Well I just wanted to end the review of "The Secret" with one more short post. Overall in "The Secret" we don't find anything new. It is really just the same positive thinking and word faith techniques that have been implemented and taught by many fairly public figures for decades now. Neither is their message about "God" new, pantheism has had numerous figures in the West to support it ranging from the Beatles to Shirley Mclain. So what do we make of "The Secret"? Well it is in essence a sophisticated and spiritualized version of the message we hear in the classic "The Little Engine that Could."If you don't remember that story that is the one where there is the little train engine who is able to overcome all its obstacles by repeating the phrase "I think I can...I think I can...I think I can..." until he has success. Essentially that is what we find in "The Secret", but here it is more sophisticated and spiritualized.
There really is one thing that stands out in the book that I have really paid scant attention to simply because to call it out would have required a post in itself and I would rather address it in a broader context then a single book review. What I am referring to is the heavy emphasis on us being the "Masters of our destiny". This sort of talk is probably the most seducing of the whole book, simply because it is this sort of thinking that is so ubiquitous.
This sort of message strokes us at the very heart of our consumeristic nature, and I think that is the main allurement of the book. We can decide what kind of car we will drive, spouse we will have, have complete control over our health and our wealth, basically we can conjure and live whatever life we want with this power. The success of this book is not merely that it was promoted on Oprah but that it sees a consumeristic and self centered culture and begins to tickle peoples ears with its soft words.
Ultimately this message is tragic and we as Christians know the weight of how damnable such a message is. Let me give a picture. Here's the scenario:
There is a women living on the second floor of a duplex, she is a very vain woman and can not even go to the Taco Bell drive thru and right back home without getting dressed up and putting on make up. Well it just so happens that one day as she is continually trying on new clothes she has just purchased and admiring her attractiveness in the mirror that she hears a yell from outside her window..."M'am! M'am! Get out of the house the lower story is on fire, if you jump my friend and I will catch you!" she replies "Who are you? And how do you know this?" The man replies "My name is Gospel, and I can see the flames inside the windows on the first floor."
Now it just so happens that as Mr.Gospel was explaining this to her that her cell phone rings on the other end is this woman's friend Ms.Flattermouth calls and says "Fire?! Listen honey there is only a fire if you think there is one, now are you gonna let ol Gospel tell you what you need to do or are you gonna control your own reality? What do you really want, do you want to run your own life or do you want to trust that Guy to save you?"
Ms.Flattermouth's advice seems very attractive to Ms.Vainself, she replies "You are right! [as smoke begins to fill the room] there is no fire, I control my reality!" As she hangs up the phone she goes to the window and shouts to Gospel "Mr.Gospel, your talk about fire and my needing to jump really brings me down, I am just fine where I am and I am in control of my reality, so Thank you for nothing!" She slams the window shut. She returns to admiring how nice her delicate complexion makes her new jewelry look only to collapse from smoke inhalation.
Now I know the analogy is a bit goofy but the point is that this situation applies to all people. We have the command from the Gospel to jump into the safety of the arms of Christ or to ignore the command and die in our own self worship. Ms.Flattermouth is supposed to give a similar message of "The Secret" which really tells people who are dead in sins and trespasses that they are just fine...and go buy a yacht. That is why I said this message is damnable, not because the word damnable is a scary way of saying I don't like it, but because this message will no doubt encourage lost sinners to continue in their self love and self reliance.
That is why I reviewed this book, because it is a message that tells people to eat all of the Turkish Delight they want and ignore the warnings of God's judgement. O how lamentable is this! Christ gives a parable on this very topic as He said:
"And he told them a parable, saying, "The land of a rich man produced plentifully, and he thought to himself, 'What shall I do, for I have nowhere to store my crops?' And he said, 'I will do this: I will tear down my barns and build larger ones, and there I will store all my grain and my goods. And I will say to my soul, Soul, you have ample goods laid up for many years; relax, eat, drink, be merry.'
But God said to him, 'Fool! This night your soul is required of you, and the things you have prepared, whose will they be?' So is the one who lays up treasure for himself and is not rich toward God."" (Luke 12:16-21)
Christ gave many parables like this one. The point is simply that our life is to consist of more than things, we are to live Corum Deo which is before God at all times and in all we do. God is to be our central treasure not things, we are to be rich toward God. The message from "The Secret" tells us to build bigger barns, to hunger for more and more things...
