Christianity and New Age Spirituality (6)

The Aquarian Nature of Reality

God

The Aquarian vision is a rejection of the monotheistic tendency of the Piscean age presented in dualistic terms – that there is one personal God, and he (typically male under Piscean patriarchy) is wholly other. Walsch, for example, asserts that ‘[w]e need a new God. The old God isn’t working anymore.’¹ In its place is a reformulation of the notion of divinity. Again there is a broad spectrum of perspectives, from scientific atheism, through animism and polytheism to pantheism. What is frequent is a discomfort with casting God as a real personality.² Instead ‘God’ is commonly expressed in panentheistic or monist/pantheistic terms, in that everything that is is ‘part of the One God or Reality,’ sometimes referred to as the ‘Christ energy,’ with nuanced views over God’s identity wholly within or as something more than the totally of all that is.³

Jesus similarly expressed distinct disquiet with the way in which God had been characterised, or more accurately caricatured, by the Judaism of his day as in favour of the righteous (in piety, observance or revolutionary zeal) and powerful. However, Jesus did not seek to reformulate conceptions of God. Rather he proffered a whole new hermeneutic and argued that the character of God had been utterly misconstrued and that the same scriptures needed to be re-read to perceive God’s true character.⁴ He distinctively used the appellation ‘abba’ for God as the father of Israel precisely because it was not unique but was overlooked, and entreated those who followed him to do the same.⁵ Thus, Jesus’ call to discipleship, to believe in Jesus’ message as God’s good news for the poor and follow him, to participate in the Kingdom of God, was a call to recognise the true personality of God and both emulate and embody that quality.⁶

Self

The Aquarian self is a development of the understanding of God. As ‘God’ pervades everything so that divine ‘spark’ resides in every person.

[T]he most pervasive and significant aspect of the lingua franca of the New Age is that the person is, in essence, spiritual. To experience the ‘Self’ itself is to experience ‘God’, the ‘Goddess’, the ‘Source’, ‘Christ Consciousness’, the ‘inner child’, the ‘way of the heart’, or , most simply and, I think, most frequently, ‘inner spirituality’. And experiences of the ‘Higher Self’, to use another favoured term, stand in stark contrast to those afforded by the ego.⁷

To avoid over-simplification, conceptions of the self should be stratified into essential self (guarded against diminution), multiple self (e.g. inner child, past incarnation) and cosmic self (i.e. higher self).⁸ Commonly, though, each individual is an essence of the divine, such that truth emanates from the self and truths from beyond the self cannot be definitive.⁹ Aquarian belief, then, is organised in terms of the authority of the self.¹⁰

It is at this point that Christian understanding of the Kingdom of God offers the most severe criticism of the Age of Aquarius. It is commonly assumed that Jesus advocated the ‘golden rule’: do to others as you would have them do to you. Whilst Jesus did utter these words, they were not given as the summary of his teaching but the summary of the Law.¹¹ Rather, Jesus’ ‘new commandment’ is to ‘do to others as I have done to you.’¹², 119. Not only is the self no longer the ultimate authority, but Jesus’ mode of living requires that individuals subject themselves to each other and to God: not self-serving but serving others, a suffering servanthood in place of authority and dominion that incorporates first and foremost the least, the poorest and the marginalised.¹³

Footnotes