Chapter 19

Clashing Cosmologies : Battle for the Worldview

The battle over worldviews — Christianity's sharpest test in nearly five centuries — is being waged in a cultural supermarket of competing beliefs and philosophies.¹

• A banner headline in USA Today proclaimed: "Yoga, Vegetarian Diet Can Heal Your Heart." But what the American Heart Association session really said was that relieving stress, exercising, and eating low-fat foods can help reverse coronary blockages.²

• In the motion picture Star Trek V, the crew of the starship Enterprise visits the center of the galaxy, where God resides. The Ancient of Days appears in the middle of a Stonehenge-like ring of monoliths. He shows the visitors his "many faces," which they immediately recognize as the gods of their various cultures. Hero Captain Kirk sums it up later by observing that they had finally learned that the real "God" lies within themselves.³

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• Miriam Starhawk, a self-proclaimed witch, speaking from the pulpit of San Francisco Theological Seminary's chapel, addressed students and faculty on "Feminist Perspectives." Seminary President J. Randolph Taylor said Starhawk's lecture was a "wide-ranging" presentation "focused primarily on creation spirituality and the interrelationship of all life." According to the Presbyterian Layman newspaper, Taylor said Starhawk "explained her personal philosophy with references to the pre-Hebrew creation myths of Mesopotamia, quoting excerpts from that ancient literature and illustrating its usage with ritual chants." But some students disagreed with their president. The "ritual chants" the witch offered in the seminary chapel, they said were really prayers to "powers under the earth."⁴

• As part of "Women's Week," sponsored by the Perkins School of Theology and held at Highland Park United Methodist Church in Dallas, Linda Finnell, another practicing witch, conducted a seminar that included such occult practices as "tarot card reading, building an altar to the goddess Diana, channeling energy, and attempting to communicate with a personal spirit guide."⁵

• Lewis Thomas, scholar-in-residence at Cornell University Medical College, defended the "Gaia hypothesis," which he called the "new idea that the Earth "is not at all the mystical notion that it would have seemed a few years back," Thomas wrote. "It is now becoming the most practical, down-to-earth thought ever thought." Thomas said he could not believe "that an organism so immense and complex, with so many interconnected and communicating central nervous systems at work, from crickets and fireflies to philosophers, should be itself mindless."⁶

• In a special "New Age" issue of Publishers Weekly, the trade journal of publishing, Jeremy Tarcher wrote an article calling for the "end" of New Age publishing. Not because he's against New Age, mind you. His company publishes an assortment of New Age books, including Marilyn Ferguson's systematic "bible" of the movement, The Aquarian Conspiracy. What Tarcher had in mind was that New Age publishing should be taken for granted as part of an accepted truth — in other words, in simply being the culture.⁷

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The job of the '80s was to set the boundaries, establish an identity and pick up the gold that lay on the surface. The New Age publisher's goal for the '90s is to find ways to integrate these ideas within the general culture rather than isolating them in a special category, and to market the product as the age-old wisdom and good advice that it really is . . .

The New Age consciousness can already be seen in a continuing flow of books dealing with psychological development, women's issues, health, relationships and recovery from dysfunctional families. In the future more books will reflect the new consciousness about the ecology, economic problems, politics, humanistic business practices and a full range of social transformation issues. There's no end to the possibilities.⁸

   Tarcher's 1989 goal of having "no New Age category as such" within five years is well ahead of schedule. Only one year later, Publishers Weekly reported that publishers and bookstores were scrambling to re-label New Age books, slipping them into slots of science, education, psychology, mythology, etc.

   Barbara Moulton, an editor at Harper-San Francisco, noted that feminine spirituality books were doing especially well at Christmastime. "Very mainstream women's magazines are approaching us for excerpts" of books like The Spiral Dance, The Great Cosmic Mother, and The Language of the Goddess, she said. "It has broken out of the New Age market to the general well-educated reader."⁹

*   *   *   *

   The surprise best-selling book of the summer of 1988 and the talk of secular American intelligentsia was The Power of Myth by Joseph Campbell. For months, bookstores couldn't keep the book in stock. The late literature professor was popularized by PBS journalist Bill Moyers in a series of television interviews summed up in the book.

   "For Americans alienated by Christian fundamentalism, Roman Catholic dogma or the soft under-belly of 'New Age' psycho-babble," wrote Don Lattin in the San Francisco Chronicle, "Campbell's ideas swept across the religious landscape like a fresh invigorating breeze."¹⁰

   Campbell defends his secular mythology as a way of achieving meaning and direction, transcending earthly activity at the same time it gives it significance.

