Customer Reviews

The Making of the New Spirituality: The Eclipse of the Western Religious Tradition

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A fine book. While the them of this work contrasts "Revealed Word" religion with the "New Spirituality" rather than just focusing on Christian (revealed word) perspectives, Herrick expands his investigation of New Age to throughly trawl our society's quest for transcendence. This work has acted to focus many threads of thought I have suspected for a while, particularly the popularity of Eastern mysticism and the quasi-mystical language of pop-science, as is the case with Carl Sagan and Dick Dawkins. Furthermore, it is rather serious in it's exposition of the background spirituality of many famous "secular" thinkers of the 18-20th centuries. It turns out many of these paragons of logic were as mired in "irrational" behaviour as the proles they scorned.

This new work by Hope College's professor of communication is a helpful examination of the decline of Christianity and the rise of a more synthetic spirituality. Through examining representative figures and influential statements that have contributed to a new way of thinking about religion in the West, Herrick strives to clarify the sources and interconnections that make up what he terms "the New Religious Synthesis". Herrick also endeavors to assess the implications of this new spirituality, finally contrasting it with the religion of the Revealed Word.

The approach of this book generally and its sweeping tour of history specifically are reminiscent of Schaeffer. With this in mind, I think it will appeal to students who enjoy a "history of ideas' approach to learning as well as generalists who simply want to `catch up' on those persons and trends that have shaped the western religious tradition since the 1700's.

As James Sire has stated of this work, this is a "lucid intellectual history with important implications for navigating the religious currents of our day".

Herrick's work is a wonderful intellectual history tracking the general religious shift from what might be recognized as the Judeo-Christian tradition (what the author calls the Revealed Word tradition) to one marked by religious pluralism, pantheism, Gnosticism, and several other trends. He not only lays out the influential sources in this shift in a convincing and easy to understand manner, but he engages what he labels the New Religious Synthesis from the Revealed Word tradition.

Anyone who finds the current religious milieu in the Western world interesting, or anyone who would like a serious work on the current state of affairs in our religious culture would find this a thoroughly researched and well-argued book.

The Making of the New Spirituality is an informative survey of western religious ideas and how they have evolved over the past few centuries. It is also a rather sad survey in that it chronicles a steady erosion of what the author calls the "Revealed Word" view (essentially Christian orthodoxy) as various new notions of spirituality have overtaken that view and in some instances crept into the church. The author did a huge amount of research to pull together all of the ideas and information contained in the book.

As I read, I had several recurring thoughts:

First, I was struck by how many proponents of the various new views rejected the Revealed Word view on the basis of reason, modern criticism, science, etc., and then set up in its place something less scientific, less reasonable, more subjective, more mystical, more speculative, etc. The inconsistency was often glaring.

Second, I was struck by the vehemence of the opposition to the Revealed Word view and the apparent readiness of the masses to cast off that view and adopt other views. I've wondered a lot about the causes of this vehemence. The possibilities, some of which the author himself raises, include: the appeal of novelty; the appeal of intellectual or spiritual fads; a desire to believe in the innate goodness and progress of mankind; resentment of Christianity's truth claims; a desire to shed moral absolutes; a "burned over," spiritually weary mindset that existed in some places; and the manner in which the church conducted herself and represented (or misrepresented) Christ.

Third, I found myself wondering whether anyone in the church was effectively replying to the various new notions of spirituality and religious truth. I kept wanting to hear the Christian response -- either then or now. In this regard the last chapter of the book, which points out the deficiencies of the various new spiritualities as compared to the Revealed Word view, was a welcome ending.

I believe that this was well written. But again, as in many other cases, it simply explores the problems. Surely authors have opinions too.

