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A Guide to New Religious Movements
Ronald Enroth,
Ph.D., Editor
Downers Grove, Illinois: InterVarsity Press, 2005. ISBN: 0830823816
(paperback), 220 pages, $15.00
Reviewed by the
Reverend Richard L. Dowhower, D.D.
Ronald M. Enroth, Ph.D., has published ten books to date;
and this is the fourth of his that I have read. This well-known writer has been
professor of sociology at evangelical Christian Westmont College in Santa
Barbara, California for the past forty years, a contributor to the Cult
Observer, Cultic Studies Journal, a member of the Cultic Studies Review
Editorial Board, and a presenter and participant in conferences of the former
American Family Foundation (AFF), now the International Cultic Studies
Association (ICSA).
Dr. Enroth and I share a passionate concern with the truth
claims made by new religious movements (NRMs) that challenge and contradict
orthodox biblical Christianity. His career and mine have taken place within
faith communities that name Jesus as Lord and have the intentional mission of
respectfully inviting others to Jesus. Furthermore, I have been fascinated for
decades by his specialty, the sociology of religion.
It is no surprise that all ten of Dr. Enroth’s books over
the past thirty-one years have been printed by religious publishers. This book
is his third with InterVarsity, “…the book publishing division of InterVarsity
Christian Fellowship/USA, a student movement active on hundreds of universities,
colleges and schools of nursing in the United States of America and a member of
the International Fellowship of Evangelical Students.” This book appears to mark
the second time Ronald Enroth has edited a collection designed to facilitate the
evangelization of members of NRMs. His list of publications includes a 1990 book
by Servant publications entitled Evangelizing the Cults, with which I am
not familiar and therefore not able to compare with this one.
The subtitle of A Guide to New Religious Movements
reflects its focus: “The Beliefs and Appeal of Astral Religion and the New Age,
the Baha’i, the Dalai Lama and Tibetan Buddhism, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Latter-Day
Saints, the Nation of Islam, Neopaganism, the Unification Church, and More”
[Yoga and Hinduism]. How did Enroth choose the movements he included and the
authors who wrote about them? All of the movements are currently active in North
America, he states. Enroth defends the choices of Buddhism and Hinduism in his
introductory essay “What is a New Religious Movement?”, but he tells little of
his criteria for selecting the others. Most conspicuous by their absence are the
Church of Scientology and the other “psychotechnologies,” as they have called
themselves. The only Islamic inclusion is the chapter titled “The Nation of
Islam,” the book’s one reprint from another publication.
“All the contributors to this volume are evangelical
Christians,” Enroth writes. “…they are committed to helping average Christians
understand the various manifestations of religiosity in today’s world so they
can effectively communicate the evangel—the gospel—to people they care about.”
From the book’s brief “List of Contributors,” one observes
that its twelve authors are highly educated, with most having doctorates in
theology and related Christian disciplines. The writers are professionally
engaged in careers that lend themselves to knowledge of the movement under
consideration. The writers are presented alphabetically in the list: Francis J.
Beckwith; James Beverly; Robert M. Bowman, Jr.; Enroth; Craig S. Keener; Vishal
Mangalwadi; LaVonne Neff; John Peck; Ron Rhodes; Charles Strohmer; James C.
Stephens; and Glen Usry. Only Mangalwadi and Stephens seem to have an insider’s
or ex-member’s experience.
Dr. Enroth seeks to include insights from the social and
behavioral sciences. To identify the shared distinguishing features of NRMs, he
draws upon the writings of Eileen Barker. The final essay, and the only one
written by a woman (LaVonne Neff), is entitled “Evaluating New Religious
Movements.”
Distancing himself and his writers from the “constricted
fundamentalist mentality,” Enroth articulates three purposes for the book: (1)
to provide compassionate understanding of the movements and their appeal, (2) to
apply God’s Word, the Bible, as “the only baseline for comparison when
ascertaining truth and error,” and (3) to “...equip them (serious, caring
Christians) to introduce people in those groups to Jesus our Lord.” I shall
attempt to evaluate the effectiveness of the book’s nine essays on specific
movements by these three criteria.
In my mind, each essay scores very high marks in the
information it provides about the movement under study, and in its
identification of the contemporary needs to which each movement appeals. The
information consists of brief historical accounts, succinct definitions of major
teachings, and the identification of influential personalities, issues, and
idiosyncrasies. In three cases—Hinduism, New Age, and Neopaganism—the authors
integrate several known groups into a single classification.
