The Unity School of Christianity
is a classic new age cult. It has the appearance of being Christian;
however, it holds pantheistic or new age beliefs at its core. Unity
was founded by Charles and Myrtle Fillmore in 1889, and was later
incorporated as a church in 1903 by the Unity Society of Practical
Christianity in Kansas City. Unity is best known by its publication
The Daily Word, used by many who are unaware of its doctrinal
positions.
History
The Unity School of Christianity
began as a quest for physical healing by its co-founder, Mary
Caroline Page, known as Myrtle, the wife of Charles Fillmore. Even
before their marriage in March of 1881 Myrtle had already developed
an eclectic theology. Charles had a background in Hinduism, Buddhism,
Rosicrucianism, and Theosophy.
They became students of
metaphysics and after taking some forty or more courses Myrtle
developed what was to become known as Practical Christianity. Myrtle
became a practitioner of "mental healing."
A
spiritual breakthrough came for Myrtle in 1886 when she attended a
meeting lead by Dr. E.B. Weeks, a noted metaphysician. Dr. Weeks made
a statement that would change Myrtle's understanding of herself and
set her on a new course of spiritual development. Myrtle was in a
state of mental and physical illness and had come to a point where
she was not helped by either medicine or physicians. Dr. Weeks'
statement that day brought her the healing she sought. She cherished
each word of the phrase "I am a child of God and therefore I do
not inherit sickness."
Myrtle believed that she had
discovered a great "spiritual truth" regarding healing,
i.e., by repeating this phrase as a positive affirmation she would be
healed. She began to offer her services to others and soon developed
a following of those seeking divine healing.
The Fillmores
were students of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a mental healer and
metaphysician. Myrtle was also a follower of Mary Baker Eddy, the
founder of Christian Science, who was likewise influenced by Quimby.
Unity, therefore, was birthed by the Fillmores, but its roots go back
to directly to Mary Baker Eddy and both directly and indirectly to
Phineas Quimby.
According to Charles Fillmore the name Unity
was adopted in 1895, denoting that Unity was devoted to the
spiritualization of all humanity and took the best from all
religions. He said the following regarding the eclectic belief system
of Unity:
We have studied many isms, many cults. People of
every religion under the sun claim that we either belong to them or
have borrowed the best part of our teaching from them. We have
borrowed the best from all religions, that is the reason we are
called Unity. . . . Unity is not a sect, not a separation of people
into an exclusive group of know-it-alls. Unity is the Truth that is
taught in all religions, simplified. . .so that anyone can understand
and apply it. Students of Unity do not find it necessary to sever
their church affiliations.
Thus many Christians adopt Unity's
teachings and bring those back into their churches, not identifying
their "new" teachings as Unity's and thereby compromising
the doctrinal integrity of the church.
Unity Doctrine and
Theology
God
God is not a personality but a spiritual
energy "force" or principle of love. Charles Fillmore in
his book, Jesus Christ Heals, says that "God is not loving. God
is love . . . from which is drawn forth all feeling, sympathy,
emotion, and all that goes to make up the joys of existence."
Fillmore goes on to say, "God does not love anybody or
anything. God is the love in everybody and everything. God exercises
none of His attributes except through the inner consciousness of the
universe and man." In other words, God is not a personal being
but an energy or force that expresses itself as a pantheistic love
that permeates all things.
H. Emilie Cady attempts to
reconcile the seemingly incongruous possibility that God can be both
personal and impersonal by her statement:
To the individual
consciousness God takes on personality, but as the creative
underlying cause of all things, He is principle, impersonal; as
expressed in each individual, He becomes personal to that one
personal, loving, all-forgiving Father-Mother.
It's obvious
that Unity's understanding of who God is has fallen victim to its own
syncretism. Unity, while attempting to identify itself as being
biblical, has offered too much on the "altar of tolerance"
and, thereby, has prostituted itself on the bed of other gods.
Donald Curtis, former minister at Unity Church of Dallas and
author of several Unity books, has this to say about God: "Every
one of us has planted within him a God-seed, and the business of life
is to see that this seed grows, unfolds, and expresses in our world."
Curtis goes on to say, "As this seed unfolds through the
development of the Christ consciousness, we fulfill our highest
objective in this world."
The ultimate goal of those who
follow Unity teaching is to recognize their "oneness" with
the "Force," thereby realizing their true self, the
God-Self. The god of Unity is an adaptation of Hindu belief regarding
the divine. God is a part of His creation. God is in all things.
Jesus the Christ
Unity also holds an unbiblical view
of Jesus. Donald Curtis agrees with Unity theology in that he
believes that Jesus the man is fundamentally different from Jesus the
Christ. Curtis says, "Christ is the universal principle of love
and wisdom. Christ is the only Son of God, but this only Son of God
lives in each one of us."
