New Age: A Christian Response to a serious Challenge

by John Harris

(Zadock Institute For Christianity and Society, Series 1 Paper, ISSN 0156-7470, Dec 1990)

… What is the New Age Movement?

… People are exploring alternate spiritual frameworks to give meaning to their life, and to provide inner resources to achieve their goals. It is this combination which we now label the New Age movement. …. It is a loose coalition of various movements, techniques and beliefs … a general willingness to discard traditional answers … Some of our more fundamentalist sisters and brothers have been quick toi label all aspects of the New Age movement as satanic. … Those, however, who have … generally ‘carried on with fear and loathing’ have not made it easy for other Christians to enter into dialogue with many ordinary people who consider themselves ‘New Agers’. Many of them reject occult practices as strongly as Christians do. many of them genuinely seek spiritual truth. We should be concerned that their search hasn’t led them to Christ and seriously examine the way we present the gospel. We should be even more concerned if some parts of the church, by labelling them as intrinsically evil, are pushing them away.

Where did it come from? The old roots of the New Age.

… some of the more important ideas …

… Eastern mysticism

… Gnosticism

… Spiritualism and psychic phenomena

… many other trends and philosophies of the past few centuries have contributed to New Age thinking – Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung and psycholanalysis to name just one strand …. New Age writers themselves acknowledge a debt to a variety of older thought forms.

Modern Roots of New Age Thinking

… The Western counter culture of the 60s

… The human potential and holistic health movements of the 70s

… ecology

… New Age thinkers are not atheists. in some ways they epitomise ‘natural theology’ of the kind Paul; wrote about in Romans 1:20. …