Can Christian Faith Be a Science?

Tom: Thanks, Gary. You’re listening to Search the Scriptures Daily, a program in which we encourage everyone who desires to know God’s truth to look to God’s Word for all that is essential for salvation and living one’s life in a way that is pleasing to Him. In this opening segment of our program, we have been selecting topics from Dave Hunt’s out-of-print book, Beyond Seduction, and we have been discussing significant doctrines that have been distorted—in many cases they are taught to mean the opposite of what the Bible teaches. In weeks past, we have considered what the Bible teaches about self, in light of today’s self-love, self-esteem and self-worth concepts heavily promoted by so-called Christian psychologists and preached from many evangelical pulpits. Lately we have been discussing the biblical doctrine of faith and how it has been corrupted by those who have re-fashioned faith into an occult power, giving man the ability to create reality through his words and imagination, that is, by speaking and visualizing whatever he desires.

Now, today Dave, I would like to talk about some of the applications that have made many of these so-called faith teachers millionaires. First of all, what about faith related to healing and prosperity? And let’s start with the faith teachers’ connection to Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, its founder, and Phineas Quimby

Dave: Well, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby was a hypnotist, actually. He supposedly healed Mary Baker Eddy—she really took a lot of her stuff from him. He was a mesmerist.

Tom: Anton Mesmer, the one who began animal magnetism?

Dave: Right, animal magnetism. It was very popular in that day, and it did some amazing things. You could put a person under this hypnotic mesmerized spell, and they could tell you what was happening many miles away. Now, they didn’t enter into it for that reason, but they discovered it accidentally. So obviously, you had a person in an occult state where they were in touch with beings. It certainly wasn’t their own mind that was telling you what was going on miles away.

But anyway, Mary Baker Eddy, she actually plagiarized, took his ideas, set them down as her own. She wrote, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. So, she made the Bible scientific, which is a very dangerous thing to do, I mean, the Bible is not science. You don’t have to be a Christian to put chemicals together and get an expected reaction. You don’t have to be a Christian to fly an airplane, you follow the laws of aerodynamics. You don’t have to be Christian to tap into the energy in the atom. Well, then she wanted to make Christianity scientific so that all you had to do was follow these certain laws, certain principles, we have talked about that in the last couple of weeks. We talked about Pat Robertson, who wrote, The Secret Kingdom, that he said was based on eight laws, and one of them was the law of miracles, and he said God never does a miracle except by the law of miracles. Amazing! If it’s a miracle, it doesn’t follow laws, that’s the whole idea of a miracle. If it follows laws, it’s not a miracle. You wouldn’t say that science is miraculous; science is naturalistic. It follows the laws that God has built into His universe. So, anyone can do it, Christian or non-Christian.

So, this is what Mary Baker Eddy wanted to, she wanted to make Christianity scientific so that there would be certain principles of the mind, which, if you followed them, you could deny pain, you could deny reality. In fact, she didn’t believe in the resurrection because she didn’t believe in death. So, Jesus, obviously didn’t rise from the dead because He never died, so, it was a delusion.

I can remember, Tom, in my childhood days, coming up with a brilliant idea, because we knew a few Christian Scientists, and I said: “Well, I’m going to walk up behind this guy (he was a Christian Scientist), and I’ll just give him a kick in the rear, and he shouldn’t know that I did it, because he didn’t see me do it, because everything is in the mind!” Now, how could my…you know, well, it was ludicrous.

But I had some friends who were Christian Scientists and they built their lives on denying that you could ever get ill. I remember, I had an office as a young CPA, in the California Bank Bldg.— I remember it was owned by Louis B. Mayer, of Metro Goldwyn Mayer, and he used to come in a chauffeured limousine a could of times a week just to look it over, you know, and so forth. I used to bump into Elizabeth Taylor on the elevator—I think her psychiatrist was in there.

Tom: This is Beverly Hills.

Dave: Beverly Hills, the corner of Wilshire and Beverly drive, the most prestigious location. In those days, that was the highest building in Beverly Hills, five stories high, and I had an office on the 5th floor, and right across from me was a Christian Science practitioner—very strange lady, wasn’t there very often. I don’t recall that she had any customers, but she maintained her office, and what you were supposed to do was, you felt you were getting sick, you deny that there is such a thing as sickness—that’s a “figment of mortal mind.” We would call it “a figment of the imagination.” So, mortal mind comes up with these things. Well, how mortal minds got infected with these ideas, well, that was the Adam delusion that began way back there.

