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.
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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.
