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The Temptation of Christ by Ary Scheffer – 1854.
It was unexpected, inasmuch as I had not intended to immediately continue discussing the New Age Movement in this ongoing video series. And yet after thinking about it, praying about it, too, I felt I had been a bit too “soft” on the New Age in the first video, not confronting sufficiently how corrosive and destructive this phenomenon can really be.
So this new video expands on the first, going further into the Movement’s strange, abstract, gnostic qualities, whilst still trying to remember that New Agers are so often idealistic, sensitive folk who are not without noble intentions.
Of course, as I said last time:
I say this as a Christian convert, who was once heavily involved in the New Age subculture for close to twenty years. Indeed, I was a New Age activist for at least half that time. And for close to three years, I also lived at the Findhorn community in the far north of Scotland and Findhorn is probably the most well-known New Age community in the world ….
All this, then, equips me to [speak of] many of the key New Age themes and ideas and also of the extraordinary rise of New Age thinking over the last forty years, since I first encountered it as a teenager, back in 1979. I hope the latter fact also gives me a certain long-range perspective, as I knew the movement in its relatively early days when it was hardly the well-known juggernaut it has become in the last forty years or so.
Now, although the video naturally comes from a traditional Catholic perspective, I pray this intimate, first-hand experience as a “New Age insider” for nearly twenty years may also be illumining to Christians of all persuasions including Evangelicals, other Protestants and simply Conservatives who are rightly concerned that New Age-ism is a progressive and liberal movement rapidly eroding Western Christian tradition.
In terms of this present video, it might be quickly added that as a New Ager, I myself identified with the Gnostics, as indeed many New Agers tend to. All this is a topic I also explore further in my recent book, Cor Jesu Sacratissimum: From Secularism and the New Age to Christendom Renewed, which explores the New Age Movement in depth. There I say:
Significantly, I became fascinated— as many New Agers do—by the Gnostics. Their de-personalized, aloof variant of Christianity was considerably more interesting to me than the real thing. For, alongside most of my New Age cohort, I was persuaded that it was, in fact, the Gnostics who represented true Christianity. The early Church had evidently taken the wrong turn by rejecting Gnosticism.
Was my opinion formed by carefully comparing Gnostic texts with Christian Theology? No. It was simply obvious the Church was wrong. We New Agers “knew” this in a reflexive, unexamined and—it should be said—altogether biased fashion. We never deemed it necessary to study both sides of the issue. At least, I have come across many Gnostic enthusiasts in the “holistic” movement over the years and I cannot recall meeting a single one who studiously compared traditional Christianity and Gnosticism side by side.
However, I will not say much more regarding this now, as the real purpose of this post is simply to be a small complement to the video below, wherein I also address, of course, the subject of Galactic Lizards …
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