UNITY SCHOOL OF CHRISTIANITY
VERSUS
THE TRIUNE AND TRUE GOD
“The Father is Principle, the son is that Principle revealed
in a creative plan, the holy spirit is the executive power of
both father and son carrying out the creative plan.”
The Unity School commits one of the basic errors of
Christian Science in that it makes God the same as love, and in
the next breath reverses the proposition, making Love the same as
God. One can easily see from this that God thereby becomes
impersonal, which concept is the direct antithesis of all
biblical revelations concerning the person and nature of God.
“God is loving … God does not love anybody … God is the
love in everybody and everything … God is love … God
exercises none of his attributes except through the inner
consciousness of the universe and man.”
From the preceding quotation, we find that it is quite
evident that unity in no sense worships the personal God of the
bible, the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. It would be
possible to list many more perversions of the biblical concept of
God from Unity literature, but none speaks more clearly against
the doctrine of the triune God than does the abject pantheism of
the definition found in Unity’s Metaphysical Dictionary. One
cannot have been born into gods family by the holy spirit nor
redeemed by the blood of Christ unless he feels the utmost
revulsion in the depths of his soul for Unity’s complete
unconcern for truth as revealed in the foregoing quotations.
The father objectively loved the world, hence He is a person
capable of Love, not just love itself, as Unity would have us
believe. For Unity, then, the God of the Bible is an impersonal
“It”, a principle, Supreme intelligence, Divine mind, etc. In no
sense, they teach, is he a personable Being. It must be very
evident to even the most devoted Unity adherent that the voice of
the Lord speaks most clearly through the scripture, bearing
testimony to his personal being, as distinguished from Unity’s
pantheistic, unchristian concept of God. The attempts of the
Unity School to obscure this Biblical doctrine with a confusion
of terminology pales beside the triumphant witness of the law,
the prophets, and the Christ, that God is personal, that he has
countless times proclaimed in his word: “Look unto me, and be ye
saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none
else” (Isaiah 45:22). Biblically speaking, then, Unity fails in
its basic premise – a non- Christian definition of God which at
one time describes him as neuter, and at another time makes him
both masculine and feminine – an error shared, incidentally, by
Christian Science, from which the Fillmores came.
UNITY VERSUS THE BIBLE
THROUGHOUT THE WHOLE CONTENT OF UNITY’S VAST WAREHOUSE of
printed propaganda, literally thousands of times the Bible is
perverted and misinterpreted at direct variance with its own
language and context by numerous Unity propagandists who are
admittedly ignorant of the basic languages of the Bible and
therefore totally unqualified to engage in deep exegetical
translations of the original texts. No better illustration of
this can be given of this than the almost-sickening “Metaphysical
Interpretation” of Psalms 23, as recorded in the late Charles
Fillmore’s book Prosperity.
“The lord is my banker my credit is good. He maketh me to
lie down in the consciousness of omnipotent abundance. He giveth
me the key to his strongbox. He restoreth my faith in his riches.
He guideth me in the paths of prosperity for his name’s sake.
Yes, though I walk through the very shadow of debt, I shall fear
no evil, for thou art with me. Thy silver and Gold, they secure
me. Thou preparest a way for me in the presence of the collector;
thou fillest my wallet with plenty; my measure runneth over.
Surely goodness and plenty will follow me all the days of my
life; and I shall do business in the name of the lord forever.”
Any reasonably intelligent man cannot fail to see that this
interpretation by Fillmore is a direct and absolute perversion of
David’s Psalms, which stressed dependence upon a personal God,
not a glorified impersonal Banker. Space does not permit detailed
analysis of this cult’s further assaults upon God’s word. However
the interested reader may obtain a thorough study which is both
historical and theological, including a full and detailed
refutation of the Unity movement, in the book Kingdom of the
Cults.
UNITY VERSUS THE DEITY, PERSON AND WORK OF CHRIST
“We do most certainly accept the Divinity of Christ and of
Jesus Christ, and we believe most thoroughly in the work he did
for mankind.”
