The Inter-Faith movement:
The New Age enters the church
By Herbert J. Pollitt. Banner of Truth. 214 pages. £6.95
ISBN 0 85151 680 7
What is the primary purpose of religion? Is it to reconcile sinners to God, or is it to bring peace among men on earth? Our godless pragmatic world would say that if religion has any point at all its purpose should be the latter. The interfaith movement has been fostering both a 'new era of religious understanding' and sometimes the idea of a 'greater religion yet to be' to surpass the current faiths, throughout our century.
This book is something of a new departure in publishing for the Banner, and one gets the impression that the material contained in it is of such an explosive nature that perhaps some other publishers would not handle it.
The author, Dr. Pollitt, a Cambridge graduate and retired teacher, has provided her an invaluable analysis of the inter-faith movement, based on meticulous research. He chronicles the history of the movement from its earliest roots with Sir Francis Younghusband, though to the involvement of Archbishop Runcie and the current Royal Family in various multi-faith services today. He explains the philosophies and intricacies of both pluralism and syncretism, marking the differences between the two. The involvement of the Vatican, the Church of England and the World Council of Churches are explained with thorough footnotes documenting almost every statement.
We are also introduced to the life and teaching of the 'shakers and movers' behind this crusade. Teilhard de Chardin, Thomas Merton, Dom Bede Griffiths, John Hick, Hans Kung, and environmentalists like Matthew Fox and Martin Palmer, occultists like Alice Bailey and Miriam Simos (Starhawk) and more are here.
The interfaith movement dismisses the Lord Jesus as a culturally-limited first-century prophet, as if it were not itself a culturally-bound phenomenon and product of the era of the world of the global village. The thrust of the book is that as the church and the elements within it pursue the interfaith agenda, it has to deny the uniqueness of Christ as the only incarnation of the true God, and inevitably ends up with a set of beliefs indistinguishable from the modern New Age movement, with its preoccupation with the 'god' within us, and altered states of consciousness, rather than the God of grace who is other than ourselves.
Though this is sometimes quite a difficult book to digest, of particular help is Dr. Pollitt's knack of confronting philosophical speculations with the plain teaching of the Bible. For example, the belief that the Spirit of God has always been at work in all religions runs counter to the words of Jesus himself, who spoke of the Holy Spirit as the Spirit of truth whom 'the world cannot accept . . . because it neither sees him nor knows him'. John 16.6,7).
World Goodwill is one of the organisations particularly mentioned by Dr. Pollitt as pushing the interfaith process. It works, according to Dr. Pollitt, under the aegis of the Lucifer Trust, founded in 1922, to disseminate the writing of Alice Bailey, who ultimately succeeded Madame Blavatsky as leader of the Theolosphical Society. Her theme was the suppression of Christianity by a world religion. The book also mentions the New Age concern to see a world government established.
Whether you subscribe to the world religion conspiracy theory, or simply see the rise of the interfaith movement as a child of our times, this is an essential book for Christians to read as we face the new millennium. The struggle to stand for the uniqueness of Christ in an age of vigorous pluralistic opposition has landed on the plate of our generation of Christians and it will not go away.
