I have come not to abolish the law and the prophets

Deacon Doug McManaman

The ethics of redemption is very different from the ethics of law, but the one does not cancel out the other. The ethics of redemption of course refers to the ethics of the New Law, which is written on the heart. It is an interior law, because in the New Covenant we have become a New Creation; human nature has been transformed. Divine grace is a sharing in the divine life, and it transforms everything we are and everything we do. Divine grace makes it possible for us to rise above our own inclination to sin and actually fulfill the demands of the law. 

What makes New Age religion so popular today and within the past 40 years is that it promises “salvation” or happiness (fulfillment) without moral reform, that is, without the moral law. It is religion without moral reform, religion without personal conversion and sacrifice. And in fact many of our protestant brethren have begun to drift into that mindset–a 90 year old Baptist woman I recently visited in hospital was complaining about just that: make no moral demands on the congregation, don’t talk about morality, the moral life, especially on a personal level; the idea is that if you are going to talk about a moral issue, make sure it is one that everyone can agree on, and that usually involves issues that are rather obvious, like racism, unjust oppression, or poverty. 

The problem is that these evils begin on the level of the human person, and so if individual human persons are not challenged and called to personal moral reform, as we see in the Commandments, then we are going to continue to see racism, unjust oppression and poverty, because evil does not begin nor exist on the level of the system, it begins and exists on the level of individual human persons. 

The Commandments go even further. You’ll notice that the first three have to do with God, the last seven have to do with our neighbour. What this implies is that if we do not fulfill the first three commandments (You shall have no other gods besides the Lord your God; Do not take the Lord’s name in vain; Keep holy the Sabbath), we won’t be able to fulfill the last seven having to do with our neighbour (Honour your mother and father; You shall not kill; You shall not commit adultery; You shall not steal, bear false witness and envy). We’ll end up violating those if we deem it necessary for our own personal happiness, because we’ve essentially made ourselves the center of our own lives, not God. 

So New Age religion is really a false promise, and it’s a false promise that makes money every ten years or so–makes money for publishers, that is, which is why every 5 or 10 years we see a new one on the bestseller list. It’s sort of like new diets that promise that we’ll lose weight without having to give up the foods we like. Take it from someone who has a lot of extra pounds on him to lose: they don’t work. There’s only one way to lose weight: stop eating so much and exercise; it’s the same with the spiritual life. The first words out of Jesus’ mouth were “Repent and believe in the gospel”. Confession, Eucharist, prayer, that’s the road to salvation.