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Recently the editor of Gnosis, America's premier alternative spirituality magazine, and Germany's leading alternative religion journal, Esotera, declared that the New Age Movement has run its course and is now effectively over. The New Age Movement first caught the attention of Christians with the publication of books by Dave Hunt and Constance Cumbey in 1983. Later Shirley MacLaine popularized New Age ideas through her many books and the television series, Out on a Limb. A rash of popular works exposing the evils of New Age ideas followed alongside equally popular books extolling the virtues of this new vision of reality.

Only recently have serious scholarly accounts of the New Age Movement appeared from the pens of Chrissie Steyn (1994), Christoph Bochinger (1994), Peter Kratz (1994), Michael York (1995), Paul Heelas (1996), M.D. Faber (1996), Wouter J. Hanegraaff (1997) and most recently John P. Newport (1998). Of these only Newport writes as an evangelical. Sadly, his book is by far the worst documented and least impressive.

Christoph Bochinger's "New Age" und moderne Religion (Giterskiger: Chr. Kaiser Verlaghaus, 1994) presents an impressive analysis of New Age texts supplements by a very useful 153-page bibliography. He provides the reader with an excellent historical overview and detailed analysis of New Age beliefs that emphasizes the richness of their sources and the diversity of this spiritual tradition.The book is particularly revealing because the author interviewed various publishers to discover why they were promoting New Age books. As might be expected, and contrary to the arguments of some conspiracy theorists, the answer was that German presses translated and published American books on the New Age Movement in response to popular public demand. Thus, the popularization of New Age ideas was not a conspiracy by publishers to promote the occult. Rather it was a response to market pressures from a public eager for occult teachings.

Bochinger does not discuss the New Age in terms of pantheism, or even monism. He simply ignores these terms because they are not significant for understanding the movement as it appears in his data. His book certainly deserves to be translated into English, so that it will reach a wider audience.Worldviews in Transition: An Investigation of the New Age Movement in South Africa (Pretoria: University of South Africa Press, 1994), by Chrissie Steyn, is the first major empirical study of the New Age. Although the title suggests that the book is essentially concerned with South Africa, Steyn uses her fieldwork to discuss the New Age generally. Based on life history interviews, survey research, and an analysis of published sources, this is an exciting book that reaches some surprising conclusions. For example, after discussing what others had written about New Age beliefs she boldly states,

Although literature critical of the New Age movement consistently maintains that the New Age worldview is pantheistic this study of the movement in South Africa did not substantiate this statement. Rather in most cases New Agers' belief systems could be described as panentheistic. A survey of the literature by leading international New Agers indicates that the South African movement conforms with its overseas counterparts.

The distinction between pantheism and panentheism is significant, for while panentheists, like pantheists, believe that God's Being permeates the universe, panthentheism also affirms, in marked contrast to panentheism, that God's Being "is more than, and is not exhausted by, the universe" (Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 4th. ed.). In other words, Steyn's research demonstrates that one of the key tenants of the evangelical apologetics against New Age thinking is empirically false. More important, her findings are substantiated by all of the studies under review with the exception of the evangelical Newport.

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December (Web-only) 1999, Vol. 43