WHAT DID E. W. KENYON THINK OF THE
METAPHYSICAL CULTS?

The following three articles appeared in E.W Kenyon's ministry publication The Living Message in 1929. At that time Kenyon was pastoring in Los Angeles. Los Angeles was also the location of many metaphysical cults and their churches. Kenyon was quite burdened for all the people who were being deceived by these cults. He saw through the façade of their Biblical language to the true nature of these cults. He addresses the beliefs of Unity and Christian Science and shows the heretical nature of these doctrines. Kenyon published the first two of the following articles as tracts and he encouraged his readers to distribute them widely.

In the third article Kenyon further addresses the issue of the false Jesus of the cults and also addresses Unitarianism and Modernism. He cites these latter two errors as the companions of the metaphysical cults in the demonic attack against the true Church and Biblical Christianity.

Anyone familiar with the accusations that have been voiced against Kenyon - that he was in some way sympathetic to the metaphysical cults and imported their ideas into his teachings - will see the utter absurdity of these accusations by reading the following articles. E.W. Kenyon was a bitter opponent of these soul-destroying cults throughout his entire ministry. It might be noted that Kenyon wrote these articles after over 30 years of ministry. Kenyon's critics have speculated that he was more orthodox in his early days but was influenced by the metaphysical cults in his later years. This is clearly not the case.

The Church is passing through a crisis of which the great body of Christian people are ignorant.

There is a wide-spread theory, sponsored by enthusiastic propagandists that is absolutely destroying the church; that is capturing many of the finest intellects of the day.

The wide-spread soul hunger of the masses, caused by a materialistic age that does not satisfy, and by the uncovering of the lust period sponsored by the movies and the pernicious magazines, has destroyed all that is holy and best in society.

When one out of every five of the marriages go into the divorce courts, and the other hundreds of thousands are knocking at the doors for admittance, it challenges the thoughtful lovers of humanity.

This new propaganda holds as its basic principle that God is not a person.

Let me quote from "Unity," their organ of propaganda:

"Child-like, untrained minds say 'God is a personal being.' The statement that God is a principle chills them and in terror they cry out, 'They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid Him.'

"Broader and more learned minds are always cramped by the thought of God as a person, for personality limits as to place and time. God is not a being, or a person having life, intelligence, love or power. God is that invisible, intangible, but very real something we call life; God is perfect love and infinite power. God is the total of these, the total of all good, whether manifested or unexpressed.

God is the name we give to that unchangeable, inexorable, principle at the source of all existence. To the individual consciousness, God takes on personality, but as the creative, under-lying cause of all things. He is principle, impersonal; as expressed in each individual, He becomes personal to that one - a personal, loving, all-forgiving Father-Mother. All that any human soul can ever need or desire is the infinite Father-principle, the great reservoir of unexpressed good. There is no limit to the Source of our being, or to His willingness to manifest more of Himself through us, when we are willing to do His will."

Now, IS God is person or is He a principle?

Principles are evolved by personalities.

A person is a spirit with a soul; he may or may not have a physical body.

His soul is composed of intellect, sensibilities and will.

What we call "conscience" is the voice of the spirit seeking to articulate its purposes so that they are intelligible to the soul.

Now the great principle that underlies the laws of justice and righteousness are principles evolved through these faculties of the soul, such as reason, love and volition.

The great principle that underlies the constitution of the United States is evolved through reason and love.

There are no principles where there are no personalities..

Can a principle be separated from the person whose personality produced it?

You answer "No."

Can a principle love or hate?

Love is an attribute of a person or personality.

God is a person; consequently God can love.

Man is a person; consequently man can love.

Now, if God is not a person, He cannot have an attribute.

If God is not a person He cannot have wisdom; He cannot have power; a principle has no power when disassociated from a human being.

A principle is something evolved by a person.

If you make a principle your god, then you are your own god.

Let me state it again:

If I evolve a principle, a great principle that underlies a system of thought, the moment that I evolve that principle, according to Unity's theory, that principle becomes God.

I bow down to that principle and call it "God"; "My Father-God"; "My Mother-God."

There cannot be wisdom, power or love without a personality to evolve them.

In other words, there must be a person out of which they must proceed.

"Unity" says that God is not a person with love, life and power; yet at the same time they say the God is a principle and that this principle has these attributes.

