Contemporary Theology II: ST507 From Theology of Hope to ... · by Elizabeth Clare Prophet entitled The Lost Years of Jesus; a book by Janet Bock entitled The Jesus Mystery; and then

Contemporary Theology II:

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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LESSON 20 of 24ST507

New Age Theology: Christology and Influence

Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism

At the end of our last lecture we were looking at the New Age understanding of Jesus Christ, and I had given you a general description of that. Now I want to turn to some of the specific themes that one finds in New Age thinking with respect to Jesus Christ. But before we do that, let’s begin with a word of prayer.

Father, we thank you for Jesus Christ, for what He has done for us, and for what He means to each one of us. We thank you, Lord, as well for the accurate and clear revelation of Him and about Him contained in your Word. As we compare that with the New Age thinking of Jesus Christ, we see many, many divergences. We pray, Lord, that we would be careful to understand exactly the biblical portrait of Christ so that we can speak to those who present a different perspective. May we also understand the problems with the alleged documents that tell about what Christ did other than what we find in the New Testament. So help us as we study. For it’s in Christ’s name we pray it. Amen.

Let me share with you some of the main perspective on Jesus Christ and New Age thinking, and here, as we said at the end of our last lecture, there are a lot of divergences, but these are some of the things that seem generally to be held by New Age thinkers. First of all, Jesus is revered and respected as a highly spiritually evolved being who serves as an example for further evolution for the rest of us. He’s referred to in a variety of ways; sometimes He’s called a Master; sometimes Guru, Yogi, Adept, Avatar, Shaman, Way-shower, or things like that. His miracles are often seen as manifestations of His mastery of divine energy or of His tapping into what’s known as the Christ-power. But the individual, personal historical Jesus is separated from the universal, impersonal eternal Christ, or Christ-consciousness, which this individual Jesus embodied but did not monopolize. Jesus is seen as a Christ, but not the only one to corner the market on Christ-consciousness, if we could put it that way.

John S. Feinberg, PhD University of Chicago, MA and PhD

Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, ThMTalbot Theological Seminary, MDiv

University of California, BA

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism © 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.


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David Spangler says this: “The Christ is not the province of a single individual, although Jesus focused the universal life grown quality we call the Christ.” The idea of Jesus as the supreme and final revelation of God is dismissed as thoroughly illegitimate. Jesus is not the one and only Christ that ever was, is, or will be. God cannot be so reserved as to restrict incarnation to one revealer. To do so would in effect limit the power of God, which would be a shackling of divinity to one physical form for all eternity, and God is not going to do that, New Agers say.

When it comes to Jesus’ death on the cross, that is rejected as having any ethical significance for salvation. Either New Agers deny it as a historical event altogether, or they reinterpret it to exclude the idea that Jesus suffered as the Christ to pay the just penalty for human sin. As to the resurrection of Christ, you can be sure that there’s no view that it was a physical fact of history and surely it did not . . . there’s no idea that this happened and in so doing demonstrated victory over sin and death and Satan; rather it is understood, if it’s even recognized at all, as a spiritual triumph, but not a triumph that is unique to Jesus. That is, there are a number of other ascended masters.

What about the second coming of Christ? Here again, the biblical perspective is denied. The second coming from the perspective of New Age thinking is not a literal, physical, and visible return in the clouds at the end of the age. Instead it is seen as indicating a stage in the evolutionary advancement of the race, when the christique energies escape the confinements of ignorance. Some New Age figures may claim to embody this energy more perfectly than others, and so better personify the second coming, but it’s not in effect referring to a specific unique event in the way that Scripture portrays it.

Then on top of that, exotic, extrabiblical documents are regarded as sources for authentic material about the life of Jesus Christ, and this is material that is clearly not available from the canonical Scriptures. These extrabiblical documents are usually taken more seriously than Scripture itself as the New Agers attempt to find a lost Christianity, one that fits their ideas and their agenda. Groothuis lists four different types of sources of such material. In the first place, there is some appeal to some ancient Gnostic texts that were discovered in 1945 in Nag Hammadi, Egypt, and the appeal to these documents is to see them as the original message of a Gnostic Jesus that became heretical only through a manipulative church hierarchy that changed it.