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   But certain "myths" are redlined by Campbell, particularly the personal lawgiver God of the Bible and the Christian idea of sin. Disdaining the concept of ultimate truth, Campbell nonetheless "asserts the ultimate truth of an impersonal and amoral divinity," notes author and New Age critic Douglas Groothuis.¹¹ The centrality of Campbell's worldview? "I know," said Campbell, "that good and evil are simply temporal aberrations and that, in God's view, there is no difference."¹²

Battle for Hearts and Minds

   In the final years of this century we will witness an escalating battle for the hearts and minds of men and women.

   Tom Sine agrees. In his book Wild Hope he says that "the greatest threat to our freedom . . . will not be from those who attempt to invade our shores or abridge our Constitution. Instead, it will come from those who become increasingly more sophisticated in manipulating our values, opinions and worldviews."¹³

   If the Christian worldview is to prevail, Christian leaders must design strategies to assert the biblical perspective in the 1990s. If they wait until 2001 it will be too late.

   We need to recognize divergent worldviews more clearly and discuss them more intelligently.

   But first we need to clarify the meaning of "worldview."

   One historian says it's "a conception of the nature of cosmic and human reality that discloses the meaning of life." According to another definition, worldviews "furnish answers to the largest questions human beings can have about their condition."¹⁴ Toffler says a worldview is a "weltanschauung," a conception of reality that solves the "mystery" or "riddle" of life. In Understanding the New Age, I define worldview as "cherished premises or assumptions you hold about ultimate reality."¹⁵

   A worldview is like a giant filing cabinet in which you arrange your suppositions about how the universe is ordered.

   Therefore, worldviews hold our presumptions about God.

   Although the distinctions are somewhat arbitrary, three major worldviews have been generally recognized by historians, theologians,

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and philosophers. Rivals for thousands of years, these worldviews are spoken of in the Bible. Paul was well acquainted with them, as 1 Corinthians 1-2 attests.

   The first view of the world is naturalism, or naturalistic humanism, sometimes associated with secularism. The second is mysticism, or what comes under the headings of monism, pantheism, and other philosophies with a New Age label. This worldview posits the unity and divinity of all beings. The third major worldview is theism / supernaturalism. The biblical, Judeo-Christian worldview is a subset of this.

   All three are alive and well on Planet Earth. But will they remain healthy as we speed toward the next millennium?

Naturalistic Humanism, Naturalism, Scientism

   Naturalistic humanism, naturalism, and scientism are the "wisdom of the world" that the Apostle Paul spoke about in 1 Corinthians. "For since in the wisdom of God, the world through its wisdom did not know him, God was pleased through the foolishness of what was preached to save those who believe . . . so that your faith might not rest on men's wisdom, but on God's power."¹⁶

   Naturalistic humanism is the prevailing worldview on most secular campuses: human reason and scientific innovation are the final authority for life and thought.

   Nihilism, the belief that there are no certainties — that everything is up for grabs — is the spirit of the times that Allan Bloom speaks about in The Closing of the American Mind, the best-selling book during the summer of 1987. He describes trends in American higher education that have led to a crumbling of the belief that truth exists — or that it matters.¹⁷

   "Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue, the only virtue, which all primary education for more than 50 years has dedicated itself to inculcating," Bloom argues. "The true believer is the real danger."¹⁸

   This is not to disparage science. We need science, which theologian Reinhold Niebuhr described as "the rational effort to understand the world's coherences and master its powers."¹⁹ We need science as well as theology to see the harmony of things and their relationships.

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   But the danger is believing that if we tote up all the exact little coherences of science, we arrive at the sum truth of everything.

   The wisdom of the world says it knows "God." And God is simply the "vast coherence of things." The rational order is "God," though most naturalists wouldn't use that word.

