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NA Rant
 LIES, DAMNED LIES
The Hallmarks of the New Spirituality
by
Alan Morrison
(Adapted from Chapter 5 of "The Serpent & the Cross")
The great masses of the people will more easily fall victims to a great lie than a small one' (Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, 1924)
Every religion has its hallmarks; and the New Spirituality which we discover everywhere today is no exception. In this paper, we survey ten of its universal hallmarks, clearly showing their deceptions and designs. Many of these hallmarks were apparent, or at least incipient, within the teachings of the Gnosticism which was prevalent in the Early Church era; but with increased development and syncretism they found their fullness in its more recent manifestations -- the New Gnosticism. Some hallmarks have been specially created for the circumstances and requirements of the present time. But they all share the same motivation: to undermine the foundations of the Lord's people, to cast to one side the concept of a Transcendent Personal God, to overthrow the teachings of the Holy Bible, and to contribute towards the building of Satan's earthly kingdom.
1. The Strawberry Fields Factor: No Objective Reality
This hallmark of the Neo-Gnostic worldview is foundational to all the others - indeed, it is fundamental to Satan's entire modus operandi. For the acceptance of this concept immediately destroys the uniqueness of God's Word as the objective source of revelation, and the fact of Jesus Christ as the substantial fount of all Truth. Instead, it deifies individuals by holding up their personal subjective world-views as being THE truth, even when they are in contradiction with one another. This concept is a major factor in the New Age Movement and has found its expression in the vogue-phrase 'Paradigm Shift'. A Paradigm Shift, in Neo-Gnostic jargon, refers to the process whereby one can, through a small but highly significant shift in perception or world-view, slip into another level of reality. It is rather like looking at a picture for the first time and seeing certain features, but on looking a second time one might see something completely different because a change took place in the way one viewed it. Yet both perceptions are said to be 'correct', thus negating any objective reality in the picture. A classic diagrammatic representation of such a concept is given in the drawing below. Is it a duck, or a rabbit? Could it be an aerial shot of the seventeenth hole at St. Andrews? Or all three?
What this concept implies is that there are as many 'realities' to a situation as there are people to perceive them: Truth is purely arbitrary and solely in the eye of the beholder. Now this can certainly be true in regard to our perceptions of many things in life, as in the example above. For there are a great many situations in which there is plainly more than one way of looking at an object. But it is a logical fallacy to deduce that this approach can be applied to every conceivable situation in the world, and even to the experience of personal existence. The reason that the drawing above can be perceived in so many ways without violating its integrity is because there is no externally imposed control which dictates how it should be viewed. Its identity is 'up for grabs'. But if the voice of God thunders: 'This is My beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased', could anyone deny that Jesus has the unmistakable identity of the Son of God? Surely reality takes on an unequivocal quality when God has imposed His objective authority upon it.
To attempt to apply the principle of 'no objective reality' to Deity, His material creation or inspired revelation (the Bible), is surely an outworking of the satanic lie in Eden ('Has God really said...?'). Perhaps such an emphasis is inevitable in a world of increasing iniquity and disobedience to God's Law. In order to bring about a complete mistrust of the concept of the Transcendent Creator God of the Scriptures, whose Word is THE Way, THE Truth and THE Life, the satanic realm has built up an assumed need for a massive paradigm shift in favour of the Eastern world-view which states that life as we know it is an illusion, that each one of us creates his own reality, that the essence of God indwells all people unconditionally, and that we can utilise this immanent 'divinity' for our own ends, both spiritual and material.
The concept of the Paradigm Shift was first formulated by science historian and philosopher Thomas Kuhn in his book 'The Structure of Scientific Revolutions'.1 The general use of this term has since been seized upon avidly by those preaching the Neo-Gnostic 'gospel', and who have a vested interest in bringing about the Hundredth Monkey consciousness of the 'Aquarian Age' via 'quantum leaps' and 'evolutionary shifts' in psychic awareness. But the concept of 'no objective reality' has been a fundamental principle from ancient times in any situation where the Satanic Initiation is in the ascendency. In classical Hinduism, the term Maya, 'illusion', is used to refer to the material world, which is judged to be devoid of objective reality. As one source puts it:
'Maya is originally the magical power of creating illusion or deceit, but in the Advaita Vedanta it refers to the illusory existence of a world of multiplicity superimposed upon the single non-dual reality (Brahman) by the power of ignorance (Avidya)...Maya is the power of God (Ishvara), which creates the illusion of a differentiated universe and conceals the divine unity behind appearances, while ignorance creates the seemingly separate self at the individual level'.2
The idea that each person is only 'seemingly separate' from the cosmos has grave implications for the biblical concept of personal responsibility for sin and its eternal consequences, as we shall shortly show. The uniqueness of each individual is also undermined, a fact which is illustrated in the Zen Buddhist proverb which says:
'Last night I dreamed I was a butterfly. Am I a man who dreamed he was a butterfly? Or am I really a butterfly who is now dreaming he is a man?'
If you meditate on that for too long, you could slip your moorings and begin to doubt your own existence: a sure recipe for self-induced psychosis. Even common sense can discern that such a statement is unmitigated nonsense. Every time we wake up, we awaken to the same world, the same circumstances, the same self; whereas, in our dreams, we enter a different world and circumstances - and very often experience ourselves as being someone else. If we accept the 'no objective reality' world-view of the East, we are entering, at best, a nursery-rhyme fantasyland; at worst, it is the ultimate nightmare scenario, with each one of us in the starring role. Here in the West, this concept has been welcomed in the field of Transpersonal Psychology. For example, the occultist and Neo-Gnostic Carl Jung says:
'Our unconscious existence is the real one and our conscious world is a kind of illusion, an apparent reality constructed for a specific purpose, like a dream which seems a reality as long as we are in it'.3
In the 1960s, a number of psychiatrists also began to take this concept onboard in a big way as their experimental work appeared to give it confirmation. In his book 'The Politics of Experience/The Bird of Paradise' (Penguin, 1967), R.D. Laing recounted how one of his patients had suddenly undergone mental disintegration after looking at himself in a mirror and subsequently went on a ten day 'voyage' into an inner world of extraordinary hallucination. On recovering from this mind-journey, the patient felt he had undergone a profound religious experience. This persuaded Laing that reality was only relative, and he began to revere the schizophrenic and psychotic as being somehow on a higher plane with greater insight into reality than the average human being - so much so that he likened psychiatrists to 'the blind leading the half-blind' when they counsel such people. This view was also supported by the internationally-renowned psychiatrist Stanislaf Grof, whose experiments on patients with LSD therapy in the 1950s had convinced him of the 'relativity of reality'. One is reminded here of the lyrics of the classic 1960s Beatles' song, 'Strawberry Fields', which says:
'Let me take you down, 'cos I'm going to Strawberry Fields;
Nothing is real...
Always - no sometimes - think its me;
But you know I know when its a dream...
It's getting hard to be someone but it all works out;
It doesn't matter much to me'.
Lyrics rooted in a similar world of drug-induced unreality were recorded in another well-known Beatles classic, 'Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds':
'Picture yourself in a boat on a river,
With tangerine trees and marmalade skies.
Somebody calls you, you answer quite slowly,
The girl with kaleidoscope eyes'.
It was well-known at the time that these words were inspired through the influence of the hallucinogenic drug LSD, and that the initials of the song-title were a none-too-subtle advertisement for the drug. Such 'acid-rock', as it is known, was extremely fashionable during the phase when such drug-use was being encouraged by the powers of darkness in order to cut a huge swath into the minds of the young and vulnerable children of the intelligentsia who would eventually grow into those who now hold positions of cultural responsibility and parenthood. Another development which has gone some way towards influencing this loosening of the idea of an objective reality is the huge growth of interest in Shamanism. Serge King is a Polynesian shaman who is director of the Order of Huna International in Hawaii, one of the many new schools for the training of shamans in the world today. On this subject of 'reality', he writes:
'The first and fundamental principle of Huna...says that "the world is what you think it is". Another, more popular way of stating the same thing is: "We create our own reality."... [Shamans] take that idea to mean that we not only attract experience by our thinking, but we actually create realities. By our assumptions, attitudes, and expectations we make things possible or impossible, real or unreal. To put it another way, by shifting mind-sets we can do ordinary and non-ordinary things in the same physical dimension that we share with everyone else... Shamans are taught as early as possible that the objective world is only one way of seeing...In shamanic thinking, the objective world is simply one more place in which to operate, and to operate effectively in any world is the shamanic goal... Shifting mind-sets or moving between worlds in full consciousness is a subtle and delicate process... With practice this becomes virtually automatic. What helps tremendously is loving yourself without reserve and trusting the God within you. But of course that is good advice whether you are a shaman or not'.4
Do you see the implications of what is being said here? That the same shift in perception which leads to an inability to distinguish between a rabbit and a duck can be applied to the very fact of our own existence, so that we can never really be sure whether we are people or butterflies or anything. Once you have accepted this way of thinking, you then become the inventor of your own reality. Such a world-view has immense implications for the lives of those accepting it. For the whole question of where one will spend eternity becomes meaningless to a person who believes he can inhabit any reality of his own making. Thus, the purpose of this mindset in satanic strategy becomes only too obvious. (Take note of the name of the publisher of the book containing the above quotation, and things will become even clearer). And when we come to the 'official' teachings of the New Gnosticism, we find that this concept of 'no objective reality' lies at the very heart of its world-view. Findhorn guru, Peter Lemesurier, puts it like this:
'The only universe that you can ever perceive is the universe that you perceive. What you are actually perceiving...is nothing more or less than your own perceptions. The universe itself, it would seem, is random enough (scientific speculators currently prefer to explain this idea in terms of a theoretically infinite number of possible 'parallel universes') to permit your consciousness to model it in any way it wishes.
'Which has to mean, in effect, that whatever seems to you to be happening "out there" is - strange as it may seem on first consideration -ultimately a direct result of your own state of consciousness. Eerie though this realisation may at first seem, the world's problems are actually your own problems. Its divisions merely reflect your own inner conflicts; its inhumanity your own inhumanity to yourself; its famines the extent to which you are starving large parts of your own psyche; its pollution problems your proneness to smother your own inner reality with imposed beliefs and illusions; its drug addiction your refusal to face reality; its unemployment your failure to put whole areas of your awareness to work; its anti-black racialism your rejection of your own darker side; its lawlessness your disregard of the basic laws of your own being; its AIDS - along with the breakdown of the earth's protective ozone layer - your unconscious realisation that ultimately you cannot protect yourself or cut yourself off from the rest of the universe; its global warming your participation in the fever of transformation that humanity is currently undergoing; its mass-movements and mass-disasters your increasing involvement, perhaps, in the growth of some kind of new, transhuman super-entity.