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A second approach focuses instead on a Tibetan document that was published at the turn of the twentieth century by a Russian journalist. This document claims that between the ages of thirteen and twenty-nine, the so-called lost years of Jesus, Jesus was actually studying and teaching and traveling in the mystic East. A third approach bases its thinking on the Dead Sea Scrolls and other such documents to uncover a so-called Essene Jesus. The Jesus who’s constructed from this material, of course, differs rather significantly from the Christ of the Gospels in Scripture.

Then, finally, there are some who appeal to assorted channelers who extract information about or even extensively from Jesus through their entities, their spirit guides, and ascended masters, or from less personal sources such as the Akashic records or the collective unconscious. An increasingly popular three-volume work that is called A Course in Miracles presents itself as nothing less than a transcript of a postmortem message from Jesus Himself.

Of these four interpretations I want to look a little bit more specifically with you at the second and the third in just a few moments. Before I move to that, though, I want to offer a quote from Groothuis’s Revealing the New Age Jesus, as he sums up this line of thinking. He says, “Historic orthodox doctrine is rejected and replaced by an esoteric interpretation of biblical texts that yields unorthodox results. Esoteric refers to the hidden, secret, or archian meaning. For instance, John White interprets being born again as dying to the past and the old sense of self through a change in consciousness, rather than receiving forgiveness of sin and new life through Jesus as Lord and Savior. Historic orthodoxy is shunned as exoteric or external religion. A mere ossified shell of formal religiosity unconnected to the inner or esoteric core of spiritual reality. For Christianity to be salvaged and rehabilitated for this new age, it must be reinterpreted esoterically. According to White, exoteric Judeo-Christianity must reawaken to the truth preserved in its esoteric tradition.” End the quote from Groothuis.

If these are some of the major themes, let me take a look with you a little bit more in detail at two of the broad approaches to Jesus. The first one is the one that suggests that Jesus during the so-called lost years went and traveled and studied in the Far East. This approach points to the life of Christ between the ages of twelve and [thirty] and it says from a scriptural standpoint, all of that is summed up in Luke 2:52 by saying, and we quote Scripture here, “Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man.” If you look just at that verse, there’s no hint



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that Christ ever left Palestine, nor is there any essential doctrine of Christianity that rests on Christ being a world traveler or rests on anything that evidently he did between the ages of twelve and thirty. Nonetheless, New Agers believe that they have the answer to what happened during those lost years in Christ’s life. They take two passages from Scripture to sanction their idea that a lot more happened in those lost years than is traditionally thought, and both of those passages come from the gospel of John, John 20:30–31 and John 21:25, and these particular passages say that there were many other things that Jesus did and said and yet we’ve only recorded, John says, the things that we feel are necessary for you to believe. If there are many other things that He did and said, maybe what those things were is that He went to the Far East and He studied and traveled and all the rest.

Another New Age thinker sees John 1:31, where you remember John the Baptist says he didn’t know Jesus,tThis New Age thinker sees this as evidence that Jesus must have been away from Palestine for quite some time. Otherwise, reasons this thinker, John, who was Jesus’ cousin, would have recognized Him. Now, as you know, this ignores the fact that John was a recluse, he lived in the desert until he appeared publically to Israel as recorded in Luke 1:80, so he might not have known an awful lot about Jesus, or perhaps the point there is that he didn’t know Jesus as the Messiah until the Holy Spirit had descended upon Christ as recorded in John 1:29–34.

In spite of these possible counterinterpretations, there are New Agers who see all of this as a sign of Jesus’ travel to the Far East. Why, though, would someone think that this was actually what occurred during those so-called lost years? It’s because of a book that was published in 1894 by a Russian journalist by the name of Nicolas Notovitch. He published a book called The Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, and the focus of this book was on a supposedly lost Tibetan text that was called The Life of Saint Issa: Best of the Sons of Men. This particular book, The Life of Saint Issa, says that Christ traveled East during those lost years. The following books also rest on and echo many of Notovitch’s claims: a book by Levi Downing entitled The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ; a book by Elizabeth Clare Prophet entitled The Lost Years of Jesus; a book by Janet Bock entitled The Jesus Mystery; and then a book by Holger Kersten entitled Jesus Lived in India.

