in the personal image of God the Creator, find that imago dei to be a gift and not a hindrance to enlightenment. (You may want to check the helpful chart comparing the secular humanist, New Age, and Christian worldviews in Unmasking the New Age.23
Christianity — and Judaism, from which it sprang — is distinctive in its worship of a God who is a "self," according to writers Alice and Stephen Lawhead. "The Christian God is not a force of nature, not a state of mind, not a spiritual fog or an energy ball loose in the universe, not a state of perfection or unity to be obtained by any amount of personal discipline or striving. God is not an 'it.' God is a person. God has a personality. God has emotions. God has desires, perceptions and will, and even needs."24
"We cannot live consistently with the implications of ultimate truth being impersonal," notes Dean Halverson in The New Age Rage, "because it is in personal relationships that we naturally find value and fulfillment. How could this be any less true when talking about our relationship with God?"25
We can have a personal relationship with the God of the Bible, Gordon Lewis observes, but not with an impersonal organizing principle or "being" itself. "And God is not the inner energy of people but is active with His believing people in accord with His redemptive purposes for the present age."26
Several pages later in Integrative Theology, his treatise on God as an active, personal Spirit, Lewis speaks about the way in which God takes personal initiative in carrying out his purposes: "Those who imagine that God transcends the personal in such a way that their deity is more like a vapor or a gas diffused throughout the universe may seem philosophically profound, but unfortunately, they are profoundly wrong. God is more like a faithful lifeguard or an all-wise personnel manager than an impersonal 'Force.' "27
Since God is an unlimited personal being, neither mysticism nor science can pin down his mysteries nor can they lead us into an intimate personal relationship with him; by
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the same token, however, a personal transcendent God makes science possible. As Halverson says: "Through scientific techniques, we are able to discover laws in the universe — not because we mentally invent them, but because the Creator placed them there. They are a reflection of His coherence, not ours."28
The biblical perspective on the proper relationship between humanity (creature) and God (Creator) signifies "meaning as well as mechanism," Brooks Alexander and Mark Albrecht point out. "We are not bags of atoms buffeted about by cosmic currents that flow past in silent indifference to our transient existence."29
Only a Creator God can give meaning to life because only this God adds the missing dimensions — eternity to time and transcendence to space — says British Bible scholar John R. W. Stott of the London Institute for Contemporary Christianity. The Christian mind should resist the attempt to banish God from his own universe. "If you deny the reality of [a transcendent] God, you're dehumanizing human beings . . . who were made by God, like God, for God, to live in fellowship with Him; and without Him everything is meaningless."30
That was the lesson God meant to teach the world when he scattered the people from their vain imaginings and striving after an intimation of eternity at the Tower of Babel. Their speech became a babble of miscommunication, cutting them off from one another and from God.
The man-made building of a way to heaven is through technological achievement — whether by a lofty tower futilely straining toward transcendence, or by New Age psychotechnologies and states of altered consciousness. But these are doomed to failure. The proud tower rose only several hundred feet; the technologies extend only as far as the fallen human psyche.
The need of the hour is for real transcendence and for transcendent worth.
Bring the transcendent back into American life, Chuck Colson preaches as he travels across the land, challenging Christians to restore the objective truth of the living God in Christ. His message usually has four points:
(1) Restore orthodoxy. Live by the laws of God's kingdom
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and Jesus' teachings of Christian truth. Fundamental, basic beliefs are necessary (2 Thess. 2:15). To preach that if you come to God he'll give you anything you want is to preach a false gospel. Lose orthodoxy and you lose the heart of the church.
(2) Be the church; it is the community of the redeemed. Be God's people. Make Jesus Lord.
(3) Think and, therefore, act like Christians. Apply the truth of Scripture in the marketplace. Argue every principle of life from this perspective: "current events in the eyes of God."
(4) Confess the faith. Be the salt and the light — take the Good News to others so they may understand the gospel and glorify God (Matthew 5:13-16).31
Yet despite such ringing calls to reassert transcendence, Christians sense a dichotomy between their noblest aspirations of goodness and the base selfishness that so easily intrudes upon even their best intentions and contaminates their choicest efforts. That is the curious mixture within humanity that is so profoundly and accurately chronicled in the early chapters of Genesis. And in the New Testament, where the apostle Paul moans: "I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do . . . . So I find it to be a law that when I want to do right, evil lies close at hand. For I delight in the law of God, in my inmost self, but I see in my members another law at war with the law of my mind and making me captive to the law of sin which dwells in my members. Wretched man that I am!" (Romans 7:19, 21-24, RSV).
Blaise Pascal, the French theologian and scientist, spoke of the "wretchedness and the greatness" of man,32 at once miserable and masterful. He remains dust, yet there is a "rumor of glory, a hint of transcendence, a whiff of dignity and destiny."33 For we have been made in the image of God.
Our intrinsic worth is that we are like God. We are not God, not divine, but like him. Even after the Fall marred and defaced and spoiled the divine image. The imago dei is still present. That's our dignity, says Stott. But there is also the fact of our depravity. "And we must never affirm one in such a way as to deny the other." Christians should opt for the "radical realism that keeps together the depravity and the
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dignity," for man is both, the white-haired expounder of the faith said in his lecture in Santa Barbara, California.