'In a phrase, we do not see things as they are: we see them as we are. And other people...are merely particular aspects of ourselves... And so it is not so much a matter of your head being in the universe, as of the universe being in your head'.5 [emphasis in original]
Here, Peter Lemesurier reduces every phenomenon in the world to mere projections of our own consciousness. 'We do not see things as they are: we see them as we are'. Therefore, there are as many worlds as there are people to create them. In the ideology of the Neo-Gnostic, it is not a personal God who has created the world - we each create our own worlds in every living moment out of our own consciousness. In other words, in their view, each one of us is God (cf. Gen.3:5)! It is most important that we understand the dire consequences of holding a world-view which claims that there is no objective reality. In fact, they are superbly realised in George Orwell's not-so-futuristic novel 'Nineteen Eighty-Four', in which the denial of objective reality is an integral part of the social and political philosophy of the Antichrist-like 'Big Brother' and his despotic 'Party'. At one stage in the book, the central character, Winston, stumbles on the realisation that
'In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience, but the very existence of external reality, was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense. And what was terrifying was not that they would kill you for thinking otherwise, but that they might be right. For, after all, how do we know that two and two make four? Or that the force of gravity works? Or that the past is unchangeable? If both the past and the external world exist only in the mind, and if the mind itself is controllable - what then?'6
This way of thinking is not merely confined to the world of fiction. It is a natural consequence of the Neo-Gnostic mindset, showing clearly that the real battlefield in this world is not on any tract of national territory but in the realm of human thought-processes - a fact which becomes understandable when one realises that it is the mind which provides the interface between humanity and the demonic realm. There is a particularly chilling moment of realisation in Orwell's novel when the 'Thought Police' agent, O'Brien, during his torture and brainwashing of Winston, states:
'We control matter because we control the mind. Reality is inside the skull. You will learn by degrees, Winston. There is nothing that we could not do. Invisibility, levitation - anything. I could float off this floor like a soap bubble if I wish to... You must get rid of those nineteenth-century ideas about the laws of Nature. We make the laws of Nature.'7
'Reality is inside the skull'. This Hindu-Gnostic statement from Orwell's Thought Police is almost identical to Peter Lemesurier's claim that 'the universe [is] in your head' and his other statement: 'We do not see things as they are: we see them as we are'. Orwell's entire conception was a remarkable piece of insight concerning the future Neo-Gnostic development of human society. He saw clearly that the most powerful way to manipulate people is to claim that reality can only ever be subjective. In just the same way that Orwell's Big Brother seeks to control human minds by removing all possibility of an objective reality, so Satan seeks to regain control of the world by the same means. For without objective reality, there can be no personal God, no Divine revelation and, by dint of logic, no certain salvation. In just the same way that when there was no king in Israel everyone did that which was right in his own eyes (Jdg.17:6), so when the King of the Universe has been dethroned in the minds of men and women, reality becomes reduced to 'the imagination of man's evil heart' - which ultimately means the deification of self (cf. Gen.6:5; Dt.29:18-19; Jer.11:7-8; 23:17). If, as the 'Thought Police' agent O'Brien puts it, 'nothing exists except through human consciousness',8heaven help us all; for human consciousness, when left to its own devices and the ravages of Satan, is the psychic dustbin of the universe. And if, as Peter Lemesurier claims, other people are 'merely particular aspects of ourselves' rather than having a bona fide objective existence of their own, then we have dehumanised every human being which God has brought into existence, and denied the existence of their Creator. If you want a vision of the warped future being generated by this concept, imagine a Neo-Gnostic sitting cross-legged on a human face - forever.
The world-view which holds that 'nothing exists except through human consciousness' is actually a classic example of the well-catalogued philosophical standpoint known as 'Solipsism', which can be defined as, 'The extreme form of subjective idealism that denies that the human mind has any valid ground for believing in the existence of anything but itself'.9 Very few thinkers have dared to hang their hat on the solipsistic peg, although the English philosopher, Bertrand Russell, declared his ideal to be 'the establishment of physics upon a solipsistic basis',10an ideal which has now come to pass. For the so-called 'New Physics' is yet another area which has encouraged the idea that life is more or less an illusion. We have written about this elsewhere in our paper on pseudo-science; but we are recording it here to show the full extent of such Neo-Gnostic conceptual fantasies. Because of recent scientific assertions that matter is just another form of energy, this has served to bolster the pantheistic claims of the Neo-Gnostics and their concept that material things are only what they appear to be within a framework of relativity. However, Dr. Ernest Lucas of the Institute for Contemporary Christianity, writing in the journal Science and Christian Belief, confounds such an idea when he writes: 'To say that matter is unreal because it can be converted into energy is like saying that ice is unreal because it can be converted into water'.11 But scientists today are not given to such rational reasoning. Instead, they have opted for the Neo-Gnostic view of reality. As one leading international physicist states in a highly regarded work: 'Physical reality does not exist independently of the observer and his experimental apparatus'.12 And he goes on to surmise that
'Perhaps all properties - and hence the entire Universe is brought into existence by observations made at some point in time by conscious beings'.13
This is entirely in accord with the Hindu-Gnostic world-view. Yet this is mainstream physics today. The presenter of a BBC science programme on the so-called 'Anthropic Principle' summed up such thinking when he made the statement: 'The centre of the Universe is in your living room'.14 As if this claim was not condemning enough of the solipsistic mythology of the New Physics, another physicist writes in similar vein when he claims that
'Physical systems cannot be said to have definite properties independent of our observations; perhaps an unheard tree falling in the forest makes no sound after all'.15
One can see that these statements bring into question the entire foundation of the objective material reality which has been created by the Triune God. What they are saying, in effect, is 'nothing really happens unless I experience it'. Each individual, therefore, becomes the centre of his or her own universe. Man become God. Such a solipsistic nightmare has now seized the 'brilliant' minds that are at the leading edge of science today. This is in spite of the fact that the general verdict on Solipsism in current philosophical circles is that, 'presented as a solution to the problem of explaining man's knowledge of the external world, it is generally regarded as a reductio ad absurdum'.16 Yet this is precisely the position of all these Neo-Gnostics today, who are building a world which is about as real as that depicted in 'Strawberry Fields'.
One's blood runs cold at the thought that when the day comes that these people take full, open control of world authority (which may not be very far away), it is not beyond the bounds of possibility that they will attempt to enforce their philosophy on Christian dissidents in much the same way as the 'Thought Police' in the book '1984' - only this time not with crude electric shock treatment, but through the use of LSD therapy and other psychodynamic 'treatments' in 'rehabilitation' centres designed to alter human consciousness in the desired manner.
The notion that there is no objective reality has even permeated professing Christian organisations. The Society for the Promotion (sic) of Christian Knowledge has recently published a book entitled 'Living Illusions'. The pre-publication press release states that the book 'examines different expressions of faith...and suggests that they are all illusions'.17 Claiming that 'there are no hard and fast rules upon which we can pin the truth about external reality and inner life', the author, a lecturer at the University of Leicester,
'illustrates his argument with examples from studies of psychoanalysis as well as art, science, theology and mysticism, to show that our beliefs and assumptions rest only on our personal perceptions'.18
The solipsistic doctrine of maya is now standard fare in many mainstream 'Christian' circles. However, as far as the genuine Christian experience is concerned, the concept of 'no objective reality' can really be viewed as one of the 'deep things of Satan'. In the first place, there is a real ethical problem here. What happens to public (or private) morality if one can say, 'It depends how you look at it...' every time someone commits a violation of the law. The Bible says that if someone kills in cold blood, objectively this is murder and he should lose his own life. But if there is no objective reality, then the excusatory standpoint of the murderer (e.g., 'I just lost my rag...', or 'She should never have left me...') becomes just as valid a reality as the Law of God. In other words, the moral integrity of the universe rests on the objectivity of reality.
Furthermore, the Bible shows that, far from being an illusion, our life-experience in this world is very real; and Jesus Himself revealed that the decisions we make during our sole earthly pilgrimage will affect us for all eternity (Jn.5:24). It is interesting to note that Lazarus and the Rich Man in Jesus' parable (Lk.16:19-31) did not look back on their lives as dreams, but that they retained their identity and reaped the reward for what they had done as conscious human beings. Mere dreamers cannot be held responsible for what they do in their dreams.
It is true that human beings do not have a holistic view of everything; our consciousness is tied to the present space/time dimension, and it stands to reason that our understanding and perception is limited when compared with that of God. But it is only God who has the total view, and it is only God who is permitted to have the total view. The desire to let go of normal consciousness and tap into 'divine consciousness' only becomes an issue for the person who wants to be like God in his understanding. But the Christian has the revealed truth that for a man to attempt to know things as God knows them was the very first deception in the cosmos ('You will be like God, knowing...', Gen.3:5).
In the novel '1984', the important axiom to which Winston clung was: 'Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows'. And that is also true for us in this age of Gnostic irrationality. But we must also say that true Freedom is the freedom to know that a living, personal God has created this universe, and that we are all partakers in the objective world-reality which He has created, whether we believe it or not.
2. All Roads Lead to Mecca: The Rise of Religious Relativism
This concept is a logical extension of the above Neo-Gnostic hallmark of 'no objective reality'. Based on the Hindu proverb, 'All paths lead to the top of the mountain', this hallmark perpetuates the delusive notion that the ultimate purpose of our earthly pilgrimage (or, in Neo-Gnostic thinking, our successive earthly incarnations) is an ecstatic mystical union with the 'Supreme Being'. The underlying idea is that the pathways which lead to the realisation of this union are many and varied, and that we must choose the path which most suits our own personal requirements. If all roads lead to Mecca, then who are we to say which one is the right road? Naturally, if you believe that the universe exists only as a projection of what is in your own head, then you will deny that there is just one objective way back to God, and will instead assert that there are as many ways to 'realising divinity' as there are people to experience it. The ancient Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, puts it like this: 'Every man's faith is according to his nature'.19 Here in the modern West, this view is epitomized in the following assertion by a leading U.K. advocate of the New Gnosticism:
'We are on the brink of the Age of Aquarius when everyone will learn to become his or her own person, directing life and knowledge in an individual way... No one can direct your path but yourself, guided by your inner self, and the gods and goddesses if you desire to know them... The Age of Aquarius is the age of the individual selecting his or her own path from the many offered'.20
The expression 'inner self ' is Neo-Gnostic jargon for 'the god within', and the 'gods and goddesses' who direct the initiate's pathway are the 'spirit guides' and discarnates that we have mentioned previously. In this world-view, all religions and spiritual pursuits are equally valid, while salvation is universally applicable. In order to progress spiritually, one simply chooses whatever happens to feel right, shopping around from a vast assortment of techniques. Such an approach cuts across the teaching of Scripture (Isa.5:21; Prov.12:15; 16:25; cf. Jdg.17:6).
