If you haven’t heard “The Secret” please read about it and join me in my anger and confusion.

The basic principle behind The Secret is the power of positive thinking. If you think positively about anything, the teachers of The Secret promise you that it will happen. Your thoughts will determine your destiny. If you wake up in the morning and think “All good things will come to me today”, it will happen. Oprah had these loons on her show a few weeks ago and millions of people responded. Testimony after testimony seemingly affirmed the power and truth of this theory.

Watch this teaching tool from the The Secret. The “I AM” statements are thoughts you could think to yourself and they will come to pass. Try not to laugh out loud at the “Everything I touch turns to gold” part.

The thing that kills me most about this theory is that they conjure some supposed scientific justification for all of this. They don’t go into depth. They just attribute the law of attraction to “Quantum Physics” and the fact that “everything is energy”.
They’ll even say that all the bad things that have happened to you in your life have somehow been attracted by you through your negative thinking. Car accidents, debt, failed relationships, and losing your job can all be attributed to your negative thoughts and justified by the “Law of Attraction”. I guess that means that smoking didn’t give someone lung cancer, it was their negative thoughts. They probably should have woke up in the morning and said “These cigarettes will not kill me” and smoked a pack. This is where this theory falls short for me. The degree to which your physical actions matter is unknown. They encourage you to realize your dreams, but they don’t tell you how much you should seek after what you want. When the teachers of the secret tell you to take physical action to get to your goal, their anaology of Alladin and his magic lamp starts to break down. I can think positively all I want about being healthy, but physical action is required to get my fat butt off the couch. I think the theory becomes “the power of definitive action” and not so much about positive thoughts. People have found success in this theory because they have been able to take definitive action and make things happen on their own. The Universe had nothing to do with it. If the Universe played a part, they wouldn’t have to do anything at all. Instead of getting rich by some stupid pyramid scam they found online, these people should be getting rich by finding a million dollars on their door step.
The Secret has a good thing going for them. They have tricked people into thinking The Universe cares about them and their selfish desires. They have also tapped into something I have written a lot about on my blog: selfishness. Who wouldn’t want to hear that they are in control of their own destiny and that you have a magic genie who only wants to bless you called The Universe?

Sounds pretty sweet to me. I think I will start thinking positively about my short left thumb bythinking things like “I will have thumbs that are the same size”. I hope the universe hears me. If not, I’ll just schedule a surgery that will lengthen my thumb..

What a load of crap.

All evangelicals are extremely familiar with the now cliched phrase “personal relationship with Jesus”. If someone were to ask one of us what they needed to do to become a Christian, we would tell them they’d have to get one of those personal relationships. You get one by asking Jesus into your heart (another cliche) and becoming best buds with Him. Your “relationship” with Him should look like your relationship with your best friend does. You should talk frequently, spend quality time together, and listen to one another, trust eachother etc. The relationship you have with Jesus is touted as “the most important decision you will ever make”. Once you make the decision, you have to keep up the relationship and keep it personal. It’s just you and Jesus, a long distance relationship with the intangible, if you will.
The idea of a “personal relationship” as a means to salvation is nowhere to be found in scripture. In fact, Romans 10:9 says, “if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved”. Beyond that, there are no more requirements for salvation put forth in scripture. Much, however, can be inferred as to what a believer’s life should look like after salvation, but the elements of a “personal relationship” as evangelicals define them, are not clearly delineated in scripture.

Indeed our salvation is something we obtain personally. I cannot be saved by another man’s proclaimation that Jesus is Lord. I myself must proclaim this truth in order to recieve eternal life. Unfortunately, I think the personal nature of our salvation can be taken to an extreme and applied to all aspects of Christian piety. Christians frequently make claims that their “relationship” with Christ is all they need. In a soteriological sense indeed that is true, but in a daily life sense, it is entirely false. Jesus calls us into community with one another. Our salvation is to be lived out horizontally as well as vertically. The early church in Acts 3 is an excellent example. They devoted themselves to the apostles teaching AND to fellowship. “All the believers were together and had EVERYTHING in common. Selling their posessions and their goods, they gave to anyone as he had need” (v 44,45). The early church was called to radical communal living. There seems to be nothing “personal” about what they devoted themselves to. Even their possessions, the stuff we’re allowed to call “our own”, was given to other people at no cost. Paul reiterates this point in his letter to the Romans: “Do not think of yourself more highly than you ought, but rather think of yourselves with sober judgment, in accordance with the measure of faith God has given you. Just as each of us has one body with many members, and these members do not all have the same function, so in Christ we who are many form one body, and each member belongs to all the others” (12:3-5). In Christ, we are not our own. We belong to one another and we must be together to make up Christ’s body. Alone we are nothing. Just like the early church, we must give everything we have to eachother. Jesus is our portion, but we share him together.

So what happened? Why don’t I see this in our church? I only see a divided, individualistic, “it’s all about me” culture. Our contemporary worship songs are inundated with “me”s and “I”s and instead of being about Jesus, they have become all about us. Our sin has become very private and all about us too. The Protestant Reformation did away with public penance so we are only required to personally confess to the Father. Our sin is simply considered a personal separation from God. The corporate impact of sin is not at all emphasized in our churches. As far as social justice is concerned, let’s just say that we are lagging in our response to the “least of these” despite over 3000 verses in our Bible telling us about them. Our attention has been pulled away from the people who need it most.

We have a very selfish church on our hands. How did we get this way? It seems as though the American dream and our inherent desire to live for ourselves has caught up to us. Prosperity theology was born out of this very same conundrum. Self-sacrifice is not something we’re willing to do. I may be willing to sacrifice myself for my Lord, but lay my life down for a friend? No way. We make our “relationship” with Christ personal in hopes of keeping ourselves to ourself. We don’t believe we belong to eachother like Paul said. Christ belongs to us and us to him, we don’t owe anything to eachother. “Just me and Jesus, that’s all I need”. Our focus becomes inward. We start to consider ourselves more important than we ought. When that happens in one area of our life it tends to permeate every other aspect of our life until it infects us completely. We take our relationship with the Lord and define it as “personal” and suddenly everything else that follows becomes very personal. We subconsciously make the connection in our minds that if our salvation is all about us, everything else must be also. Some of you might think this is off-base, but what else could be happening to us? Paul says that “the only thing that counts is faith expressing itself through love” (Gal 5:6). Our faith should be expressed in horizontal love for one another. Paul says this over and over again in his letters.

Making our relationship with Christ strictly personal is beneficial because it absolves our responsibility for one another. We’re scared to give ourselves to eachother and we’re scared to take on eachother’s crap. Belonging to you means that all that is mine is yours. It also means that apart from you, I am nothing. This idea is so radical that we run away from it as fast as we can. We personalize Jesus and make it all about us. We fail to see the implications our faith has beyond ourself.

This is my theory. It is the only explanation I can come up with for why our church is so selfish and so neglectful of all the verses in the Bible that talk about self-denial. It hurts to die to yourself. It hurts even more to die for eachother.