Paul's Passing Thoughts

I have been watching the “Wide Is The Gate” video series by Caryl Productions. The series addresses “Christianized New Age Spirituality.” The series has many excellent observations. The following are the major ones:

1. Eastern Mysticism that teaches creation is God, and that God is in every person, has been integrated into mainstream Christianity.
2. Over the years, the integration has been fine tuned to appear orthodox.
3. When one aspect of such a movement is exposed, they change the name.
4. The Bible predicted that Christianity would be saturated with such false doctrines in the latter days.

There are two major movements right now that are being used by the kingdom of darkness to promote its major agenda: to get Christians as far away as possible from learning and doing God’s word. The folks at Caryl Productions are spot on; the New Age Movement never went away, it is alive and well under a different name, and in a local church near you. The video series addresses one of the major movements: the  I am divinity crowd, and the practical application is various formulas for discovering one’s own inherit godhood.  A mass of Christian thought, in various forms, falls under this category: “I am my own god.”

The host of the video makes a good point that in contrast, true evangelicals believe God to be outside of man, as opposed to mankind being inherently one with deity. Of course, the host is speaking in regard to the need for salvation. Now comes the evil sibling claiming, “the centrality of the objective gospel outside of us.” The contenders in the video make the point (and rightly so) that Christianized mysticism focuses on subjective “truth,” and the goodness within instead of God’s objective truth, and His goodness outside of us. But again, like they state well in the video, the movement continually retools in order to slip in unawares.

Enter New Calvinism. Their the centrality of the objective gospel outside of us (group A) would seem to be the perfect storm against the centrality of the subjective gospel inside of us (group B). This bunch are not amateur deceivers by any means. They introduce themselves as the extreme antithesis, while the goal is exactly the same. In fact, the practical application of both are identical: contemplationism. A primary theme in the video is the spiritual contemplationism of Christianized New Age Spirituality. And New Calvinism is no different.

I will now explain how both movements attain the exact same goal, but with different means. New Calvinists point to the means as a way to distinguish themselves from the other camp and to appear as contenders for a true gospel. New Calvinists believe that ALL reality is interpreted through “Christ” and His works. It isn’t about what Jesus SAYS to us, per se, it’s about who he is as a “person.” In the words of Paul David Tripp: “He comes as a person, not as a cognitive concept that we insert into a new formula for life” (How People Change, p.27). Tripp then proceeds (in the same book) to explain a complex Gnostic concept for replacing the learn and do “formula” propagated by Christ in Matthew 7:24-27.

Hence, rather than to say, “Truth is subjective and is found inside of us and we make truth whatever it is to us,” New Calvinists say, “Truth is found completely outside of us and is interpreted through a deeper and deeper knowledge of Christ and His works.” That’s supposedly an objective truth, but what does it mean? How do we gain a deeper and deeper knowledge of Christ as a person? By learning His word and doing it? No, because that’s not learning more and more about Christ, that’s doing what Christ commands, and since all objective truth is outside of us, we are still totally depraved and are unable to obey Him anyway.

Furthermore, New Calvinists believe that any doctrine indicating an infusion of Grace into the believer at salvation is a false gospel, and was the very crux of the Reformation; true spiritual life must remain outside of the believer. They concur with the new birth, but the new birth, to the New Calvinist, means that we are still spiritually dead and totally depraved; we have life in us (Christ), but we are still spiritually dead.

So, how do Christians change? According to New Calvinists, they don’t, but rather manifest the active obedience of Christ—the active obedience of Christ while He lived on Earth is imputed to us in this life as we “manifest” that obedience via Christ who indwells us by the Holy Spirit. How does that happen? It happens as we gain deeper and deeper knowledge of Christ through the Scriptures. To the New Calvinist, the Bible is an “objective” book about Christ only, a tool for gaining deeper knowledge about Christ. If we use it for that purpose only, the Spirit is involved, but if we use the Bible for the purpose of learning God’s imperatives for the purpose of obedience, that is using the Bible in the exact same way that the Pharisees used the Torah. Supposedly. According to New Calvinists, one is of the Spirit, the other is the “dead letter of the law.”

The final equation is simple: gospel contemplationism. Group A,  and group B end up at the same place: seeking God through meditation and contemplationism. The only difference is the object of the meditation. And both are subjective. When New Calvinists have to see Jesus in every verse of the Bible, the results are bound to be subjective. Besides, New Calvinists believe we are still totally depraved, and anything that is inside of us is subjective; ie, we really can’t know anything—we are incapable of applying cognitive truth.  What’s the difference between that and the new age idea that real truth is unknowable? Nothing. The New Calvinist way to spiritual life is meditation on Christ, and then sit back and watch what Christ might do. Paul David Tripp calls this, “New and surprising fruit.” Whatever we see in the Bible is imputed to us in the same way that righteousness was imputed to us when we were saved, resulting in “manifestations of Christ.”

The following exercise may lend some understanding on this. Find a passage in the Bible that has absolutely nothing to do with the gospel. For instance, God telling Adam to name all of the animals He created. Then, ask ten different Christians to draw a gospel meaning from the verse (ie, what does the passage say about Christ, His works, and the gospel). You can be sure that you will get ten different observations. But New Calvinists would say that all ten interpretations must be correct because they concern the gospel, and gospel interpretation is always attended by the Spirit. The subjective is therefore true because it came from a narrow, supposedly objective prism (even though a gospel result is always to be assumed). However, New Calvinists do recognize a structural aspect to the Scriptures that instructs them on how to organize church polity, but this is seen as a practical necessity for organization, not sanctification.

There is simply no difference between the two. They both seek to draw Christians away from the application of cognitive truth by replacing it with contemplationism.

paul