The book presents a concise historical and theological review of the new spirituality, what we used to call the New Age movement. He reveals its roots in ancient pagan religions as well as in Gnosticism. What I found out supports my own experiences. Many aspects of Gnosticism have infiltrated the evangelical church in the quest for spiritual meditation, spiritual experience, and true worship. Herrick is to be commended for his work, though I would agree with one reviewer that his writing tends to be a bit difficult to get through. Despite that I would recommend all pastors to read this to develop their spiritual discernment. Our congregants are being swayed by the media in more ways than we think.

The research that went into this book is impressive. There really is a lot of sound, historical meat. My only beef is with the quality of the writing itself. The way the author constantly includes hand-tipping phrases like "In the next chapter we are going to be looking at..." is not state-of-the-art writing. I teach my high school students to avoid references to yourself, and to avoid telling the reader what you're about to tell him, because it gets in the way of the actual ideas presented in the writing. Just say it. Just write it.
Francis Schaeffer didn't tell you what he was going to tell you; Francis Schaeffer just told you. Francis Schaeffer didn't need summary conclusions at the end of every chapter, too.
I also wish the author would've expressed more of his contrary, biblically held opinions (without referring to himself) alongside the nefarious gnostic opinions he writes about. A non-believer could go some way through parts of this book without being apprised that these gnostic beliefs were/are actually mistaken.
All that said, taken as a whole and as a piece of research, the book is nearly impeccable. Well worth reading.
P.S. I got this from my pastor at my church, and some of my fellow parishioners actually apparently know the author. They tell me he is amazingly intelligent. I believe them. There is a LOT of knowledge packed in this book.

Herrick is to be commended for addressing the topic of how the New Spirituality came about and has challenged traditional models of Christianity (evangelicalism in particular), but in this reviewer's opinion his work falls short. His analysis and discussion of the people and organizations that he does discuss are often shallow and too brief. And there are other people and groups who have played a vital role in the development of new spirituality who are not discussed at all. For evangelicals this book is perhaps better than nothing, but readers looking for a more thorough study will most likely have to look beyond this book.

I agree with BC Lion's review - while presented as a scholarly nonfiction work, in reality The Making of the New Spirituality is spin for fundamental Christianity. As soon as I came to the part on A Course in Miracles, I knew where Herrick was going with this book. His remarks about the Course showed bias and ignorance. As he flippantly declared the Course "nearly incomprehensible prose," I wondered at his own mental faculties for understand abstract concepts. But I also immediately knew where he stood - firmly in authoritarian, old-timey, fundamental Christianity and that the entire rest of the book was going to be shadowed by his own bias. While he certainly listed many steps over the centuries to the "other spirituality" and knew his "facts," he was incapable of understanding the spirit of the changes, the deeply meaningful experiences that people have when engaging in some of these "other spiritualities" that are, for many, sorely lacking in traditional mindless and narrowly focused ritual. At this point, I skipped ahead to the end to see his "conclusion" and sure enough, he proved what I suspected. Hey, it's my fault that I didn't read BC Lion's review before wasting my money on this book.

I agree with earlier reviews on two points: that the writing here is rather stiff and formalistic; and that Herrick's reach as a researcher is broad and inclusive.

Rather than an objective look at the evolving nature of western spirituality, however, Herrick has a bias toward what he calls the "Revealed Word" (i.e. mainstream Judeo-Christian tradition) and believes that the "New Religious Synthesis" (i.e. the flowering of new spiritual approaches in the last century) is no substitute. In fact, he writes in his conclusion, new forms of personal, "gnostic" spirituality promote "a self-aggrandizing substitute for an authentic religious faith" -- thus dismissing the dozens of remarkable thinkers he's chronicled in the previous 250 pages.

I have found that the writings of Joseph Campbell, Jack Kornfield, Mark Epstein, Carl Sagan and various others who could loosely be defined as "neo-gnostics" have awakened my spiritual life in a way that my church upbringing never did. I appreciate that Herrick is open-minded and does not use fundamentalist language to hammer home his points, but I suspect that this is a tract disguised as non-fiction.