Satan was a rebel against God’s crown and glory and a fallen creature before God created man. Matthew Henry wrote that Satan “…knew he could not destroy man but by debauching him. The game therefore which Satan had to play was to draw our first parents to sin, and so to separate them and their God. The whole race of mankind had here, as it were, but one neck, and at that Satan struck.”[1] The strike would be through man’s freewill. One of the deceptions Satan crafted through the ages was spiritual humanism to which man’s freewill was particularly susceptible. As Satan had once diverted Eve’s gaze from God to self, so Satan continues to divert man from God and His plan of redemption to self by substituting spiritual humanism’s counterfeit solutions drawn from pantheistic religions, ancient traditions, pagan cultures, and modern-day psychology (see Chapter 16).

The New Age in Christian clothing

To make spiritual humanism culturally relevant in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Satan painted a modern face on it, dressed it new clothes to fit the modern spirit of the age, and called it the New Age. But spiritual humanism’s beliefs, objectives, deceptions, traits, and characteristics remain the same, and its ancestry traces directly back to Eastern and other pagan religions.

An examination of African traditional religions presents a summary of those traits and characteristics shared by substantially all pagan religions, elements of which have seeped into some modern evangelical churches.

• Very pragmatic and oriented to providing for the temporal needs and wishes of their followers.
• Not based on consistently applied and understandable doctrines, rules and regulations.
These religions depend largely on existence, experience and feelings.
• Polytheistic, impersonal mystical powers, hierarchy of spiritual beings and powers.
• Religion based on power.
• May incorporate elements of Christianity as part of their religions.
• God is manipulated (as opposed to being praised in Christianity).
• Words have innate power in themselves (curses, chants, incantations, etc.).
• Use magic to manipulate the spirits and world around them.[2]

In pantheistic Eastern religions, there is no personal and loving God (e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism). The impersonal, uncaring god of the pantheists does not love mankind or care about their sufferings so man is left to his own devices to find answers to life’s questions and find peace on this earth. For pantheists, these answers and peace can only be found by being reunited with the impersonal universal spiritual essence/force from which they believe man is an insoluble part.[3] Notice that most characteristics of pagan religions from the above list focus on the efforts of man: first, internally through mental exercises, and second, externally through power and manipulation. Since these religions seek and serve a non-loving God, it is only natural that the marks of their faith are centered on the self as opposed to Christianity’s focus on other-directed loving relationships with humans and a personal, loving God.

In the absence of help from a non-caring, impersonal God, New Age teachers and practitioners offer a plethora of solutions and assistance in becoming reunited with the impersonal universal spiritual essence/force to which man is an insoluble part. One of those solutions is purported to be found in New Thought.

The New Thought movement

The New Thought movement began in the late 1860s and is essentially pantheistic. It teaches that man is divine and has unlimited potential. The movement developed from the teachings of Phineas Quimby.[4] He believed that the thoughts of the human mind determined whether the body was healthy or sick.

Physical diseases are caused by wrong thinking or false beliefs. Disease is merely an “error” created “not by God, but by man.” Eliminate false beliefs, Quimby taught, and the chief culprit for disease is thereby removed, yielding a healthy body.[5]

The New Thought movement expanded Quimby’s teachings to include a belief that humans can use their thoughts to determine the conditions of their lives and thereby experience not only good health but success and a full life. This occurs because of the “law of attraction” which is the concept that one’s thoughts attract the things a person wants and expects. From this movement several “mind” science religions were founded including Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science.[6]

According to the law of attraction, a person’s life and circumstances are a physical expression or indicator of his thought life. In other words, whatever a person thinks he attracts. But the question arises as to how a person can control and direct his thought life. People have many thousands of thoughts every day that supposedly determine what they attract. One cannot corral, examine, and mold each of those thoughts to assure that he attracts only the good. According to the law of attraction a person’s feelings are a filter by which one can know what he is thinking and attracting to his life. Therefore, a person must get in touch with their feelings because good feelings create a good future, and bad feelings create a bad future. By practicing the law of attraction, a person can receive their desired future by simply seeing themselves in that future and believing it will happen. The law of attraction assures that it will come about.[7] The law of attraction is deeply rooted in humanism’s exaltation of self and accounts for the great emphasis placed on having a good self-esteem (feeling good about one’s self).

Peale and New Thought

By the end of the 1950s, Billy Graham and Norman Vincent Peale each headed one of the two distinct branches of evangelical Christianity. Graham remained true to the five fundamental doctrines held by the populist evangelical churches since the early 1700s which were expressed in a series of books published in 1910 titled The Fundamentals: A Testimony to the Truth (see Chapter 14). Unlike the fundamental and unchanging doctrines of Christianity preached by Graham, Peale’s practical Christian living was designed to be a “new Christian emphasis…attuned to the inner life…[and] was a better solution to the needs of modern Americans.”[8] As has been the case throughout the history of Christianity and the church, the contest for the soul of American evangelicalism once again centered on the age-old quest for truth and doctrinal purity.

But Peale’s claims of a “new Christian emphasis” were not new but based on spiritual humanism’s false and failed answers to the basic questions of life. Peale’s answers were uncomplicated and based individual initiative. If people’s troubles lay within themselves, then the answers were there too. They merely had to tap the divine energy stored within the unconscious. The essence of Peale’s work is based on “the belief that through the mind and subconscious, utilizing techniques of positive thinking and affirmative prayer, one can achieve spiritual harmony and personal power.”[9]

Peale began reading literature about New Thought and mental sciences about 1928, but these philosophies did not became the most important and recognizable part of his public message until the late 1940s.[10] With the publication of The Power of Positive Thinking in 1952, Peale fully incorporated New Thought concepts into his message and ministry.

The Power of Positive Thinking was Peale’s master work and described the essence of practical Christian living. In reality, Peale’s practical Christianity was a modernized and Christianized version of New Thought in which the human mind has extraordinary potential through mental and spiritual realities to shape material or physical events. In other words, physical realities experienced by man originate in the mental and metaphysical (beyond what is perceptible to the senses). Through prayer and positive thinking, one can see the spark of divinity in one’s self and bring it into alignment with God (the divine spirit of the universe) which makes possible healing and worldly wealth.[11]

The origins and teachings of New Thought are indisputably New Age. Although there has been some controversy regarding the sources Peale used in his New Thought writings, it is also indisputable that Peale introduced, championed, and popularized these New Age practices throughout the American evangelical church.

Florence Scovel Shinn (1871-1940) was a New Thought teacher and writer.[12] The first of four books she published was The Game of Life and How to Play It (1925) and the second was Your Word is Your Wand (1928). Her third book, The Secret Door to Success, was published in 1940, the year of her death. The Power of the Spoken Word was her fourth book published posthumously in 1945.[13] Shinn’s The Game of Life and How to Play It was reissued in 1986, and Peale wrote a glowing endorsement printed on the front and back covers of the book.

The Game of Life is filled with wisdom and creative insights. That its teachings will work I know to be fact, for I’ve long used them myself.

By studying and practicing the principles laid down in this book one may find prosperity, solve problems, have better health, achieve good personal relations-in a word, win the game of life.[14]

In 1995, nine years after his endorsement of the book, Peale was accused of plagiarizing some of Shinn’s work in his famous book The Power of Positive Thinking. An article in one publication spoke of startling similarities with the writings of Shinn, “an obscure teacher of Occult science.” Shinn drew upon material of earlier occult writers and religions dating as far back as the ancient Egyptian philosopher Hermes Trismegistus.[15] In most of these New Age writings of whatever era, there tends to be certain words, phrases, and terms that are commonly if not universally used. Peale certainly admits to having read Shinn’s work, and he may have done so as far back as 1928. But it is doubtful that Peale had consciously plagiarized Shinn’s work or would have needed to, given his extensive reading and research on the subject. If Peale had concerns about plagiarism, it is also unlikely that he would have endorsed the book only nine years earlier. Both Peale’s and Shinn’s books had been available for decades.

