Struggle, growth, and freedom versus faith, repentance, and service
The new mood in the culture was strikingly anticipated in the nineteenth century by Ralph Waldo Emerson, one of the mentors of the new spirituality: “Man is weak to the extent that he looks outside himself for help. It is only as he throws himself unhesitatingly upon the God within himself that he learns his own power and works miracles.”8 The motto of the New Age is struggle, growth, and freedom as opposed to the biblical motto—faith, repentance, and service.

The loss of transcendence is especially disconcerting when we consider the theological options today. There seems to be a confluence of various theological movements (liberationist, feminist, neo-mystical, process) toward a religion of radical immanence in which human experience and imagination preempt biblical revelation as the measuring rod for truth.

Attempts to downgrade the Old Testament
That real heresy is now a problem in the Church is attested by the frequent attempts to downgrade the Old Testament. Johann Semler (d. 1791), one of the first German theologians to apply the historical-critical method to the study of Scripture, described the Old Testament as “a collection of crude Jewish prejudices diametrically opposed to Christianity.”9 Complaining that the Old Testament promotes a legalistic type of thought, Schleiermacher recommended that it be ranked as a mere appendage to the New Testament.10 Radical feminists see the Old Testament as incurably patriarchal and the Sky Father, the supposed god of the Old Testament, as an obstacle to women’s liberation.11 Existentialist and process theologians view large parts of the Bible as mythological and have assigned themselves the task of translating what they consider basically poetry into a modern ontology. There is some sentiment in liberationist circles to deemphasize the Jewish matrix of Scripture out of a commitment to the rights of Palestinians.

New Age symbols supplanting worship practices
What is ominous is that the new theologies, which are for the most part aligned with ideological movements, are seeking to revamp the worship practices of the Church. Prayer books and hymnals are being altered, Father-language for God is being drastically curtailed, and new symbols for God are being offered: the infinite depth and ground of all being, the creative process, the Womb of Being, the Primal Matrix, the pool of unlimited power, the new Being, the power of being, the Eternal Now, and so forth. Try praying to one of these!

In November 1989 the Anglican Church in New Zealand introduced a prayer book that not only eliminated allegedly sexist language but also dropped most references to Zion and Israel. It was explained that a prayer manual was needed to offer texts more relevant to the Maoris and South Pacific Islanders. Wendy Ross, president of the New Zealand Jewish Council uttered this protest: “The only precedent for this was the German church during the Nazi era that wanted to de-judaize the Scriptures. . . . We regard the removal of the words Zion and Israel in most cases as profoundly anti-Jewish.”12

This calls to mind close parallels between the religious situation today and the situation of the church in Germany in the later 1920s and 1930s. The so-called German Christians were especially intent on combatting the idea that revelation was limited to biblical times: it continues, they said, throughout human history—in every culture and race. The religious intuitions of the German people were deemed equal (if not superior) in authority to the insights of the Bible. Scripture was reinterpreted through the lens of the Volkgeist (the spirit of the Germanic people). A concerted attempt was made to purge the Bible of Judaic expressions like Zion and hallelujah. Interestingly, in some radical circles God was conceived of androgynously and referred to as Father-Mother. And it should be noted that the German Christians enlisted in their support some of the leading theologians and biblical scholars of that day.

[This article was originally published in Touchstone: A Journal of Mere Christianity, Summer 1991. Touchstone is a monthly ecumenical journal which endeavors to promote doctrinal, moral, and devotional orthodoxy among Roman Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox. Copyright © 2004 the Fellowship of St. James. Used with permission.].
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