Christ says the person who harbors such an attitude and lives on it is a fool. This is not an insult but a statement of fact. It is the height of foolishness to ignore God and love things. For it is God with whom we have to deal, and to sound a bit like Edwards, no amount of things or wealth or "I think I cans..." will be able to deliver us from the judgement of God. Only Christ's shed blood applied can and will.
That is why this "Secret" message is so tragic, it encourages people to keep on in their God ignoring lifestyles and affirms them in them.
7 comments:
I am at a loss to understand what this parable conveys.Until very recently in human history there was widespread belief in the existence of a class of supernatural agencies variously known as fairies, gnomes, goblins, pixies, elves and sprites. They were "supernatural" because their properties and powers did not lie under the government of natural laws of physics and biology: some of them could fly, be or become invisible, cast magic spells, make people disappear if they stood in "fairy rings" in woodland groves, and much besides. The folklores of different cultures conceived of and named these beings in different ways; for example, Ireland's leprechauns (and their very troublesome thieving relatives, cluricauns) were said to be fairies, though leprechauns take the form of tiny wizened old men, generally inebriated, though not enough to prevent them from making shoes, which is their chief occupation; whereas the fairies of England were (somewhat true to the sources of their main avatar in sublimated Victorian eroticism) naked or diaphanously dressed miniature nubile young female shapes with dragonfly wings and pre-Raphaelite hair. These latter were seen, even "photographed", and believed in not only by the majority of countryfolk, who blamed them for missing pins, agues and other minor troubles, but by such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who seemed himself to lack the powers of logical deduction he attributed to his chief literary creation.
No doubt there are still people about (will we hear from any here?) who believe in fairies (the little dragonfly-wing ones), if only after the manner of the charming old Irish lady who, when asked whether she believed in leprechauns, said, "I do not; but they are there anyway".
But if so, they will be of that class of people whose desire to believe in fairies is so strong, so rooted in psychological need or shaping by (for example) inculcations in childhood, that they cannot bring themselves, or allow themselves, to think rationally (proportionally, fitting grounds to hypothesis) about their conviction.
For to do so they would need to converse with themselves as follows: First, let me be clear about what it is whose existence I here hypothesise. What properties do I ascribe to these entities? On what grounds do I ascribe them? What would have to be false or different about the regularities observed in nature and described in terms of powerfully established theories in physics and biology, for it to be even minimally conceivable that there could be the powers and properties defining of these entities? What actions and intentions do I ascribe to these entities? How do these fit with the historical and sociological facts of human existence? If there were such beings and they did such things, how would they fare in (say) a human court of law, or merely before the bar of human kindness and generosity? And so on.
It is of course open to fairyians (or perhaps fairyists, or fairylims?) to say that fairies are so mysterious and various, so enshrouded in obscurity, so beyond human comprehension (though not enough for us to know, with utter conviction, that they exist, of course, and even what they want - enough conviction, when occasion demands, to kill a few afairyists or different-fairyists) that it is pointless to engage in any effort to understand them and make them consistent with the worldview by which we daily make our toast, catch our buses, use our laptops, cure our coughs, fly to Ibiza, etc etc, in almost all of which cases we are jolly glad that strange and supernatural things do not happen - for example, as we come in to land at Heathrow, where the steady and predictable laws of physics, and reliable principles of engineering are so vastly preferable to the suppositious ministrations of goblins. Who would rather depend, in such a case, on what can be gleaned from the Brothers Grimm, in preference to the science of aeronautics ("twice iota and the minimum angle of glide")?
The point to extract from these thoughts is that every belief or hypothesis depends for its respectability on how it was arrived at, how open it is to test, and how it consists with what is powerfully established and repeatedly (a billion times repeatedly) confirmed in our common sense and scientific views of the world. Beliefs about fairies are anecdotal and fanciful, emerge from different folkloric traditions rooted in the ignorant past, and were mainly sustained by the unlettered, though they attracted their Conan Doyles. Had the institutions of political power needed belief in them for governing the populace, motivating them to war, or any other such purpose useful to rulers, there would today be official Fairy Rings, an Archgoblin of Chanctonbury, and daily readings of Hans Christian Andersen in schools.
But of course, the fairies had competition. Until the Church of England got going with its primary schools in the 19th century, largely as it happens to extirpate this rival to the credulity it required for itself, belief in fairies was commonplace and universal, a fact now forgotten, so successful was C of E elementary education. The church achieved this more by demonising folkloric beliefs than by offering rational analysis of them, and helping people to proportion evidence to them. This last would, presumably, have proved too swingeing in its result. But it certainly prompts a hopeful thought...