The New Age heresy that men must evolve mentally and spiritually by awakening the god who sleeps deep within each human is a false philosophy which the Bible explicitly condemns. “…Cursed is the man who trusts in man and makes flesh his arm, whose heart turns away from the Lord…The heart is deceitful above all things and desperately corrupt; who can understand it?” [Jeremiah 17:5, 9. RSV] In Acts we find that Jesus is the only source of our salvation, “And there is salvation in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given among men by which we must be saved.” [Acts 4:12. RSV]

Psychologized religion

Beginning about 1900, mainline liberal pastors and churches began to experiment with the use of psychotherapeutic theories and techniques in pastoral care and counseling. From the very beginning of his ministry at Marble Church, Peale devoted eight to ten hours each week to counseling individuals. Eventually, the burden became too great, and the church hired Dr. Stanley Blanton, a Freudian-trained psychiatrist, to assist Peale. In 1937, Marble Collegiate Church Clinic was established in the basement of the church. By 1940, Peale withdrew from day-to-day operations and work in the clinic because of an increase in speaking engagements. Blanton became director of the clinic and other church staff worked in the clinic along with part-time psychologists and psychiatrists.[16]

After Peale’s departure from active involvement, Marble Church sustained the clinic while its identity attained more of a “religio-psychiatric” orientation. The new professionals embraced psychological theories from the works of neo-Freudians (Jung, Alfred Adler, and Erich Fromm) and later post-Freudians (Harry Stack Sullivan, Abraham Maslow, Rollo May, and Carl Rogers). In 1951, the clinic became the American Foundation for Religion and Psychiatry, an independent and fully licensed clinic in its own right with a new location and organization.[17]

Christian Smith credits the acceptance of psychology within mainline, liberal Protestant churches during the 1920s as one of the six major contributors of the secular revolution that transformed American culture.

The secular revolution transformed the basic cultural understanding of the human self and its care, displacing the established spirituality and morality framed Protestant conception of the “care of souls” (over which the church and its agencies held jurisdiction), and establishing instead a naturalistic, psychologized model of human personhood (over which therapists and psychologists are the authorities.)[18]

In the 1920s, a psychological concept known as “self-realization” began to be taught in mainline Protestant churches and seminaries. Self-realization occurs when the entity of self achieves fulfillment and full potentiation. Because of the importance placed on self-realization, the supreme goal of the spiritual life is to be fulfilled and reach one’s full potential. George Albert Coe was a professor at Union Theological Seminary and pioneered the self-realization movement by introducing psychology into pastoral care and counseling, seminaries, and Sunday school classes. As a result pastoral care and counseling sought to help people adjust and adapt in service of the self by focusing on a person’s interests, preferences, and yearnings for self-realization.[19]

Proponents of traditional American Protestantism and the early psychologists were competing for cultural authority in the early twentieth century. Feeling incapable of defending the faith of their ancestors in the age of Darwinian scientific progress, the mainline Protestant establishment chose to accept psychology as a means of explaining God, man, and the religious experience.[20] Out of this abandonment of traditional Christian theology, the therapeutic gospel was born.
______

Norman Vincent Peale’s practical Christianity was unique in that it blended humanistic psychology with the occult beliefs and practices of the New Age. Both were intended to heal the soul of man—one through self-realization and the other through getting in touch with the god within. To these ministrations, Peale added a third ingredient to his practical Christianity—the introduction of church growth methodologies and practices focused on “…‘discipling’ rather than ‘perfecting’ members—that is, bringing them in in the anticipation that education would subsequently reveal to them the fuller implications of a richer, more self-conscious faith.”[21] All of the ingredients in Peale’s practical Christianity served the god of “self” and have been adopted by many American evangelical churches in the twenty-first century.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1961), P. 8.
[2] Gary E. Gilley with Jay Wegter, This little church had none, (Carlisle, Pennsylvania: EP Books, 2009), p. 71-72.
[3] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 148.
[4] Gilley and Wegter, p. 73.
[5] Ibid., quoting Ron Rhodes, The Challenge of the Cults and New Religions, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan, 2001), pp. 104-105.
[6] Ibid., pp. 73-74.
[7] Ibid., pp. 65-66.
[8] Carol V. R. George, God’s Salesman – Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 85.
[9] Ibid., pp. viii, 6.
[10] Ibid., p.134.
[11] Ross Douthat, Bad Religion – How We Became a Nation of Heretics, (New York: Free Press, 2012), P. 184.
[12] “Works of Florence Scovel Shinn,” Internet Sacred Text Archive. http://www.sacred-
texts.com/nth/shinn/index.htm (accessed October 13, 2015).
[13] Florence Scovel Shinn, The Complete Works – Florence Scovel Shinn, (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, Inc., 2010).
[14] Warren B. Smith, A Wonderful Deception, (Magalia, California: Mountain Stream Press, 2012), p. 41.
[15] Ibid., pp. 40-41.
[16] George, pp. 89-91.
[17] Ibid., pp. 91-92.
[18] Christian Smith, “Introduction: Rethinking the Secularization of American Public Life,” The Secular Revolution, ed. Christian Smith, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 3, 27.
[19] Keith G. Meador, “My Own Salvation,” The Secular Revolution, ed. Christian Smith, (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 295-296.
[20] Ibid., p. 272.
[21] George, pp. 56-57.

There were three major voices that stoked the fires that led to the reemergence of American evangelicalism in the late 1940s and 1950s. Two were of the preaching-revivalist tradition and principally concerned with the eternal destination of their listeners: Baptist evangelist Billy Graham and Catholic Bishop Fulton Sheen. The third was Norman Vincent Peale. Although he called himself an evangelist that adhered to evangelism’s implicit call for conversion, Peale’s educational and theological development eventually led him to embrace a “new Christian emphasis.” In later years he called it practical Christian living which was “…attuned to the inner life…[and] was presumed to be a better solution to the needs of modern Americans.”[1] Out of Peale’s theology centered on practical Christian living arose the therapeutic gospel that was adopted by many evangelical ministers and churches over the last half of the twentieth century and dominates American evangelicalism in the first decades of the twenty-first century.

Peale occupied a unique position on America’s religious landscape during the two decades following World War II. Peale was politically conservative and therefore perpetually at odds with the liberal establishment, both political and theological. Yet, by his own admission he was theologically liberal. Peale was not enamored by the liberal social gospel as well as their neglect of the practical work of the ministry. Even though personally a theological liberal, in 1924 he critiqued his seminary education and said the school had failed to adequately link the scripture with “the knowledge of the present…to enable me to go out and preach—to strengthen and amplify the message which I feel I have.” Although he claimed to champion the “old-fashioned gospel story,” he significantly altered its message with humanistic principles and practices, both secular and spiritual. When issues or conflicts arose within the church, his theological perspective was consistently revealed as he sided with the liberals rather than fundamentalists.[2]

Norman Vincent Peale was born in 1898 to a minister father and his wife in Bowersville, Ohio. Clifford Peale had been a successful physician and at one time was the health minister for Milwaukee. Having once felt the call to the ministry, he ignored it for a while, but his health broke and required an operation that left him near death. Peale survived and believed the Lord had spared him. Encouraged by his mother, Peale left the practice of medicine and became a Methodist minister. He served in a number of pastorates in small Ohio towns and moved to Cincinnati in 1902 when Norman was four. In 1913, the Peale his family moved from the Cincinnati suburb of Greenville to the small town of Bellefontaine, Ohio, where Norman graduated from High school in 1916. In the fall his parents took him to Ohio Wesleyan University, a Methodist college in the small town of Delaware.[3] Norman Peale received his B.A. degree in June 1920. Following fifteen months working as a reporter for the Detroit Journal, Peale enrolled at Boston University, and upon feeling an affirmation of his call to the ministry, he soon switched his enrollment to the university’s seminary.[4]

As a child Norman was very sensitive and painfully shy. To help their son overcome his extreme bashfulness, Norman was often asked to recite poems for family gatherings or groups of friends. But his extreme shyness caused Norman to frequently hide in the attic when he saw visitors arriving at the Peale home.[5]

Peale’s shyness continued to plague him in high school and followed him to Ohio Wesleyan. One professor approached Peale about his shyness and told him to ask Jesus to help him overcome his shyness and to also read the works of well-known psychologist William James. Another professor suggested that he read the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. One biographer wrote that Peale’s discovery of James and Emerson “…eventually became part of his mental equipment and then a lifetime fascination…[They] remained lasting intellectual companions because they counted for something in Peale’s own life,” and he often sought validation for his own ministry in their views.[6]

Emerson’s Transcendentalism and its spiritual humanism was a comfortable fit with Peale’s practical Christianity. Emerson outlined Transcendentalism in Nature, published in 1836 and was credited as being America’s first native-born philosophy. Historian Paul Johnson described Transcendentalism as “a Yankee form of neo-platonism, mystical, a bit irrational, very vague, and cloudy.”[7] The philosophical message of Transcendentalism links the source of all knowledge to the inner self of intuition and imagination.