Tom: But Dave, Christian Science practitioners, again, somebody in Christian Science, if they feel a sickness coming on, or believe they are sick, as you said, they are not supposed to go to a doctor…

Dave: No.

Tom: They are supposed to have the practitioner come to their home. Now Dave, I have often wondered, with a broken arm, you know it’s one thing to have a psychosomatic…as they say, you know, well, what does that mean? But it’s one thing to believe that you are sick, or feel that something is coming on, but you’ve got your arm dangling there and you can’t—how do you deal with that?

Dave: We don’t talk about those things.

Tom: We do, but they don’t.

Dave: That’s’ kind of an unusual situation, and that a person obviously is under a very heavy delusion at that point. I had friends who were Christian Scientists, ex-Christian Scientists eventually. I remember one dear lady—you couldn’t talk about death. I think her husband died and nobody would go to the funeral—you didn’t hold a funeral, you know—I don’t know what you would do with a corpse, the laws of the land require that you bury this body, but no friend of hers would show up, and in fact, she lost all of her Christian Science friends because she had acknowledged that there was such a thing as death. It wasn’t the fault of something called disease, or sickness, or death, or rigor mortis setting in—it was this lady’s fault. She had acknowledged this unreality and had therefore created it, and in effect she had murdered her husband, but they don’t acknowledge murder, so…

Tom: Dave, did this work for Mary Baker Eddy? I mean, initially there was some healing through Phineas Quimby, but it seems to me, I remember that throughout her life she was continually sick.

Dave: She was continually sick, she was continually in pain, she was taking morphine, but denying it all the time.

Tom: Dave, just one other thing, —I heard that she blamed this on the prayers of Christians, that they came across as curses to keep her in this physical state.

Dave: Well, they shouldn’t have had any power. How could their prayers create negative reality and yet she couldn’t overcome it with positive reality? Well, Tom, that idea came into the church through Norman Vincent Peale.

Tom: Can I back you up before you go there?

Dave: All right.

Tom: After Mary Baker Eddy, it seems to me we go to New Thought. E.W. Kenyon certainly was the father of the modern positive confession, Word Faith teachers.

Dave: Yeah, E.W. Kenyon studied in the 1890s, at the Emerson School of Oratory in Boston, and of course the First Church of Christ Scientist, the mother church is in Boston, and they send out their sermons everywhere—and so, it was out of this Emerson School of Oratory…

Tom: This is Ralph Waldo Emerson of New Thought.

Dave: …right, that these ideas came, and some of the leaders came out of there. E.W. Kenyon wrote a number of books in which now he is trying to make Christian Science a little more Christian. He even talks about the blood of Christ, the death of Christ, and so forth, but now he has mixed it in with Christian Science.

Tom: Dave, I have a quote here from Charles S. Braden, church historian. He says “Three or four words pretty well identify New Thought and those kindred movements that derive from it: Health and Healing, Abundance or Prosperity, sometimes even Wealth and Happiness.” That’s what the word-faith, prosperity-healing movement is all about.

Dave: Spirits in Rebellion, is that the name of that book? Well, if you can create your own reality, Tom, by your positive confession, your positive thinking, then let’s have it really good. Of course, it became mixed up with a lot of other things as it moved more into mainstream evangelicalism, so that you had the idea that healing was in the atonement. Now these—Mary Baker Eddy would deny the reality of the death, burial, and resurrection of Christ, but she would say there isn’t any such thing as death or sickness, but these men would say, “Well, there is, but we can overcome that by basically adopting the principles of Christian Science.”