How in the world was it that Notovitch supposedly found this manuscript? Let me read to you what Groothuis says as he describes



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how this supposedly happened. On page 151 of his Revealing the New Age Jesus, we read, “In the preface of the Unknown Life of Jesus Christ, Notovitch reports that after the Turkish War in 1877–78, he journeyed, that is, Notovitch journeyed to India to study the peoples who inhabit India and their customs, the grand and mysterious archaeology and the colossal and majestic nature of their country. After various travels he arrived at Ladakh, Tibet, from where he intended to return to Russia, but while he was there he heard from a chief lama of very ancient memoirs relating to the life of Jesus Christ contained in certain great monasteries. With renewed vigor, Notovitch decided to hunt down this material instead of returning to Russia. While at Leh, the capital of Ladakh, he visited the Himis monastery, where the chief lama informed him that copies of the manuscript were housed. Notovitch says that in order not to arouse suspicion, he decided to depart for India. After his departure, Notovitch says he fortuitously broke his leg, which brought him back to Himis for treatment and ultimately for the recovery of the lost years of Jesus. And he claims that upon his request, the chief lama brought to him ‘the manuscripts relating to Jesus Christ and assisted by my interpreter who translated for me the Tibetan language, transferred carefully to my notebook what the lama read to me.’ He says that since he did not doubt the authenticity of the chronicle, which was ‘edited with great exactitude by the Brahminic, and more especially the Buddhistic historians of India and Nepal,’ he sought to publish a translation.’”

This Life of Saint Issa is divided into fourteen chapters with verses within each chapter, and it’s in chapter 4 that we begin to learn of what happened to Issa, and Issa is the Tibetan term for Jesus, we learn what happened to Issa during those lost years. And let me read, if I may, Groothuis’s description of what the book says, and you can see all the things that Jesus was supposed to have done during these lost years.

Beginning on page 152 we read, “God spoke through this child and even as a youth, Issa gathered a following by talking of the only indivisible God and exhorting the strayed souls to repent and purify themselves from their sins. [This gospel 4 and verse 8]. Yet at age thirteen, just when he expected to marry, Issa left Jerusalem with a train of merchants and journeyed to the Sindh in India,” according to this book chapter 4, verses 13, “in order to perfect himself in the knowledge of the Word of God and the study of the laws of the great Buddha. At age fourteen Issa came this side of the Sindh and settled among the Aryas in the country beloved by God (chapter 5, verse 1). After his fame spread in the Northern



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Sindh, the devotees of the god Djaine (chapter 5, verse 2) sought him, but he left the deluded worshippers (chapter 5, verse3) and went to Dijagguernat in the country of Orsis (chapter 5, verse 3) where Brahma priests taught him to comprehend the Vedas, to cure physical ills by prayer, to teach the sacred Scriptures, to drive out evil desires from man and remake him in the likeness of God (chapter 5, verse 4).

“During six years here and in other holy cities Issa lived and loved the lower Hindu classes and sided with them against the oppressing higher classes. He even denied the divine inspiration of the Vedas and the Puranas in favor of the universal law of worshiping God alone (chapter 5, verses 12–13). Issa denounced all idolatry, and called down the anger of God on those who worship inanimate objects (chapter 5, verses 15–26). God is the cause of the mysterious life of man into whom He has breathed part of His divine being, according to chapter 5, verse 18.

“Although the higher classes of priests and warriors took offense at Issa’s rejection of their teaching and sought to kill him, he escaped to the country of the Gautamides, where the great Buddah Sakya-Muni came to the world, among a people who worshiped the only and sublime Brahma (chapter 6, verse 2). In other words, Issa moved from Hinduism to Buddhism, although a Buddhist worshiping Brahma is anomalous to say the least,” says Groothuis. “He then mastered the Pali language and studied the sacred Sutras (Buddhists scriptures) for six years, after which he could perfectly expound the sacred scrolls, according to chapter 6, verse 4.

“He then left Nepal in the Himalayan Mountains and descended to the valley of Radjipoutan. He later moved to the west and everywhere preached the supreme perfection attainable by man (chapter 6, verse 5 says). Issa continued to condemn idolatry among the pagans (chapter 6, verses 7–16), warning that those who create idols will be the prey of an eternal fire (chapter 7, verse 10). Many forsook their idols (chapter 7, verse 1 says).

“Issa’s next stop was Persia, where he excoriated the Zoroastrians for viewing God as both good and evil and for worshiping the sun (chapter 8 of this gospel tells us about that). This was less than warmly received by the Magi who abandoned Issa on a highway outside the city in the middle of the night, hoping that he would become breakfast for wild beasts. But he didn’t, he escaped.