The average Christian (or non-Christian layman for that
matter) who pursues the literature of Unity would doubtless
accept the above statement at face value. Yet, like the ancient
Gnostics, Unity denies the complete and absolute deity of Jesus
of Nazareth and insists instead that he and the Christ, the
spiritual of Jesus, are two separate entities. The Bible says
that god so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son,
but the Bible here does not refer to Jesus of Nazareth, the outer
man; it refers to the Christ, the spiritual identity of Jesus,
whom he acknowledged in all his ways, and brought forth into his
outer, until even the flesh of his body was lifted up, purified,
Spiritualized, and redeemed. Thus he became Jesus Christ, the
word made flesh. And we are to follow into this perfect state and
become like him, for in each of us is the Christ, the only
begotten son. We can through Jesus Christ our redeemer and
example, bring forth the Christ within us, the true self of men,
and be made perfect even as our father in heaven is perfect, as
Jesus Christ commanded his followers to be.
The Bible declares the eternal word of God (John 1:1) became
man in Jesus of Nazareth (John 1:14) and that He never ceased to
be the Deity – that He was and ever shall be (Philippians 2:6-8;
Colossians 2:9; John 8:58; Revelation 1:8-18 etc.).
Jesus Christ was not Jesus and Christ as the Gnostics and
Unity cultists would have us believe; rather he was the God-Man,
two natures in one being, immutable forever.
The interested reader should know the following quoted
examples of repeated term-switching, all applied by them to man,
but Biblically only applied to Jesus Christ. “I am the Son of
God” (Matthew 27:43; John 10:36); “…the only begotten Son
dwelling in the bosom of the father” (John 1:18); “I am the
Christ of God” (Matthew 16:16); “I am the beloved son in whom the
father is well pleased” (Matthew 3:17;17:5) “of a truth I am the
son of God” (Matthew 27:54); “All that the father has is mine”
(John 16:15); “He who has seen me has seen the father” (John
14:9); “I and my father are one” (John 10:30).
The interested reader will also observe that Unity reduces
the Lord Jesus Christ to a mere man who had within him “the
perfect Christ idea,” and that “that same Christ idea is in every
man.” Thus it is taught by Unity that all men are miniature
christs, sharing in his nature and power. Should any doubt this
assertion, we quote Unity’s own literature to substantiate our
contention:
“Jesus was able to say, ‘All authority has been given to me
in heaven and on earth’ – we, too, can say truthfully that this
authority has been given to us.”
Unity cannot deny that these are its teachings and that the
word of God in its entirety stands arrayed against such outright
perversions of the true gospel.
UNITY VERSUS THE ATONEMENT AND RESURRECTION OF CHRIST
As Unity perverts numerous other Biblical doctrines, so does
it attack the great and true teachings of the sacrifice of Jesus
Christ. In the tradition of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science,
Unity first of all denies the very obvious reason for Christ’s
atonement in the first place by maintaining that sin is merely
“discordant belief” or “mortal mind,” not rebellion against the
laws of a Holy God. To quote the Unity literature once again,
which makes its stand very clear, “There is no sin, sickness, or
death.”
Opposed to this outright denial of sin’s existence we find
the plain declarations of Scripture. “All have sinned, and come
short of the glory of God” (Romans 3:23); “All unrighteousness is
sin” (1 John 5:17); “If we say that we have no sin, we deceive
ourselves, and the truth is not in us” (1 John 1:8).
How futile it is for Unity or any other cult to attempt to
escape from the paralyzing reality that “sin is the transgression
of the law,” and “the wages of sin is death” (1 John 3:4; Romans
6:23)! The Bible clearly teaches that the atonement of Christ was
the fulfillment of the old testament sacrifice of a lamb for the
sins of the people (Exodus 12:5-14), and that Christ as the “lamb
of God” (John 1:29) made full and complete payment for all sin,
forever, upon the cross of Calvary, “once”, and then seated
himself at the “right hand of the majesty on high” (Hebrews 1:3).
