Eckhart Tolle's Misunderstandings

Whenever Oprah is attached to a movement or spiritual idea, beware.

Eckhart Tolle has a new book called A New Earth, which proffers much of the same New Age thought that his other book, The Power of Now, similarly did. It is expected that people in America adopt pantheistic monism as their personal worldview (of course many want to be a "god"), but what is deeply unsettling is the continued misuse of the nature, life, and work of Christ. James Kennedy succinctly demonstrates the problems in the article linked above.

However, Kennedy didn't challenge the contradictory nature of Tolle's claims on evil. Tolle lambastes human history and the evil that pervades it. But how can anything be evil at all if God, the self, and time are not ultimately real? These views are deeply contradictory.

Besides some excerpts and interviews I have read about Tolle's philosophy, I had one encounter with a gentleman a few years back that troubled me. This gentleman said he read The Power of Now over and over again. Each time when he finished, he started again so that he could understand more. He explained the contents of the book to me, and while I wasn't overly acquainted with the New Age view it propounded, the idea struck me as akin (but not the same) to the Christian spiritual disciplines but with no object in mind. Christians use the disciplines to experience the grace of God and to become more like Him. This person used these various disciplines, which sounded like mindless Eastern meditation, with either nothing in mind or his own deifying self as the object. This is the epitome of human sin- rejecting God and deifying self.

Overall, it is quite the trend to fit Christ, but not necessarily Christianity, into pantheistic monism. Even Deepak Chopra is doing it, and of course Oprah endorses him as well.