People, men and women equally, have knowledge about themselves and the world around them that “transcends” or goes beyond what they can see, hear, taste, touch or feel. This knowledge comes through intuition and imagination, not through logic or the senses. People can trust themselves to be their own authority on what is right.[8]

Peale linked Emerson’s belief that knowledge about man and his world comes from the mystical intuition and imagination found within man to James’s secular humanism which promoted the practical and experiential science of psychology. James is known as the father of American Psychology and wrote its seminal text in 1890, The Principles of Psychology. Eventually, James, his colleagues, and his students at Harvard developed American psychology as a science which emphasized the self as opposed to the soul. It was a pragmatic and experiential science of the mind that could be channeled along therapeutic lines to benefit mankind. The Christian concept of habits is the particular ways of living that define man in relation God. However, through psychology James redefined habits “as a process of personal and social growth toward an ever-better, ill-defined, integrated personality.”[9]

Through the work of James and his fellow psychologists, psychology infiltrated and eventually overwhelmed mainline Protestantism. Keith Meador described this development as a baptism of Protestantism in psychological rationalism and practicality.

In the 1920s, mainline Protestant seminaries began teaching the concept of “self-realization,” which conceived of the self as an entity whose fulfillment and full potentiation were paramount within the spiritual life. As a result, helping people “adjust” and “adapt” in service of the self became the goal of pastoral counseling. Through continual adjustment and adaptation, people would grow in their perceptions and come closer to the ultimate goal of self-realization.[10]

Although Peale did not wholly embrace James’s or Emerson’s views, those views became important reference points for Peale’s practical Christianity and its therapeutic gospel message expressed through his ministry of preaching, teaching, lectures, speeches, magazines, and books.[11]

While at seminary, Peale’s shyness, fear of speaking before classmates, and feelings of inferiority continued to haunt him. Yet, away from seminary, Peal expressed great joy on weekends when preaching as a student to “a church full of dedicated people.” But when he returned to seminary on Sunday nights, he wrote that, “My conflicts returned, my inferiority reasserted itself and I froze up until the next Friday I went happily off to my church again.”[12]

While still at Boston University’s seminary, Peale became a student pastor at a church in Berkeley, Rhode Island in 1922. Upon graduation from seminary in the spring of 1924, Peale was called to St. Mark’s Church in Brooklyn which was later relocated and renamed King’s Highway Methodist Church. In April 1927 Peale was invited to University Avenue Methodist Church in Syracuse, New York. There he met and married Ruth Stafford who would be his wife for sixty years. In March 1932, Norman and Ruth made their final move to the Marble Collegiate Church, a Reformed Church in America congregation with a history dating back to 1628. Located on New York City’s prestigious Fifth Avenue, the imposing and elegant 1500-seat church surrounded by skyscrapers had declined to only 200 regular attendees but had a huge endowment. The move to Marble Church necessitated that Peale make a theological shift from Methodist Arminianism to the hard determinism of Calvin within the Reformed Church. In her biography of Peale, Carol George wrote that Peale never truly left his Methodist roots but created and perfected a unique ministry and syncretic message that cut across many denominational lines.[13]

With a handsome salary, lifetime tenure, three-month annual vacation, and duties that required only preaching three times each week and service as the senior administrator, Peale saw Marble Church as an opportunity to create a personalized ministry. This included two small books written by Peale in 1937 and 1938 (The Art of Living and You Can Win) which were products of his immersion in the literature and beliefs of metaphysical spirituality (religious science).[14]

Beginning in 1942, while still serving as senior pastor of Marble Church, the pace of Peale’s life increased dramatically as he was continually called to speak before various religious, political, business, and industry gatherings around the nation. Peale founded Guideposts magazine in 1944 which became the most influential transmitter of Peale’s message, an “organ for a great, positive Christian movement” which summarized his ideals of “Americanism, free enterprise, and practical Christianity.” In 1950, the Foundation of Christian Living became the center of the Norman and Ruth Peale’s religious empire.[15]

By the 1950s, the painfully shy little boy born in 1898 in the small Ohio town of Bowersville had become a nationally celebrated churchman, social commentator, self-help guru, author, and spokesman for a vast constituency of Americans. It was Peale’s 1952 book The Power of Positive Thinking that propelled him to the pinnacle of his already amazing career. The book was perfectly timed to capture the uplifting wave of Christianity in America during the late 1940s and 1950s. The book emphasized self-empowerment and peace of mind which was especially appealing to generations attempting to “catch up” with life following almost two decades of turmoil caused by the Great Depression and World War II.[16]

The Power of Positive Thinking resonated with a vast and diverse audience of businessmen, middle-aged women, and the unchurched. Carol George summarized one reviewer’s favorable opinion of the book, “It was friendly, unpretentious, and concerned about the misery cause by spiritual poverty. In its ebullient, upbeat tone, it belonged more to the success genre of New Thought literature than the inspirational variety…” The book provided a remedy for many people who believed they were sick and in need of care. Believing they could not be fully productive contributors to society, they willingly embraced Peale’s practical Christianity and its therapeutic message of positive thinking.[17] Peale’s book landed on the New York Times bestseller list in 1952, the year of its publication, and stayed there for 180 weeks.[18]

By 1957, Peale was reaching an estimated thirty million people through his preaching, syndicated newspaper column, weekly radio program, Guideposts magazine, three published sermons monthly, and his book sales.[19] Peale’s thirty million was the same number as the weekly television audience reached by Bishop Fulton Sheen’s at the show’s height during the late 1950s.[20]

While Sheen was reaching the millions through the medium of television, Peale and Billy Graham were using an array of media to reach their millions. Graham, the neo-fundamentalist, had little in common with Peale, the neo-modernist. The one thing they had in common was that both were preaching to a much wider audience than just their professed denominational adherents. Although having a wide and somewhat overlapping audience, their respective platforms were seemingly at opposite ends of the field. Graham was an unrepentant premillennialist, political conservative, and fundamentalist who believed in the authority of the scriptures, Christ’s virgin birth, the atoning death of Christ, His bodily resurrection, His second coming, and salvation by faith through grace. Peale’s theology was far closer to modernism. Peale was initially suspicious of the younger evangelist but had a change of attitude following their first meeting in Switzerland in 1955. Peale became a supporter of Graham’s Manhattan crusade planned for 1957 and served on the blue-ribbon committee with other clergy and prominent citizens that helped organize the crusade which lasted sixteen weeks (see Chapter 15). Peale was delighted with the results of the crusade as were most of the participating clergy.[21]

A fascinating incident happened during one of the nights of the crusade. At the end of the service, Peale joined hundreds of others as they moved toward the platform in response to Graham’s invitation to make another “commitment” to Christ. Peale later called his renewed commitment that night as a “second blessing” in which he “went deeper” into the faith.[22] This was reminiscent of a similar commitment made twenty-four years earlier when Peale and his wife were vacationing in England. Peale had completed two years at Marble Church and was exceptionally discouraged. While sitting in a lovely hotel garden in Keswick, Norman felt himself a failure and expressed to Ruth his doubts about continuing his ministry at Marble Church. He felt his message was not “getting through” to the congregation and despaired at his lack of results in the church’s growth. Ruth Peale waited a few moments before she spoke. When she began talking to her husband, she did not coddle or sympathize with him but spoke words of encouragement that he so often had spoken to thousands of others. Peale listened to his wife, was encouraged, and agreed that he should stay at Marble Church. He called his renewed commitment at Keswick a “rededication” and often fondly remembered that moment as one of the most profound and rewarding experiences of his life.[23]

Peale retired from Marble Church in 1984 after fifty-two years of service and fifty years after he almost quit while at that small hotel garden in Keswick.[24] He died on Christmas Eve in 1993 at the age of 95.