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“Then Issa at age twenty-nine returned to Israel for three years.” And so on it goes to tell of the eventual demise of Issa at the hands of crucifixion and so on and so forth. All of this again spoken of in this gospel or this Life of Saint Issa. As Groothuis notes, the theology of this document is really a mixture of Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism. Let me again read to you what Groothuis says about this on pages 154 through 155.

He says, “The god of Issa seems to be a personal and moral being who demands worship and hates idolatry” [hence Judaism], “even threatening unrepentant idolaters with hell. The Christian element is present in the sum of Issa’s teachings are close to those found in the Gospels, particularly when he says he did not come to disown the laws of Moses, but to reestablish them in the hearts of men” [The Life of Issa, chapter 10, verse 21 says that, and you might want to compare that with Matthew 5:17–20]. “Yet the appearance of Issa,” Groothuis says, “is closer to the Pantheistic Hindu idea of an avatar, a periodic manifestation of God, than the Christian view of God uniquely incarnated as a man because Issa is said to manifest the soul of the universe. Issa seems most favorably disposed toward Buddhism, which unlike the other religions he is exposed to, he doesn’t criticize. He leaves Israel with the express purpose of studying the laws of the great Buddha, Zoroastrianism and Gjainism fare far less well.”

Groothuis then notes eight key dissimilarities between the Jesus of this text, The Life of Issa, and that of the biblical record, and let me share those with you. For one thing, we read of Issa learning from the Hindus how to cure physical ills by means of prayer, but the text gives us no record of him doing so or of any supernatural touch upon his ministry. Issa then, unlike Jesus, is a stranger to the miraculous. Then secondly in the story of Issa, the Jewish religious leaders side with Issa against Pilate begging him to not execute Issa, and this contradicts all four Gospels which present both the Jewish and Roman leadership and rulers as equally responsible for Christ’s death. The growing tension between Jesus and the Jewish religious establishment that is so keenly felt in the Gospels is nonexistent in the account of Issa.

Third, although Issa is somehow a revelation of God, he’s not an incarnation in the biblical sense. He’s said to be a manifestation of the soul of the universe and a saint in whom part of the divine spirit had lived on earth. Obviously these descriptions don’t fit with biblical theology which says that Jesus Christ is the Word made flesh. Then fourth, Issa and the narration repeatedly speak



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of sin and the need to repent from sin, especially idolatry, and yet Issa is silent about any atoning sacrifice being offered for sin. Instead, what we read in chapter 6 and verse 6 of The Life of Issa is that “the good he must do to his fellow man is the sure means of speedy union with the eternal spirit,” and in the same verse, “He who has recovered this primitive purity shall die with his transgressions forgiven.” And Issa teaches that part of God dwells in each person, and it is intimated that salvation involves identifying oneself with this indwelling part. Of course, all of this is different from the scriptural teaching.

Then a fifth difference, Issa never presents himself as a ransom given to redeem many from sin, as Mark 10:45 says of Jesus; Jesus says of Himself there, nor does Issa affirm much of anything about Himself. The text says that Issa saved hardened sinners, but he did this by his example and his teaching that leads to repentance, not by giving of his life. So Issa is more of an ethical teacher than he is a redeemer.

A sixth difference has to do with the account of Issa’s crucifixion. It occupies only a very strong fraction of the life of Issa, whereas the Gospels emphasize this aspect of Christ’s life more than any aspect at all of what He did and said. And this betrays the theology of the life of Issa; Issa dies a martyr’s death, not a savior’s death. His life becomes more important than his death. His death is the end; it’s not a beginning.

Then a seventh difference is that what the Gospels present as the climax of Jesus’ ministry and His ultimate vindication, namely, the resurrection, The Life of Saint Issa flatly denies. According to The Life of Saint Issa, Issa’s body was secretly moved by Pilate after which His followers mistakenly assumed that His body was supernaturally transported to heaven, when in reality it was rotting in an unmarked grave of Pilate’s choosing. Then a final difference is that the text of The Life of Issa provides no reason why Pilate would think that moving the body to another grave would discourage an insurrection, nor is any reason evident whatsoever. But if Pilate feared a mass Christian movement and knew where Jesus’ body was located, it would have only made sense for him to produce the corpse in order to squash all preaching of the resurrection, but history knows nothing of this whatsoever. You get a feel for some of the contradictions between The Life of Saint Issa and the Gospels.



