History of the New Apostolic Reformation, part 2: Word of Faith
What is now known as “Word of Faith” or “Word-Faith” Christianity may be traced back to the early nineteenth-century United States. and the originators of New Thought. Common to all New Thought thinkers was the belief that the health of the body depends on the health of the mind. While not all New Thought exponents considered themselves Christian believers or ministers, they all presented a spiritual teaching. Writing in 1901, William James observed,
“There are various sects of this “New Thought,” …but their agreements are so profound that their differences may be neglected for my present purpose… It is a deliberately optimistic scheme of life, with both a speculative and a practical side…it must now be reckoned with as a genuine religious power.”
In this post, I’ll survey the main characters of the New Thought movement, and close by summarizing their contributions to what would become the NAR.
Phineas Parkhurst Quimby (1802-1866)
Quimby is often credited as the founder of New Thought, but it might be more accurate to call him its earliest well-known exponent, since he set out to found no school or church. While he published nothing during his lifetime apart from advertisements, he was well-known for his healing activity and the philosophy on which he based it; namely, that disease in the body originates in the mind, or thought. This was the basis of his healing practice. If he could correct the sufferer’s thinking, their symptoms would disappear. Unlike conventional physicians, Dr. P.P. Quimby, as he styled himself, cured not with medication, but by explanation.
He held that all illness is basically a matter of the mind and that it results from the patient’s mistaken beliefs. Hence, cure lies in discovering the truth. Although not religious in the orthodox sense, he believed he had rediscovered the healing methods of Jesus.
The saying “mind over matter” may appear to sum up Quimby’s beliefs, but in fact he went a step further, teaching that “mind and matter are the same.” Anyone who realizes this, he taught, would be able to heal just as Jesus did. Jesus was able to heal, not because He had a divine nature, but because He had found a “science” or truth accessible to anyone.
Mary Baker Eddy (1828-1910) and Christian Science
While Eddy was treated by Quimby, and adopted his basic assumptions that disease in the body results from mental error, she differed from him in founding a denomination, personally determining the details of its structure, and claiming to have discovered the fundamental principles of its doctrine by herself. Consequently, even though Christian Science is an outstanding example of New Thought, the promoters of the Word of Faith and, eventually, the New Apostolic Reformation, would not cite her as an inspiration. By packaging New Thought into a single, tightly controlled and "branded” system, Eddy lost the chance to have a lasting influence on those outside the official boundaries of Christian Science.
Charles Fillmore (1854-1948) and Unity
After Charles and his wife Myrtle attended New Thought classes in Kansas City, Missouri, and experienced healing of physical ailments, they co-founded Unity Church in 1889. Charles wrote numerous books and pamphlets promoting New Thought. His pamphlet, Jesus Christ Heals, affirms that Jesus could work miracles, not because He was a unique union of divine and human natures in a single Person, but because He understood universal principles of “mind” that are accessible to anyone. Not only was Christ not unique in this, but there is nothing that sets the Christian apart from non-Christians in the ability to work healings. Fillmore asserts that this teaching is supported by the Apostle Paul (1 Cor 3:16-17):
"Ye are a temple of God, and . . . the Spirit of God dwelleth in you," simply means that God dwells in us as our minds dwell in our bodies (Christian Healing).
According to Unity, Jesus was a “wayshower,” one of many in human history, an “elder brother” who shows “us our own potential as humans when we are fully aligned with God.”
Ralph Waldo Trine (1866-1958)
True to his name, Ralph Waldo Trine was influenced by the transcendentalism of Emerson, and by many others — Christ, Ruskin, Emmet Fox, Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Henry Drummond, the Buddha, et alii. In his 1897 work In Tune with the Infinite , he does not appeal to the authority of divine revelation as found in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures. Instead he relates that he has discovered a “science” or “universal law” of how “divine power” may flow into any man or woman, making them “god-men.” Trine approvingly quotes an anonymous knower:
The strength of your body, the strength of your mind, your success in business, and the pleasure your company brings others, depends on the nature of your thoughts. . . . In whatever mood you set your mind does your spirit receive of unseen substance in correspondence with that mood. It is as much a chemical law as a spiritual law. Chemistry is not confined to the elements we see. The elements we do not see with the physical eye outnumber ten thousand times those we do see. The Christ injunction, 'Do good to those who hate you,' is based on a scientific fact and a natural law.