Mysticism

   The New Age worldview holds that God is an impersonal force, or a field of energy that holds everything together. Joseph Campbell commits to a "trans-theological" image of divinity, "an undefinable, inconceivable mystery, thought of as a power, that is the source and end and supporting ground of all life and being."²⁰

   Campbell, Groothuis submits, may have become a kind of posthumous prophet for the New Age worldview. For Campbell is in essential agreement with New Age celebrities like Shirley MacLaine, Werner Erhard, and John Denver: "All is one, god is an impersonal and amoral force in which we participate; supernatural revelation and redemption are not needed."²¹

   But the New Age worldview goes further and speaks about the wisdom of self-consciousness. "New Agers avoid the materialist's despair, not by affirming transcendent absolutes, but by destroying rationality and denying the reality of the material world. For them, subjective reality is all there is."²²

   We create our own truth, our own reality. "Normal thinking processes are replaced with a nonrational mystical awareness."²³ In essence, God is everything; everything is God: and humans are part of that process — so we are God.

   "New Agers typically view themselves as operating on a 'higher' spiritual plane than other people and believe that the whole traditional dichotomy between right and wrong is merely the product of a degenerated aspect of life," says Kevin Garvey, a New Age analyst. If man is God, then any act is potentially a sacrament, any idea potentially sacred.²⁴

   The problem, according to the New Age worldview, is not sin or evil, but ignorance. The problem is that we have forgotten who we are — that we are divine.

   And the way to return to Godhead? (to use the Hare Krishna phrase).

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Through psychotechnologies — all designed to alter the mind's perceptions. This shift may occur through mind-altering drugs such as LSD, meditation techniques, intense group encounters, psychic experiences, or other routes. These techniques are intended to alter consciousness and lead to "Enlightenment," which is supposed to occur when we shut down the analytical, logical, "left" hemisphere of the brain in favor of the feeling, intuitive, "right" hemisphere.

   Enlightenment is "merging" with God, becoming one with the One. All religious paths are valid roads to truth. In this mystical "knowing," we supposedly see the "many faces" of Deity, the same "Star Trek V" God that all religions purportedly worship.

   The New Age depiction of God, wrote Donna Steichen, "is held to be the immanent consciousness of the evolving universe, which we can all know by direct experience, because we are part of it."²⁵

   In other words, the Gaia hypothesis. What controversial jesuit Tehilhard de Chardin called "the soul of the world." What mystic physicist Fritjov Capra terms "the cosmic dance of energy." What Jean Houston calls the "emerging evolutionary process." And what Matthew Fox speaks of as "the divine 'I am' in every person and creature."

   The widespread and multifaceted New Age worldview subtly touches virtually every aspect of our lives. It is mainstreamed into our daily newspapers, alluded to in Congressional hearings, and written into the Congressional Record. From public school classes, business seminars, psychology and science texts, to health, music, art, entertainment, and politics — and even in churches and seminaries — New Age theories and self-actualization therapies abound.²⁶

   This meshing of the metaphysical and the material boils down to a pop psychology of self-affirmation, necromancy through "channeling," and a wholesale borrowing from Eastern belief in reincarnation and the notion that the cosmos is a universal energy field or life force.

   The New Age worldview appeals because people are looking for something new. Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah speaks of "vague spiritual orientations."²⁷ Those who have rejected traditional Christianity nonetheless feel there must be something more. They seek transcendence. And the New Age movement promises "quick fix" spirituality, global harmony, and self-empowerment from the "divine

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within" — without troublesome demands for personal moral accountability.

  New Age is creeping into Christian thought and into more than a few churches. Its worldview is perhaps subconsciously adopted by those looking for an alternative to the impotence and vague spiritual orientations of lackluster congregations.

Judeo-Christian Theism

   The "wisdom of God" is radically different from the worldviews of both naturalistic humanism and the New Age.

   God is Personal — not an "it." He has attributes. He is separate from his creation; the creation is not God but his handiwork. Human beings are created in God's likeness or image,²⁸ but we are not God or gods. As Soren Kierkegaard once put it, there is an "infinite qualitative difference" between the human and the divine.²⁹

   In the Judeo-Christian worldview there is a problem with human existence, but it is not "metaphysical amnesia," as in forgetting that we are divine.

   In the biblical worldview, the problem is sin, human disobedience to the revealed moral demands of a merciful but righteous Father in heaven. The broken relationship cannot be mended through psychotechnologies that seek to unite us with a loose energy-ball God who is "all that is."

   "Christian conversion is not the case of fanning that little spiritual spark in the human soul into a flame. It is a case of invading a dark and doomed soul with spiritual light from above," declares Steve Turner. Nor does Christian spirituality originate "in a small area of the human brain. It is a transference of God's personality into the human life, and it can only happen on the basis of repentance, faith and discipleship," he continues. "It cannot be coaxed, kick-started, or chanted into being."³⁰

   Restoration comes through repentance, forgiveness, and the atoning work of Jesus Christ on the cross of Calvary.