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In addition to this, Groothuis notes that at least at some key points, some five key points, the gospel of Saint Issa, The Life of Saint Issa, is even at odds with New Age theology in spite of the fact that there are New Agers who often appeal to it in support of their views. Let me mention these five divergences from New Age thinking.

First of all, the text of The Life of Saint Issa seems to speak of God as a personal and moral being, not the impersonal force or principle or vibration of New Age theology. Issa’s god is repeatedly angry at humans for their disobedience, particularly concerning idolatry. Hinduism, though, which provides much of the spiritual background of New Age spirituality, takes it on the theological chin, if we can put it that way, to echo Groothuis’s words, several times.

Then secondarily, although Issa speaks of humans as having at least part of the divine spirit in them, he calls people to repent of sin, and sin in Issa is being understood as actions and attitudes that displease a personal God. And Groothuis notes, this is in contradiction to the idea of the New Agers that human potential is such that it’s relatively, so to speak, infinite, and New Agers stress human sinlessness. At one point, Issa says that miracles cannot be performed by man, thus putting him, that is, Issa, at odds with the paranormal propensity of much New Age thinking. That would be a third difference as well.

A fourth difference between New Age thinking and The Life of Saint Issa is that Issa comes out against divination, saying that “he who has recourse to diviner’s soils, the temple of his heart, and shows his lack of faith in his creator.” This would mean that you couldn’t possibly engage in any number of New Age divining processes such as tarot card reading, casting the I Ching, using crystal divination, and psychic readings and the like. So that’s another difference.

Then a fifth divergence is that the story of Issa seems unclear about reincarnation. It says that God was in some sense reincarnated in Issa, but it also speaks of the Judgment Day as if it were a final judgment. Issa does deny transmigration, saying that God will never humiliate His child by casting his soul for chastisement into the body of a beast, so when you look at all the evidence there, as Groothuis says, “We can say that the text is ambiguous on this key New Age doctrine of reincarnation.”



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As to the reliability of The Life of Issa, Groothuis notes a number of factual inaccuracies and conceptual oddities in terms of its authenticity; was it really something that was written way, way back in earlier eras by the Tibetans? Groothuis gives a good bit of information to show that it isn’t authentic, and a good bit of evidence even to the fact that Notovitch never discovered this alleged manuscript at all. Let me on this last matter simply read one portion of what Groothuis has to say from page 163, and for the further evidence on the authenticity and reliability of this work, you will want to consult Groothuis yourself. But listen to what he says.

On page 163 he says, “A translator was enlisted by Douglas to read extracts from Notovitch’s book to the chief lama, in order to elicit his response. The lama’s comments were recorded in a statement signed by the lama, Douglas, and the translator, Shahmwell Joldan, late postmaster of Ladakh.

“In the document, reprinted in the journal, the lama contradicts all of Notovitch’s major assertions. When asked about the Issa document, the Chief Superior Lama replies,” and here’s the quote, “‘I have been for forty-two years a Lama, and am well acquainted with all the well-known Buddhist books and manuscripts, and I have never heard of one which mentions the name of Issa, and it is my firm and honest belief that none exists. I have inquired of our principal Lamas in other monasteries of Tibet, and they are not acquainted with any books or manuscripts which mention the name of Issa.’

“When asked if the name Issa was held in high respect by Buddhists, the lama replied, ‘They know nothing even of his name; none of the Lamas has ever heard it, save through missionaries and European sources.’ The lama further denied that any Westerner had stayed there to nurse a broken leg [this contradicts what Notovitch tells us]. He denied having spoken with Notovitch about the religions of the ancient Egyptians, Assyrians, and people of Israel [contrary to what Notovitch had said] and he even denied knowing anything about these religions. He likewise denied that the monastery contained any Buddhist writings in the Pali language [again, that contradicts Notovitch].” You begin to get the feel that this document, then, must be entirely a forgery.

