To expand Litekeeper’s request, why don’t you write an essay for us that you merit an “A”?
Any one who puts Paul Tillich and Karl Barth in the same theological pigeonhole and labels it existentialist makes himself a laughingstock to anyone who has even the slightest acquaintance with Tillich and Barth. They belong to very different theological trajectories. Neither of which trajectory is the source of Johnny-authenticity post-modern.
It gets worse. What Macarthur writes here about “mysticism” is ludicrous. Precisely the anti-liberal, sola-Scriptura Neo-orthodox school of Barth and Brunner was SUSPICIOUS of “mysticism” which they thought depended on ontological continuity between the divine and the human that was unscriptural and which led to Hegelian divinization of the Zeitgeist. They wrote books attacking “mysticism.”
Now, the Christian mysticism they wrongly attacked had NOTHING to do with New Age mysticism that Macarthur attacks.
So, he delivers a two-fer here: first he attributes pro-mysticism views to one of the most anti-(Christian)-mystical movements (Neo-Orthodoxy) and he, not knowing better, thinks “mystical” = “mystical” = “mystica”—word association out of ignorance, again (as he does with “existential”).
The Christian mystical tradition works with a clear distinction between God and human and asserts a close union of the two without ontological confusion. It’s very consistent with the NT.
The Eastern mystical traditions are monist and the New Age mystics come out of that monism: “Hey, dude, it’s all One, you know, and like, hey, when we smoke up, man, it’s really cool and we’re all united with the One and we feel just real cool man.”
There’s a possible compatibility between that and Hegel’s “mystical” Zeitgeist, yes,
BUT THAT’S EXACTLY WHAT BARTH was reacting against. He and his buds, sadly, confused classic Christian mystical union (which is not monistic and keeps God/Christ distinct from but united via the Incarnation with each other) with Hegelian monism and rejected both.
Macarthur manages to toss them all into the same pot and the gumbo that he ends up with is not palatable.