Norman Vincent Peale appears to have been a good and decent man. He cared deeply for his fellowman and accomplished much that was good. However, his theological perspectives and prescriptions were flawed because they were fundamentally opposed to the doctrines and teachings of the Bible. As will be seen in the next two chapters, Peale’s practical Christianity left a dual legacy to the evangelical church of New Age spiritual humanism and the therapeutic gospel of the Church Growth movement.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Carol V. R. George, God’s Salesman – Norman Vincent Peale and The Power of Positive Thinking, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 85.
[2] Ibid., viii, ix., 46, 49, 50-51.
[3] Arthur Gordon, One Man’s Way, (Pawling, New York: Foundation for Christian Living, 1958, 1972), pp. 4, 9-10, 19, 33, 39, 45.
[4] George, pp. 39, 40-41.
[5] Gordon, p. 21.
[6] George, pp. 33, 36-37.
[7] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 405.
[8] “Transcendentalism, an American Philosophy,” U.S. History. http://www.ushistory.org/us/26f.asp (accessed October 9, 2015).
[9] Keith G. Meador, “My Own Salvation,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, ed., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 271, 283, 294.
[10] Ibid., p. 295.
[11] George, p. 37.
[12] Ibid., p. 52.
[13] Ibid., pp. 54-56, 58, 66, 68-69, 76.
[14] Ibid., pp. 75, 86.
[15] Ibid., pp. 103-104.
[16] Ibid., pp. 128-129.
[17] Ibid., p. 137.
[18] Ross Douthat, Bad Religion – How We Became a Nation of Heretics, (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 52.
[19] George, p. 131.
[20] Douthat, p. 41.
[21] George, pp. 147-148.
[22] Ibid., p. 148.
[23] Gordon, pp. 172-176.
[24] George, p. 238.

Positive confession and prosperity gospel

Since the middle of the twentieth century a great many Eastern religions and New Age practices and beliefs have been absorbed into Western society. Almost simultaneously, preaching and teaching that emphasizes health, prosperity, and happiness are available to all Christians have infiltrated many evangelical churches. These churches are usually found under the banner of the Word of Faith movement and tend to be independent or have a loose affiliation with other churches with a similar message. The closeness to which individuals and churches adhere to the doctrines and practices of the positive confession movement (or prosperity gospel as some have called it) spans a broad spectrum ranging from those with marginal associations with the movement to those who fully embrace and center their lives on the Word of Faith message and its tenets. Therefore, one must use care and look beneath the Word of Faith label to determine the biblical soundness of their respective teachings and practices. Many preach a faith message that is doctrinally sound.

The acknowledged founder of the Word of Faith movement was Kenneth Hagin who had a spiritual vision during the 1950s that he described in How To Write Your Own Ticket With God. Hagin wrote that Christ had revealed certain things to him during vision, and this revelation became the foundation for the teachings and practices of positive confession.

…you can receive anything in the present tense, such as salvation, the baptism in the Holy Spirit, healing for your body, spiritual victory, or finances. Anything the Bible promises you now, you can receive now by taking these four steps…

Step 1: Say it…In my vision, Jesus said, “Positive or negative, it is up to the individual. According to what the individual says, that shall he receive.”…

Step 2: Do it…Jesus dictated to me during my vision. “Your action defeats you or puts you over. According to your action, you receive or you are kept from receiving.”…

Step 3: Receive it…It is like plugging into an electrical outlet. If we can learn to plug into this supernatural power, we can put it to work for us, and we can be healed…

Step 4: Tell it…Jesus said to me, “Tell it so others may believe.”…

…You said if anybody anywhere would take these four steps, they would receive from you anything they wanted.[1] [emphasis in original]

The principal teachings of positive confession are that there are both positive and negative aspects to confession. It is believed that the pleasant circumstances of life can be enjoyed through expressing positive statements that align with specific scriptures. The unpleasant is avoided by refraining from negative statements. Effectively, what a person says is the determinant of what he will receive and what he will become. Therefore, positive confession is a tool with which one can banish poverty, disease, sickness, and other afflictions of life.[2] The growth and success of churches in the positive confession movement have occurred because it is very appealing to most people in modern America’s prevailing culture and fits well with its humanistic emphasis on self-esteem, self-improvement, success, and materialism.

However, positive confession is doctrinal deviation and fails to align with a proper and complete biblical understanding of faith at several levels. Advocates of positive confession effectively treat God (and His Word) as a mechanical dispensing machine. They may soften the message, but it is essentially saying that one need only to select the right scripture verse, speak the right confession, act upon it, and receive you request.

Teach the entire gospel

Proper interpretation of the Bible requires that we consider each scripture in light of all other scriptures relating to a specific matter. Paul was very specific when he gave this instruction to the Corinthian church.

Now we have received, not the spirit of the world, but the spirit which is of God; that we might know the things that are freely given us of God. Which things also we speak, not in the words which man’s wisdom teacheth, but which the Holy Ghost teacheth; comparing spiritual things with spiritual. [1 Corinthians 2:12-13. KJV] [emphasis added]

In other words, the best support and understanding of a particular scripture occurs when comparing it with other applicable scriptures—comparing spiritual things with spiritual things. Matthew Henry described the alternative when he wrote, “…if the principles of human art and science are to be made a test of revelation, we shall certainly judge amiss concerning it.”[3] Advocates of positive confession are in great error when they teach that the words spoken by Christians can somehow serve as mechanical triggers to release positive or negative outcomes in their lives. Sound doctrine cannot be built on isolated portions of scripture taken out of context but must be built on the total teaching of God’s Word.

One must ask how the adherents to the teachings of positive confession would have fared during the first three hundred years of the persecuted Christian church scattered throughout the Roman Empire. How do believers in positive confession reconcile the disconnection between what they teach and the lives of the apostles? All the apostles were greatly persecuted and eventually executed except John who was exiled to Patmos. Paul was beaten, stoned, shipwrecked, and imprisoned numerous times and eventually beheaded. He died with the thorn still in his flesh which he had asked God to remove three times.

And lest I should be exalted above measure through the abundance of the revelations, there was given to me a thorn in the flesh, the messenger of Satan to buffet me, lest I should be exalted above measure. For this thing I besought the Lord thrice, that it might depart from me. And he said unto me, My grace is sufficient for thee: for my strength is made perfect in weakness. Most gladly will I rather glory in my infirmities, that the power of Christ may rest upon me. [2 Corinthians 12:7-9. KJV]

The truth of God’s word applies universally to all cultures and all ages. Nevertheless, positive confession appears to appeal to and find ready acceptance where people are already living in an affluent society. It is also apparent that positive confession’s teachings do not have the same acceptance in those parts of the world where faithful Bible-believing Christians continually face extreme poverty, persecution, and possible martyrdom.[4]

God’s will

God’s will must always be superior to a believer’s wants and desires. Yet, the positive confession doctrine states that the believer can have whatever he says. To decide which of these two irreconcilable positions is correct or must be amended, we look to the scriptures. We have already mentioned Paul’s thorn in the flesh. In that situation, God’s will was higher than Paul’s need for the removal of the thorn. Paul received two things because he accepted God’s will above his own—pride was crushed and the power of Christ rested upon him. Even as Jesus prayed in Gethsemane the night prior to his crucifixion that the cup might be removed, His desire deferred to the will of the Father when he said, “Nevertheless, not my will but thine, be done.” [Luke 22:42. KJV]

The desires of the believer’s heart are important to God, and He may bless accordingly. However, as we pray for our desires, we must also seek to know His will regarding those desires. James said, “Ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.” [James 4:15. KJV] But there are occasions when believers may not know what to pray for. In those situations the believer needs to continue to pray and recognize the Holy Spirit makes intercession for him according to the will of God. Here we must heed Paul’s words for he said that when we do not know what we should pray for “…the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sighs too deep for words. And he who searches the hearts of men knows what is the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God.” [Romans 8:26b-27. RSV]

Pride and self are difficult adversaries and firmly rooted in the free will of man. The seductive doctrine of positive confession, unchecked by seeking the will of God, adds considerable fuel to the quest for desires and pleasures burning in the heart of man.

Positive confession v. importunate prayer

In one sense, positive confession distances the believer from the Father. Over time it often becomes easy for practitioners of positive confession to slip into a mode of prayerlessness through repetitious quoting of scriptures and confessions as opposed to seeking God’s desire for their lives. Too often we see Christians (not just positive confession adherents) approach God the way many children approach their parents. “Hey, Dad. I need several things. Here’s my list, and make it quick, will you? I have plans and won’t be around for a while. We’ll talk later.”

