35.

 What stipulations does the textbook place on our understanding of union with God? Your answer should have three parts.

            First, Orthodoxy's teaching on deification rejects all forms of pantheism. Union with God in no wise involves union with His divine essence; it involves instead union with His divine energies. “He who is deified through grace acquires all that God has, without also being identified with Him in essence” (St. Gregory Palamas).

            Secondly, man always retains his full personal integrity, no matter how closely he becomes united to God. Although the union between God and man is a true union, Creator and creature do not become fused into a single being in it. Orthodox mystical theology rejects the notion of Eastern religions that man is entirely absorbed into the deity. Man in his deified state is distinct from God (although not separate from Him). Just as the mystery of the Holy Trinity is a mystery of unity in diversity, so it is among those who express the Trinity in themselves: they still keep their personal characteristics. When St. Maximus the Confessor wrote that “God and those who are worthy of God have one and the same energy” [from Ambigua], he was not saying that the saints lose their free will, but that when deified, they voluntarily and lovingly bring their own will into compliance with God's will.

            Lastly, man's becoming a god does not put an end to his being human. “We remain creatures while becoming god by grace, as Christ remained God when becoming Man by the Incarnation,” so Vladimir Lossky explains. Man can never become God by nature, but becomes merely a created god, a god by grace or status.

            To become a partaker of the divine nature through theosis, something from God, is not to be confused with its satanic counterfeit offered in the New Age movement. At a time with the powers of darkness are pushing forward toward the new world order and global rule, the same element has devised the New Age movement and has presented its religious ideas as something conceived by the most illumined minds, the only exit out of the current global crises, the last hope for salvation, and the greatest good for achieving mutual tolerance and love. Since the lie of the serpent ye shall be as gods is repeated in this movement, and since only Christ gives people that which the serpent could only tempt mankind with, the following explanation is given of this movement:

The New Age movement is a conglomerate of pagan practices with a mixing of ancient mysteries, Hindu mysticism, humanism, occultism and Luciferism. The main concept of the New Age movement, the idea which permeates and connects all of the various aspects of this new religion, their common denominator, is the concept of a higher force, a god of forces, in which every enlightened person has a part. It is, further, an understanding of the “godness” of man's essence and one's ability to tap into this godhood-of-self by means of prescribed and verified techniques. Using the words of one prominent New Age proselytizer, actress Shirley MacLaine: “Man has existed from the beginning of time and space.... Man was the co-creator with God of the cosmos.... The tragedy of the human race was that we had forgotten that we were each divine.... You must never worship anyone or anything other than self. For you are God. To love self is to love God.... I know that I exist, therefore I am. I know that the God source exists, therefore it is. Since I am part of that force, then I am that I am.”

Are MacLaine's words not a repeat of the serpent's lie with which he tempted the first people by saying, “Ye shall be as gods” (Gen 3:5)? Is this not the very same lie which brought about man's fall when he accepted it, which brought about his eviction from Paradise and brought about his death? Is not man's acceptance of this lie the reason why Christ needed to come to earth and take upon Himself suffering for our redemption? Going back even further in time, is this not a repeat of the rebellion against God by Lucifer, who was so overcome with pride that he attempted to place his throne in place of God's throne?

According to a recent poll, two thirds of Americans believe in some aspect of New Age teachings. These ideas have permeated all spheres of society and education. However, this is not sufficient for those coming into power. They need to change the consciousness of mankind in its foundation. Therefore, they have started with the most available, the most naive and susceptible group. The last and most frightening phase of this onslaught has begun; it is a phase in which the remnants of Christian thinking will receive their final blow. The arena has been transferred to the souls of children [“The New Age and Children,” Orthodox Life, vol. 42, no. 6, 1992, p. 20].

The anonymous writer of these lines goes on to explain that today, TV is a tool of socio-religious indoctrination through which concepts of good and evil are presented in totally inverted manner against a backdrop of magic, the supernatural and the demonic. He also shows how New Age indoctrination goes on in public schools, In view of this onslaught of propaganda, it is all the more urgent to understand what true union with God is, and what its New Age counterfeit is about.