This world-view of religious relativity is not confined to the outer reaches of the Neo-Gnostic empire. Even the former Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Robert Runcie, has said that 'all religions possess a provisional, interim character as ways and signs to help us in our pilgrimage to Ultimate Truth and Perfection'.21 And Pope John Paul II of Rome said, regarding the many religions of the world, that:
'though the routes taken may be different, there is but a single goal to which is directed the deepest aspiration of the human spirit as expressed in its quest for God'.22
One might ask: to which summits of which mountaintops do Scientology, Satanism or Snake-Handling lead us? We have taken up this entire question of true religion in relation to syncretism in the paper on this website entitled "The Hidden Agenda of the Ecumenical Movement".
3. Purple Haze: The Inducement of Mental Minimalism
In the thinking of the New Gnosticism, because 'spirit' is ethereal and non-corporeal - beyond words and logic - and because the Fall was a fall into matter, therefore the use of the human mind provides an obstacle which must be tamed, suppressed and ultimately overcome if one is to be able to make contact with one's 'inner self' (New-Age-speak for our alleged Godhood) and become truly spiritual. Wherever the New Gnosticism is operating, this assertion of the inferiority and hindrance of the mind to proper spiritual development will be very much to the forefront. The reason? To allow Satan easy entrance to our faculties.
Within the professing Church, this is a primary reason why the foundational techniques of the Christian sect known as the Charismatic Movement involve trance-inducing practices such as prolonged, repetitious chorus singing, a suggestion-induced swoon known as being 'slain in the spirit', and ecstatic babbling mistaken for the spiritual gift of languages revealed in the Bible. In fact, the present writer has heard it said, by a number of members of this sect, that the mind or intellectual reasoning presents a real stumbling-block to the Christian experience. Given the attraction to trance-inducing, mystical religion amongst this sect, it is not surprising to discover that leaders in this movement create an unnatural division between 'spirit' and 'intellect', advising those who attend their meetings and conferences to 'leave their minds at the door with their shoes', in much the same way as one would find in a darshan meeting led by Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh. A great many Christians are being hoodwinked today by this satanic call to abandon intellectual discernment.
For example, former Quaker and rock guitarist John Wimber, founder of the highly influential, neo-Pentecostal, Vineyard ministries in California, openly advocates a 'paradigm shift' away from thinking with Western logic into the exclusively experiential way of oriental thinking - a concept thoroughly in line with the mystical ideology of the New Gnosticism.23 He also claims that 'first century Semites did not argue from a premise to a conclusion; they were not controlled by rationalism'.24 This is a highly erroneous and mischievous statement. Not only is it historically inaccurate but it also attempts to denigrate logic, as if this is something to be shunned. It also epitomises the considerable confusion in the Charismatic Movement in terms of its failure to identify the difference between (unhealthy) rationalism, whereby the miraculous is denied and the supernatural work of the Spirit is blasphemed, and (wholesome) rationality, whereby the Christian exercises necessary discernment and chooses that which is compatible with the law of God. Because of this misunderstanding, it is often said in Charismatic circles that the use of the mind is destructive to true spirituality, and there is a general belittlement of the intellect over against what is deemed to be 'the Spirit'. But there could be no more demonic suggestion than this. The suspension of the rational has been the stuff of mysticism and cultdom since the beginning of human history. Far from suspending the activity of the mind, the indwelling Holy Spirit actually transforms and sharpens it so that it works powerfully and in the full service of the Lord Jesus Christ (Lk.21:12-15; 1 Cor.2:15-16; Mt.22:37; Rom.12:2; Eph.4:23; 2 Tim.1:7).
In stating that 'first century Semites did not argue from a premise to a conclusion', John Wimber is also showing his profound ignorance of both history and the Bible. The ultimate first century Semite was surely the Lord Jesus Christ; yet He continually used the most devastating logic to demolish His opponents. One simple example: 'He who is of God hears God's words; therefore you do not hear, because you are not of God' (Jn.8:47). If A, then B. If not A, therefore not B. Pure logic: arguing from a premise to a conclusion. Many other examples could be given; but two more will suffice. Again, He said: 'If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you' (Jn.15:19). If A, then B. If not A, therefore not B. Pure logic. Again, He said:
'What man is there among you who has one sheep, and if it falls into a pit on the Sabbath, will not lay hold of it and lift it out? Of how much more value then is a man than a sheep? Therefore it is lawful to do good on the Sabbath' (Mt.12:11-12).
That is pure logic: arguing from a premise to an irrefutable conclusion. And it was used by a first century Semite as a matter of course. Arguing in this manner, from the lesser to the greater, was a common first-century Semitic form of logic. Another first century Semite, Paul the Apostle, used exactly the same technique: 'He who did not spare His own Son, but delivered Him up for us all, how shall He not with Him also freely give us all things?' (Rom.8:32). Paul regularly used the most devastating logic. When he was taking the Corinthians to task because there were some among them who - although continuing as believers - said that there is no resurrection of the dead, he used a straightforward logical argument: 'If the dead do not rise, then Christ is not risen. And if Christ is not risen, your faith is futile; you are still in your sins!' (1 Cor.15:16-17). He used logic to show them the irrationality of their position, just as Jesus used logic to show the Pharisees and Sadducees the irrationality of their position. And we need to use logic today to show their modern successors the futility of their position. Without logic, we will never be able to '[cast] down arguments and every high thing that exalts itself against the knowledge of God, bringing every thought into captivity to the obedience of Christ' (2 Cor.10:5). The Christian mind is actually a hyper-logical mind. So, we find that the first century Semite who had been born blind and who had spent his life as a beggar on the streets of Jerusalem, after he had been healed and brought into a saving relationship with Christ (the Logos), found that he was able to use the most withering logic against the Pharisees. His triumphant logical syllogism at the climax of his interview with the Pharisees (Jn.9:30-33), who had accused Jesus of being a sinner (Jn.9:24) and of not being from God (Jn.9:29), goes like this:
Major Premise: 'Only those who are worshippers of God, who do His will and who are not (impenitent) sinners are heard by Him.'
Minor Premise: 'This man was heard by God, because He opened the eyes of one who was born blind - something previously unheard of.'
Conclusion: 'This Man is from God. If He were not from God He could do nothing. He must definitely not be an (impenitent) sinner'.
What is most interesting about this exchange is that this beggar was actually using the same kind of reasoning as the Pharisees in order to defeat them. First century Semites engaged in logical combat. We can see from this that it is twentieth century Charismatics who cannot argue from a premise to a conclusion - not only because of their muddled reasoning but because their fundamental premises are profoundly mistaken. They confuse 'rationality' with 'rationalism', and reject both. It is significant to note that when Jesus was refuting the Sadducees - the supreme rationalists of the day - and their dumb attempts to prove that there was no resurrection, He does not accuse them of being rationalists but instead demolishes them with one logical argument after another and then upbraids them for 'not knowing the Scriptures' (Mt.22:29) - an accusation which should be levelled at all those who would dare claim that 'first century Semites did not argue from a premise to a conclusion'. It is not at all 'rationalistic' to argue from a premise to a conclusion: it is the only way to establish the truth - whether you are a first century Semite or a twentieth century Anglo-Saxon!
So let us wholeheartedly reject humanistic rationalism, with its bland denial of the supernatural; but let us at the same time exercise the God-given faculty of rationality, by which healthy discernment is established, sound logic is embraced and every false way shunned. Never before has a 'sound mind' been so necessary in the life of the Church. To substitute mysticism for rationalism is the spiritual equivalent of moving from a one-dimensional world into a black hole.
Perhaps, in these matters, the children of the world are often wiser than the childen of light. When the Lord uses the secular press to make observations that expose the absurdity of sects in today's professing Church, we should sit up and take notice. In a brilliant extended editorial on the Charismatic Movement in the Sunday Telegraph entitled 'That New Black Magic', Sir Peregrine Worsthorne wrote:
"Charismatic religion is very much part of the New Age. That is to say, it is part of the flood of mindlessness that appears to be spreading throughout Western countries. From various brands of oriental meditation to witchcraft to little green men in UFOs, there is evidence that more and more people are seeking refuge from the difficulties of life in mysticism, mysteries and superstition".25
It is in these ways that the Charismatic Movement is very much a part of the worldwide Neo-Gnostic renaissance. The Eastern mystic seeks an ultimate experience of spiritual enlightenment, which is called in Sanskrit, Nirvana. It is highly significant that this word is translated as 'a blowing out of the mind', which involves the dissolving of the individual ego and a blending of oneself into the 'cosmic soup'. In a world-view which regards reality as being merely subjective, the individuated consciousness is seen as obstructive to spiritual progress. The Neo-Gnostic of today - whether Charismatic or New Age - has simply followed in this 'mind-blowing' tradition. We have already mentioned above the many techniques which are utilised in order to effect this state: meditation, psychic exploration, consciousness-altering, drugs, psychotherapies, asceticism, gurus, and a variety of trance-inducing practices such as repetitive singing and ecstatic babbling.
In refutation of this Hindu-Gnostic tenet of faith, the Scriptures reveal that in order to come to God, we must first believe that He is (Heb.11:6) - a perception which does not involve the snuffing-out of the mind but, rather, a heightened exercise of it. The right use of the mind is an integral and essential part of Christian experience. The worship of God involves using the mind in equal proportion to all other cooperating agencies of the human constitution (Mt.22:37; Lk.10:27). Accordingly, when a person becomes a Christian under the power of God, his mind is also a vital part of the transformation process (cf. Rom.12:2), rather than something to be left behind or - as some mystics describe it - 'put in a cloud of unknowing'. It is certainly true that over-intellectualism and scholasticism will hold the Spirit at bay; but the solution to that can never be found in going to the other extremes of mystic mindlessness or ecstatic indulgence.
4. An Undiscerning Eye: The Stifling of Judgementalism
A recurring feature of Satan's occultic plan is the pressing into his service of a number of Bible verses which are taken out of context and thus given a distorted meaning. A classic example of this occurs with the use of that saying of the Lord Jesus Christ: 'Judge not, that you be not judged' (Mt.7:1). Satan, in the garb of an angel of light, would have us interpret this verse as meaning that we must never make any judgement which paints something or someone in a negative light. Such an interpretation, however, has no foundation whatsoever in the Bible. Firstly, Jesus was referring primarily in this verse to our indulgence in hypocritical, condemnatory judgement of another person concerning faults which we have not confronted in our own lives, or things about which we are ill-equipped to make such judgements. This is clearly borne-out by the context in which it is set (cf. Mt.7:1-6), coupled with the supplementary statement of Jesus that we should not 'judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous judgement' (Jn.7:24).
