With EckhartTolle’s book, things become clearer. This is not, like The Secret, a cheap, “self-help” marketing job to make money for Tolle and his patron, Oprah Winfrey (who obviously does not need it). This measured attempt to describe how the New Spirituality meets the very deep needs of the human soul and how this vision will bring the only hope to an imploding, self-destructive planet, is now proposed to the “global community” by Oprah—“the most exciting thing I’ve ever done and a fulfillment of my life’s purpose”—and will certainly ensure that A New Earth will make an enormous impact on our spirituality-hungry world.
Adding to its appeal are the many close parallels between this and the Bible’s view of things. At times Tolle can cite Jesus without the reader feeling that texts have been wrenched out of their context. Indeed Tolle cites the Bible twenty one times. Both he and the Baptist Oprah see themselves as better “Christians” now that they have finally “opened their minds to see that there is not just one way,” and understood the true dynamics of spirituality, as explained in the book—which of course, is the only way!

Tolle describes the human situation of dysfunction, anxiety and dissatisfaction. He recognizes the contemporary evidence of man’s inhumanity to man, and then plausibly identifies its cause as the “egoic” mind, a mind constantly focused on the self and the self’s projections of egotistical desires. Tolle rejects all false attempt to be good by “trying to be good”; he identifies inauthentic attempts to gain significance through physical possessions and manipulative relationships, and cites Jesus about the “poor in spirit”; he has no time for secular humanism and the consumer society; he promotes  positive value of suffering; he encourages a spirit of forgiveness, citing the words of Jesus on the cross. All in all, there is a genuine realism here that one rarely finds in recent glitzy human potential literature. The selfish, human condition is meant to lead us to salvation.

Inevitably, there are parallels with the descriptions the beneficiary results associated with Christian conversion— “new birth,” “joy and peace,” “peace that passes understanding,” the result of an experience of “grace.” All this gives rise to a biblical-type eschatology, of “a new heavens and a new earth.” Apparently you can keep your past Christianity, and blend it with the new spirituality, in the form of “Christ-consciousness,” for the good of the planet.

There is only one major and fundamental difference. The essential “conversion experience” consists of a radical inversion of the biblical material. This is not mentioned, of course, and is implicitly dismissed as part of ideological religion of the
“I’m right, you’re wrong” variety, from which Oprah liberated herself by “letting God out of the box of rules and doctrines,” freeing herself from the “man-made god” she had come to dislike. According to Tolle, with a loud “Amen” from Oprah, the only true solution (the one way?) to one’s desperate state is a deep, emotional Gnostic experience of the true self as a spirit being, independent of all outward, physical forms. That ultimate “you” is an integral part of the world of true Being. In other words, Tolle leads the reader to the classic human dilemma: “How can I find freedom in a world of imposing external structures?” His solution, like Hinduism, is to dismiss the structures of physical and mental reality, as well as conscience, as illusion, and, against the obvious, affirm one’s divinity. In an apparent act of deep humiliation, one begins to live in the moment, in touch with “the totality.”

After all the careful analysis of the human condition, Tolle’s description of the transformatory experience is the same as those described in all the classical pagan texts. One of Tolle’s spiritual influences was Krishnamurti, who rose to fame under the tutelage of noted Theosophical leaders Annie Besant and Charles Leadbeater. The ultimate experience in this long esoteric tradition is seeing the self as divine, as the “I Am.” As Harold Bloom of Yale once said, upon coming to this same realization: “I am uncreated, as old as God.” This experience is absolutely true. There is no other reality.

But what if there were, a reality New Earth purposely suppresses, consisting of reconciliation with the Creator? What Bloom, Tolle and Oprah deny, on pure faith, is the reality of a personal, truly existent, transcendent God, Creator of heaven and earth, who is different than us creatures, who holds the meaning of existence in His hands, and by his incarnation, redeems his creation from the effects of human sin. If that God truly exists, then liberation from forms, like the Gnostic liberation from matter, and the Hindu liberation from maya, is really the classic rejection of the Creator, as mentioned by Paul in Romans 1:25, and produces rejection of the only liberation that will save us—from our guilty state before God.

In this case, if God is the builder and founder of this world and the world to come, then pagan “humility,” held up as the key to life in the “new earth” community, is really the ultimate act of human hubris, and spells final disaster for such a man-made human utopia.
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Dr. Peter Jones
Director, Christian Witness to a Pagan Planet [Editors note: the original URL (link) referenced in this article is no longer valid, so the link has been removed.]

Adjunct Professor, Westminster Seminary in California