A New Age Religion

Over the last 100 years people have looked all over the place for spiritual enlightenment, often adopting various forms of what has become known as New Age spirituality which was regarded as a more advanced form of religious understanding with greater insights than conventional approaches. It is true that, as the last post pointed out, the churches have fallen away from the purity of truth because they have become infected by secularism, but the fact remains that the real New Age religion is Christianity and we only fail to recognise this because we are so used to it. Read the Gospels, particularly that of St John, and you will see why this is so. Christ brought something entirely new to the world which was the chance of entrance to a new creation in which the material or outer was made fully transparent to the spiritual or inner. He made possible the union of Heaven and Earth, and this was expressed symbolically by the New Jerusalem, a city built by God though with the aid of man, all of whose real creativity goes into the construction. The fact that the original garden of Eden becomes the heavenly city of Jerusalem shows we are not just returning to the paradisiacal perfection of eternity but, through time, forging something entirely new.

The New Age religions of the 20th century were really just jumbles of ancient beliefs mashed up together and presented as new. But there was nothing new about any of it. They included bits of ancient paganism with a smattering of Eastern mysticism, a touch of occultism and a seasoning of psychically received messages from the inner planes, some worthwhile, most not, but none of this was new as such. It did point to the immanence of God which was a good corrective to the conventional Christian idea of God as largely transcendent, but it was also heavily influenced by what you might call the Babylonian Mystery religion which is one of the oldest false paths around, going right back to the Fall of Man and the attempt to become a god independently of God. New Age religion was not demonic as such but it had the potential to become so because it was focused more on gaining experience in the psychic and spiritual worlds than on sanctifying the soul. The demons can give mystical highs or the semblance of them but they cannot convey the sense of the holy, and it is holiness not spirituality that opens the door to the real New Age when Man will enter into full communion with God.