For Trine, faith is not assent to divinely revealed propositions; rather, “Faith is nothing more nor less than the operation of the thought forces in the form of an earnest desire, coupled with expectation as to its fulfillment.”
Trine can speak of God as Father, but not of Jesus as the only-begotten Son. Anyone, baptized or not, who recognizes the immanent presence of the divine within himself lives as a “son of God” who may regard God as “Father.” Christ was not divine in any unique way. He ate and drank with sinners, not to call them to repentance or re-integrate them into God’s people, but simply because He, unlike the Pharisees, recognized God in them. He could do that because He had already recognized God in himself. Christ could work miracles, but so can anyone who recognizes God within himself or herself.1 This awareness of God as not only transcendent but also immanent leads to the ability to hear the “voice of God” which is nothing else but the “voice of intuition,” “the voice of conscience,” and the “voice of the soul.”2 This inner voice is “ the light that lighteth every man that cometh into the world” (cf. John 1:9).
Trine takes “mind over matter” quite literally, and also “scientifically.” He tells of a “well-known” scientist who was able to analyze the perspiration of several different men and then identify exactly which passion dominated each one: anger, guilt, fear, etc. (unfortunately, he omits the name of this well-known scientist). Trine describes the operation of the “placebo effect” and the power of suggestion as practiced by physicians. For him, these demonstrate the one and only principle of all effective medicine: the scientific “law” that governs our reality. True healing is brought about by the operation of life forces within; drugs, medicines, or surgery are artificial methods that can do nothing except remove obstructions to the operation of the inner life forces. Sickness, suffering, and disease are not a normal part of life with natural causes, but abnormal, the consequence of human beings violating the laws of the universe.3 Our words have power to heal, because our word has “creative power” to make manifest the unseen spirit-world in the visible, material world.
Trine both studied and taught at Emerson College of Oratory4 (now Emerson College) in Boston, where he overlapped for a short time with
E.W. Kenyon (1867–1948)
While Kenneth Hagin Sr. (1917-2003) made the Word of Faith famous, Kenyon was its true father. While he and Trine may have been at Emerson College at the same time, we can’t trace a direct line from Trine’s teaching to Kenyon’s. Kenyon obviously drew on basic principles of New Thought, but mixed them with his peculiar version of Christianity to produce an explicitly theistic system.
Kevin Scott Smith sums it up in his MA thesis:
“Kenyon…was largely responsible for assimilating mind-science into popular conservative Christianity…in his attempt to champion Christianity against competing metaphysical healing movements (New Thought, Unity, Christian Science), [he] …developed a ‘metaphysical mixture’ of fundamentalist faith-cure and transcendentalist mind-cure.”
Kenyon presents a dualistic vision of the cosmos, in which there is no distinction between moral evil and physical evil. “All disease is of the devil.” Kenyon is not only the progenitor of the Word of Faith movement, but the origin point of what would later be called “dominion theology,” the seeds of which were already present in the works of Trine. Kenyon teaches that Adam and Eve were not only the creation of God, but also His children. God created them because he was “lonely;” “the Father heart of the Creator God longed for sons and daughters” (The Father and His Family, epub edition by Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society, 2020, 18). In his original condition, man had authority over all creation. By disobeying God, Adam lost that dominion, because he had committed a felony: “The sin of Adam was the crime of High Treason. God had conferred upon him the legal authority to rule the Universe.” As a consequence of his crime, dominion and authority were handed over to Satan, who received “universal dominion over God’s creation” (TFHF 28). Adam’s descendants no longer had a “God-nature,” but a “sin-nature.” A new reality now plagued creation: disease. “Sickness and sin have the same origin” (Jesus the Healer, 62). Even God was bound by this legal problem.