We noted that there are some other approaches to Jesus among New Agers. This one said that Jesus went and studied in the Far East. Another one we want to look at for just a few moments says



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that Jesus was an Essene. There are some New Agers who see the Essenes as a kind of halfway house in their beliefs between Orthodox Judaism and Eastern mysticism. They believe, as well, that Jesus was either an Essene or at least strongly influenced by them, and the simplest way to see if this is correct, as Groothuis suggests, is to see what the Essenes believed, compare it with Jesus’ teaching, and see, as well, whatever further evidence New Agers have that Jesus was an Essene.

Groothuis, then, for several pages—pages 177 to 180—lays out Essene beliefs, and as he shows, the basic approach of the Essenes was a strict monotheism, and it differs at many significant points from New Age thinking. As to whether Jesus was an Essene, well, as Groothuis shows on pages 182 to 186, there are some definite differences between Jesus and the Essenes, as well as divergence between Jesus and the New Age. I will leave to your own consideration the specific details of that.

The other evidence that is offered for the New Age view that Jesus was an Essene is Edmond Szekely’s The Essen Gospel of Peace, which is a translation of a supposed Aramaic manuscript that was buried in the secret archives of the Vatican library. As to the substance of the work, I would encourage you to see Groothuis’s description on pages 186 to 188 of Revealing the New Age Jesus, and then he shows on pages 188 to 190 that there are some serious major questions about whether this document is true and whether it even was written by the people who claimed to have written it.

Let me move beyond the New Age view of Jesus; I think you have gotten enough of a taste of that to see where the New Agers come down on that issue. The last thing that I want to talk about in regard to New Age theology is New Age’s influences and its connections, and as Groothuis shows in his first book, Unmasking the New Age, the New Age movement has an approach to and an agenda for many different areas of life. In particular, he shows its influence in the holistic health movement, in psychology, in science, and politics. What New Agers would say about health and psychology are probably not all that hard to predict, so I’m not going to focus so much on that, but their views of and their impact on science and politics, I think, is worth noting.

So first of all, let’s take a look at science and the New Age. Although for many centuries science and religion have been at war with one another, the New Age says it has a resolution to that conflict. In fact, a new understanding of science fits very nicely



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with New Age thinking. Whereas the counterculture had rejected modern technology because they were afraid that as a result of it we were going to destroy the world with nuclear power and the like; whereas, they had rejected modern technology, now there is a rethinking of all of that. As Groothuis says, and I quote him from page 94 of Unmasking the New Age, “Books such as Fritjof Capra’s the The Tao of Phsyics and Michael Talbot’s Mysticism and the New Physics argue that new theories about the nature of the cosmos have opened the scientific community to some new ideas. The unity of all things; the nonexistence of an independent external world; and the unity of opposites. In other words, science has been brought face to face with ancient mysticism, but what has so transformed a rationalistic scientism into mysticism?” Then Groothuis goes on to answer that last question.

And as he notes, prior to the twentieth century, science was governed by Newtonian mechanics. Newton saw the world as the working of predictable, mechanical laws that were set in the context of absolute space and absolute time. But when we get to the twentieth century, Einstein and quantum physics changed all of that. We discussed some of this when we talked about the backgrounds of process theology. Einstein’s theory of relativity spelled the rejection of the notions of absolute space and time. Max Planck was the father of quantum theory. He proposed that matter absorbs heat energy and emits light energy discontinuously in unexpected lumps or spurts that were called energy packets, or as Einstein called them, quanta. These quanta acted unpredictably, not smoothly and, if you will, politely as in the old Newtonian mechanistic model. The subatomic world was not a mosaic of hard bits of matter. Instead, it was constantly moving and not always in a predictable way.

The implications of all this are staggering. Nies Bohr, one of the early scientific theorists to do work on quantum theory, says that “anyone who is not shocked by quantum theory has not understood it. The world of mechanical certainties and precise calculation is behind us.” Many, such as Bohr and [Werner] Heisenberg, have even said that “reality is at best run by chance. And this was much to the consternation of Einstein who said that God does not play dice with the universe. Nonetheless, the quantum theory which accounts for the behavior of scores of subatomic particles has established itself among scientists as the best explanation of the events encountered.” I’ve been quoting from pages 95 to 97 here and there in Groothuis’s work.