Obviously then, we are supposed to make judgements - even negative judgements - but from the solid foundation of righteousness rather than from mere superficiality. In other words, our yardstick for judgement should be the God-breathed Scriptures rather than our own petty human traditions and values. Furthermore, we should never ignore the fact that there is a vital artery running throughout the length of the Bible, which overrides the respectful rapport which should normally exist between all peoples, and which instead emphasises the importance of discerning the difference between true and false teaching.
It is true that we cannot make infallible judgements about individual hearts - only the Lord can do that (Jer.17:10) - but we are repeatedly urged to use the gift of discernment in relation to sorting out positive spiritual influences from negative ones (Mt.24:4; Mk.13:21-23; Rom.16:17; 1 Cor.2:12-16; Eph.5:6; Jas.5:19,20; 2 Pet.3:17; 1 Jn.4:1). In fact, the Greek word in the New Testament which is translated as 'discernment' is diakrisis, a compound of dia, between, and krisis, judgement. Discernment means to make a distinguishing judgement. As disciples of Christ, we are faith-bound to exercise such judgemental discernment in all our relationships, always bearing in mind the clarifying statement in Jn.7:24: objective, righteous, Scriptural judgement, rather than egocentric, superficial, legalistic condemnation. The same holds true for our need to censure doctrine which threatens the stability and soundness of the Church on earth. As the Anglican Bishop J.C. Ryle expressed this more than one hundred years ago:
'There is a spiritual instinct in most true believers which generally enables them to distinguish between true and false teaching... Let us beware of despising this spiritual instinct. Whatever a sneering world may please to say, it is one of the peculiar marks of the indwelling of the Holy Ghost'.26
It is supremely ironic that the Neo-Gnostics, who claim that the Spirit of God indwells all human beings unconditionally and who would also advocate non-judgementalism towards other 'faiths', not only fail to exercise any discernment whatsoever, but also employ a blasphemous and utterly condemnatory judgementalism against all those who seek to be faithful to the Lord God and Christ of the Scriptures. For they are most scathing when referring to true Christians.
There is, of course, a hidden agenda here: For it is Satan's sincerest wish that we should never make a negative judgement about those who set out to destroy the Church and its foundations, or who spread deadly heresy and false doctrine. Correspondingly, the real reason that human non-judgementalism in any form is becoming so fashionable in this age is that it makes the concept of a judging, avenging God seem ridiculous, anachronistic and implausible - a clever ploy on Satan's part to fool the world as his own inevitable doom approaches. In spite of Jesus' repeated warnings of such judgement, people would rather gloss over this awesome cosmic reality - the Lamb who 'treads the winepress of the fierceness and wrath of Almighty God' (Rev.19:15) - emphasising in its stead the infinitely more comfortable concept of the ineffability of a loving, all-embracing Universalist God. Until there is a realisation that the avenging wrath of a judging God is an integral part of the unsearchable love of God, there will be little true repentance on this bedevilled planet.
5. The Marcionite Malady: Rejection of the Old Testament
Another hallmark which is consistent with all manifestations of Gnosticism, whether Old or New, is the rejection of the Old Testament Scriptures and their relegation to the level of mythology or fable. One of the first people to make his mark in this way in the history of the Church was a man by the name of Marcion (died c.160), who concocted a personalised blend of Gnosticism and formed his own canon of Scripture consisting of an abridged Gospel of Luke and ten of the Pauline letters. He believed that the God of the Old Testament was unjustifiably violent and vastly inferior to the Father of the Lord Jesus in the New Testament. That gentle Church father, Polycarp (c.70 - c.155/160), referred to Marcion as the 'first-born of Satan', and his teaching wielded great influence in the Church until the fifth century when it was absorbed into Manichaeism. However, his anti-Old Testament legacy has lingered long, and regularly features as a hallmark of all those who seek to undermine the person and work of Jehovah-Christ.
The reasons for this rejection of the Old Testament are easy to discern. First, there is a continuity between the Old and New Testaments which, if they are rent asunder, makes both portions of Scripture meaningless. As Augustine of Hippo put it, 'The New in the Old is latent; the Old in the New is patent'. Let us not forget the fact that Jesus regarded the entire Old Testament as the inspired Word of God which could never be broken (e.g., Jn.10:35; Lk.24:27,44). He frequently quoted it authoritatively, and both He and the Apostles clearly viewed His life and death as a fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy ('It is written...' ).
In the Neo-Gnostic view, the Old Testament is reduced to the 'fabulous' - a series of allegorical fables designed to show certain spiritual realities. This can take many contrasting forms. In the early 1970s, a book came out by John Marco Allegro, professor of Semitic Languages at Manchester University and translator of the Dead Sea Scrolls, entitled 'The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross'. In this work, it was claimed that the Bible - the Old Testament in particular - was an elaborately woven fabric of allegorical tales put together by an hallucinogenic, mushroom-eating fertility cult. In this work it was claimed, among many other things, that Esau (who was a ruddy, hairy man) symbolised the red-topped and hairy psychedelic fungus Amanita Muscaria. One had to marvel at the ways in which familiar Bible stories could somehow be forced to support this theory - all of which had eluded students of the Bible for almost two thousand years. Naturally, the author became rich on the proceeds and retired to a tax haven in the Isle of Man!
There is no end to the methods used by the Neo-Gnostics to twist and subvert the Old Testament Scriptures in support of their cause. The present writer once attended a series of seminars unfolding this 'fabulous' understanding of the Bible, in which it was claimed that the Children of Israel's flight from Egypt into the wilderness symbolises the escape of the 'Inner Self ' from enslavement to the ego-mind, that Joseph's multi-coloured coat represented his etheric 'aura', that Goliath symbolises the outsized human-ego which has to be 'killed' through the resolve of the childlike 'Inner Self ' (David), and so on, ad nauseam.
It is certainly true that there are many symbolic elements in the Old Testament - 'types', as they are known. But we would interpret the symbolism in a very different way from the Gnostics. Far from reducing the O.T. to a series of mere myths, these symbols strengthen and highlight its infallible connection with the New Testament. For all these types find their 'antitypes' or fulfilment in the N.T., and were prefiguring later events so that they would be more easily understood and accepted when they came to pass. For example, the judgement of the Flood prefigured the Final Judgement to come, the O.T. sacrifices prefigured the sacrifice of Christ, the deliverance of the Children of Israel from Pharaoh typified the deliverance of believers from Satan, the slaying of Goliath by David prefigured the destruction of the Antichrist (and his mentor, Satan) by the Lord Jesus Christ, and so on. However, the crucial difference between the Christian believer's understanding of these symbolic elements and that of their Gnostic counterparts is that these events were not only symbolic of future events but that they were also real historical events in themselves. The great strength of this symbolism lay in the fact that God had actually foreordained that historical events should provide a matrix in which the Old Testament people could apprehend the future, and, conversely, that through these events in the past we in the Church can today have an even fuller understanding of the more recent episodes which they prefigured.
The crucial importance of the Old Testament to the Christian faith cannot be stressed enough. Yet many believers have scant regard for it today, believing it to have been superseded by the New. Such a mistake has grave consequences for the future of Christianity. As one writer warns:
'The fact that Gnosticism, like certain later movements, ties rejection of the Hebrew Old Testament to fresh superstitions and an interest in the occult, helps us to see the cardinal importance of the Old Testament for Christian orthodoxy. The major doctrines of Christianity are indeed drawn from the New Testament, and superficially it might appear as though the Old Testament is of interest chiefly as background. As a matter of fact, however, it is the Old Testament that guarantees the rootedness of Christ, his person, and his work in real history. Whenever the Old Testament is ignored or reduced to mere Jewish religious thought, Christians fall prey to various mythologies and occultism'.27
The sinister potential of such an allegorical approach to the Bible for the satanic strategy becomes all-too-clear when one recalls that saying approved by the Neo-Gnostic scientist, Lyall Watson, 'When a myth is shared by large numbers of people, it becomes a reality'.28 Therefore, believers must fight tooth and claw for the unique historicity of the Old Testament; for without it - as Satan knows only too well - the integrity of the New Testament is brought into question, and thereby the very foundations of the Christian Gospel. The two Testaments must stand or fall together.
6. 'Deliverance' from Evil: The Depersonalising of the Devil
One of the most far-reaching aspects of the world-view of the New Gnosticism is its flat denial of the objective fact that evil has taken root in the cosmos, due to the original intervention of wicked angelic hosts. There is never the remotest hint in all the material being channelled from spirit-entities about an ongoing spiritual battle of primitive origins. It is always assumed that all channelled messages come from benign beings, and that any evil aspects in the Universe are a mere projection of the minds of people who are not very highly evolved. To make any suggestion of conflict in these circles will elicit accusations that one is projecting one's own 'screwed-up state' onto the world and that one should immediately seek psycho-spiritual help to get sorted out.
Readers will recall how the New Age business training consultant Peter Russell claimed that the biblical references to Jesus Christ depict the 'Inner Christ' in all people, and that Satan or Antichrist represents the individual 'ego-mind' which must be eliminated. It is easy to discern the reason behind such an allegorisation of the Book of Revelation. Once Satan has been effectively depersonalised and made to symbolise the human ego, not only is the structure of the Bible completely transformed, but its entire eschatology is radically altered, as we can see from Peter Russell's subsequent interpretation of the New Jerusalem as symbolising
'a world freed from the dictates of our ego-mind, a world in which a liberated mind is the norm rather than the exception... There will, at last, be peace on earth - the inner peace we have been seeking all along".29
Contrary to this teaching, Jesus tells us not to imagine that He came to bring peace on earth, saying, 'I did not come to bring peace but a sword' (Mt.10:34). He taught that the Gospel will naturally divide groups and families, and that this will not be resolved until the end of the Age when 'the angels will come forth, separate the wicked from the just, and cast them into the furnace of fire' (Mt.13:49-50). This separation, which heralds the beginning of the New Jerusalem, has nothing whatsoever to do with 'Inner Selves' being liberated from 'ego-minds'. It is a real event which happens to real, morally responsible individuals, and which will cause considerable 'wailing and gnashing of teeth' (Mt.13:50).