Importunity has many synonyms including several that have undesirable connotations: demanding, persistence, supplication, entreaty, appeal, petition, plea, insistence. Yet, Jesus emphasized the importance of importunate prayer. Its importance is revealed in Christ’s parable of the persistent friend who came asking for bread at midnight. Christ summarized his teaching in a single verse, “And I tell you, Ask, and it shall be given you; seek, and ye shall find; knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” [Luke 11:9]. In Luke 18:1-8 we see the parable of widow who constantly sought justice from an unjust judge. Christ’s teaching in this parable was that the believer ought always pray and not lose heart.

The believer may not understand the “why” of unanswered prayers, and God’s reasons for not answering may never be known. Yet, Jesus encouraged importunate prayer. It is not a sign of a believer’s doubt or impatience with God. When we approach God with humility, love, and deference to His yet-to-be-revealed will, importunate prayer is a reflection of the believer’s obedience and faith.

Positive confession in a fallen world

Advocates of positive confession imply that its adherents will reign as kings in this life. Kings dominate, and the implication is that believers practicing positive confession are not be dominated by circumstances such as poverty and sickness. Although perhaps unconsciously, the kings of this world have become the role models for many in the positive confession movement. As a consequence, their desires naturally tend to focus on the things that worldly kings value and seek.[5]

The primary role model of the Christian should be no other than Christ. And the life of Christ incarnate was far from the trouble-free life of those Christians seeking dominion on this earth. “…The Son of man must suffer many things, and be rejected by the elders and chief priests and scribes, and be killed, and on the third day be raised.” [Luke 9:22. RSV] Christ makes clear that the way of His followers must be the way of the cross, and the way of the cross requires death to self.

But pain, suffering, and death to self appear to be foreign concepts to many in the modern church and especially to those caught up in the positive confession message. Although we live in a fallen world, many try to use the Bible as a “get out of pain and suffering free” card to be used as needed and which gives the believer an aura of self-sufficiency. But self-sufficiency is the deadly enemy of the surrender of self to God. As C. S. Lewis wrote in The Problem of Pain, “This full acting out of the self’s surrender to God therefore demands pain: this action, to be perfect, must be done from the pure will to obey, in the absence, or in the teeth, of inclination. How impossible it is to enact the surrender of the self by doing what we like…”[6]

Positive confession v. the sovereignty of God

A favorite verse of positive confession adherents is found in John’s gospel, “Whatsoever ye shall ask in my name, that will I do, that the Father may be glorified in the Son.” [John 14:13. KJV] Taken alone, it seems to imply that God has abdicated his sovereignty. But it has been noted above that Paul admonished Christians to compare spiritual things with spiritual things. Therefore, what John wrote in Chapter 14 must be tempered and understood by what he said in Chapter 5. “This is the confidence that we have in him, that, if we ask anything according to his will, he heareth us: and if we know that he hear us, whatsoever we ask, we know that we have the petitions that we desired of him.” [John 5:14, 15. KJV] [emphasis added] Therefore, a request must be within God’s sovereign will. God’s will limits the authority of the believer. However, the positive confession movement focuses on commanding or compelling God and little time or thought is devoted to discovering His will regarding a request.[7]

Positive confession – Enemy of contentment

Another favorite verse of positive confession adherents is found in Paul’s letter to the Philippians. “I can do all things through Christ which strengtheneth me.” [Philippians 4:13. KJV] But Paul was not talking about “doing or commanding circumstances to change” but “being.” Paul had learned to be content in whatever situation he found himself. Whether in abundant prosperity or extreme need, he had learned to be content through Christ’s strength. But, for many in the positive confession movement, contentment is not an option when life deals them a season of hardship, sickness, financial reverses, or other trials. Yes, these needs should be matters of prayer. We should ask and believe, but we do not demand or command. And if the answers don’t come, we must not berate ourselves for our supposed failure to believe, utter the right commands, or pull the right levers to operate our mechanical God. Like Paul, we must be content knowing Christ’s strength will lead us through the valley.
______

In the first chapter of this series it was stated that the diminution and/or abandonment of the Bible as the infallible and inerrant truth of God is occurring in varying degrees in many evangelical denominations, churches, fellowships, and organizations across America. In this chapter we have examined the Word of Faith movement that arose in evangelical churches during the 1950s.

Many of the Word of Faith ministers and members are highly valued and much loved brothers and sisters in Christ. As is the case in all evangelical churches, others in the movement are Christian in name only and have brought great harm and reproach to the church of Jesus Christ through the positive confession gospel’s false beliefs and doctrines.

No man has a perfect understanding of the mind of Christ and His Word. However, we are charged to study God’s Word to show ourselves approved. Upon sober reflection following a holistic study of the scriptures, many Christians who hold to the view that the Bible is the inspired, inerrant, and infallible Word of God have found the beliefs and teachings of the positive confession movement violate the biblical rules of interpretation.

Although many in evangelical churches may hold varying interpretations of numerous doctrinal issues, most differences have minimal eternal consequences. However, the beliefs and teachings of positive confession mirror anti-biblical elements of the New Age and Eastern religions. In many instances these beliefs and teachings have caused great harm and reproach to the Kingdom as some believers have lost out with God or have drawn away the great truths of God’s word.[8]

Whatever the failings and errors of the positive confession and prosperity gospel, we must reiterate that the Bible is a message of faith and contains many great truths which affirm that in our day God does heal our bodies, provides for our needs, that believers are given authority, and that a disciplined mind is important for victorious living. But all biblical truths must be examined, understood, and followed in light of the total teaching of scripture.[9]

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Kenneth E. Hagin, How To Write Your Own Ticket With God, Kindle Cloud Reader, (Tulsa, Oklahoma: Rhema Bible Church aka Kenneth Hagin Ministries, 1979).
[2] “The Believer and Positive Confession,” The General Council of the Assemblies of God, August 19, 1980, p. 2. http://ag.org/top/Beliefs/Position_Papers/pp_downloads/pp_4183_ confession.pdf (accessed October 6, 2015).
[3] Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Zondervan Publishing House, 1960), p. 1805.
[4] “The Believer and Positive Confession,” The General Council of the Assemblies of God, p. 8.
[5] Ibid., p. 6.
[6] C. S. Lewis, The Problem of Pain from The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, ( New York: Harper One, 2002), pp. 607-608.
[7] “The Believer and Positive Confession,” The General Council of the Assemblies of God, p. 7.
[8] Ibid., p. 9.
[9] Ibid.

The great contest between God and Satan is for the allegiance of men and women. At stake are their eternal relationships with God. Mankind is fallen and lives in a fallen world. In order to restore a right relationship with God and live eternally with Him, man must accept the atoning sacrifice made by God’s Son on the cross at Calvary. But Satan does not sit idly by and let that happen. The earth is Satan’s lair and reflects his spirit. The spirit of the world has plagued mankind since Satan tempted Eve in the Garden. It has been Satan’s tool of choice by which he attempts to prevent or destroy man’s relationship with God. In Chapter 1 it was said that the spirit of the world is Satan’s chameleon—always refining its outward allure to match the demands and desires of the present culture, but however it transforms itself to please man, it remains unchangeably corrupt within. Whatever the outward manifestations of the spirit of the world are in any age, at its core we find humanism—the ultimate deception by which Satan attempts to displace God in the heart of man and his affairs.

In the course of human history the spirit of the world has predominantly presented itself in two forms: spiritual humanism and secular humanism. Both promote an exaltation of self. For the last three hundred years in Western civilization, the humanistic spirit of the world has shown its secular face, and it was secular humanism that presented the greatest challenge to the American church (See Chapter 10). According to Enlightenment thinkers and philosophers of the late seventeenth and all of the eighteenth century, the ideal society was to be achieved through the never-ending progress of man and society. The tools of progress were science and reason which are used in an attempt to destroy faith in a supernatural God. But secular humanists failed to understand the true nature of man which Alexis de Tocqueville described over 180 years ago.

…the imperfect joys of this world will never satisfy his heart. Man alone of all created beings shows a natural disgust for existence and an immense longing to exist; he despises life and fears annihilation. These different feelings constantly drive his soul toward the contemplation of another world and religion it is which directs him there. Religion is thus one particular form of hope as natural to the human heart as hope itself. Men cannot detach themselves from religious beliefs except by some wrong-headed thinking and by a sort of moral violence inflicted upon their true nature; they are drawn back by an irresistible inclination. Unbelief is an accident; faith is the only permanent state of mankind.[1]

This natural inclination of man to religion and the hope that it offers presented a problem for the secular humanists. Therefore, Satan did what he always does when challenged by the truth. He resurrected a counterfeit called spiritual humanism to satisfy man’s irresistible yearning to know God.

