Affirmations and Confessions of a Progressive Christian Layman
Modern Novelists Spread Unorthodox Christian Ideas
Part 1 – The Celestine Prophecy

It’s amazing to me how theologically progressive modern novelists are and yet they are being read by millions, who don’t appear to be disturbed by unorthodox ideas about Christianity that are in these novels.
 
Several authors, including Kathleen McGowan and David S. Brody, have questioned historical authenticity. For example, McGowan wrote, “History is not what happened. History is what was written down.” She also wrote: “The French esoteric writer Louis Charpentier once said that when history and tradition disagree, you can be sure that history is wrong.” In the author’s notes of The Book of Love, she wrote: “All history is conjecture. All of it. It is the height of folly and arrogance for anyone to say that he or she knows definitively what happened in the past.” A historical novelist prefers “to work in Technicolor whereas academics choose to work strictly in the realm of black and white.” Brody wrote, “The historical record was often no more than the product of a single scribe’s take on events, shaped by his or her experiences and values. And often slanted by a particular agenda.”
 
These are not necessarily novel concepts, but conservative readers of the Bible don’t agree with these statements. Sixty-one percent of adults who are aligned with a Christian church believe that “every word in the Bible is true and can be trusted.”
 
Let’s look at The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield (1993), which was the biggest-selling book in the world for three years in the late 1990s. Some readers considered it “utter trash” while others said, “it changed my life.”

This book explored the idea of synchronicity, which was first hypothesized by Carl Jung. Redfield claimed that coincidences were happening more often, to a greater number of people, and that they were somehow linked to our evolution as a species. His book claimed that coincidences are not mere chance but carry meaning.

The novel’s main character undertakes a journey to find and understand a series of nine spiritual insights in an ancient manuscript in Peru. The book is a first-person narrative of the narrator’s spiritual awakening.
 
The narrator learns the insights, one by one, often experiencing an insight before actually reading the text, while being pursued by powerful forces within the Catholic Church and the Peruvian government who are opposed to the insights being revealed. In the end, he learned the first nine insights and returned to the United States, with a promise of a Tenth Insight would be revealed soon. The insights are given only through summaries for brevity’s sake; he notes that the “partial translation” of the Ninth Insight was twenty typewritten pages.
 
Redfield describes the second insight as enlarging of the circle of our thinking beyond our life, our job, our country, to appreciate humanity across the ages. A character in the book explains that in the last thousand years we have moved from a God-centered world to one based on our own achievements and discoveries. The philosophical security people felt in the Middle Ages has been replaced by a drive for secular material security, but now this is being questioned.
 
During the second insight part of The Celestine Prophecy, the following ideas are found:
 
During the Middle Ages, everything in life was defined by the Church. The priests were extremely influential. They created a reality which places their idea about God’s plan for mankind at the very center of life. Every person’s social position was secondary to the spiritual reality of life as defined by the Church.
 
Life was about passing a spiritual test. The priests claimed that God created mankind for one purpose: to win or lose salvation. And humans must correctly choose between two opposing forces: God or the temptations of the devil.
 
A person wasn’t qualified to determine their status; this was the Church’s authority. The Church interpreted the scriptures and told a person whether they were living as God intended or whether they were being duped by Satan. If the person followed the Church’s instructions, they were assured of a rewarding afterlife, but if they did not adhere to the prescribed guidelines, they were excommunicated and damned for eternity.
 
During the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the Medieval world view fell apart, partly because the people questioned why priests secretly violated their vows of chastity or took gratuities to look the other way when politically powerful or wealthy parishioners violated the Church’s rules or laws.
 
A group led by Martin Luther called for a complete break from papal Christianity. They claimed the Church was corrupt and demanded an end to its reign over people’s minds. A new Church was formed based on the idea that each person should have access to the scriptures and to interpret them themselves.
 
The Church that had defined reality for centuries was losing its credibility. Consequently, the whole world was being thrown into question.
 
By the 1600s, astronomers had proved beyond a doubt that the sun and stars did not revolve around the earth as the Church maintained.
 
People became anxious about many things that, in the past, would have been attributed to God or the devil. But as the medieval world view broke down, certainty went with it.
 
As the Modern Age began, there was a growing democratic spirit and massive distrust of authority, whether papal or royal. Definitions of the universe based on speculation or scriptural faith were no longer automatically accepted. In spite of the loss of certainty, people didn’t want to risk some new group controlling their reality. Thus, there was a new mandate for science.
 
People looked out on the vast universe and thought that we needed a way to systematically explore this new world using the scientific method, which is nothing more than testing the idea about how the universe works, arriving afterward at some conclusion, and then offering this conclusion to others to see if they agree.
 
People had lost their certainty about a God-ruled universe and, because of that, their certainty about the nature of God. They thought the scientific method could discover the nature of everything, including God and the true purpose of mankind’s existence on this planet. So explorers went out to find the true nature of our situation and to report back. They weren’t able to complete their mission. When the scientific method couldn’t explain God and mankind’s purpose on the planet, the lack of certainty affected Western culture deeply. We needed something else to do until our questions were answered. Eventually we asked, why not settle into this new world of ours while we are waiting?
 
In another part of the book, the following questions were raised: Aren’t the scriptures a story of people learning to receive God’s energy and will within? Isn’t that what the early prophets led the people to do in the Old Testament? And isn’t that receptivity to God’s energy within what culminated in the life of Jesus to the extent that we say God descended to earth? Isn’t the New Testament the story of a group of people being filled with some kind of energy that transformed them? Didn’t Jesus say that what he did, we could do also, and more? We’ve never really taken that idea seriously.
 
When humans raise their vibrations to a level where others cannot see them, it will signal that they are crossing the barrier between this life and the other world from which we came and to which we go after death. This conscious crossing over was the path shown by the Christ. He opened up to the energy until he was so light he could walk on water. He transcended death and was the first to cross over, to expand the physical world into the spiritual. His life demonstrated how to do this, and if we connect with the same source we can head the same way, step by step. At some point, everyone will vibrate highly enough so they can walk into heaven.
 
One of Redfield’s major themes is that conflict and ill will create friction against the natural flow of energy in the universe, whereas to love unconditionally is to move with this energy and take on its grace and power.
 
The Celestine Prophecy was successful because it focused renewed interest in spirituality while questioning traditional religion. In asserting the idea of direct intuition of spiritual knowledge rather than receiving it second-hand, it is a Gnostic work.

Read Part 2 Here
Read Part 3 Here
Read Part 4 Here
Read Part 5 Here
Read Part 6 Here
Read Part 7 Here