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Defining Characteristics of our Christian Faith

Words from Dr. Jim Poit, Executive Pastor, Crystal Cathedral Ministries

A quick visit to your local bookstore will prove to you that New Age Spirituality just might be the fastest growing and most prominent spiritual belief system in America today. Millions of well-educated, professional, articulate, sincere Americans (many of them well-intentioned Christians) have become patrons of what can be described as self-help or self-awareness spirituality.

We believe this form of spirituality is very different than the biblical, positive Christian message that we teach at the Crystal Cathedral. New Age Spirituality combines beliefs from many religious systems including Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Gnosticism, and it also borrows many concepts from Christianity. From Hinduism, New Age Spirituality teaches the concept of monism, that “all is one” and all reality is a unified whole. It also borrows from Hinduism the concept of pantheism, that “all is God” and all reality is divine. This leads to understanding in the New Age movement that God is an impersonal force or energy. Everything that exists is part of God, and God is present in everything. Therefore, we are all part of a larger collective consciousness that “makes up” what we call God.

The New Age god is created in our image; their god is whoever or whatever they want their god to be. New Agers will borrow Genesis 1:27 from the Judeo-Christian tradition and explain that to be created in God’s image means that we must be part of a greater consciousness, a “god consciousness.” In fact, all of reality together makes up this god consciousness. Therefore New Agers conclude that all of us are divine and that we are all “god”. God is no longer to be sought beyond the world, but deep within our own being.

This leads many New Agers to the idea that there is not just one Christ, whose name is Jesus, but many christs. The Jesus of history, who lived, died on a cross, and was resurrected, becomes one among many wise men. Jesus is distinct from an eternal, impersonal, universal christ which can be incarnated into all our beings or souls through enlightenment and the clearing of our conscious minds of the clutter that blocks our intuition, a concept adopted from Buddhism. In this way, every person can become “the christ” by obtaining a christ consciousness. Jesus is understood by New Agers to be a “way-shower” to a greater consciousness which can be awakened within each individual person because each person is divine.

In the New Age system of beliefs, God becomes, therefore, a spiritual force or divine energy to be harnessed and manipulated by each individual. Their god can be used to obtain greater enlightenment or insight into the mysteries of the universe, which will bring about a new era of self-discovery, spiritual awareness, personal enlightenment, and global unity. For New Agers, salvation is self-fulfillment, self-realization, and self-redemption; it is a process of becoming aware of one’s own divinity. Sin in the New Age system is defined as overcoming one’s misconceptions and awakening to a new understanding of one’s personal divinity.

Biblical Christianity on the other hand, which we support at the Crystal Cathedral, teaches that God exists apart from creation. God is what Karl Barth called “the Wholly Other.” Barth wrote,

God is the new, incomparable, unattainable, not only heavenly but more than heavenly interest, who has drawn the regard of the men of the Bible to himself. He desires their complete attention, their entire obedience. For he must be true to himself; he must be and remain holy. He cannot be grasped, brought under management, and put to use; he cannot serve. He must rule. He must himself grasp, seize, manage, use. He can satisfy no other needs than his own. He is not in another world over against this one; he submerges all of this in the other. He is not a thing among other things, but the Wholly Other, the infinite aggregate of all merely relative others. He is not the form of religious history but is the Lord of our life, the eternal Lord of the world.

Karl Barth, The Word of God and the Word of Man

The Bible teaches that God is personal - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit - and is active in this world but exists apart from creation, meaning the Creator cannot be confused with creation. Creation, including human beings, is not divine or eternal. We cannot save ourselves. We obtain salvation and can live eternally with God through faith in Jesus Christ alone. In Christianity, salvation is not an experience of self, a meditative and intuitive dwelling within oneself, but much more the forgiveness of sin, which ultimately is a lack of faith and trust in God. When Jesus suffered and died on the cross, he obtained for us the forgiveness of our sin and the right to be children of God, ultimately restoring our relationship with the Creator.

While at the Cathedral we believe in the infinite worth and immeasurable potential of every human being, this does not mean that we believe salvation can be obtained through our own goodness or self-worth. It does not mean that we subscribe to the New Age belief that salvation can be obtained outside a relationship with Jesus Christ. Instead, we believe that a person can only reach their fullest potential through faith in Jesus Christ. Salvation is the central act in the life of a Christian by which he or she is brought into a right relationship with God through the redemptive grace of Jesus Christ, forgiven of sins, adopted as a child of God, and given eternal life. It is a gift of God and is entirely wrapped up in the person of Jesus Christ.