In the twentieth century secular humanism’s promises died in the ashes of two world wars and the Great Depression. In the 1960s there was a growing alienation and restlessness, particularly among the young. Although man’s faith in progress and reason still dominates the leadership and institutions of Western civilization, many became disillusioned and sought elsewhere for answers to the basic questions of life. For those disheartened by the religious barrenness of secular humanism, Satan resurrected spiritual humanism, painted a modern face on this ages-old spirit of the world, and dressed it new clothes to fit the spirit of the age. Out of spiritual humanism was born the New Age movement.[2]

Just as secular humanism touches every institution and facet of modern life, spiritual humanism endeavors to conform every aspect of human experience and society to its counterfeit solutions which draw upon various pagan cultures, ancient traditions, Eastern religions, and modern-day psychology. To implement these solutions which claim to address the ills of modern man, New Agers promote the tenets of spiritual humanism in their “…desire to create a better society, a ‘new age’ in which humanity lives in harmony with itself, nature, and the cosmos.”[3]

The New Age movement is multifaceted and often appears contradictory, but there are common elements that connect the highly diverse array of New Age organizations and their agendas. The fundamental underlying goal is the complete revolution of society in the United States and ultimately the entire world to create a one-world federation and “planetary citizenship in the global village.”[4]

To properly describe spiritual humanism (and the New Age movement) as it attempts to entice men and infiltrate the evangelical church, we must look at the common elements of its philosophy and beliefs in comparison with the Christian worldview. To make this comparison we must examine how well the two worldviews identify and align with truth in answering the basic questions of life. These questions fall into three categories: Creation – Every worldview must begin with its ultimate origins. Where did the world come from? Who are we? How did we get to the present day? Fall – How does the worldview explain evil and suffering? What has gone wrong? Redemption – If life is to have meaning, purpose, and hope, it must address the consequences of the fall. How does each of these worldviews propose to reverse the fall, that is, to set the world right again? Without consistent answers to these questions, a worldview can offer no hope for redemption.[5]

Creation

Few men or women have more clearly or succinctly contrasted Christianity and humanistic philosophies of all varieties than C. S. Lewis, one of the greatest Christian writers and apologists of the twentieth century. He began by dividing humanity into two groups: one that believes in some kind of God (theists) and the other that does not (atheists and agnostics). The next division separates those that believe in God by the type of God they believe in. Lewis separates this group into two categories. The first group believes their god(s) (typically polytheistic) is beyond good and evil. This system of beliefs is called pantheism which is compatible in varying degrees with the beliefs of most Eastern religions. The second group believes their God (usually monotheistic) is “definitely ‘good’ or ‘righteous’, a God who takes sides, who loves love and hates hatred, who wants us to behave in one way and not another.”[6] Christianity resides in this second group.

In the Christian worldview, God existed before the universe was created, and then God created the universe and all that is within including the laws that govern that creation. God did not create man out of need. Rather, it was a will to love, an expression of the very character of God, to share the inner life of the Trinity (i.e., relationship). Man’s chief end is to glorify God (worship, reverence) through love and obedience (devotion, Godliness) while communing with God forever. Unlike all of the other elements of His creation, man was created with a free will. But creating man with a free will meant the possibility of rejection of God and His love. In other words free will carried with it the potential for rejection of God, but free will was necessary for the possibility of love.

Monism of the Eastern religions differs from creationism of Christianity. Monism’s view is that there is only one kind of ultimate substance and that reality is one unitary organic whole with no independent parts.[7] With monism as its foundation, Eastern religions teach the doctrine of pantheism in which humans progress through multiple reincarnations in their journey toward their divinity and ultimate oneness–a state in which one is oblivious to care, pain, or external reality.

In pantheistic Eastern religions, there is no personal and loving God (e.g., Hinduism, Buddhism) but a Divinity that is attributed to “…a nonpersonal, non-cognitive spiritual force field.” Ultimate pantheistic reality (truth) is a “unified mind or spiritual essence pervading all things.” The supreme goal of Eastern religions centers on a reprieve from the burden of self by losing the individual spirit as it unified with the pantheistic One. Again, the pantheistic God is not a personal Being (no consciousness or desires) but a nonpersonal spiritual essence of which everyone and everything is a part.[8] Pantheists believe God animates the universe and that the universe is almost God. If the universe did not exist, then God would not exist. Therefore, everything in the universe is a part of God.

In summary, pantheism teaches that God is everything and everyone. Therefore, everything and everyone is God. They attempt to use the Bible as support for their belief and point to David’s words in Psalms. “Whither shall I go from thy Spirit? or whither shall I flee from thy presence? If I ascend up unto heaven, thou art there: if I make my bed in hell, behold, thou art there.” [Psalm 193:7-8. KJV] But David is speaking of God’s omnipresence. God is everywhere but he is not everything or in everything. If pantheism were true, everything is God (including man) and worthy of worship. But things worshiped apart from God are idols, and the Bible clearly and frequently warns against idolatry.

Fall

In the Christian worldview, mankind’s free will allowed man to think and act in ways that are contrary to God’s will and plan for His creation. When man violated God’s laws (truths) through disobedience, it was called sin, and as a result decay and death entered and affected not only man but all of God’s creation. The problem of evil and suffering results from man’s rebellion and subsequent separation from God.

In pantheistic Eastern religions, sin and separation arise because “…we don’t know we are a part of god. We think we’re individuals with separate existences and identities. This is what gives birth to greed and selfishness, conflict and warfare.”[9] In other words, the individual is separated from the One, that nonpersonal spiritual essence, and sin and suffering result because the person has not merged himself into or been absorbed by this godly essence or substance. However, in the Christian worldview, sin and suffering arise because of man’s rebellion which causes a broken relationship and separation from God, not because he fails to see himself as a part of God.

Redemption

Man’s rejection was not a surprise to an omniscient God. He knew that man would sin before He created him. God still loves man but was separated from him by sin because God is just and holy. Justice requires man to atone for his sin, but he was incapable of righting the wrongs of his rebellion. Because God is a loving God, He created a way through His son, Jesus Christ, which allows man to bring order to the chaos caused by his separation. Therefore, Christ’s substitutionary death on the cross made possible man’s redemption and return to a right relationship with God. But man continues to have free will and must choose to accept or reject Christ’s work of salvation.

Since Eastern religion pantheists believe that man and all of creation are part of god, their solution to the problem of evil and suffering in the world is reunite the individual with the god within. The impersonal, uncaring god of the pantheists does not love mankind or care about their sufferings. Help must come from the Eastern religions and New Agers who offer seekers assistance in being reunited with the impersonal universal spiritual essence/force which they believe we are an insoluble part.[10]

One practitioner has described New Age spirituality as an internal experience through which one answers the inner call of his or her Spirit—the god within. The internal experience is achieved through a combination of humanistic psychology, mystical and esoteric traditions, and Eastern religions.

The inner calling is your Spirit. Your Spirit is the part of you that is connected to and is a part of God. Your Spirit is the part of you that calls for you to take action and claim your joy, your bliss, and your abundance. It is the real you and your Spirit demands to be heard. This is what your journey is about. It’s finding that inner calling, answering it, and releasing the authentic YOU into the world![11] [emphasis in original]

To answer the call of one’s spirit and be reunified with the god within, Eastern religions and New Age pantheists offer an amazing variety of tools, practices, and techniques to help people recover a sense that they are all gods: spells, chants, transcendental meditation, crystals, centering, tarot cards, diets, self-esteem, guided imagery, positive thinking, yoga, visualization, and many more. Unfortunately, the distance between these practices and some of the things that occur in some American evangelical churches are not that far apart as we shall see in the chapters to follow.[12]

New Age movement

Following years of studying Eastern mystic religions, Randall Baer became a professional New Age teacher, holistic health practitioner, and activist. Before age 30 he had written two widely acclaimed books published by a mainstream publisher, developed a large teaching and research facility, and was a headliner on the New Age lecture circuit. Following a horrifying New Age experience with devouring darkness and demons, Baer was able to recover from the encounter, extricate himself from the New Age movement, and become a Christian. In his Inside the New Age Nightmare, Baer defines and describes its seductions.[13]

Baer labels the New Age movement as a product of spiritual humanism whose cornerstone is the belief that “…man is divine in nature, and is therefore essentially “God” or an enlightened “God-man.” Secular humanism displaces God with “…scientific rationalism, self-generated truth, and self-generated destiny” whereas spiritual humanism “…assigns man to a throne that spans the heavens and the earth in a divine heritage of universal lordship, omnipotence, and self-created glory.” While secular humanism denies Deity and proposes that man can find true meaning in life through exalting his own intellectual, creative, and moral powers, spiritual humanism affirms Deity in which man is deemed a race of cosmic gods with god-like powers.[14] However, both branches of humanism rely on man, through his own abilities and nature, to ascend and occupy the throne of self that is built on a foundation of either reason and science or self-proclaimed divinity from where he proposes to rule over a self-created heaven on earth.