Man ruled not only Satan, but he also ruled all the angelic beings. He was next in authority to God, and when he turned that vast Kingdom over into the hands of Satan, it was a legal transference. It was so legal that God was obliged to recognize its legality, and the only way that God could meet the issue was to send His Beloved Son down out of Heaven to suffer the penalty of Adam’s transgression… Satan, then, has legal rights that God must recognize (TFHF 45, 46)
Because Jesus was virginally conceived, He was without a sin-nature, and not subject to Satan like the rest of the human race. He had the same authority and dominion as Adam before the Fall; this is why He was able to work miracles (it also meant, Kenyon teaches, that His body could not die, but we must save that discussion for some other time). When Jesus rose from the dead, Satan was vanquished and lost his absolute dominion over creation. Who has it now? The believer. The believer now has authority and dominion, and a legal right to exercise them. If someone is healed of a physical disease or bad habit in the Name of Jesus, this is not a grace, but a routine legal transaction.
“They shall lay hands on the sick, and they shall recover.” Here it is not sufferance or pity, but Legal Authority. You have as much right to demand healing as you have to demand the cashing of a check at a bank where you have a deposit (TFHF 165).
Instead of asking God to heal the sick and accepting whatever happens next as the expression of the divine will, or just praying for the sick, the believer can command healing.
Kenyon’s teaching on the Church and “power” lives on today in those who say “Jesus did not die for a powerless Church.” It is the ancestor of what later will be called “power evangelism,” the concept that the preaching of the Gospel should ordinarily be accompanied by signs and wonders that constitute a “demonstration of the Holy Spirit and power.”
Of a piece with Kenyon’s teaching on authority and dominion is his famous teaching on “positive confession.” Word of Faith teachers have popularized this practice, sometimes with such catchphrases as “name it and claim it.” This teaching morphed into belief in the “law of attraction” popularized by Rhonda Byrnes’ book The Secret, and tv host Oprah Winfrey. Among NAR-influenced Christians, it takes the form of “declarations,” and the teaching that the word of the believer can “release” or “unleash” power to change material reality.
Kenyon’s teaching on “hearing God’s voice” underlies present-day emphasis on the “now” word or “rhema” word of God.
Conclusions
This post, Part Two (of four I hope) of the History of the New Apostolic Reformation, ran a bit longer than Part One. Before ending it, I want to point out a belief common to all the figures mentioned above: that Jesus was able to work miracles, not because He was the eternal, divine, Son of God, but because He had discovered a universal principle or “science” accessible to anyone or, in the case of Kenyon, because He possessed an impersonal “authority” no different from what was subsequently entrusted to “the believer” of today. Put a pin in that. We will return to it.
Some of you are no doubt saying “Wait! Why did he not mention John A. MacMillan’s work on The Authority of the Believer and the works based on it by Paul E. Billheimer?” You are absolutely right to do so, and I promise I will bring them up later, because they deserve their own post. Farewell for now, Faithful Reader, and please stay tuned for Part Three of this History: Jesus Revolution.
These miracles were performed not by those who were more than men, but by
those who through the recognition of their oneness with God became
God-men, so that the higher forces and powers worked through them.
“In the degree that we come into the recognition of our own true
selves, into the realization of the oneness of our life with the
Infinite Life, and in the degree that we open ourselves to this divine
inflow, does this voice of intuition, this voice of the soul, this
voice of God, speak clearly; and in the degree that we recognize,
listen to, and obey it, does it speak ever more clearly, until
by-and-by there comes the time when it is unerring, absolutely
unerring, in its guidance.”
Full, rich, and abounding health is the normal and the natural condition of life. Anything else is an abnormal condition, and abnormal conditions as a rule come through perversions. God never created sickness, suffering, and disease; they are man's own creations. They come through his violating the laws under which he lives.
Founded by the Unitarian minister Charles Wesley Emerson, a distant cousin of Ralph Waldo.
Drummond and Troward are very interesting as well.