Truth and Falsity About God, Part 2

[Note: You can read Part 1 of this series here.]

The first three books I published were apologetic critiques of the New Age movement and worldview.[1] Having become a Christian in 1976 after exploring Eastern religions, mysticism, and the occult (but not Satanism), as an aspiring apologist, I wanted to explain, expose, and refute the worldview that was capturing the attention of so many through films, books, seminars, and new religious movements. Although I have returned to this topic in other books and writings,[2] the New Age has not been my focus of study or ministry. However, after reading a recent book by Tara Isabella Burton called Strange Rites,[3] I realized that, although the term “New Age” is not used frequently, nothing has fundamentally changed in how Americans view or embrace different forms of paganism. The pantheism, polytheism, spiritism, nature worship, and occultism are all still there. What has changed is that paganism is now more self-consciously aligned with LGBTQ interests and, of course, all of this is usually mediated by the internet (which did not exist when I first wrote).

The subtitle of Burton’s book is enlightening: “new religions for a godless world.” The religions she investigates are all predicated on the nonexistence of the Christian God. In that sense, they are godless, even if they affirm belief in some spiritual being or beings (including, especially, the self). The defining feature of this riotous welter of religions is that they are self-styled or designer religions, with gods no bigger than one’s errant imagination. She writes that “the most common phrase I heard among the people I interviewed was, ‘I make my own religion.’”[4] Burton wrote another book on this theme, called Self-Made, which also captures the approach to this new paganism. She writes that “faith in the creative and even magical powers of the self-fashioning self” are linked to a decline in belief in the Christian worldview, with its assignment of roles and its declaration of objective principles.[5] In an article on “soft occultism,” Patricia Patnode notes that for many young people unaffiliated with a specific religion,

we become the main characters. We feel that we can uncover hidden knowledge of ourselves. We can better understand our true nature, if we only surrender our souls to personality quizzes and horoscope apps. These tools offer us assistance in navigating daily life, replacing or largely supplementing surrender and devotion to a particular God.[6]

Or, we should say that the self becomes the counterfeit god, and the creature attempts to take the place of the Creator—the definition and quintessence of futility.

All of these pagan religious beliefs and practices are addressed by the Bible’s denunciation of idols. An idol is an artificial god, a manmade imitation of a deity. The Old Testament repeatedly condemns them, most explicitly in the Second Commandment (Exodus 20:4-6). A spiritual idol may be a physical artifact or an image or a mere idea. (One can also make an idol out of ideals or ambitions.) Whatever it is, it is not God.

Biblical scholar Jonathan Cahn captures the dynamic of idolatry in his insightful book Return of the Gods.

When God is removed, the need to worship Him remains, even in the modern world. And if that need is diverted from Him, it will go elsewhere. If a nation or civilization turns away from Deity, then all things become subject to deification. Or in other words, if nothing is God, then anything and everything is God. So it was not only that Israel turned to Baal; it also turned to the Baalim, or the many Baals. Most Americans would never admit to turning to such things or creating idols. Nor would they utter the names of the gods. Nevertheless, as did Israel in its fall, America now turned to worship its own American gods and fashioned its own American idol.[7]

Further, the very idea of objective truth that has authority over us is dismissed.

Where there is more than one God, or many gods and Baals, the door is open for many truths, conflicting truths, and thus no truth. When one makes an idol, one is fabricating one’s own god, and thus one’s own ultimate reality, and one’s own truth. But when one creates truth, truth becomes a fabrication and ceases to be truth. And when one creates or holds to one’s own truth, truth again ceases to be. Two plus two cannot equal four for one person and five for another. So one of the signs of Baal’s subversion of a culture is that the culture will turn away from objectivity to subjectivity.[8]

However, an increasing number of Americans are explicitly embracing false gods and their idols are on display, whether they be the gods of Norse mythology or Wicca or even Satan himself in various forms of Satanism.[9]

The Apostle Paul indicted idols in his address to the Athenian philosophers. After speaking of God as the everywhere present and self-existent Creator of the universe and of all people, Paul goes after the idols of Athens, which sparked his ire earlier (Acts 17:16).

Therefore since we are God’s offspring, we should not think that the divine being is like gold or silver or stone—an image made by human design and skill (Acts 17:29).

If we are the creatures of a personal God, then it is illogical to make impersonal images as objects of worship, since they are less than we are and are, thus, unworthy of worship.[10] Of course, many argue that these images represent something far beyond them, something spiritual and transcendent. But only God, the Creator, Judge, and Redeemer is worthy of worship. All other claimants are imposters and must be rejected. The worship of idols is not just a theological mistake; it insures religious ruin. As Jonah said, “Those who cling to worthless idols turn away from God’s love for them” (Jonah 2:8).