Secular and spiritual humanism are two faces of Satan’s spirit of the world which work hand-in-hand to subvert man’s relationship with God. During the years 1870-1930, the American church surrendered to secular humanists much of its power and authority to direct and influence culture. Beginning in the 1960s, the culture was eventually conquered by secular humanists and faith was substantially driven from the public square and confined within the churches and the muffled voices of its members. Subsequently, Satan has intensified his attack from within American evangelical churches. As evangelical churches have accommodated the world as a means of survival, a measure of spiritual humanism has infiltrated many of these American churches. Therefore, it is imperative that evangelical Christians identify and understand the beliefs and practices of spiritual humanism and the New Age movement if they are to effectively combat those forces.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, trans. Gerald E. Bevan, (New York: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 346-347.
[2] Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now Shall We Live? (Wheaton, Illinois: Tyndale House Publishers, Inc., 1999), p. 263.
[3] Randall N. Baer, Inside the New Age Nightmare, (Lafayette, Louisiana: Huntington House, Inc., 1989), pp. 87-89.
[4] Ibid., pp. 82-83.
[5] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 134
[6] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity, from The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, (New York: Harper One, 2002), pp. 39-40.
[7] “monism,” Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary, (Springfield, Massachusetts: G. & C. Merriam Company, 1963), p. 547.
[8] Pearcey, Total Truth, p. 147.
[9] Ibid., p. 148.
[10] Ibid.
[11] Mignon V. Supnet, Spirit 101, (Self-published, 2012, 2013), p. 18.
[12] Pearcey, Total Truth, p. 148.
[13] Baer, pp. v, 55, 63.
[14] Ibid., p. 84.

In the 1920s the fundamentalists abandoned the culture to the modernists and humanist secularizers, and they also lost control of the large mainline churches in the 1930s. The mainline modernist Protestant establishment had won the war with the fundamentalists to be the church’s voice, but they were in the twilight years of their power to set the tone for American culture. The liberal churches’ triumph coincided with the advent of the Great Depression, and they assisted in setting the political course for the nation in those troubled times. In 1908, the highly humanistic and socialistic tenets of the liberal churches’ defunct social gospel movement had been codified in the Social Creed of the Churches by the Federal Council of Churches in Christ in America.[1] Many of these recommendations were resurrected and implemented as part of President Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s. However, the America over which the triumphant humanists, secularizers, and liberal churches presided remained in turmoil through 1945 and beyond.

As end of World War II approached, there were momentary feelings of euphoria, goodwill, and hope for a more cooperative world order among the soon to be victorious allied nations. But when the gates of the death camps swung open at the end of the war to reveal the horrors of Nazi atrocities, those illusions quickly melted away as the realities of war exposed the heart of mankind and his capacity for evil. J. N. Robert’s summarized the post-war search for answers as to the “why” of Nazi Germany.

In many ways, Germany had been one of the most progressive countries in Europe; the embodiment of much that was best in its civilization. That Germany should fall prey to collective derangement on this scale suggested that something had been wrong at the root of that civilization itself. The crimes of the Nazis had been carried out not in a fit of barbaric intoxication with conquest, but in a systematic, scientific controlled, bureaucratic (though often inefficient) way, about which there was little that was irrational except the appalling end which it sought.[2] [emphasis added]

The post-war world remained puzzled at Germany’s “collective derangement” given its veneer of rationality and scientific and cultural progress. That “something” that had been wrong at the root of the civilization over which the Nazis presided was evil. But the evil found at the root of its civilization spread far beyond Germany’s borders. Much of the world also worshiped the same gods of rationalism, science, materialism, secularism, and progress. They had assumed the nature of man was basically good, but the realities of the war removed humanism’s mask of goodness to reveal the hideous face of evil. And the source of that collective evil resides in the heart of every person who ever lived.[3]

Following two world wars separated by the Great Depression, mankind was having second thoughts about managing its own affairs through reliance on the naïve claims of Enlightenment philosophies and their humanistic prescriptions. Therefore, following World War II, God was back “in style,” and America was seen as His most favored evangelist.

The end of World War II saw the reemergence of evangelical Protestantism as a substantial force in American life. Even Catholic writer Ross Douthat, a severe critic of much of Protestantism, called evangelical Protestantism a “…postwar revival of American Christianity, which ushered in a kind of Indian summer for orthodox belief.”[4] These were neo-evangelicals who still held to fundamentalist views of the Bible but sought to escape from their separatism and engage the culture with a “redemptive vision that would not only embrace individuals but also social structures and institutions.”[5] There were several key players that led the revival of American Christianity during this period, but first it is helpful in understanding the neo-evangelical era following World War II to briefly examine the demographics and social conditions that supported and encouraged this reemergence of evangelical Protestantism but also sowed the seeds that led to its decline beginning in the late 1960s.

Douthat’s Indian summer of evangelical Protestantism closely overlays the birth and growing-up years of the Boomer generation which most historians mark as beginning at the close of 1945 and lasting through the end of 1964. During those years, six areas of significant shared events and formative experiences shaped the Boomer generation and what they became in the late 1960s and beyond: child rearing techniques influenced by Benjamin Spock instilled a spirit of permissiveness; a progressive, humanistic educational model based on John Dewey’s teachings; the advent of television and its attendant acculturation of children; the exceptionally large and dominating Boomer cohort; unparalleled prosperity; and a burst of technological advances. Each of these influences and their outworking can be seen in the Boomer personality that emerged by the middle to late 1960s.[6]

The large size of the Boomer cohort did not cause the reemergence of evangelical Protestantism, but it certainly fueled its growth. It is estimated that between seventy-six and eighty million Boomers were born between the end of 1945 the end of 1964. The birth rate per year during that nineteen year span averaged 24.3 live births per 1000 in population. This compares to 19.9 for the sixteen-year period 1930 through 1945 and only 15.8 for the thirty-six year period from 1965 through 2000.[7]

Just as remarkable as the rapid population growth was the rapid growth of evangelical Protestantism in both numbers and stature in American culture. The number of Americans who were formally affiliated with a church or a denomination increased steadily: 43 percent in 1930, 49 percent in 1940, 55 percent in 1950, and 69 percent in 1960, perhaps the highest in all of American history.[8] Church construction increased from $26 million in 1945 to $409 million in 1950 and more than doubled again to $1 billion in 1960. When polled about who was doing the most good in the nation’s common life, 46 percent of Americans named the clergy whose favorable numbers far exceeded those of politicians, businessmen, and labor leaders.[9]

American evangelical Protestantism was vigorous and energized in tens of thousands of churches in thousands of cities and towns from the late 1940s to the early 1960s. This vitality was both denominationally and locally driven through revivals, Sunday schools, literature, conventions, and conferences. There were also voices rising on the national scene in the late 1940s and throughout the 1950s that would use the new medium of television and other mass media to further the cause of evangelism both nationally and locally. The two most prominent revivalists in the 1950s were a Catholic Bishop and a Baptist preacher.

The Catholic Bishop

Bishop Fulton J. Sheen (1895-1979) was an experienced radio broadcaster on the Catholic Hour during the 1930s and 1940s. In 1951, Sheen was an auxiliary bishop for New York when he was asked to fill a thirty-minute slot at 8 p.m. on Tuesday nights, typically considered a ratings graveyard. Within a few years Sheen became one of the first celebrities in the early days of television as his viewership eventually climbed to thirty million.[10] Sheen presented his message of apologetics mixed with moral advice to a vast audience comprised mostly of non-Catholics.

