What is The New Age? An overview.

The New Age Movement has had a profound impact on our contemporary postmodern world. In the areas of psychology, science, medicine, philosophy, and religion, the New Age Movement promises a hopeful, humanistic future, but it logically collapses if one considers its implications for long enough.

The New Age Movement is an eclectic mix of spiritual and metaphysical beliefs drawn from various traditions, including Eastern religions (like Buddhism and Hinduism), Western esotericism, mysticism, astrology, and alternative medicine. There is an emphasis on personal spiritual growth, self-discovery, and holistic well-being, as well as pantheism, with a primary belief in monism —the idea that ‘all is one.’

Oprah, Tolle, and Williamson

New Age leaders, such as Oprah Winfrey and Eckhart Tolle, have abandoned traditional Christianity to adopt a New Age perspective on humanity, life, God, and reality. Oprah has influenced many people with her New Age thoughts on spirituality and religion, from her talk show and TV network OWN. She has been influenced by Marianne Williamson and Eckhart Tolle, tearing up in interviews as she describes her deep connection to ‘everything’ as God.

Oprah, Williamson, and Tolle’s underlying premise is that all material things (from planets to pebbles to flowers to animals) result from a universal, immaterial life force expressing itself in material form, and that humans are a part of that expression. Oprah and Tolle teach that we have evolved to the point where we have the potential to become aware of our ‘oneness’ with the universal life force. The purpose of all mankind is to become aware that their Being is an expression of the One Life Force (Cable, 2024).

Oprah said this in an interview,

“And you know, it’s been a journey to get to the place where I understand that what I believe is that Jesus came to show us Christ’s consciousness. Jesus came to show us the way of the heart, and what Jesus was saying was to show us the higher consciousness that we’re all talking about here. Jesus came to say, ‘Look, I’m going to live in the body, in the human body, and I’m going to show you how it’s done.’ These are some principles and laws that you can use to live by, knowing that way. And when I started to recognize that, that Jesus didn’t come in my belief, even as a Christian, I don’t believe that Jesus came to start Christianity.... Well, I am a Christian who believes that there are certainly many more paths to God other than Christianity (Oprah, 2008).”

This quote demonstrates the reality that New Age spirituality is in direct contradiction with Christianity. New Age spirituality is not complementary or can be considered another way to practice Christianity, because the New Age denies the singularity of salvation in Christ alone, as the Bible teaches.

Another reason the New Age message is fundamentally contradictory to the message of Christ is that the New Age teaches that our condition is ‘ignorance’ and the solution is ‘transformation through awareness of our divinity and oneness.’ Tolle stated this in his book,

“You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you and allowing the goodness to emerge. But it can only emerge if something fundamental changes in your state of consciousness (Tolle, 13).”

Again, according to Tolle, salvation is not based on mercy and grace through Jesus Christ’s historical physical atonement for us, but salvation is based on our inner ignorance turning into an awareness of our internal goodness.

The Bible teaches the opposite:

"The heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately sick; who can understand it?" (Jeremiah 17:9)

Thought leaders like Oprah and Tolle have been accepted into evangelical circles because of post-modern tolerance that undermines the commitment to truth.

Tolle and Oprah encourage their followers by saying, “How ‘spiritual’ you are has nothing to do with what you believe, but everything to do with your state of consciousness.”

The issue with this statement is that the object of belief is less important than the subjective reality of each person. New Age teaching diminishes objective reality as being of little significance and elevates subjective reality as the ‘ultimate’ truth, even though this is contradictory.

New Age Beliefs

One stark difference between the New Age Movement and Christianity is the belief in Monism. This is a pantheistic view (much like Hinduism) of creation being God and “all is one.”

“This view is radically at odds with a Christian worldview of reality,” Philosopher Douglas Groothuis says. He continues to say, “A Christian worldview affirms that God’s creation is not an undivided unity but rather a created diversity of objects, events, and persons (Groothuis, 19).”

This theology fails to fulfill the human need for a personal, all-powerful, and loving Creator outside of themselves. Further, since humans did not create themselves, or anything else for that matter, they cannot be God.

The New Agers’ pantheistic views become even more distorted and less coherent as the New Agers believe in total freedom or autonomy of other human beings. The belief in human autonomy is buttressed by their pantheistic teaching that everyone is innately divine. Since each person is part of the divine essence, one has the self-authority to do one's own.

Simply put, the prevailing attitude among the New Agers is that "since I am God, who can push me around (Chepkwon, 318)."

The New Age movement derives from Eastern religions and astrology, which teach that humanity’s primary problem is ignorance. The New Age Movement teaches that humanity is divine, and the problem is that we do not realize our “oneness” and our true divine nature.

Salvation in the New Age is “gaining a new perspective, in which we see the interconnectedness of all things, including ourselves, with the divine Oneness (Ibid, 167).” There is a common stream of thought throughout Eastern religions and the New Age Movement: there is an illusion that we must rise above and be released from to discover a higher understanding of existence.

The New Age Movement has attempted to bring spiritual fulfillment to those who are burdened by the logical implications of atheism, since atheism ultimately brings people to nihilistic meaninglessness. The rise in atheism has proven to be empty and unsatisfying, so people have unknowingly accepted a worldview that closely resembles atheism: pantheism ( aka, all is one new age monism).

The ‘Rise of One’ in New Age spirituality was described this way by cultural historian William Irwin Thompson,

“Better the enchanted world of spirits than the lifeless bulk of a meaningless universe (atheism).”

Groothuis noted that when spiritual thought was banished through secularism, it came back with ‘pantheistic insistence’ (Ibid., 43).

Pantheism, by definition, means that everything is a manifestation of God, and that God can be identified with all the forces of nature; that God is everything and everything is God. This principle has led the New Agers to believe that everyone is innately divine and, consequently, everyone is "God (Ibid, 318)."

The problem with pantheism is that it does not logically fit with the concept of cause/effect, nor does it align with the cosmological realities of our universe. Our universe has been proven through the laws of thermodynamics and astrophysics to (1) have a beginning and (2) be in the process of decay (or cooling off).

The universe is not eternal and, therefore, not God. Pantheism does not align with our current understanding of the cosmological properties of the universe. Instead, the universe came into being by an uncaused first cause, who is God. The Bible clearly explains that creation is separate from its Creator (Romans 1:25).

Pantheism always invites people into a place of intellectual dishonesty because no person has created anything in creation to be defined as God.

This concept of everyone being God removes what the True God has given us: individuality, autonomy, and choice. We are not created to be without an individual identity because God says he “knows the hairs on your head,” that “you are fearfully and wonderfully made,” and that we will “get a new name.”

This indicates that God has designed us to be individuals in relationship with Him. Understanding ourselves as the way God made us will be more spiritually fulfilling than understanding our identity in the New Age. If God is “all,” then ‘He' doesn't really exist, since god is ‘us’. If humans are ‘god’, then this means god is impersonal, unpredictable, and largely unknown. As a matter of fact, God does not even have distinct attributes or standards by which to know Him if ‘all is god.’

The Christian understanding of God is more fulfilling because God is all-powerful and sovereign, which gives us security in this chaotic world; He is known and personal, which allows us to have direction, comfort, and clarity of who He is; and He is Savior, which means we can know love in a way that is outside of this world and cannot be produced by human beings alone.

Salvation in Christianity stems from the Christian belief in the total depravity of mankind; humans, therefore, need to be saved from their sins and are unable to do this on their own.

We are distinctly different from God, who is separate from His creation.

He sent His Son to die for the sins of those who will believe in His name to be saved.