Because, in the world-view of the Neo-Gnostic, the being called Satan is merely a symbol of the human ego, conflict only occurs as a result of the ego-mind standing in the way of psychic liberation. Eradicate the ego and the world will be transformed. This, in turn, determinines the Neo-Gnostic comprehension of evil and the presence of malfunction in the cosmos. In the light of these claims, certain questions must be raised: Who or what were the demons which Jesus cast out of so many people during His earthly pilgrimage? Were they just projections of malicious 'thought forms', as the Neo-Gnostics suggest? Or was Jesus merely paying lip-service to the religious ideas of the time by speaking in demonological terms, as the theological modernists believe?
The Bible clearly shows that the Lord Jesus Christ accepted the concept of a vast pantheon of demons which operate under the leadership and authority of an evil personal being called Satan (Mt.12:22-28). He also taught that 'the devil and his angels' were morally responsible personal beings who were destined to spend eternity in hell when the Final Judgement comes at the end of this present age (Mt.25:41; cf. Rev.20:10). Furthermore, Jesus clearly spoke of Satan as having been a real person who was 'ruler of this world' at the time of His Incarnation, and who He had come to overthrow (Jn.12:31). He also depicted Satan as a personal being who invented the lie at the outset of human history and who brought death into the world (Jn.8:44). The Apostle John concurs with this when he says that the devil was a being who was morally responsible, having 'sinned from the beginning', and that the Son of God had become incarnate precisely to 'destroy the works of the devil' (1 Jn.3:8). All the writers of the New Testament mention the actuality of demons or evil angels as personal beings (e.g., 1 Cor.10:20-21; 1 Tim.4:1; Jas.2:19; Rev.6:14).
The many people who were portrayed as afflicted with demons in the Scriptures are not shown to be the victims of their own intransigent egos, but are depicted as being oppressed and possessed by actual entities with a personality who were addressed as such by the Lord Jesus and those He empowered to cast them out (e.g., Lk.8:2 & 30). The Apostle Paul speaks in very clear terms about the fact that believers are involved in a cosmic spiritual battle against all 'the wiles of the devil' under whose jurisdiction operates a vast horde of spirit-entities, who are 'the rulers of the darkness of this world' (Eph.6:11-12).
It is clear that Satan has written the agenda of the Neo-Gnostics concerning the devil and his wicked henchmen. To teach that evil spirits are merely projections of the evil minds of 'unevolved' people and that Satan represents the human ego which must be overcome through tuning into 'the Christ within', is one of the most consummate ploys he has yet vomited into the minds of men. In the next section we will look at one of the key derivative ideas to emerge from this depersonalisation of the devil, and from the denial of demonic reality.
7. The Good Within: Denial of Original Sin (and Guilt)
Following closely on the heels of the Neo-Gnostic's mythological representation of the devil comes his denial of the original sin of our first parents. In depicting the Fall as a gradual descent into gross matter and ego-consciousness, the doctrine of the imputation of Adam's sin to all humanity (as taught by the inspired Apostle, Rom.5:12; 1 Cor.15:21-22; cf. Gen.3:1-6; Isa.43:27) is bundled neatly into obscurity.
The New Gnosticism upholds the notion that humanity is basically good, and that if we could only be reformed with meditation, better parenting, vegetarianism, realignment of body energies, relating to 'spirit-guides', surrendering to peace and justice movements, psychotherapy, green thinking, etc., we would be able to get together across the globe and create a beautiful planet teeming with lovely people. It is not difficult to discern the reason why this delusion has come about. Satan has no greater wish than to conceal from his offspring the fact that there has been a Fall into lawlessness, and thereby to deny the great claim of the true Gospel that our subsequent inherent sinfulness has rendered us helpless, lost, without salvation, and in need of a gracious Saviour (Jn.15:5). The Neo-Gnostics' mythologising of Satan and twisted symbolisation of the early Genesis material has so strongly coloured their understanding of the Fall into which humanity has been plunged, that there is no place whatsoever for the idea of the innate sinfulness of mankind. For the modern Gnostic, therefore, the presence of evil in the world is solely a product of human perception rather than having an objective reality. As an example of state-of-the-art Neo-Gnostic thinking on these matters, Findhorn guru Peter Lemesurier rejects the idea of a personalised Satan by claiming it is old-fashioned dualism, and then says:
'There seems to be no alternative but to accept the fact that the world was always perfect, humanity was always perfect, and no imperfection ever entered the picture at all. What, then, did enter the picture? What entered the picture was human consciousness - not merely the generalised awareness of the right brain, but also the focussed, analytical consciousness of the left. It was this latter form of consciousness that then started to divide up the world into categories which formed the basis of all thought and language... The imagined imperfection of the world was always a mere illusion from the beginning. What had happened was that humanity had lost sight of reality as it was. And the only way to improve the situation was - and is - to put human consciousness back in touch with that reality, not least by re-establishing contact with our direct perceptions, uncontaminated by the entirely theoretical categories and judgements of our rampant left-brain consciousness'.30 [emphasis in original]
The recommended way here to bring improvement to human existence is 'to re-establish contact with reality', that is, one's 'Inner Self '. Evil and malfunction in the world are simply cured by a shift in perception - a leap in consciousness. Surely, Peter Lemesurier is speaking for every Neo-Gnostic alive today when he goes on to make the remarkable claim that
'The Illusion is that the world is imperfect and divided against itself, that the Garden of Eden has been lost to us and needs to be restored. The reality is that all is absolutely perfect as it is, and that the Garden of Eden has never ceased to be'.31
These extraordinary words could have been written by Satan himself, as they eradicate every vestige of his evil work from the start of human history. Not only that; an inevitable outworking of this denial of original sin is the teaching that all people who have ever lived will be saved. Although it is true that all people are God's creatures and owe their very lives and sustenance to Him, our creaturehood is not the guarantee of our adoption into the family of God (Jn.1:12; Rom.8:8-17; 9:8; 2 Cor.6:18; Gal.4:5-6). The erroneous teaching that all are in God's family - and thereby in His favour - ignores not only countless references to the special election and predestination of those chosen by God in His mercy to be a part of His family and kingdom (e.g., Mt.11:25; 20:16; 25:34; Lk.8:10; 10:20; 18:7; Jn.6:37-39,44-45; 10:2-4,25-29; 17:2,6,9; Rom.8:28-30; Eph.1:4-5,9-11; etc.), but also the many statements by the Lord Jesus Himself which proclaim the uncomfortable truth that not all are going to be saved (e.g., Mt.13:24-30,38-42; 22:11-14; Lk.20:45-47; Jn.3:36; 5:28-29; etc.).
8. The 'god' Within: Universal Divine Consciousness
Another favourite teaching in the satanic gospel of the New Consciousness is that because man was created in the image of God, there is something of the essence of God in each one of us - known in Neo-Gnostic jargon as 'The Divine Consciousness' or 'The Doctrine of the Inner Light' or 'The Higher Self'. As we have repeatedly shown in other papers, the claim is made that we can readily tap into this inner divinity through consciousness-altering techniques and thereby attain personal Godhood. This teaching of 'the God within' is not only the most fundamental of all the tenets of the New Gnosticism , but it has been the mainstay of shamanism and Eastern mysticism for millennia. It is our strong conviction that during the coming years, this teaching will become one of the prime ways that the corrosion of the Christian Gospel will be hastened. For this reason, it is most important for believers to be able to refute entirely the idea that all people have God indwelling them. For if this is true, then it removes the exclusive nature of Chrisian salvation over against the claims of all the world religions.
Once again we find that this concept has come about through the diabolic characteristic of plucking texts from the Bible, then applying them out of context in order to support a personal philosophy and to claim biblical endorsement for teachings which are entirely at variance with the mind of God. Three Old Testament passages are used by Neo-Gnostics to support their claim that all people have a spark of indwelling divinity. Let us examine these texts.
A prime Old Testament passage used to support the Gnostic idea of God indwelling every creature occurs in Psalm 46:10, from which an erroneous rendering is constructed so that it reads: 'Be still, and know God'. The idea is that all people have to do is to 'be still' - which is usually interpreted in Neo-Gnostic circles as the act of transcendental-style meditation or other activity to numb the mind - and then they will attain 'God-consciousness', i.e., 'know' that they are God. Again, this is a perversion of the Scripture, removing it from its true context. The text does not advise readers to 'be still, and know the God within'. Instead, as the context makes clear, the Lord is commanding His enemies (and those of His people) to cease from their battling and recognise His divine authority and power in the earth. The Hebrew word translated as 'still', raphah, means 'cease' or 'desist'. So when God says, 'Be still, and know that I am God', He is really saying here: 'Cease from all your foolish turmoils and recognise that I am God, and that you cannot resist Me or confound My people'.
The second Old Testament text used by Gnostics to prove the doctrine of 'the God within' occurs in the Book of Job (34:14-15), in which some translations of a saying of Elihu can give the impression that God's Spirit indwells every person. Turning to the original Hebrew, a literal translation reads:
'If He sets his heart on man, if He gathers to Himself his spirit and his breath, all flesh shall perish together, and man shall turn again to dust'.
It is the spirit and breath of man - his God-given life-force - which is being referred to here as being withdrawn, not the indwelling Holy Spirit of God (note the capitalisations of the pronouns referring to divinity). As John Gill points out in his comment on this verse, the 'spirit' which is 'gatherered in' to God in Job 34:14 is
'not His own Spirit and breath, drawing in and retaining that within Himself, and witholding the influence of it from His creatures; but the spirit and breath of man, which are from God, and which, as He gives, He can gather when He pleases'.32
In fact, in support of this, Elihu makes a statement earlier in his discourse in Job, saying, 'The Spirit of God has made me, and the breath of the Almighty gives me life' (Job 33:4). This does not at all imply that Elihu believes God has imparted a spark of divinity into his being. It simply refers to the creative and upholding power of the Spirit in his life. King Solomon also refers to the same phenomenon when he says that at death 'the spirit (or breath) will return to God who gave it' (Eccl.12:7). Again, although human life is certainly created and upheld by God's Spirit, it is the spirit (lifeforce) of man that is being referred to by Solomon, not the Holy Spirit of God or any form of indwelling divine essence.
This same idea holds true in Psalm 104:29-30, another text alleged to support the Gnostic doctrine of 'the God within'. Here, in a wonderful outburst extolling God's creation and His sovereignty over it, the psalmist says to the Lord, 'You take away their breath, they die and return to their dust. You send forth Your Spirit, they are created; and You renew the face of the earth'. However, there is no suggestion here of the pantheistic notion of indwelling divinity in God's human creation. All that these verses show is that all life is dependent on God for its sustenance, and that it is the Spirit of God which is involved in creation and renewal.