Is there anyone alive today above the age of nine, and halfway sane, who would assign a prior probability of 50% to the existence of fairies on the ground that "we do not know whether or not there are fairies"? Is there anyone who satisfies these conditions who seriously thinks that we do not know that there are no fairies?
I pronounce with humour and am evidently less than serious in these observations, and would seek to appeal to your appreciation on those within Christian history who have preserved the classics, of Roman and Greek literature, as well as chastising the element of theocracy that endeavoured to censor the classics, through pious disregard of seditious or blasphemous tracts, no matter their singular genius of expressions.
I perhaps in futility would continue to enjoin you in a reflection on the above epistemological points which ultimately send "homeward", as the lovely Scottish song has it, "to think again": which would be, by far, an even greater boon.
Hey Bob,
Quick question regarding your review.
You wrote,
"Now I know the analogy is a bit goofy but the point is that this situation applies to all people. We have the command from the Gospel to jump into the safety of the arms of Christ or to ignore the command and die in our own self worship. Ms.Flattermouth is supposed to give a similar message of "The Secret" which really tells people who are dead in sins and trespasses that they are just fine...and go buy a yacht. That is why I said this message is damnable, not because the word damnable is a scary way of saying I don't like it, but because this message will no doubt encourage lost sinners to continue in their self love and self reliance.
That is why I reviewed this book, because it is a message that tells people to eat all of the Turkish Delight they want and ignore the warnings of God's judgement."
You say this message is "damnable" because it will "encourage lost sinners to continue in their self love and self reliance". Now just how does this work from a Calvinist perspective? Is the message damnable to the elect? Of course not, no amount of false teaching can prevent God from drawing his elect to himself, right? Is it damnable for the reprobate? How so? How can they be any more damned than they already are? Is it dangerous to give a reprobate a false sense of security? They will never respond to God anyway. They will not respond even if they are sufficiently warned every second of every day, correct? They are dead in their sins, remember? They will never respond unless God irresistibly regenerates them, and God has determined, from all eternity, not to do that. So how, when the claims of Calvinism are considered, is this little book so damnable?
Just wondering.
Hey I didn't even see this question, my reply is about 3 weeks late...oh well.
Kangaroo-
"You say this message is "damnable" because it will "encourage lost sinners to continue in their self love and self reliance". Now just how does this work from a Calvinist perspective?"
Just like I said, it encourages people to continue to live for themselves and ignore God.
"Is the message damnable to the elect? Of course not, no amount of false teaching can prevent God from drawing his elect to himself, right? Is it damnable for the reprobate? How so? How can they be any more damned than they already are?"
Well, God by His grace opens peoples eyes to make the choice and leap into Christ's arms. As for those who are non-elect this message will merely give them a false security and they will continue to choose to reject Christ. So no they are not "more damned" or more dead in sins then before but perhaps more deluded in their deadness.
"Is it dangerous to give a reprobate a false sense of security? They will never respond to God anyway."
Not so much dangerous as deceitful.
" So how, when the claims of Calvinism are considered, is this little book so damnable?"
Because those who believe it's message will be damned while they think themselves to be just fine.
To be clear it is no more damnable than any other anti-Christ philosophy, however the issue with this book is that many have said it is compatable with Christianity.
Bob said: "Because those who believe it's message will be damned while they think themselves to be just fine."
God forbid that those destined to hell by an irrevocable decree should "think themselves to be just fine". We need to be sure they fully understand the unavoidable horrors that await them.
I knew at the moment I saw that book that there was something wrong with it,(for there is not a greater secret than Christ being the Salvation of the World),yet I didn't know what it was nor did I want to spend my time reading it. Now that I read your review the book is truly worst than I thought. Thank you for your info I enjoyed your writing very much.
Kangaroo states-
"God forbid that those destined to hell by an irrevocable decree should "think themselves to be just fine". We need to be sure they fully understand the unavoidable horrors that await them."
I always scratch my head when semi-pelagians talk like this. The soveriegnty of God in salvation is often accomplished through means...namely preachers of the gospel/evangelists. Likewise, damnation is often wrought through means, namely false teachers and those decievers.
This can be seen in God's good end of saving people from starvation through Josephy yet that involves the ordained means of getting Joseph to Egypt, namely the evil of his brothers.
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