None of the NRMs was unknown to me previously, and I
learned even more from each essay. But when it came to the other two
categories—i.e., the application of the truth of the Bible and orthodoxy, and
specific coaching to equip Christians to introduce Jesus to movement members—the
writers were inconsistent and frequently failed to meet Enroth’s purposes.
In the specific application of orthodox Biblical truth,
four of nine authors do admirably: Rhodes and Bowman each cite more than 100
identified Biblical references. Ron Rhodes writes about the Jehovah’s Witnesses
and Ronald M. Bowman, Jr., about the Latter-Day Saints. Only two writers recall
the historic heresy of Gnosticism: James C. Stephens writes about the Dalai Lama
and Buddhism, and John Peck about Neopaganism. Because Kevin Garvey and others
have for years attacked the truth claims of NRMs for the gnostic heresy, I was
surprised that not more of these doctors of philosophy and theology make the
association.
Three writings are weak on the application of Biblical
truth: those about Yoga and Hinduism by Vishal Mangalwadi, and the one about
Baha’I by Francis J. Beckwith. In two others, James Beverly’s chapter on the
Unification Church and Charles Strohmer’s on the New Age, the topic is
nonexistent.
When it comes to specific suggestions about how to lead
movement members to faith in Jesus, the first essayist, Ron Rhodes, offers seven
clearly stated ways to reach Jehovah’s Witnesses. Essayists Bowman and Beckwith,
writing on the Latter-Day Saints and Baha’is, respectively, try but fall short.
The other writers do not address the issue.
A similar inconsistency also marks the supportive
materials: bibliography, glossary, and footnotes. Only one writer provides a
glossary, and one provides a bibliography that includes NRM Websites. Footnotes
vary from a single note to as many as 111. The only appendix or index is the
“List of Contributors.”
In a work so preoccupied with truth claims, I was comforted
to find that LaVonne Neff’s concluding chapter, “Evaluating New Religious
Movements,” includes a second priority, “how the group affects people’s lives.”
Her reference to Jesus’ teaching that “You shall know them by their fruits”
(Matthew 7:16) had been playing frequently in the back of my mind during my
reading. I never have been able to divorce truth claims from practices.
In announcing his purposes, Enroth raised questions for me
about how he understands the discipline known as Christian Apologetics. In
aspiring to his higher priority, outreach and evangelization, he writes, “It
[this book] is not aimed primarily at the Christian cult-watchers who are
engaged in commendable apologetic and educational ministries.” He closes his
introductory essay by quoting one of the key New Testament texts that supports
apologetics, I Peter 3:15: “Always be prepared to make a defense to anyone who
calls you to account for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and
reverence.”
I understand Christian Apologetics to be an indispensable
technique in efforts of evangelical outreach, especially to ones already
committed to an alternative teaching. Lecturing to his students at Union
Theological Seminary in New York City in the spring of 1953, Paul Tillich
defined the apologetic method as (a) establishing a common basis for meaningful
conversation with mutually acceptable ideas, (b) showing the defects of paganism
to pagans, and (3) showing that Christianity is the fulfillment of what is
longed for and desired in paganism, answering the existential question. (A
HISTORY OF CHRISTIAN THOUGHT, by Paul Tillich, Recorded and Edited by Peter H.
John 1953) That one of the writers is listed as the founder and director of a
Center for Biblical Apologetics further confused me.
If the writers had been more intentional in practicing the
apologetic method, they might have done a better job fulfilling Enroth’s second
and third purposes. InterVarsity and other evangelists would be well advised to
recognize the NRM tendency to an “ethic of holy deception” by which apologists
for some of the new movements are encouraged and justified to engage in
intentional fraud, lies, and misrepresentation to further the ends of the
movement. Such a technique of deception makes honest dialog difficult, if not
impossible.
Despite the inadequacies of A Guide to New Religions
Movements in meeting all of the editor’s goals, its publication says it
meets InterVarsity’s purposes. For my part, I shall be forever grateful for
Ronald Enroth’s contributions, especially his Churches That Abuse and
Recovery from Churches That Abuse. Many of my colleagues and I have
distributed lots of copies of those books!
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