However, having shown that these texts in the Book of Job and the Psalms refer to the lifeforce which God upholds by His Spirit rather than the indwelling Spirit of God, it would be most beneficial for us to turn our attention to the original creation of the first man Adam. For, in doing so, we will learn much about the true nature of the spiritual relationship between God and man, as well as about Satan's strategy in respect to this doctrine of 'the God within'. In the Book of Genesis, there is one verse on this matter which says:
'And the Lord God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath [spirit] of life; and man became a living being' (Gen.2:7).
When the Neo-Gnostics come to this text, they read it as if it proves that the 'spirit of man' is of the same essence as the Spirit of God. For example, the Franciscan monk Brother Ramon, states:
'God breathed his life-giving ruach [Hebrew for spirit or breath] into Adam's nostrils and he became a living soul... In the Bible the breath of man is a manifestation of the breath of the Eternal Being'.33
Here he simply assumes that the human spirit (the 'breath of man') can be directly identified with the Spirit of God and that this is every person's natural heritage. This is tantamount to the deification of man. The claim is made by all Neo-Gnostics that through the degeneration of human consciousness, human beings have lost contact with that original 'god within' imparted to man in the creation. Having been obscured by the development of a 'false self', they assert that all that is necessary to 'rediscover' it, or 'rekindle' it, is to use certain meditation techniques which will radically alter our consciousness and bring us once more into contact with our ancient heritage. How do these claims square up to the biblical data?
It is certainly the case that Adam must have had the indwelling Holy Spirit as part of his original creation when God breathed the breath of life into him; but this is not at all to be identified with the Gnostic's 'god within' or the mystical notion of a universal indwelling 'spark of divinity'. The teaching that Adam had the indwelling Holy Spirit is surely a fundamental canon of the Christian faith, resting primarily on the relationship between Adam and Christ. The Apostle Paul says that Adam, to whom he refers as 'the first man Adam' (1 Cor.15:45), was 'a type of Him who was to come' (Rom.5:14), that is, the Lord Jesus, whom he refers to as 'the last Adam'. In Rom.5:12-14 and 1 Cor.15:20-49, Paul shows the clear analogy between the two Adams: The first Adam brought sin and death into the world through his seduction by Satan; the Last Adam overturns this through His obedience and successful resistance of Satan. If the last Adam had the Spirit, then by analogy the First Adam must have done also. As George Smeaton puts it in an analysis of Gen.2:7 in his excellent work on the Holy Spirit:
'The doctrine that man was originally, though mutably, replenished with the Spirit, may be termed the deep fundamental thought of the Scripture-doctrine of man. If the first and second Adam are so related that the first man was the analogue or figure of the second, as all admit on the authority of the Scripture (Rom.5:12-14), it is clear that, unless the first man possessed the Spirit, the last man, the Healer or Restorer of the forfeited inheritance, would not have been the medium of giving the Spirit, who was withdrawn on account of sin, and who could be restored only on account of the everlasting righteousness which Christ brought in (Rom.8:10)... No one, in fact, can read the action of Christ on the first evening after His resurrection, and consider the symbolic breathing on the disciples [Jn.20:21-22], and the words which fell from Him in conveying a new gift of the Spirit, without an impress that these two acts were counterparts - the one [in Gen.2:7] the original gift, the other [in Jn.20:22] the restoration of what was lost'.34
Does all this mean that people have God unconditionally indwelling them, as the Gnostics would claim? Not at all. For the Holy Spirit was withdrawn from Adam as a result of his fall into sin. The one who had been made in the pure image of God could no longer be described as such. Now it could be said of him: 'The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked' (Jer.17:9) and 'the imagination of man's heart is evil from his youth' (Gen.8:21). From the following generation onwards, men could only cry out: 'Behold, I was shapen in iniquity; and in sin did my mother conceive me' (Ps.51:5, A.V.). The Lutheran Formula of Concord (1580) makes a sweeping affirmation on this post-Fall human condition, which brilliantly sums up its totality:
'Original sin in human nature is not only a total lack of good in spiritual, divine things, but at the same time it replaces the lost image of God in man with a deep, wicked, abominable, bottomless, inscrutable, and inexpressible corruption of his entire nature with all its powers, especially of the highest and foremost powers of the soul in mind, heart and will.
'As a result, since the Fall man inherits an inborn wicked stamp, an interior uncleanness of the heart and evil desires and inclinations. By nature every one of us inherits from Adam a heart, sensation, and mindset which, in its highest powers and the light of reason, is by nature diametrically opposed to God and his highest commands and is actually enmity against God, especially in divine and spiritual matters'.35
In the Scots Confession of 1560 there is a similar emphasis concerning the result of the Fall on the image of God in man:
'Because of this transgression, commonly called Original sin, the Image of God was utterly defaced in man, and he and his posterity of nature become enemies to God, slaves to Satan, and servants unto sin'.36
Far from continuing to possess the gift of the indwelling Holy Spirit - which Gnostics and Mystics interpret as a spark of original God-given divinity or a 'Hidden Self' which can be tapped through meditational techniques - the Belgic Confession (1561) boldly states:
'Since man became wicked and perverse, corrupt in all his ways, he has lost all his excellent gifts which he had once received from God. He has nothing left but some small traces, which are sufficient to make man inexcusable. For whatever light is in us has changed into darkness, as Scripture teaches us: the light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it (Jn.1:8); where the apostle John calls mankind darkness'.37
Consistent with this verdict, in the Heidelberg Catechism, the question is asked: 'But are we so corrupt that we are totally unable to do any good and inclined to all evil?' To which the answer is given: 'Yes, unless we are regenerated by the Spirit of God'.38 The condition of man as bereft of the Holy Spirit and no longer in the pure image of God has spread to every man and woman after Adam and Eve. This is why the Lord could say, shortly before the judgement of the Flood, 'My Spirit shall not strive with man forever, for he is indeed flesh' (Gen.6:3). Man had so descended from grace as a result of the Fall that he was indeed just 'flesh', bereft of the indwelling Spirit of God. This is corroborated by Jude when he describes sinful man as 'not having the Spirit' (Jude 19). The Lord Jesus clearly differentiated between two classes: 'That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit' (Jn.3:6); the one is merely 'in Adam', the other 'in Christ'. From the First Adam, the human race has inherited a physical body; from the Last Adam, believers inherit a spiritual body also (1 Cor.15:45). And Paul also made a clear distinction between those who do not have the indwelling Spirit and those who do:
'So then, those who are in the flesh cannot please God. But you are not in the flesh but in the Spirit, if indeed the Spirit of God dwells in you. Now if anyone does not have the Spirit of Christ, he is not His'.
(Rom.8:8-9)
Those who do not have the Spirit of Christ are those who are merely the physical descendants of Adam - once born - whereas those who do have the Spirit of Christ are those who have been 'born again' through the regenerating power of God (Jn.3:3). The original sin of the First Adam caused the withdrawal of the Spirit from man; the (sinless) Last Adam restores the Spirit in those who come to Him in faith and repentance. It is only those who repent and believe that have this original gift restored to them (Col.3:10; Eph.4:24). All this means that the Neo-Gnostic claim of a universal 'God within' is a sheer fantasy which goes against both the plain evidence of the Holy Scriptures and the witness of the Church. Perhaps we can now recognise the importance of upholding this original indwelling of the First Adam by the Holy Spirit and the subsequent loss of the Spirit at the Fall. For the only way one can have the indwelling Holy Spirit today is through His restoration in those who believe in the Second Adam, the Lord Jesus Christ.
Strangely, the doctrine of Adam's original possession of the Holy Spirit has received little recognition since the writings of a great many of the Church Fathers who vigorously upheld it. It may be that the neglect of this doctrine is because of a fear that it panders to a Pantheistic view of creation and appears to support the Gnostic world-view of universal indwelling divinity.39 But this fear is unfounded when the relationship between Adam and Christ is properly understood, and the full effects of the Fall have been grasped. Indeed, the proclamation of this doctrine actually works against the view of the Gnostic, as it clearly places every one of them outside the realm of those who have the Spirit of God!
One of the New Testament texts advanced by the Gnostics in support of their doctrine of 'the God within' is that saying of the Apostle Peter '...you may be partakers of the divine nature' (2 Pet.1:4). However, yet again this passage works against the Neo-Gnostic view because it is not addressed to all people everywhere but to 'those who have obtained like precious faith with us by the righteousness of our God and Savior Jesus Christ' (2 Pet.1:1). Even on their own admission, Gnostics uphold the idea of knowledge (gnosis) rather than faith for salvation. So this letter could hardly apply to those who propagate the New Gnosticism, who do not rely in faith on the imputed righteousness of Christ for their salvation, but on their own systems and techniques. True Christians, by having the imputed righteousness of Christ and the indwelling Holy Spirit of God, become - through their fellowship with Christ - partakers in the divine nature. But this does not at all mean that they are partakers in the divine essence. Being a 'partaker in the divine nature', as one Christian writer has put it so well,
'does not mean that man shall give up one nature and assume another, but that he shall become the recipient, through grace, of what the Bible has termed "the glory" of God. What Christianity proclaims is an eternal participation in the Life of God - but not an identity'.40
That is the fundamental difference between the orthodox, biblical, Christian concept of the relationship between God and man, and the 'divinisation-of-man' conjecture of all the Satan-inspired religions and cults of the world. To be a participant in the life of God and a recipient of the glory of God - as Adam was and as all believers are - is very different from the notion that one can achieve divinity through contacting 'the God within'.
There is one further New Testament text which is used in support of the Gnostic claim that all human beings unconditionally have a spark of God indwelling them which is waiting to be kindled into flame by consciousness-altering techniques. This is the statement by the Lord Jesus to the Pharisees that 'the kingdom of God is within you', (Lk.17:21). The rendering of the Greek entos humon as 'within you' in this translation is technically imprecise - and especially so within this particular context. A far more reliable translation is 'in your midst' or 'among you', in support of which J.P. Lange states the following three grounds:
'1) That in this way the antithesis between the external coming [of the kingdom] and the being already actually present is kept more sharply defined; 2) That the kingdom of God had not been truly set up in the hearts of these Pharisees; 3) That in Jn.1:26; 12:35; Luke 7:16; 11:20 the same thought which is expressed in our translation is expressed in another way; while, on the other hand, for the apparently profound but really not very intelligible statement, that the kingdom of God is found in the man, no other proofs are to be found in our Lord's words'.41
An important factor in these verses is that Jesus is not speaking of the inwardness of the kingdom, but of its presence. The kingdom of God does not come into a person - for that is occult mysticism. Rather, a person becomes an inhabitant of God's kingdom at conversion, as can be shown from many other places in Scripture (cf. Col.1:13; Mt.25:34; Jn.3:5; Acts 14:22).
