Christianity and New Age Spirituality (7)

The Aquarian Nature of Reality

Faith Community

Ideas of a faith community in the Age of Aquarius are paradoxical. On the one hand, individual authority and autonomy is fundamental. Truth is mediated by one’s own experience in a kind of epistemological individualism, and doctrines, traditions and institutions are inherently suspect. New Age teachers do not expect that they will be blindly listened to; truths from outside the self must be tested by personal experience.¹ On the other hand, there have historically been many communities drawn around a central Aquarian idea or charismatic personality, Auroville and Findhorn being classic examples.² By and large, though, most adherents are connected through practices and networks and collect on an ad hoc basis at specific events, such as workshops and festivals.³ This would seem emblematic of the tolerance ethic of the Age of Aquarius.

By contrast, the body of believers is a key idea for Christian understanding of the Kingdom of God. Jesus clearly understood himself, in announcing the Kingdom of God, to be starting a movement of Jewish reform that devastated the social structure of his day and radically reformed it around himself as a new covenant community.⁴ And it is clear that his earliest followers understood themselves to be carrying on that movement of servant community.⁵ It is still the challenge today for followers of Jesus.⁶

Ethics

Aquarian ethics must rise to several important challenges. First is the problem of evil. New Age commonly seeks to overthrow binary oppositions, and so the good-evil duality is frequently deemed to be an illusion.⁷ Instead of battling against ‘evil’ phenomena, everything is perceived as part of ‘one ultimately benevolent cosmic design,’ and the apparently negative is then approached as a potential for learning and development.⁸ Evil and suffering sit within the axiomatic ‘rightness’ of the cosmos. This is a distinctly different approach to that of Jesus’ Kingdom of God, which recognises the reality of evil and anticipates its total overthrow in the strange victory of the suffering servant.⁹

Second is the question of ethical relativism. The illusion of good and evil is also often asserted in eschewal of judgmental attitudes and pronouncements of right and wrong.¹⁰ Some actions are identified as undesirable, but it is unclear whether that determination is made on a moral basis – the question is sidestepped by appeal to the greater good of evolutionary life at a cosmic rather than human level.¹¹ Jesus avoids this by appealing to his ‘heavenly father’s’ Kingdom of love.¹²

Thirdly, whilst a monist identification with all life does lead to a service ethic of universal compassion, the illusion of evil and suffering does not lead to a Jesus-like preference for the poor and marginalised.¹³

Footnotes