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PREACHING SKILLSExploring "A New Earth"A probing look at Eckhart Tolle's wildly popular bookBrian Lowery
If you've seen the weekly pop culture roundups we do on the Preaching Today blog, you know Eckhart Tolle's A New Earth has rested atop the New York Times bestseller list for weeks. Recent counts have it selling over three million copies—one million of which are due to Oprah's picking it for her book club. Over two million people are participating in a ten-week interactive webinar that Oprah hosts with Tolle (pronounced "toll-ee"). This is what many people are reading as they sip their lattes in Starbucks or close their evenings balled up on the couch. Many may very well be churchgoers.
The book's back matter calls Tolle's work "a profoundly spiritual manifesto for a better way of life—and for building a better world." But A New Earth tastes like the warmed leftovers of modernism, humanism, and the New Ageism of the '80s, with hints of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Christianity.
With a spiritual mix like that, preachers have good reason to address the hopes and promises held out in A New Earth. Tolle quotes from the Bible every three pages or so. Some of his reflections have just enough truth to lull the reader into a dreamy spiritual sleep that misses the rest of the story. Tolle even rewrites Scripture to his own advantage. Many might argue A New Earth is biblical—it's anything but. In this article, I'd like to identify three of Tolle's themes that preachers may want to address with biblical and theological alternatives.
Trumpeting the goodness of humanity
"You do not become good by trying to be good, but by finding the goodness that is already within you, and allowing that goodness to emerge."
—A New Earth, p. 13
The truth is, there is tremendous goodness within humanity. A theology of imago dei says as much. But it is also just as true that we are quite awful. A theology of fallenness says as much. We can do a lot of good things, but our oft-misguided thinking certainly finds us doing the wrong things more often. At our very best, it seems we can sometimes only manage to do good things for the wrong reasons. You cannot trumpet the goodness of humanity without acknowledging our need to successfully overcome human depravity. To be fair, Tolle would push back and say his entire book deals with overcoming the power of human depravity, which he calls the Ego. The Ego is the unconscious self that holds us back from reaching our full potential. It's enslaved to pride, materialism, and personal gain. Tolle acknowledges that when left to our own devices for self-betterment and world change, we instead make bombs and find more effective ways for lucrative business. This is the Ego at work within us, he says, and we can overcome it with grit and determination. We need only to silence the stubborn thing when it speaks and become conscious of what is good about us. It's the very beauty of the biblical account of the new heavens and new earth that makes the vision in A New Earth so disturbing. A New Earth basically represents Tolle's version of Paul's old-man/new-man theology. The Ego is the old man, while the enlightened self is the new man trying to wrestle the codger to the ground. But there's a huge difference between the apostle and the guru. The effort to overcome the Ego is a human effort—which is what got us into trouble in the first place. When the wrestling match is over, Tolle's new man is really nothing more than a man who happens to be at best a bit more evolved. Paul's new man, on the other hand, is new because he is hidden in Christ. This is the heart of the gospel: if humanity was ever to overcome depravity, it was only going to be through the transcendent-yet-immanent work of a God-man. Suggestions for preaching: One fascinating thing you could do is compare Tolle's philosophy to Paul's theology in Romans. A survey sermon that systematically addresses the major theological tenets of Romans will lay the groundwork for the listener to address virtually every issue raised by Tolle in A New Earth. For example, why not compare Tolle's old-man/new-man journey from Ego to Enlightenment to Paul's old-man/new-man journey in Romans 6–8? Replacing the I Am with me
"Before you ask any other question, first ask the most fundamental question of your life: Who am I?" —A New Earth, p. 186
Tolle's book is written to provide meaningful answers to what he considers the most fundamental question of existence: Who am I? This is a particularly important question for us to ask with the time given us on earth. In fact, it's a profoundly biblical one (Ecclesiastes, anyone?). The chief problem is Tolle offers only half of the question that needs to dance in his readers' minds: "Who am I in light of who I know God to be?" It's not terribly surprising that Tolle swallowed up the pivotal second half of the question with the first half. In the first few sections of A New Earth, Tolle works hard to collapse God into man, making them one in the same.
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