So, Kenneth Hagen would say: “Well, sometimes when I talk about these things, people accuse me of teaching Christian Science.” And well, indeed they would, because it sounds very much like Christian Science, so he plagiarized E.W. Kenyon. One of the ideas that came out of that, Kenyon wrote a book, What Happened Between the Cross and the Throne, and he said that the penalty for our sins was not paid on the cross, even though Jesus said, “It is finished,” and even though Jesus said, “Father, into thy hands I commit my Spirit,” and he said to the thief on the cross, “Today you will be with me in paradise,” somehow Jesus ended up in hell in the hands of Satan, where, I mean, you even had popular songs in the charismatic movement about Jesus being dragged up and down the corridors of hell, and the demons are celebrating because Jesus is dead. That’s just ridiculous, Tom, because, I mean, for a number of reasons: Number 1, Satan isn’t in hell yet. He hasn’t been confined to the lake of fire. Furthermore, he will not be the proprietor; he will not be tormenting people—he will be tormented himself.

So, the idea was that Satan beat Jesus mercilessly for three days and three nights in hell and that was where our redemption came from. Well, I think Satan is clever enough that he would beat Jesus not quite enough to really save us but to torture Him really well. Satan is not God’s minister of justice, and Tom, again, not getting back on a sore point, but that reminds me of the movie, The Passion of the Christ…

Tom: Which is being reissued.

Dave: Well, it depicts the Roman soldiers as God’s ministers of justice, and it is supposedly their strokes with the scourge and so forth—they are punishing Christ for the sins of the whole world, they are meting out God’s infinite justice—it isn’t true! “It pleased Yahweh to bruise Him,” so it was the bruising of God that Jesus endured for us, the punishment that we all deserve.

Then you got the idea that healing is in the atonement so that if you are a real Christian you should never be sick. Now Tom, I don’t know how people can follow these ideas. Number 1, they are not biblical; Number 2, they don’t make sense, because every person who is ever taught that is either dead already or they are dying, and there has never been anyone to demonstrate that spirit-filled Christians live any longer than anyone else. Now, you might have some arguments of Seventh-day Adventists, because of their diet, might live a little longer, I don’t know—I rather doubt that. Or that Mormons, because of their way of life live a little longer—No, I don’t think so. It just simply isn’t true!

Healing in the atonement? Yes, everything we have is in the atonement, but there is no guarantee that I will never get sick, or that I will never die. I mean, this world would really be over-populated if all the Christians didn’t die, and if that were the case, I mean, everybody would want to become a Christian so they wouldn’t die. It would not be a help, Tom, it would make this world a horrible place.

Anyway, that is a popular teaching in many charismatic, Pentecostal circles today—that if you really have the faith, you shouldn’t be sick. So, you can see the relationship then to Mary Baker Eddy, Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, Kenneth Hagen, and E.W. Kenyon: “to maintain my health, I confess my health. And I don’t ever say I am getting a cold, because that’s a negative confession. But if I happen to get sick, then I confess my healing,” and we are back to what we talked about last week, Tom, it’s power of the mind.

Tom: Sure, Dave, that’s the basis for magic, for witchcraft, not only is it not biblical; it doesn’t really work.

Dave: Well, actually, the witch doctors, the voodoo priests, they had something going for them that the positive-confession people, the Christian Scientists, don’t have, but I think they could fall into it. They have spirit guides, and they have made the sorcerer’s bargain with Mephistopheles, the little demon, they sold their soul to hell for power. You interviewed some time ago a former witch doctor.

Tom: Right, a shaman from the Yanomamo tribe in Venezuela.

Dave: Right. Well, I was just in Cuba, and was talking with some people who had quite

a bit of experience in Haiti, and there is some really powerful demonic stuff going on there. It’s a little more powerful than the positive-confession people, who mainly talk people into…I mean, they make them think they have been healed, but in fact, they are not really healed. But there are some real things that go on there that are really frightening in Haiti. I was talking with a man—in fact, this was not in Cuba, who spends a lot of time in Haiti, and he was recounting some of these things. Some of these places, you don’t go up there—the demonic power is so great. However, it cannot overcome the power of Christ.

Tom: Dave, it’s interesting, just lately—although it has always been this way—but lately voodoo, or vodun, has been declared the official state religion of Haiti. Dave, it’s sad, but it demonstrates…when you go to Haiti and see the poverty, you see all the things that have gone on, it has to do with its religious base.