Through his holy and precious blood, therefore, we have peace
with God (Colossians 1:20), “and the blood of Jesus Christ
cleanseth us from all sin” (1 John 1:7).
In sharp contrast to this Scriptural picture of the
atonement, the Unity veil projects itself in unmistakable
language: “The atonement is the union of man with God the father,
in Christ. Stating it in terms of mind, we should say that the
atonement is the at-one-ment or agreement of reconciliation of
man’s mind with divine mind through the superconsciousness of
Christ mind.”
The original Hebrew and Greek languages of the Bible leave
no room for the chopping apart of syllables, such as Unity
practices on the English translations; therefore, linguistically
speaking, the entire view they promulgate, based on a purely
arbitrary dissection of the term atonement, is a monstrous face
hardly worthy of refutation.
Respecting the doctrine of the resurrection of our Lord, and
of all men for that matter, it should be noted that Unity
believes in and boldly teaches reincarnation in place of
resurrection, as this quotation from their statement of faith
amply demonstrates: “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. ‘This
corruptible must put on incorruption.'”
One may see in this thoroughly pagan view that Unity,
theosophy, Hinduism, Buddism, and countless other Oriental
philosophies go hand-in-hand down the primrose path of
reincarnation, which the Scriptures flatly contradict by
declaring for the Christian, “To be absent from the body [is] to
be present with the Lord” (2 Corinthians 5:8); and for the non-
Christian, “He that believeth not the Son shall not see life, but
the wrath of God abideth on him” (John 3:36). Innumerable
passages of Scripture belie the concept of reincarnation, which
brands Unity irrevocably as a dangerous non-Christian cult.
THE CHRISTIAN APPROACH
Many persons ask, “Conceding that the facts as you present
them are true and that Unity is a threat to the gospel of our
Lord, how can we best meet Unity’s challenge to our faith?”
To this question I propose the following plan of action to
be adopted when one deals with Unity adherence.
1. Insist that, whenever Biblical terms are used, you define
the words to mutual satisfaction. This is important because
followers of this cult repeatedly misuse common Scriptural terms
and thus mislead the unwary into believing that they agree with
the basic gospel, which they do not, as their literature clearly
shows.
2. Emphasize from the Scripture the personality of the living
God; show how incorrect it is to believe in an “It” when the
Bible teaches that God is our living, loving, heavenly Father,
and not just an impersonal principle. Remember, a principle can
not hear, think, see, speak, create, or save; but God does all
these things and much more because He is a Person (Genesis 1:1;
Exodus 3:14; 20:1).
3. Drive home the inescapable fact of human depravity (Romans
3:23), universal evil, and personal sin. Appeal to reason to show
that God loves sinners but hates sin. “If we say we have no sin
we deceive ourselves,” says John (1 John 1:8). Ask the Unity
adherent if he or she knows what can remove sin other than the
sacrifice on the Cross. Stress the desire of God to receive and
forgive the sinner (Acts 7:30,31) rather than eternally punish
him.
4. Finally, in a spirit of Christian love, tolerance, and
patience, stress the need for redemption from sin, the awful
penalty of rejection of the Cross, and the certain reward for
obedience. Never attempt to win the argument forcefully, do not
condemn unless on a Scriptural basis, and, last but not least,
stand firm, “reprove, exhort, with all long suffering and
doctrine,” “contend for the faith, and preach the word.” Always
remember that “this is good and acceptable in the sight of God
our Savior, who will have all men to be saved and to come into
the knowledge of the truth” (1 Timothy 2:3,4).
In these closing days of grace, it is the duty of the
Christian church to defend as never before the gospel of our Lord
and the doctrines of our common salvation. That God, who is rich
in merciful, may see fit to raise a powerful standard in this
needy field must be our earnest prayer.
Computers for Christ