The successful refutation of the Gnostic teaching of the universal 'God within' is an absolute necessity for believers today. Many foundational aspects of Christianity are made void if this concept is held to be true. A few examples follow:
* If it can be proved that all people at every stage in history have had an indwelling spark of divinity, then the entire biblical concept of the Fall and subsequent loss of the indwelling Holy Spirit is denied.
* The loss of the Holy Spirit in the wake of the Fall meant that man would die - spiritually as well as physically. The restoration of the indwelling Spirit in believers is their guarantee of eternal life (Eph.1:13-14; 2 Cor.5:5). If all people still have a spark of Divinity which can be activated through various techniques, then this removes the need to receive eternal life from Jesus Christ, who is described as a 'life-giving spirit' (1 Cor.15:45).
* If all one needs to do for salvation is to 'tap into' the 'God/Christ within' through certain foolproof techniques, then the necessity for the historical event of Jesus' atonement for sin is swept to one side.
* The need for the Son of God to become incarnate is rendered entirely meaningless in the face of a universal 'Inner Christ' who is available 'on tap' to all people at every stage of history, without the need for repentance. For if the first Adam had not lost the indwelling Holy Spirit as a result of sin, then there was no need for the last Adam (Christ) to be manifested in the flesh and to restore the Holy Spirit to those who would follow Him.
If the teaching of the universal 'God within' is true, the list of Christian doctrines which would fall could go on forever. In fact, it is precisely for this reason that it has come to play such a prominent role in the satanic strategy of the Gospel Age. For at the heart of this teaching we find that original satanic lie that human beings can become God (Gen.3:4-6). When Satan told our first parents that they would be like God and never die if they obeyed him rather than their Creator, no sooner had they done so than God's judgement brought decay into the world and the indwelling Holy Spirit was taken from them - which was the complete opposite of what the devil had originally promised! Truly, he was a liar par excellence; and he continues to be just as much of a liar today by hoodwinking his subjects into believing that they still have the original 'spark of divinity' - which is how Gnostics will always view the indwelling Holy Spirit - which was given to Adam. And when they 'tune-in' to this 'God within', the 'Higher Self ', in order to awaken it, the Old Serpent ensures that they will have all the experiences necessary to perpetuate the Lie.
9. Gone Today, Here Tomorrow: The Great Reincarnation Hoax
Having shown how that original lie that man can become God is perpetuated by the teaching of the 'universal God within', we will now discover the primary manner in which Satan perpetuates that other original lie that man would never die if he disobeyed his Creator and followed him. Although this lie is perpetuated, to a large extent, through alleged mediumistic contact with the spirits of the dead and through out-of-the-body experiences, by far the most successful teaching has been that of reincarnation, the acceptance of which is now worldwide.
The concept of reincarnation is fundamental to Neo-Gnostic belief. Having been a basic teaching of the Eastern religions from time immemorial, an integral part of many Gnostic and Cabbalistic sects, and part of the teaching of Plato and Pythagoras, reincarnation (or metempsychosis, as it is sometimes called) has developed in the West as a result of the confluence of certain circumstances which have worked in its favour, as well as by the overt propaganda of various individuals. During earlier centuries, the colonisation of Oriental countries by Western powers meant that numerous administrators and officials were exposed to such beliefs and brought them back to the West. Earlier this century, the visits of such gurus as Swami Vivekananda to the Parliament of the World's Religions in 1893 in Chicago, coupled with the wide dissemination of the theosophical teachings of Helena Blavatsky, Rudolf Steiner and Alice Bailey, enabled belief in reincarnation to flourish widely. In theosophical thought - which is the quintessence of modern Western reincarnational belief - each individual comprises a higher self whose natural abode is in a higher dimension than that in which the material cosmos exists. In order to grow into full perfection, each higher self must come down to the material cosmos in a series of lifetimes through which he or she learns and develops spiritually. Conscious cooperation with this process will speed things up to a perfect conclusion. The Ascended Masters mentioned in our website paper on the subject are allegedly those who have come to the end of their incarnational cycle and no longer have need for a material body (although they are apparently able to use one as a vehicle to fulfil their purposes).
The notion of a single 'higher self', which comes in a different bodily manifestation on a repeated basis just does not make sense. For it works out as a kind of docetism as people only appear to be individual people but are really phantasms of a mysterious 'higher self ' which is the real thing, but which no one ever sees. But what exactly is this mysterious 'Higher Self '? It is bizarre to suggest that behind every human being there is really an ethereal being which is the 'real person' but which never reveals itself and which just hops from one incarnation to the next like an actor in a one-man show wearing one costume after another? Is each individuated personality just a heap of clothing - a prop - which can be discarded forever by a performer in a cosmic play after he has milked the part for all he can get? There is also an ethical problem in that one can do an evil act without ever having a conscious realisation of its value or effect in this life; and when the time comes in a future incarnation for one to pay the consequences for that act of an earlier lifetime, there is still no conscious realisation of the evil carried out in earlier incarnation. In short, reincarnation creates an ethical nightmare.
Today a number of Primal Therapy groups not only encourage participants to delve back into natal and intra-uterine experiences, but to go beyond into former lives which allegedly have an effect upon our personalities today. In one group attended by this writer, a man was told that he suffered from paranoid tendencies because, in a former incarnation, he was allegedly thrown down a well by his mother as a child in medieval times.42 A noticeable feature of those who believe in reincarnation is that whenever they speak about their past lives, they never see themselves as, say, a cockroach or a beggar. They have always been some high and mighty personage or great sage. The same holds true whenever one visits a psychic who claims to be able to tell one about one's past lives. Prior to his conversion, the present writer was told by various mediums that he has been an American Indian medicine man, a leading bishop in the early Church, and a famous Indian poet! Somehow, one is never told that one has been a thoroughly evil character or an insignificant insect. Flattery is a great aid to the development of Gnostic spirituality!
The Church first became concerned about this ancient doctrine when the reincarnationist teachings of Origen of Alexandria (185-254), who had been influenced by Gnosticism, began to find many sectarian adherents among believers. His teachings on these matters were officially condemned at the Second Council of Constantinople in A.D. 553. The doctrine of reincarnation was further condemned at the Councils of Lyons (1274) and Florence (1439). The entire concept of reincarnation presents a full-frontal challenge to the Christian doctrines of bodily resurrection and Divine judgement. For the Bible plainly teaches that at the end of the present age, each individual who has ever been alive will be reunited with his or her body.43 The model for this is Jesus Christ himself, who died, was buried and on the third day rose again from the dead, reunited with exactly the same body which was buried in the tomb. But if it is true that a 'higher self' reincarnates through many lives, there would be some considerable confusion as to which body it would be reunited with! The teaching of the Bible is clear: a person 'passes away and does not come again' (Ps.78:39). Every human being, without exception, is 'appointed...to die once, but after this the judgement' (Heb.9:27).
Intimately connected with reincarnation is the concept of Karma, the teaching that bad and good deeds are compensated for in successive lives. However, this doctrine contradicts the substitutionary atonement of the Lord Jesus Christ on the Cross. For it is only through this that one can be wholly absolved of one's sin (Heb.10:1-4), rather than the Karmic teaching that one must work out one's bad Karma through good works in a successive incarnations.
In the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus (Lk.16:19ff.), we are given a rare biblical glimpse into the world beyond the grave. Although this is indeed a parable, there are certain fundamental principles which come across clearly in this teaching of Jesus. First, there is a retention of identity with the life which was being lived prior to the death. Lazarus did not revert to some 'higher self' after death, but continued to be Lazarus. The Rich Man did not have to suffer the working-out of Karma in future lives to pay for his sins as the Rich Man; instead he was held responsible for his sins immediately after he had died. In other words, it was appointed for him - like every other human being - 'to die once, but after this the judgement'. In all of Jesus' teaching, He never once gave the remotest intimation that He upheld the doctrine of reincarnation, which is simply another manifestation of the unconditional eternal life (You will not surely die', Gen.3:4) which Satan promised to our first parents in Eden at the beginning of human history.
10. The Omega Point: Satan's Endtime Fantasy
Our final hallmark of the New Gnosticism involves a spiritualised form of evolution theory which asserts that all things are moving inexorably towards absolute perfection. This utopian theory has been most fully developed by the French Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, and has been incalculably influential on the theories of the New Gnosticism. De Chardin believed that the movement of evolution is towards greater complexity and ever higher consciousness, culminating in what he called 'Point Omega'. He puts it like this:
'Mankind, at the end of its totalization, its folding-in upon itself, may reach a critical level of maturity where, leaving Earth and stars to lapse slowly back into the dwindling mass of primordial energy, it will detach itself from this planet and join the one true, irreversible essence of things, the Omega point...An escape from the planet, not in space or outwardly, but spiritually and inwardly, such as the hypercentration of cosmic matter upon itself allows'.44
Although Teilhard's language was always rather obtuse, the implication here is clear. For those who require a succinct summary of Teilhard's theory of life, culminating in the Omega point, John Ferguson, the former Dean of the Open University in the U.K. and ardent advocate of 'metaphysics', writes:
'Man has the power of understanding and transforming the evolutionary process. The movement of history is towards greater cohesion, culturally and psychically. There is a threefold convergent evolution, chemical, organic, psychosocial, in what Teilhard calls the hydrosphere, the biosphere and the noosphere. Mankind is converging into a kind of super-organism'.45
This Neo-Gnostic teaching that the whole of humanity - good and evil, regenerate and unregenerate - is 'converging into a kind of super-organism' is Universalism on a grand scale, for which the Neo-Gnostic claims biblical support in two verses. The first is from Paul: 'that in the dispensation of the fullness of the times He might gather together in one all things in Christ, both which are in heaven and which are on earth-in Him' (Eph.1:10). The second is from the words of Jesus: 'And I, if I am lifted up from the earth, will draw all to Myself' (Jn.12:32, author's translation). But these verses have been plucked out of context to support a teaching which cannot be upheld from the Bible. Furthermore, the choice of these verses is highly selective as, in each case, they occur in the context of other statements which completely contradict the teachings of Neo-Gnostics. In his letter to the Ephesians, Paul writes that salvation is an entirely unearned gift from God (Eph.2:4-10), whereas the Gnostic believes that he has to achieve salvation by his own efforts. He also states that Christians are involved in spiritual warfare with evil spirits who rule from the heavenlies over the darkness of this age (Eph.6:12), a view which would be regarded as anathema within Neo-Gnostic circles. Similarly, when the Lord Jesus uttered the words above, they were immediately preceeded by a statement that the world was under the rulership of an evil personal being who he was about to overthrow (Jn.12:31), which the Apostle John informs us elsewhere was the undergirding purpose of His incarnation (1 Jn.3:8).