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How does this relate to New Age thinking? It underscores some of the major themes of New Agers about the interconnectedness of all things, parallels that one finds, as a matter of fact, with Eastern mysticism. Let me, if I may, just read to you what Groothuis says about all of this. He says, “The old conception of hard, mechanical matter is in disrepute. Matter is not reducible to neat, divisible pieces that mathematically obey the rules.” He then quotes Capra, that subatomic particles “are not ‘things’ but are interconnections between ‘things’ and these ‘things’ in turn are interconnections between other ‘things,’ and so on. In quantum theory, you never end up with ‘things’; you always deal with interconnections.”

“Capra believes that because we cannot cut up the universe into independently existing smaller units, we must see its basic oneness. Theoretical physicist Dave Bohm speaks of an implicate or unfolded order of unbroken wholeness that binds all things together in unceasing fluctuations. We must move from a fragmented viewpoint to one that encompasses the whole. Relativity and quantum theory, he believes, ‘imply the need to look on the world as an undivided whole, in which all parts of the universe, including the observer and his instruments, merge and unite in one totality.’

“But according to Capra this is what the Eastern mystics have been saying for thousands of years: all is one. In Capra’s very popular and influential book The Tao of Physics he finds parallels between the new physics and the mystics. By setting statements by physicists next to those of Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu mystics and Scripture, he finds mutually supportive testimony for the oneness of all things, the unity of opposites (or complementarity), the relativity of space and time, and the ever-changing nature of reality. The old materialism gives ground to the Tao.” You get the picture there of how this relates to New Age thinking.

In addition, the Heisenberg uncertainty principle is used by some thinkers to argue that subatomic particles don’t have an independent external and objective existence. Their attributes of being a wave or particle are dependent on their observation, and this leads to a position that some have called quantum solipsism. Now how does this relate to the New Age? Again, let me read to you from Groothuis.

He says, “Consciousness is thrust into the metaphysical driver’s seat. Rather than recording reality, we determine it. This notion is fueled by another scientific breakthrough, the holographic



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paradigm. The hologram, discovered through photographic experiments, is a three-dimensional projection resulting from the interaction of laser beams. Unexpectedly, researchers found that the entire hologram could be reproduced from any one of its component parts. Each part of the hologram no matter how small, can reproduce the whole image when illumined by laser lights.’

“This leads George Leonard to compare the hologram to the Hindu idea of the Net of Jewels, in which every jewel, every piece of the universe, contains every other piece. This he believes is the core of all mysticism: the idea of all-in-oneness. The Stanford neuroscientist Karl Pribram has proposed that the brain functions holographically because its abilities do not seem to be specifically located in various parts of the brain. This would explain how the destruction of certain parts of the brain do not always destroy a specific function.”

And then Groothuis says, “Without going into detail, the upshot for many New Age thinkers is that all knowledge is potentially contained in consciousness. Pribram has speculated that maybe the world is a hologram. Leonard speculates that in such a universe, information about the whole is available at every point. And according to Michael Talbot, ‘the new physics suggest that the consciousness contains a reality structure, some neurophysiological mechanism which psychically affects reality itself.’”

You can see how this fits together with New Age thinking. Then Groothuis goes on to explain how these developments also allow for the paranormal to be possible, and then he gives some critiques of all of this, but you see how developments in science fit very nicely into New Age thinking.

Let me, then, turn for one final item, and that is the relationship of politics to New Age thinking. We’re going to have to complete this in the next lecture, but let me at least begin to point out what’s happening here. It is only natural, it seems, that a theology of personal transformation as a result of a transformed consciousness should lead to a politics of transformation. Marilyn Ferguson says, “The political system needs to be transformed, not reformed. This transformation requires not merely a change of political structure, but a new consciousness. This brand of politics must step into the gap by transcending traditional ideologies in our present political purposelessness. In fact, it calls for a whole new worldview.”

Transcript - ST507 Contemporary Theology II: From Theology of Hope to Postmodernism© 2019 Our Daily Bread University. All rights reserved.

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New Age Theology: Christology and InfluenceLesson 20 of 24

How did we get to that point, and what is that new worldview, that new politics that the New Age is pushing upon us? In the next lecture we’re going to initially deal with that matter, and then I want to begin for the majority of our next lecture and for the following lecture to talk about postmodernism and postmodern theologies.

Documents

Contemporary Theology II: ST507 From Theology of Hope to ... · by Elizabeth Clare Prophet entitled The Lost Years of Jesus; a book by Janet Bock entitled The Jesus Mystery; and then