Human beings are capable of the loftiest nobility and the basest cruelty. We can behave like God, in whose image we were made, and like the animals from whom we were meant to be forever distinct. Human beings are able to think, choose, love, pray, worship; but human beings are also able to covet, to fight, to hate and to kill. Human beings are the inventors of churches for the worship of God, hospitals for the care of the sick, universities for the acquisition of wisdom. And human beings are also the inventors of torture chambers, concentration camps and nuclear arsenals. Strange, bewildering paradox. Noble, and ignoble; rational and irrational; moral and immoral; god-like and bestial.34
And then Stott quotes what Richard Holloway, the bishop of Edinburgh's Episcopal Church of Scotland, said at a recent conference:
This is my dilemma: I am dust and ashes; frail, wayward, a set of predetermined behavioral responses, riddled with fears, beset with needs, the quintessence of dust, and unto dust I shall return.
But there is something else in me. Dust I may be, but troubled dust. Dust that dreams. Dust that has strange premonitions of transfiguration, of a glory in store, a destiny prepared, an inheritance that will one day be my own. So my life is stretched out in a painful dialectic between ashes and glory, between weakness and transfiguration. I am a rebel to myself, an exasperating enigma, this strange duality of dust and glory.35
That's the human paradox: the glimmer of transcendence — the hope of glory — that shines through the shadow of our waywardness and rebellion.
New Age transcendence revels in innate human potential; Christian faith confesses the innate inability to please a righteous God but glories in the potential of his grace to transform human personality into the likeness of the face of Christ (2 Corinthians 4:6).
Chapter 32 || Table of Contents
1. J.D. Douglas, ed., New Bible Dictionary (London: InterVarsity Fellowship, 1967), 116–17.
2. William H. Willimon, "Community & Computers: Babel, Bytes & Bits" (editorial), Christian Century, 9–16 September 1987, 741.
3. Richard John Neuhaus, Naked Public Square (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1984), 153.
4. Charles Colson, with Ellen Santilli Vaughn, Kingdoms in Conflict (New York: William Morrow; Grand Rapids: Zondervan Publishing House, 1987), 78.
5. John Stott, lecture given at All Saints by the Sea Episcopal Church, Santa Barbara, Calif., 14 November 1987.
6. Sri Chinmoy, "The United Nations – An Instrument of Unification," Share International Magazine 4, no. 3 (March 1985): 16.
7. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1978), 281, 283.
8. Marilyn Ferguson, The Aquarian Conspiracy, Personal and Social Transformation in the 1980s (Los Angeles: J.P. Tarcher, 1980), 382.
9. Ibid., 378–79.
10. Marilyn Ferguson and Ray Gottlieb, "New Common Sense: Secrets of the Visionary Life" (manuscript draft), 80–81.
11. Quoted in Russell Chandler, "An Ascetic Way to Transcend the Tangible," review of Deng Ming Dao, The Wandering Taoist (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1983), Los Angeles Times Book Review, 24 July 1983.
12. Brooks Alexander, "A Generation of Wizards: Shamanism & Contemporary Culture," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Special Collection Journal 6, no. 1 (Winter 1984): 18.
13. Robert S. Ellwood and Harry B. Partin, Religious and Spiritual Groups in Modern America (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1988), 31.
14. Carl A. Raschke, Interruption of Eternity: Modern Gnosticism in the Origins of the New Religious Consciousness (Chicago: Nelson-Hall, 1980), 238.
15. Ibid., 238–39.
16. J. Gordon Melton, "Toward a Christian Response to the New Age Movement," 1985, 1.
17. James W. Sire, Scripture Twisting (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1980), 29–30.
18. Carl F.H. Henry, interview with author, Monrovia, Calif., 2 November 1987.
19. Mark C. Albrecht, Reincarnation: A Christian Critique of New Age Doctrine (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1982), 89.
20. F. LaGard Smith, Out on a Broken Limb (Eugene, Oreg.: Harvest House Publishers, 1986), 177.
21. Karen Hoyt et al., New Age Rage (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1987), 42.
22. Alexander, "A Generation of Wizards," 19.
23. Douglas R. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, Ill.: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 167.
24. Alice Lawhead and Stephen Lawhead, Pilgrim's Guide to the New Age (Batavia, Ill.: Lion Publishing Corp., 1986), 33.
25. Hoyt et al., New Age Rage, 214.
26. Gordon R. Lewis and Bruce A. Demarest, Integrative Theology (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1987), 1:203.
27. Ibid., 1:209.
28. Hoyt et al., New Age Rage, 88.
29. Mark Albrecht and Brooks Alexander, "The Sellout of Science," Spiritual Counterfeits Project Journal (August 1978): 28.
30. John Stott, lecture given at All Saints by the Sea Episcopal Church, Santa Barbara, Calif., 14 November 1987.
31. Chuck Colson, Christian Booksellers' Association Convention, Anaheim, Calif., 12 July 1987; idem, El Montecito Presbyterian Church, Santa Barbara, Calif, 18 October 1987.
32. Blaise Pascal, Pensees 7.430.
33. Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age, 87.
34. John Stott, lecture given at All Saints by the Sea Episcopal Church, Santa Barbara, Calif., 14 November 1987.
35. Ibid.