One of the failures of the today’s evangelical churches has been the abandonment of any hint of the clergy’s traditional authority as an accommodation to the egalitarian spirit of the age. When the lost in any culture seeks truth and answers to the daunting questions of life, they have little respect for or listen to a faith, Christian or otherwise, that by its appearance, actions, and preaching appears weak, insipid, and ineffectual. Bishop Sheen understood the need for an aura of clerical authority.

When the great apologist set out to bring the Catholic faith to a mass-market audience, he didn’t doff his collar and throw on blue jeans; instead, his prime-time performances drew much of their power from the way his costume and style hinted at an authority that transcended the spirit of the age.[11] [emphasis added]

This author was a young Protestant child of the 1950s who vividly remembers being spellbound by Bishop Sheen as he presented the powerful and timeless stories from the Bible and applied them in such a dramatic and sensible fashion to the problems of modern life, even those of an eight or nine year old boy. One writer described Sheen and the compelling nature of his program.

Sheen may have been the finest popular lecturer ever to appear on television…he was elegant, elevated, relaxed, often very funny…The show had a precise formula. Sheen, wearing his bishop’s cross, crimson cape, and skullcap, would stride into a parlor-like studio, pause, tell a humorous story, and then pose the problem for the evening…The problem analysis inevitably pointed in one direction—to humanity’s need for God, for Truth, for Divine Love.[12]

Although Sheen’s philosophy was very Catholic, he never mentioned the Catholic Church or its doctrine. He connected with his non-Catholic viewers because “…he somehow made a very particular form of Christian thought seem like the natural common ground for a pious but deeply pluralistic society.”[13]

The Baptist Preacher

In 1946, the dean of the Harvard Divinity School stated that the tradition of revivals had been entirely discredited by the hacks and hucksters of fundamentalism. However, just three years later a thirty-one year old Baptist preacher proved the dean and his liberal colleagues greatly mistaken. Billy Graham was born in 1918 and raised in rural North Carolina during the Depression. His father was a dairy farmer who had only three years of formal schooling. Once Presbyterians, they joined a dispensationalist church whose roots were unquestionably fundamentalist—both literalist in reading the scripture and apocalyptic regarding the end of the age. After attending several Bible colleges during the 1930s, Graham was ordained as a Southern Baptist minister in 1939. He received his degree and met his future wife at Illinois’s Wheaton College in the early 1940s. Graham had a talent for preaching and traveled the revival circuit to hone his skills.[14]

In 1949, Graham’s eight-week tent meeting revival in Los Angeles attracted 350,000 and marked the beginning of his meteoric rise in the nation’s consciousness that has lasted into the second decade of the twenty-first century.[15] In 1957, Graham had been the most celebrated evangelist for almost a decade when he and his organization staged the famous 1957 Manhattan crusade which featured a 4000 member choir, 3000 ushers, and thousands of counselors for those who had made a decision for Christ. For sixteen weeks Graham preached to twenty thousand per night at Madison Square Gardens. On one mid-summer day the crusade was taken to Yankee Stadium and broke all attendance records when 100,000 attended. The crusade ended on Labor Day weekend with an open-air meeting surrounded by skyscrapers at 42nd and Broadway’s Times Square which attracted a crowd comparable in size to the one at Yankee Stadium.[16]

Recall that in the preceding chapter it was noted that during the 1925 Scopes “Monkey” trial the New York Times had described the defenders of fundamentalist doctrines as freaks, queer fish, half-baked creatures, and having unregulated or ill-balanced minds.[17] Thirty-two years later, Graham was so popular and well-respected that the Times began printing the texts of Graham’s Manhattan crusade sermons. Other media took notice such as ABC who broadcasted hour-long segments of the revival.[18] Billy Graham had accomplished something remarkable in American Christianity. He had taken revivalism and its evangelical adherents from the wilderness and scorn to Main Street and respectability. Douthat described the magnitude of Graham’s accomplishment in the remarkable change of America’s attitude toward evangelicals.

…his style was something else—ecumenical, openhanded, confident, American. The revivalists of fundamentalism’s wilderness years were figures of fun for nonbelievers…and by the early 1940s revivalism itself seemed to be on the verge of dying out…But Graham almost singlehandedly revitalized the form, using it to carry an Evangelical message from the backwoods tent meetings to the nation’s biggest cities and arenas—and then overseas as well, to Europe and the Third World and even behind the Iron Curtain…Billy Graham had done the near-impossible; he had carried Evangelical Christianity from the margins to the mainstream, making Evangelical faith seem respectable as well as fervent, not only relevant but modern.[19]

The difference between Graham and the fundamentalists of an earlier generation was that he did not abandon but engaged the culture. What is all the more remarkable is that the source and substance of Graham’s message never changed to fit the mood of the times. Some may challenge this last statement by pointing to Graham’s big city crusades in which he cooperated not only with evangelicals but embraced mainline Protestants and Catholic leaders and referring those responding to the altar call to their churches where appropriate. But here Graham did not compromise his beliefs but seems to have followed the example of C. S. Lewis who also engaged the culture of the unchurched world through his World War II radio broadcasts later published as Mere Christianity.

The reader should be warned that I offer no help to anyone who is hesitating between two Christian ‘denominations’…I hope no reader will suppose that ‘mere’ Christianity is here put forward as an alternative to the creeds of the existing communions—as if a man could adopt it in preference to Congregationalism or Greek Orthodoxy or anything else. It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted (in writing Mere Christianity). But it is in the room, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in…

You must keep on praying for light; and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and paneling. In plain language, the question should never be: ‘Do I like that kind of service?’ but ‘Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?’[20]

Like Lewis, Graham was engaging the culture and bringing them into the hall. He was speaking to the spiritually lost in his big city crusades and television appearances, whether they were the unchurched or church members in name only. His mission was to win the hearts of his audience to Christ and deliver them to the door of a local church.

In their quest for relevance and dialogue, many modern evangelical churches have confused the hall as being the rooms. For them, the hall has become the final destination from which one never progresses theologically. Douthat pinpoints the source of this modern evangelical confusion, “In their attempts to woo the biggest possible audience, megachurch pastors have watered down Evangelical theology and ignored much of their own Reformation heritage.” [21] Sadly, a great number of America’s evangelical churches are living in the same hall as the megachurch experts who supposedly have figured out a better way to do church. However, their congregations long for the meat of the Word and the intimacy of fellowship with God to be found only in the warm and welcoming rooms of their particular faith.

Larry G. Johnson

Sources:

[1] B. K. Kuiper, The Church in History, (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 1951, 1964), p. 376.
[2] Ibid., p. 964.
[3] Larry G. Johnson, “This was done by ordinary people – Part I,” CultureWarrior.net, May 30, 2014. https://www.culturewarrior.net/2014/05/30/this-was-done-by-ordinary-people-part-i/ (accessed September 21, 2015).
[4] Ross Douthat, Bad Religion – How We Became a Nation of Heretics, (New York: Free Press, 2012), p. 21.
[5] Nancy Pearcey, Total Truth, (Wheaton, Illinois: Crossway, 2004, 2005), p. 18.
[6] Larry G. Johnson, Ye shall be as gods – Humanism and Christianity – The Battle for Supremacy in the American Cultural Vision, (Owasso, Oklahoma: Anvil House Publishers, 2011), p. 37.
[7] Ibid., p. 31.
[8] Paul Johnson, A History of the American People, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1997), p. 839.
[9] Douthat, p. 22.
[10] Ibid., pp. 22-23, 40-41.
[11] Ibid., p. 44.
[12] Ibid., p. 41.
[13] Ibid., quoting Charles R. Morris, American Catholic: The Saints and sinners Who Built America’s Most Powerful Church.
[14] Ibid., pp. 33, 35.
[15] Johnson, A History of the American People, p. 839
[16] Douthat, pp. 32.
[17] Richard W. Flory, “Promoting a Secular Standard,” The Secular Revolution, Christian Smith, ed., (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2003), pp. 405-406.
[18] Douthat, p. 32.
[19] Ibid., pp. 35, 37.
[21] C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity from The Complete C. S. Lewis Signature Classics, (New York: Harper One, 1952, 2002), pp. 5, 11.
[21] Douthat, pp. 287-287.