   "Paul's successful establishment of the biblical worldview, and toppling of opposing worldviews, resulted directly from his cross-centered life, preaching and focus," says Norman R. Gulley, professor

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of systematic theology at Southern College of Seventh-day Adventists in Tennessee.³¹

   The wisdom of God has always been foolishness to the world. The preaching of Christ crucified and resurrected is incompatible with worldly wisdom. But it is the timeless wisdom of God that Christians must proclaim in new and fresh ways if a hardy biblical and evangelical theology is to endure into the 21st century.

   In today's pluralistic world, the imperative of a Gospel that insists Christ is the only way, truth, and life sounds arrogant. One of the most seductive and appealing features of the New Age worldview is that it is tolerant — or appears to be. It invites women and men to spread their wings and fly with godlike possibilities.

   But the bottom line is that the New Age worldview is nothing more than the serpent's lie in Genesis 3:5: If you eat of the forbidden fruit "you will be like God."

Pass It On

   How, then, can we pass on the Christian worldview to our children and grandchildren?

   During a discussion between several dozen evangelical scholars in Washington, Gordon College sociologist Stan Gaede suggested that

The real question . . . is, "Are we giving our students an alternative worldview to the one they are getting in the modern age? Are they learning to think biblically about all of life? Is the Creator at the center of their understanding of creation? Is God's glory the primary purpose behind their thinking and doing?" If the answers to these questions is "yes," then regardless of what our students come to think of the particulars within the evangelical tradition, they will be in a position to carry on the task of the Reformation, even in the modern world.³²

   "What concerns me, however," Gaede continued,

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is that most Christian educators are not in a position to foster such a worldview — because they have never developed one themselves. One reason for this is that evangelicalism has been as much a reaction to something as an affirmation of something.³³

   Admittedly, cultivating a biblical worldview is difficult in a modern world where the "freedom" of intellectual pluralism tempts us to compromise.

   My son T.J. attends what was once a Methodist-related university. In a required freshman class called "Worldviews," the professor urged his students to "be skeptical about everything . . . Learning grows only from doubt." He concluded that "the university is one of the few places — or it ought to be — where doubt needs no defense."³⁴

   Today's university students are asking questions. Heavy questions about ultimate issues, and they surfaced in T.J.'s Worldview course:

• Is there a God?

• Why are we alive?

• What is death?

• How do we live?

• Why is North, north? What structures our thoughts?

• What about good versus evil?

• What is justice?

• Are all humans and life forms equal?

• What is our relationship to Nature and to the nature of the world?

• What parts of us are hereditary and what parts are environmental?

   The answers depend on your worldview.

   Which worldview will we communicate to the generations of the next century?

   Questioning, thinking for oneself, is absolutely essential for vigorous faith. But to think that truth is unknowable, that moral values must be held forever in suspension, is to fall into the trap of the world's wisdom — the world that does not understand the power and wisdom of God.

   The biblical worldview needs to be defended against all others. The Bible is trustworthy and unique in historical character. The Jewish Scriptures alone, as religion and as history, are supreme over

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every other ancient writing. They are personally honest and factually accurate.

   The Gospel is "hard news," and its cornerstone is laid in history, with consequences in history. The uniqueness of the Christian worldview is that the Christ drama really happened, while the myths about other world religions did not. The mythic imagination called for by Joseph Campbell is tempting. but it must be rejected. As Groothuis observes, Campbell "chokes on the hard historicity of Christianity, and is not comfortable until he recasts it in metaphorical terms."³⁵

   But metaphors contain no saving power.

   The Christian worldview is oriented toward fact and verification, not subjective mysticism based on altered consciousness.

   The other central support for the Christian worldview is the resurrection, as over against reincarnation. That is part of the historical Christ-event — fact, not theory.

   The resurrection of Christ is the wisdom of God, and it is not known by the wisdom of the world, nor by the "wisdom" of the "universal mind." Faith grasps it even if we can't fully comprehend it. It is the realistic remedy for sin and the vanity of the human heart.

   Christians need to say with clarity and conviction that human beings cannot know God when we make our humanity the ultimate end.

   To understand the forces shaping the next age, the church must teach its people how to discern worldviews and separate clashing cosmologies.

Chapter Twenty  ||  Table of Contents