Curtis makes a primary
deviation from biblical understanding in that he holds the position
that Jesus is man and that Christ is divine consciousness. He states,
"Let us prepare ourself so that the Christ may be born in our
own consciousness!" In other words, our spirituality is based on
the discovery that the Christ is inherently within each one of us
regardless of our personal beliefs or affiliations.
Curtis
continues: "When we say 'Jesus the Christ,' we must realize that
Jesus represents man and Christ represents God in man." Unity
distorts Christ as the Messiah and renders Him as a "universal
principle of love" that resides in all of humanity simply
waiting to be discovered through self-consciousness.
Unity,
along with other New Age belief systems, espouses a mental and
spiritual 'transformation' that will raise our consciousness.
According to Curtis "there are levels of development through
which we grow toward full Christ-consciousness when we are truly
transformed, fully reborn."
The pantheistic nature of
Unity is expressed in Curtis' declaration that "we let our self
be ruled by the Christ within. We let the Christ teaching unfold in
and through us in this great new age. We know that this Christ
principle indwells every individual, no matter what his religious
beliefs may be. . . . We give thanks for the realization of the
mystical Christ, for the Christ consciousness alive in our life."
Unified Man
According to Donald Curtis, man's primary
purpose is to recognize that he is divine. He states: "There is
another teaching, however a higher teaching. It is that man has
always existed as part of God, and that this God-self, which is the
living Essence of everything, individualizes itself in man."
Curtis goes on to say that "within each of us there is a
great, wise, and beautiful Being. This is what we really are -- the
living Essence of everything. We are evolving constantly. We have
self-consciousness; now we must develop God-consciousness, a sense of
universal unity. And we must endeavor to manifest this God-
consciousness in our world to solve our apparent differences through
love and understanding."
Unity teaches evolution, both
physical and mental or spiritual. It teaches that mankind evolves
toward Godhood and that this collective God-consciousness will be
man's solution to all his problems. This teaching elevates mankind to
divinity, a position that is far from biblical teaching.
In
his book The Way of the Christ, Curtis says that "man is human,
but he is first of all divine." He adds that "as we
recognize and identify with the Christ within, we become one with the
universal Self-God."
This is nothing more than Hindu
philosophy dressed in Western garb: everything is a part of God and
God encompasses all that is, whether it be animate or inanimate. This
idea, pantheism, is widely held in the East and is being imported to
the United States via every means available to man.
Salvation
H. Emilie Cady in her book, Lessons in Truth, says that "man
originally lived consciously in the spiritual part of himself. He
fell by descending in his consciousness to the external or more
material part of himself." In other words, the fall of man was
from the spiritual realm to the physical and this fall has caused him
to suffer spiritual amnesia. Therefore man's dilemma is to reclaim
his place in the spiritual realm through right thinking.
Unity
teaches that as man discovers his innate divinity he continues to
raise his consciousness until he becomes fully God- realized. Once
man has achieved this state of understanding he recognizes that he is
in perfect oneness with God and is not in need of redemption but that
he is indeed the divine.
The unbiblical position regarding
salvation held by Unity is clearly seen in the Unity publication, The
Way to Salvation. This pamphlet states that "Jesus Christ was
not meant to be slain as a substitute for man; that is, to atone
vicariously for him. Each person must achieve at-one-ment with God,
by letting the Christ Spirit within him resurrect his soul into
Christ perfection."
Curtis says that "more than
ever, we need to become quiet and focus upon the inner. We need to be
still and to know that the presence within is God." When one
becomes fully aware of this divine presence salvation is realized
because the individual no longer has a sense of lostness.
Reincarnation
Unity teaches that the individual lives
a number of lifetimes within one existence. Dr. Donald Curtis of the
Unity Church of Dallas writes that "it isn't so important that
we make it in this particular lifetime, as it is to realize that we
do make it, because there is only one lifetime and it goes on
forever."
Article 22 of the Unity Statement of Faith
states, "we believe that the dissolution of spirit, soul and
body, caused by death, is annulled by rebirth of the same spirit and
soul in another body here on earth. We believe the repeated
incarnations of man to be a merciful provision of our loving Father
to the end that all may have opportunity to attain immortality
through regeneration, as did Jesus."
Charles Fillmore
rejected the standard understanding of reincarnation as described by
the Hindu or the Buddhist. He could not accept their respective
teachings regarding the Law of Karma or the Transmigration of the
soul. For him reincarnation was a much more simple way for God to
offer man a second chance at perfection.
This teaching of
reincarnation is perhaps the most destructive of all the false
teachings of Unity. The belief in reincarnation undercuts the primary
tenets of the gospel. One would have to deny the deity of our Lord,
His physical resurrection, and His Second Coming to accept the error
of Charles and Myrtle Fillmore.
