The God Within

[a] sense of an overwhelming divine love, ‘like a lion roaring in from within my chest.’”

What is Elizabeth Gilbert’s core belief? Our positive duty is to “take whatever works from wherever you can find it, and [then] you keep moving toward the light.” The key to understanding divinity for Gilbert is this sense of hearing God speak “in my voice from within my own self.” Douthat adds that her voice is, “distinctive–warm and chatty, self-deprecating and sincere–but her testimony is not unique.”

Eat, Pray, Live preaches the same gospel that is preached by a growing number of modern gurus, teachers and would-be holy men and women; e.g. Deepak Chopra, Eckhart Tolle, Paulo Coelho, James Redfield, Neale Donald Walsch and Marianne Williamson. These are the same voices that have been given a huge platform in our popular culture by superstars like Oprah Winfrey. They are the modern voices of an ancient heresy called Gnosticism. This is George Lucas’ Jedi, whose mystical Force, is much like Gilbert’s god, a being who “surrounds us, penetrates us, and binds the universe together.” This is what is often meant by so many who express a desire to be “spiritual without being religious.” The proponents of this view are not comfortable with the word God and are universally critical of organized religion. They insist that their spiritual vision is bigger than all religions or what can be said in any dogma about God.

What makes Douthat’s critique so important is not his survey of this faith form, which has been done well by others. What is unique is his clear understanding of Gilbert’s book and how it testifies quite explicitly to a kind of faith as much as St. Augustine’s Confessions or Thomas Merton’s The Seven Story Mountain. The faith it witnesses to, however, is a faith with a particular theology that includes a particular way of understanding God. Both Augustine and Merton included a deeply mystical understanding of the divine in their classic works but it is a Christian understanding. Gilbert’s view could be summed up as a partial glimpse of God, or divine light, one that is rooted entirely in personal experience with no reference to external revelation. As Neale Donald Walsch says, “Listen to your Highest Thought. . . . Whenever any of these differ from what you’ve been told by your teachers, or read in your books, forget the words.”

I am an evangelical mystic. I believe rationalistic explanations of the mysteries of Christian faith convince no one and thus create no true wonder or deep worship. But note my words here very carefully. I am centered in the gospel, a revealed messaged about God’s love, Christ’s suffering and death, my forgiveness and his bodily resurrection. This is Christian mysticism! What the God within offers us is a do it yourself faith that you can create out of your own mind that has no reference to divine revelation outside of me. The center of this faith is me. This is why understanding heresy is so important for Christians. Real heresy denies the core of what we believe, understand and live. When it is popular inside the church we are in deeper trouble than we know. Why? Without divine revelation outside of me there is no Christianity! Thus when the church begins to listen to voices like that of Elizabeth Gilbert, as many more do than you may think, the visible church is adrift in a sea of Gnostic religion. This was, after all, the original Christian heresy. It is back and it is back in a really big way. The question is clear: “Do we know this and what are we doing about it?”