ABHE Session #3 – Peter Jones

Peter Jones graduated from the University of Wales and Princeton Theological Seminary. (www.truthXchange.com)

The Challenge of Christian Education in an increasingly neo-pagan culture.

There is a greater threat even than secularism from “pagan monistic synthesis.” We will be facing this kind of religious attack against the gospel.

The rise of neo-pagan was predicted by Francis Schaeffer. “The East has come west, pantheism will be pressed as the only answer to ecological problems. The eastern religions will be to Christianity a new dangerous gnosticism.”

The sixties promised it. They sang about the coming of the age of Aquarius. Drop out, turn on. Don’t just do something, sit there. You can order a new age hamburger in New York by saying “Make me one with everything.”

We are drowning in it. According to the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life, 70% of Americans believe that religions other than their own lead to eternal life.

This creates problems for us as evangelicals.

A. The problem of Christian uniqueness in an “all is one” culture. The Christian generation you are teaching is steeped in the imperious necessity of co-existence, radical tolerance, all-inclusive oneness. Can’t we all get along?

Charles Colson told about a student who was in a training session for worldview. As she said that Christianity was unique, 7 of the 8 student leaders balked at the idea that only Christianity is true and everything else is false. This rising generation has been bathed in “all is one” and can’t speak about the uniqueness of Christianity.

B. Homosexuality – a question of a threat to the image of God in created human beings or just one sexual expression among many. Evangelicalism is beginning to implode on this subject. The left-wing evangelicals are entertaining the possibility of accepting homosexuality and homosexual marriage. (http://www.truthxchange.com/article/53-homosexuality-the-evangelical-temptation/#header)

The Los Angeles times asked a Baptist minister who said, “Traditionally Baptist churches have not approved. I would have to pray about it.” Many are falling for the gay agenda. The generation we are teaching (75% of 18-30 year olds) believes that homosexuality is a valid lifestyle – going diametrically opposed to the clear statements of Scripture.

C. Our students’ mouths are closed. They have no categories for dealing with the ideologies surrounding them. They cannot articulate their faith in compelling ways in an increasingly hostile culture. To have the courage to stand up and say something in a hostile culture takes confidence. Christian witness is being sentimentalized: Jesus and me, not Jesus Lord of the cosmos. The reason Jesus can be with me is because He is Lord of the cosmos. Jesus condescending to be my Savior and Lord is the only thing that makes me able to be with him. Our generations have lost that.

D. False Solutions are attempted.
Campus ministries, mission organizations, and large sections of the evangelical church are turning silence into a virtue. At the national pastor’s conference in San Diego, sponsored by Zondervan and IVP, they heard nothing about the gospel. Silence of the gospel is turned into a virtue. World Vision showed pastors how to get involved digging ditches in Africa, but nothing was shared about how to free Africans from ancestor worship through the power of the gospel. We hear more and more about “deeds, not creeds.” Avoiding the hot button issues and getting involved in socio-economic and environmental issues. Evangelicals are now doing this! They don’t see the value of blending deeds with creeds.

One of the great fears of the rising generation is giving offense. The book UNChristian describes how our young people are told that Christians are really obnoxious. There is a fear of the unpopular perceptions. We don’t have to be obnoxious, but we have to speak the truth. We are told that speaking the truth is obnoxious.

We face a world of religious synthesis. Look at the popular bumper sticker:

It’s not enough to say that the bible says so, even though it does. Explain why the Bible says things and what the deep underlying reasons for resisting this religious syncretism.
The United Nations is focused on uniting religions. Look at the interviews between Oprah and Eckhart Tolle.

Here are the essential five points of the synthetic worldview. Christianity has to oppose these because of the nature of what we believe.

1. All is one and one is all – This can be represented by a circle. Many pagan religions are symbolized by the circle. Nothing is wrong with the circle, but it is being used as a symbol for the deep meaning of the cosmos. It’s the notion of bringing everything together. The idea is that everything shares the same substance. Everything fits into the circle and holds everything together. This is “Monism,” the theory of oneness. Everything shares in the same basic attribute and has a quality of the divine in it. Buddhists celebrate unity with the “mandala” which in Sansckrit means circle or cosmogram. Beholding a mandala conveys an impression of wholeness bringing peace and meaning. “God is not an external, supernatural being ruling over humanity. God is rather the power of love which flows through each one of us…the source of life, of love, the ground of being, …[but] life has taught us that theism is dead.” – John Shelby Spong

2. All humanity is one – This can be represented by little circles within a big circle. Each human being is a holographic version of the big circle. Each human has a notion of the divine or spark of the divine. Because that is true, we can hope to bring all the peoples of the world together. This has tremendous geopolitical power. Some people now talk about global governance and structures that can be established for making sure the world is one in an economic point of view. It is an incredible moment for a pagan worldview to fit with the reality of our geopolitical world. In the global world, everything is connected. Global interdependence would bring the end of the nation state. This is connected to the view of the human race being capable of bound together by the spark of divinity within us. But this is NOT the gospel. “I am uncreated, as old as God.” – Harold Bloom. More and people are understanding the power of this so-called gospel in their lives. We are producing people who actually believe they are divine. “There is something in the soul that is uncreated and uncreatable.” – so-called Christian mystic, the Dominican Meister Eckhart (1260-1327) But everyone has a birthday. It is false to say that I am uncreated. Be careful to realize how far this new spirituality will take people who buy into it.