These contemporary false and godless notions of God all deny the Creator/creation distinction and in one way or another place humans on the same level as the divine (see Romans 1:18-32).

To do so, they must commit two sins.[11] First, they must lower God to their level; this is a spurious demotion. He is no longer the transcendent, personal, holy, and infinite being, but rather a force, principle, substance, field, or vibration. Or God is demoted to being one of many gods, who are personal, but finite. For pantheism, rather than being “I am who I am” (Exodus 3:14), God is reduced to a voiceless and faceless “It is what it is,” which affirms nothing. On this view, God is infinite, but not personal. Second, human beings must be raised to a higher state than what they are; this is a spurious promotion. Human finitude as creatures and sin as sinners is rejected in favor of affirming a vague spiritual identity that is one with the universal force, principle, substance, field, or vibration.

This can take either a polytheistic or pantheistic form. The polytheist believes in many finite gods, selecting the god of their choice for worship and favors. But these gods are not fundamentally different from humans and, on some modern pagan accounts, humans may join the ranks of the pantheon.[12] The pantheist asserts that everything is divine. All is God and there is nothing outside God. But this God is not a personal being who knows and acts in the world. The pantheist believes that he or she is one with God. There is no real distinction between humanity and deity, although many supposedly suffer from divine amnesia, forgetting their deified status.

Since God is a transcendent and personal being, Christians must deny any form of polytheism or pantheism. God is immanent as well, but that means he is “with us,” not that he is us. After giving a lecture in a secular classroom, I was told that if God is everywhere, then God must be everything. I replied, “I am standing with you here now, but I am not you and you are not me.” He got the point. Isaiah tells us the truth:

For this is what the high and exalted One says—
he who lives forever, whose name is holy:
“I live in a high and holy place,
but also with the one who is contrite and lowly in spirit,
to revive the spirit of the lowly
and to revive the heart of the contrite (Isaiah 57:15).

Sadly, Christians sometimes compromise a biblical view of God by saying that there is a divine spark in humanity. This is a teaching from Stoicism, not the Bible. A spark is one with the flame, and we are not one with God in our essence. We can become “one with God” relationally but only through the finished work of Jesus Christ to reconcile us to God. But union with Christ is not identity as God, which would be blasphemy (Ezekiel 28:1-10).

Notes

[1] Douglas Groothuis, Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986), Confronting the New Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1988), Revealing the New Age Jesus (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1990).

[2] Douglas Groothuis, Deceived by the Light (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1995) and Jesus in an Age of Controversy (Eugene, OR: Harvest House, 1996).

[3] Tara Isabella Burton, Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World (New York: PublicAffairs, 2022).

[4] Burton, Strange Rites, 33.

[5] Tara Isabella Burton, Self-Made: Creating our Identities from Da Vinci to the Kardashians (New York: PublicAffairs, 2023).

[6] Patricia Patnode, “Soft Occultism,” The American Thinker, December 1, 2023, https://americanmind.org/salvo/soft-occultism.

[7] Jonathan Cahn, The Return of the Gods (Lake Mary, FL: FrontLine, 2022), 47, Kindle edition. Cahn’s insights in this book are on target, although I don’t agree with all of his views on prophecy.

[8] Cahn, The Return of the Gods, 48. For more on truth and its denial, see Douglas Groothuis, Truth Decay: Defending Christianity from the Challenge of Postmodernism (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2000) and Stewart Kelly, Truth Considered and Applied (Nashville: B&H Academic, 2011).

[9] Burton, Strange Rites, 121, 131, 134-137.

[10] Adam Clarke, Commentary on the Holy Bible: One-Volume Edition, abridged by Ralph Earle (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Books, 1967), 1006.

[11] I first learned this concept of demoting God and promoting man from the notable counter-cult apologist Walter Martin, but I cannot find a source.

[12] See Douglas Groothuis, “New Age Spirituality,” Unmasking the New Age (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1986). For an academic overview of paganism in the West, see Robin Douglas, “The Old Gods Return,” Antigone, https://antigonejournal.com/2024/10/pagan-revivals.

— Douglas Groothuis is University Research Professor of Apologetics and Christian Worldview at Cornerstone University and is the author of twenty books, including, most recently, Beyond the Wager: The Christian Brilliance of Blaise Pascal (InterVarsity-Academic, 2024) and Christian Apologetics, 2nd ed. (InterVarsity-Academic, 2022).