While the Church warns people to 'flee from the wrath to come', the demonic realm whispers in the ears of the world that 'peace and justice can be created on the earth'. But what the recipients of this message do not realise is that it is just 'when they say, "Peace and safety!" then sudden destruction comes upon them' (1 Th.5:3). Their belief in Satan's lies will mean that, for them, the return of the Lord will overtake them as a thief in the night (1 Th.5:2,4; 2 Pet.3:10).
The place of this teaching in satanic strategy is not hard to discern. For the Old Serpent knows full well from the Word of God the fate which lies in store both for him and his followers. The concept of a future convergence of the creation into a kind of 'super-organism' denies many vital Bible truths such as Satan's 'little season', the bodily Resurrection and personal return of Christ, global judgement, and so on. It represents a spiritualised, planetary version of Emil Coué's positive-thought epigram: 'Every day and in every way, I am getting better and better!' - a concept which is contradicted by the fact that the Bible shows that the world situation has first to get a whole lot worse, to the point of planetary destruction! Just as he does with other teachings which are fatal to his ambitions, he has invented his own counterfeit version of the time of the end, in which there is no place for the debacle which will overtake him. The utopian conceit of the New Age is an earthbound, satanic concept which does not even begin to qualify as a pale reflection of the reconstituted universe to come.
Conclusion
Here we conclude our survey covering the hallmarks of the New Gnosticism. We have really traced the development of the spiritual subterfuge of Satan throughout this Gospel Age, and observed the fact that the work of the devil has now come out into the open after centuries in comparative secrecy. Today, in the twentieth century since the coming of the Lord Jesus Christ, we can see the fruits of these centuries of accumulative subversive warfare. As the Church continues to be battered with a welter of Gnostic teachings, one can begin to understand that prophetic saying of the Holy Spirit that the time would come when those in the visible Church would 'heap to themselves teachers, having itching ears; and they shall turn away their ears from the truth, and shall be turned unto fables' (2 Tim.4:3-4, A.V.). The word 'heap' here is most appropriate. Never has the flood of false teachers and false prophets within the Church been so torrential. But let us understand well here. The sole purpose of Satan bringing teaching into this world which contradicts that of the Word is in order to destroy the Church, rather than the world. This is a profound truth. For he does not need to deceive the children of the world - they are already his. He owns them lock, stock and barrel! But those who have escaped from his authority into the waiting arms of Christ cause him no end of anguish.
The Christian depicts himself as one who is reaching up towards a God whom he can only know through the ministry of the one Mediator, the Lord Jesus Christ; whereas the Gnostic depicts himself as having already manifested his own divinity. Moreover, if Gnosticism was the true Christian doctrine as delivered to the Church by Jesus Christ and the Apostles, then it would never have gone underground with its doctrine for more than a thousand years, while perpetuating itself through secret teachings. That occult path is not the way of the true Christian, who is exhorted to proclaim the Gospel openly. The holders of Christian truth would never go 'underground' with the Gospel in order to keep it hidden for a thousand years or more. It is a mark of the true Christian that he faces persecution with a brave face and speaks the truth boldly without fear of what mere men can do to him. As Jesus said to His disciples: 'Whatever I tell you in the dark, speak in the light; and what you hear in the ear, preach on the housetops' (Mt.10:27). Let us remember those words of the Lord Jesus, describing His own life, saying, 'I spoke openly to the world. I always taught in synagogues and in the temple, where the Jews always meet, and in secret I have said nothing' (Jn.18:20). These words alone prove that there can be no 'secret wisdom tradition' or 'esoteric gnosis' in the perpetuation of Christian doctrine.
The Neo-Gnostics of today consist, in the main, of many millions of deceived, idealistic, spiritual vagrants, who want to escape the boundaries of their ordinary consciousness and build their science fiction playgrounds; always searching but never coming to a knowledge of the truth (cf. 2 Tim.3:7). But behind all this, these deluded wanderers are being shepherded, wittingly or unwittingly, by those who are steeped in occult wickedness, but whose minds have been blinded by Satan into believing the lie that they are sublime spiritual beings serving the 'higher purposes' of humanity. Gnosticism, the New Consciousness, the New Age Movement - call it what you will - is nothing more than the deification of man. The devil's perfect work.
The New Gnosticism is Satan's religion rendered respectable to Western atheistic society, and has grown into a deception of international proportions which surely has the potential to fulfill the conditions, foretold in many places in Scripture, of the time when man finally establishes the global basis for Satan's long-awaited earthly kingdom. But our story has only just begun. One could also go on to examine the many avenues and disciplines through which this 'Golden Age' is being effected in science, psychology, women's liberation, mysticism, the professing Church and world religion. All these are caught up in the all-embracing work of the beast whose power and authority are wholly derived from Satan (Rev.13:2), the doomed strategist of an evil age.
1 Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (University of Chicago, 1970).
2 John R. Hinnells (Ed.), The Penguin Dictionary of Religions (Penguin, 1984), p.208.
3 C.G. Jung, Memories, Dreams and Reflections (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1968), p.324.
4 From the chapter 'Seeing is Believing: The Four Worlds of a Shaman' by Serge King, in Gary Doore (Ed.), Shaman's Path: Healing, Personal Growth and Empowerment (Shambala Publications, 1988), pp.44-52.
5 Lemesurier, This New Age Business: The Story of the Ancient and Continuing Quest to Bring Down Heaven on Earth (Findhorn, 1990), pp.230-232.
6 George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (Penguin, 1984), pp.72-73.
7 Ibid., p.228.
8 Ibid., p.228.
9 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, Vol.X, p.946.
10 Chambers's Encyclopaedia, 1963, Vol.XII, p.695.
11 Quoted in an article entitled, 'New Agers Spell End for Science' in the Times Higher Education Supplement, May 8th 1992, p.6.
12 John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tippler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (OUP, 1988), p.464.
13 Ibid. p.470.
14 BBC World Service science programme Journey to the Centre of the Universe, 0515 hrs, September 28th, 1992.
15 J.F. Clouser and A. Shimony, quoted in John D. Barrow and Frank J. Tippler, The Anthropic Cosmological Principle, p.463.
16 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 15th edition, Vol.X, p.946.
17 August 1993 press release for Michael Jacobs, Living Illusions (SPCK, 1993).
18 Ibid.
19 Bhagavad Gita, XVII, iii.
20 Marion Green, Magic for the Aquarian Age (Aquarian Press, 1983), pp.8, 106.
21 Dr. Robert Runcie, Archbishop of Canterbury, from a transcript of his 'Sir Francis Younghusband Lecture' to the World Congress of Faiths, published as 'Christianity and World Religions' (World Congress of Faiths, n.d.), p.10.
22 Pope John Paul II, 'Redemptor Hominis', n.11.
23 John Wimber, Power Evangelism (Hodder & Stoughton, 1985), p.89. But read all of his Chapter 5 in this first edition to appreciate where Wimber is leading his readers. His 'Paradigm Shift' is directly parallel with that advocated by all mystics, gnostics and New Age syncretists. To back up his argument, he even includes a 'subjective reality' picture like the rabbit or duck illustration shown earlier. In the more recent edition of his book (1992), the material has been expanded somewhat but it still retains the original thrust (see pp.129-149).
24 John Wimber, Ibid., p.74.
25 Sunday Telegraph, 14th. April 1991.
26 J.C. Ryle, Expository Thoughts on the Gospels: John, Vol.II (James Clarke, 1985), pp.198, 199.
27 Harold O.J. Brown, Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy from the Apostles to the Present (Baker, 1984), p.51.
28 Lyall Watson, Lifetide (Hodder & Stoughton, 1979), p.158.
29 Peter Russell, The White Hole in Time: Our Future Evolution and the Meaning of Now (Aquarian Press, 1992), p.178.
30 Peter Lemesurier, This New Age Business: The Story of the Ancient and Continuing Quest to Bring Down Heaven on Earth (Findhorn Press, 1990), pp.213-214.
31 Ibid., p.232.
32 John Gill, An Exposition of the Old Testament (Mathews & Leigh, 1810), Vol. III, p.466.
33 Brother Ramon, A Hidden Fire: Exploring the Deeper Reaches of Prayer (Marshall Pickering, 1985), pp.71-72.
34 George Smeaton, The Doctrine of the Holy Spirit (Banner of Truth, 1974), pp.15-17. George Smeaton was Professor of New Testament Exegesis at Free Church of Scotland College in Edinburgh from 1857-1889. His two books on the Atonement (Banner of Truth) and that on the Holy Spirit cannot be recommended enough. They shed a good deal of highly original light on the Scriptures, yet never straying beyond them.
35 Formula of Concord, Solid Declaration, Article I, §11.
36 Scots Confession, Article III.
37 Belgic Confession, Article 14.
38 Heidelberg Catechism, Lord's Day 3, Question 8.
39 For example, the Jewish philosopher, Philo, who lived at the time of Christ's earthly ministry, argued against the idea that it was God's Spirit which was breathed into man, on the basis that such an interpretation deifies sinful man (Allegorical Interpretation, 1:13). But there are two oversights here. In the first place, Adam was not sinful when he was created, and did not become so until he was seduced by Satan. Secondly, Philo makes the typical pagan error of imagining that to have the indwelling Holy Spirit means that a person becomes deified, becomes a god. It is precisely this error which has been propagated in the Gnostic approach to those texts which speak of the relationship between the Spirit and mankind.
40 Wolfgang Smith, Teilhardism and the New Religion (TAN Publishing, 1988), p.128.
41 Lange's Commentary on the Scriptures, Vol.VIII, Part.2 (Zondervan, 1975), p.266.
42 This form of suggestion on the part of the therapist to the patient in secular groups is very similar to the suggestions given in the so-called 'word of knowledge' which occurs in many Charismatic 'Inner Healing' groups today.
43 For those who may wonder how a soul can be reunited with a body which has long since decayed or which was hopelessly deformed, or which has been obliterated in fire, explosion or other trauma, Augustine of Hippo writes: "Nor does the earthly material out of which men's mortal bodies are created ever perish; but though it may crumble into dust or ashes, or be dissolved into vapours and exhalations, though it may be transformed into the substance of other bodies, or dispersed into the elements, though it should become food for beasts or men, and be changed into their flesh, it returns in a moment of time to that human soul which animated it at the first, and which caused it to become man, and to live and grow", Enchiridion, Chapter 88, in The Writings of the Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers (Eerdmans, 1956), Vol.III, p.265. For further information on this subject, read the whole section from Chapter 84-91.
44 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Future of Man (Harper & Row, 1964), pp.123-124.
45 John Ferguson, An Illustrated Encyclopaedia of Mysticism and the Mystery Religions (Thames & Hudson, 1976), p.192.
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