Dave: They have sold their souls to Satan, and it has a grip on that country. But Tom, we could go to New Orleans—New Orleans is called, I remember, The National Reporter, or was it Our Sunday Visitor? that acknowledged that New Orleans is the most Catholic city in America, and it is also the one most heavily into vodun, and they go to there to worship the voodoo gods on the way to Mass, or on the way home from Mass. And, you know that in Haiti every voodoo ceremony begins with prayers to the Catholic saints. ou know what Santeria is—it came from Africa, and the slaves that were brought here, and they brought their witchcraft with them. Well, that was a no-no, so they gave their African gods new names—the names of the Catholic saints. So now you have a mixture between Catholicism and, basically, voodoo, or shamanism, witchcraft, and it is very powerful as well.

Tom: And Dave, it’s practiced by lawyers, college professors—this is not something for the poor, or that you just find in Harlem or some area of New York, Los Angeles, wherever it might be.

Dave: So now we have taken another subtle step, Tom. Instead of attributing the power to my mind, when I say there are some entities out there, and you get in league with them, you become their servant, they will make you powerful, they will heal you, they will make you wealthy, and so forth.

Tom: Dave, quoting Braden, as I did earlier, he adds another aspect besides healing. He talks about abundance or prosperity, sometimes even wealth or happiness. I have a quote here, Dave—male and female, in terms of the leaders of this movement, you have to recognize Kenneth Copeland and Gloria Copeland—Now, here’s a quote from Gloria Copeland: “You give one dollar for the gospel’s sake and a hundred dollars belongs to you, you give ten dollars and receive a thousand, you give a thousand and you receive a hundred thousand. I know that you can multiply but I want you to see it in black and white. Give one airplane and receive 100 times the value of the airplane; give one car and the return would furnish you a life time of cars. In short, Mark:10:30But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.
See All... is a very good deal.” Mark:10:30But he shall receive an hundredfold now in this time, houses, and brethren, and sisters, and mothers, and children, and lands, with persecutions; and in the world to come eternal life.
See All...—let me read it for our listeners: “But you shall receive a hundredfold now in this time, houses and brethren and sisters and mothers, and children and lands, with persecutions and in the world to come, eternal life.”

Dave: They left out the persecutions, of course.

Tom: Of course.

Dave: Tom, again, it’s ridiculous. The blindness of those who become their followers is only exceeded by their greed. That’s what blinds them to this. Oh, wait a minute, Kenneth Copeland or Gloria Copeland, if this is such a great deal, why are you asking people to give to your ministry? Why don’t you give to other people’s ministries? Give ten dollars, you get a thousand back; give a thousand dollars, you get a hundred thousand back. Now, you’ve got an airplane, Kenneth—maybe he has got more than that now—why don’t you give it away, and you will have a hundred airplanes, houses and lands—it’s not what it’s talking about that “I possess these things.”

Tom, everywhere I go around the world, and you experience the same, we are invited into homes. I was invited into homes in Cuba—these people have almost nothing, but they are generous with what they have. So, I have beds, houses, homes, all over the world that would welcome me. I don’t own them. These people want to own them. But we also have persecution, and some of these people are really persecuted. I was staying in a kind of a log cabin in Russia—these people were persecuted, and they didn’t have anything. I remember, Tom, Sunday dinner, the best they had, pickle soup—that was it. I think we may have had a little bit of bread with it.

You get persecutions, but the joy of the Lord is so great. I remember Richard Wurmbrand one of my dear friends, he told me that sometimes in prison he was in such pain, you couldn’t believe the pain from the torture, and yet he literally danced with joy because the joy of the Lord was so great that he belonged to Christ and that heaven is his home.

So, Tom, it’s tragic what is happening, because they are turning people—Jesus said, “Don’t lay up treasure on this earth, lay up treasure in heaven—where your treasure is, there your heart will be also.” And now we have people with the ambition of becoming wealthy, successful in this world.

And Tom, we don’t have time, but the next step is you move this over from Norman Vincent Peale to Robert Schuller, then to the success-motivation, then to the seeker-friendly churches, and so forth, and they are looking for success in this world, happiness in this world, and they have missed the teaching of Scripture and the call of the gospel and the reproach of the name of Christ and of the cross.

Tom: And in that process they have rejected THE faith once and for all delivered to the saints.