3. All religions are one – This can be represented by a big circle that looks like a pepperoni pizza cut into eight slices. All religions lead to God and have a piece of the truth. Putting all the religions together will give us the whole truth. Some evangelicals are happy just being considered one piece of the pie, part of the peoples of faith. This is not new. Back in the 12th century, Ibn Arabi (a Sufi master) wrote “My soul is a Mosque for Muslims, a temple for Hindus, an altar for Zoroastrians, a church for Christians, a synagogue for Jews, and a pasture for gazelles.” This was even a problem in the first century AD. Think about Paul and his visit to Athens. Going past all of those altars, they were not fighting with each other. It was an implicit syncretism. Miletus called himself a priest for all the gods. A spokesman for Buddhism said, “It is in the area of personal religious awakening that transcends specific traditions where some Buddhists find the greatest chance for common ground with other traditions.” The center of the pizza is “spirituality”, the tasty part everybody wants. The crust is the tough part that people don’t eat. That’s how people look at religions, that they all have their crust and they all have their good points.

4. There is one problem – A pagan eschatology is created. Alice Bailey says “The heart of humanity is sound.” Jesus in A course in Miracles said “Man’s only sin is not remembering his own perfect sinless divine nature. The only devil is our illusion that we are separate from and not part of God…the lack you need to correct is the sense of separation from God. The notion of separation and distinctions has to be removed. They think the reason the world isn’t united together is that there are too many jagged divisions between us. A social program is necessary to remove them. Here are some samples distinctions that are eliminated: Theism/Monism, Creator/Creature, God/Man, Animal/Human, Christ/Satan, Life/Death, Heaven/Hell, Truth/Falsehood, Right/Wrong, Good/Evil, Sin/Holiness, Bible/Other Scriptures, monotheism/polytheism, traditional/alternate families, male/female, parents/children, love/pornography, homosexuality/heterosexuality. All of these are distinctions the Bible clearly defines.

But in pagan monistic synthesis, all of these things are simply relative points on the circle, various perspectives held by different people. If we could just eliminate those divisions, we would solve all of mankind’s problems. These distinctions are being blurred and removed. The new liberated gender promotes 14 different gender choices (“Omnigender”). These things are passed on as civil rights. Behind that is the powerful ideology of pagan monism.

5. There is one solution – From a pagan point of view, the solution is to go to the center. The solution is in the middle of the big circle, and that is the small circle that is in the center of you. Mysticism is where the solution is being sought. Finding inner peace in the middle of who we are is a powerful ideology even moving through the Bible belt. Walsch’s God – “Listen to your feelings…words are the least reliable purveyors of truth.” This comes from hinduism and gnosticism. Stop thinking, start feeling. Huston Smith on KPBS, July 9, 2003 described the difference between Buddhist mediation and Christian prayer: “Christian prayer uses words…the mystical view of God uses ‘night vision’ where one sees behind and beyond the God of theism.” The goal of paganism is to stop thinking and get behind the mind of God.

Yoga comes from the Sanskrit word “Yuj” meaning to yoke, join, or unite. yoga thus means “union with God” or “yoked with God.” Swami Sivananda states: “we must consciously destroy the mind…Keep your intellect at a respectable distance when you study mythology…. That which separates you from God is mind.” We believe that the mind is part of the image of God, but paganism is trying to remove that aspect of the image of God. We need to be people of the mind, not to be proud, but to use this amazing gift God has given to us to bring glory to Him. Mantra is a Sanskrit word, made up of two words: man = think and tra = be liberated from. Some of our Christian techniques of worship ought to be careful that we don’t fall into the mystical trap of silencing the mind so that we don’t know the mind of Christ.

The goal of paganism is conjunctio oppositorum = Joining of the opposites. You take those opposites and meet in the middle to empower yourself.

Pagan eschatology, evolution to the rescue, spiritual transformation.

This worldview, it is claimed, will bring an end to human depression and egotism, religious fear and conflict, conflicts between nations, the ecological crisis, and a transformation of humanity.

The Wiccan circles speak of a “Sophianic Millennium,” the era of Goddess blessing and worship when all peoples and faiths will be united around the Divine Feminine.

The new spirituality should not be underestimated. It offers cosmological, monistic claims about sexuality, ecology, geo-politics, social justice, end of war, and future of the planet.

Meanwhile, what is the answer we give as Christians? Jesus loves me, he’s my friend, sentimentalized gospel, no teaching about Jesus, the Lord of the Cosmos.

The many forms of monism all explain the world by the world. You can describe the world as spiritualist or materialist, atheistic or “theistic”, monotheistic or polytheistic, ascetic or libertine, acosmic or procosmic, gnostic or romantic, animistic or rationalistic, secular humanist or neo-pagan.

Synthesis or monism is a smokescreen for univocity. The opposite of synthesis is antithesis. There are two kinds of religion, and we must understand that we are not a religion of oneness, but of twoness.
paganus – alienus
esoteric – exoteric
introspective – extraspective
internalist – externalist
monistic – theistic
all is one – all is two
both/and – either/or
homocosmology – heterocosmology
Ours is alienus, exoteric, extraspective, externalist, theistic, all is two, either/or, heterocosmology.

Romans 1:25 – They exchanged the truth for the lie and worshiped and served the creation rather than the Creator, who is blessed forever, amen. Some religions worship the creation, others worship the Creator. There are two circles, not one. All is two, rather than all is one. His circle is larger than our circle. The glory of the gospel is twoness, rather than oneness.