Journal: Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society
Volume: JETS 36:4 (Dec 1993)
Article: The Church And The New Spirituality
Author: Gordon R. Lewis

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JETS 36:4 (December 1993) p. 433

The Church And The New Spirituality

Gordon R. Lewis*

During America’s bicentennial celebration in 1976 Tom Wolfe wrote that we are now seeing “the upward roll (and not the crest, by any means) of the third great religious awakening in American history, one that historians will very likely term the Third Great Awakening.”1 The editors of The New Age Journal call it the “consciousness movement,” the “New Age,” the “Aquarian conspiracy.” While working on this address I have come to think of it as the “new spirituality.” In 1984 leaders of the new spirituality produced “a guide to the nearly limitless possibilities of the life of the spirit today” for “all those who want to live everyday life as part of the spiritual path, to get (and to give) the most from each moment of life.”2

I. The New Spirituality

According to researcher J. Gordon Melton, the new spirituality is “built much more around vision and experience than doctrines and a belief system.”3 Huston Smith explains: “Unconvinced by theology, which along with theory of every sort is dismissed as a ‘head trip,’ the young especially are looking to experience direct, unmediated God-awareness through altered states of consciousness.”4

1. Roots. Carl A. Raschke traces the new spiritual consciousness to gnosticism: “The Gnostic flight by mind-magic into eternity is spurred by an unsettling realization of the loss of worldly place.”5 Related roots can be noted in spiritism, mystery religions, neo-Platonism, medieval mysticism, theosophy and—most recently—the anti-establishment trends of the 1960s.

* An earlier draft of this presidential address was delivered on November 20, 1992, at the forty-fifth annual meeting of ETS in San Francisco by President-Elect Gerry Breshears because President Gordon Lewis, professor of systematic theology at Denver Seminary, P.O. Box 10,000, Denver, CO 80210, was medically unable to attend the meeting.

JETS 36:4 (December 1993) p. 434

In response to a questionnaire asking leaders of the new-age spirituality to name individuals whose ideas had influenced them, Marilyn Ferguson reports those most often named in the order of frequency:

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, C. G. Jung, Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers, Aldous Huxley, Roberto Assagioli, and J. Krishnamurti. Others frequently mentioned: Paul Tillich, Herman Hesse, Alfred North Whitehead, Martin Buber, … Alan Watts,...

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