Reincarnation undercuts
Christian doctrine in three ways. First, it assumes that God is
impersonal and is therefore unknowable. Second, reincarnation
denigrates the Atonement of Christ, and third, it denies the fact
that Jesus physically resurrected from the dead. We need to look at
each of these more closely.
The Bible does not offer any
evidence to support these assumptions. On the contrary, the Bible
clearly teaches that God is a personal Being and that He is knowable.
Isaiah 43:25 and Jeremiah 31:20 tell us that God remembers; Exodus
3:12 and Matthew 3:17 say that God speaks; Genesis 1:1 and 6:5 along
with Exodus 2:24 say that God sees, hears and creates. Elsewhere the
Bible tells us that God is a personal Spirit (John 4:24 and Hebrews
1:3). Since God is a personal Being, He has a will (Matthew 6:10,
Hebrews 10:7-9 and 1 John 2:17). Because God has an expressed will,
He will also judge His creation (Ezekiel 18:30 and 34:20, and also 2
Corinthians 5:10).
Unity attempts to denigrate the Atonement
of Christ in order to build a better case for reincarnation; however,
the Atonement delivers man from the cyclical concept of rebirth.
Reincarnation does not offer us either peace or hope. The Atonement
offers us peace because we do not have to rely on our own
righteousness, and it offers us hope because of what Jesus did on the
cross. Jesus has dealt with our sin on the cross and our response is
to simply accept His work on our behalf.
Likewise, Unity
cannot accept a physical resurrection for our Lord. Unity holds that
the disciples expected Jesus to be reincarnated, not resurrected. The
biblical claims that Jesus rose physically, appeared to and was
recognized by many, was physically touched by some, and ate fish with
others are troublesome and must be explained away or spiritualized
into meaninglessness if Unity is to seem plausible. (See Luke 24:16
and 31.)
Conclusion
The Unity School of Christianity
is recognized as a cult because it exhibits several cultic
characteristics. One such characteristic is syncretism. Syncretism is
the attempt to combine or reconcile differing beliefs, usually by
taking the most attractive features from several sources and
combining them into a something new. Unity has taken what some would
call "the best qualities" of various religious view points
and combined them into a new and more acceptable faith.
Another
characteristic of cults that is true of Unity is the denial of the
biblical doctrine of salvation by faith in Christ's person and His
finished work on the cross. In Unity, salvation comes by recognizing
our inherent divinity and our oneness with God.
Unity is, in
my opinion, the most deceptive of the cultic groups that use the word
Christian in their name. Unity's distinction is that the follower of
its teaching is encouraged to remain in his respective church home
whether it be Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, or whatever. The
followers of Unity considers their denominational affiliation as a
mission field where they can subtly disseminate their ideas.
I
recall that when I first became a believer and was attending a
Methodist church, there was a particular woman in the church who
often greeted me with the phrase, "Greetings to your higher
self." It was a peculiar way to greet someone, yet I never asked
her what she meant by it. It was several years later when I became a
student of the cults that I understood the significance of her
greeting. She was a follower of Unity's teachings, that each of us
has the divine residing within us and that the higher self is God.
According to Charles Fillmore, Unity is the blending of
various religions and belief systems into one unified system of
thought. The Fillmores introduced beliefs into their system that had
been commonplace in Eastern religions and occult practices.
The
Fillmores introduced a pantheistic view of God to their followers and
saw God as being both male and female. God is seen as an energy or
force that resides in all things both animate and inanimate. Likewise
God is seen as being impersonal and a part of His creation.
Jesus
is a principle of "love" that brings oneness to all things.
This Christ principle is present within each one of us and ultimately
unifies us in a salvation experience.
Unity teaches that
man's primary problem is that he has spiritual amnesia and needs to
reconnect with his destiny. He needs to regain the realization that
he is evolving toward divinity.
Salvation, according to
Unity, comes by recognizing one's divine nature. Unity does not
recognize the Atonement of Christ but rather seeks what Eastern
mystics refer to as at-one-ment or realizing oneness with the divine
on a spiritual level.
Since Unity does not recognize the work
of Christ on the cross (the Atonement), but rather accepts evolution
as a positive ingredient in man's spirituality, it is only logical
that they embrace reincarnation as a valid system for spiritual
enlightenment. As you can see, then Unity is not based on biblical
teaching. To the contrary, it is heavily influenced by Eastern
thought and belief. Unity is a classic New Age cult and is not
Christian in any aspect of its doctrine or teaching.
WITNESS
TO THE WORD MENU
MUSELTOF
COUNTERCULT AND APOLOGETICS
UK APOLOGETICS
Copyright 1995 Probe Ministries.
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