Man is not a creative being; he cannot create.

Man can discover; he can unite gasses, metals and oils; he can plant and fuse; he can build; he can encourage life in the plant and animal and human world, to produce a higher and better life; but, he cannot create.

He can take existing metals and make a new metal; he can take existing gasses and make a new gas; he can take existing chemicals and make a new chemical, but he must have the metal, the gas and the chemical to begin with.

Man cannot make, independent of what has already been created, one new thing, unless that new thing is a theoretical god.

He has to use what was before.

He cannot say, "let there be" and bring forth a new metal, unknown before, and without relationship to any other metal.

IF man has in him the creative principle (and the theories of Unity and Christian Science declare that he has), if… IF God is only a principle and resides in the "I"; the spirit "me"; the "I am" of me; then this "I am" of me can create worlds and things; and this "I am" of me is able to say "let there be" and there will be.

This "I am" - this principle - could go on creating new metals, new oils, new gasses, new trees, new worlds, and new humans.

If this god is life - the life that permeates where life exists, and is not a person; and, as they say, has not life, love or power; then we have the strangest conundrum to unravel.

In one breath they declare that God is not a person that can love and has life and power; the next moment they claim that every person is God - has God within them.

They have another statement that all life is God and God is all good.

They say I can pray to the God on the inside of me that has neither personality, being, will or substance, and that that God will hear my prayer and give me strength and bring me money!

I am to call that impersonal principle "Father-Mother-God."

In the opening of their magazine, they declare:

"We believe in Christ Jesus, the Son of God made manifest in Jesus of Nazareth, who overcame death, and who is now with us in His perfect body as the Way-shower in regeneration for all men.

"We believe in the atonement that Jesus reestablished between God and man and that through Jesus we can regain our original estate as sons of God.

"We believe that Jesus Christ, the Son of God, is alive and in the world today.

"We believe that Jehovah, God, is incarnate in Jesus Christ and that ALL men may attain the Christ perfection by living the righteous life. 'Ye therefore shall be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.'

"We believe that through conscious union with Jesus in the regeneration, man can transform his body and make it perpetually healthy, therefore immortal, and that we can attain eternal life in this way and in no other way.

"We believe in the 'second coming' of Jesus Christ is now being fulfilled, and that His spirit is quickening the whole world."

Now, in the light of what they declare about God, that He is not a person and what they declare about Jesus Christ and His metaphysical resurrection, these declarations are absolutely misleading.

Their declarations of belief in the substitutionary sacrifice of Jesus are absolutely misleading.

They have used the language of the Bible to express an error more deadly to faith and to life than has ever been expressed before in words.

They have no heaven beyond the grave.

In the place of that they offer you a beautiful theory.

They take the attributes of God and apply them to the "I, My, and Me" of self.

They take the language of the Bible to clothe that which the Bible absolutely refutes from Genesis 1:1 to the close of Revelation.

God IS a person.

"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

No principle can create the heavens, and no principle can create the earth.

No person, without intelligence, without brain, without reason, could design a Universe like this one.

I want to ask this question: IF God is but a principle, and that principle is evolved in man, where was God before man came into being? Man had to come into being before there could be a creation.

Where was man when the "principle" that he evolved from his own personality said, "Let there be light"; "Let there be an earth; Let there be sun, moon and stars in the heavens."

On what did this wonder-man stand when he issued these commands?

What creative force created this all-principle that is evolved in man?

This religion is in the final analysis, simple and pure worship of "SELF". >

It is exalting man to the place of God.

Mark you this:

As man cannot create - only plant and amalgamate already created things - so, a theory that is based upon the premises that "Unity" stands upon cannot receive from their god anything that a man cannot do.

Their god is limited on the four sides by man.

God is not a person; He is not omnipotent; He is not omniscient; He is not the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ that has a home in which there are many mansions - He is but a principle.

Being but a principle, that principle has evolved from a personality and that personality is in man.

Then the god that man has created is no greater than himself, for man could not create a god that could do more than he can do.

Unity would lead us to disclaim that God was a person and that Jesus Christ was a person, and in so doing I give up the reality and the certainty of my Father loving me, and of Jesus Christ loving me.

I give up the reality of an actual person and in the place of it I put a principle and clothe that principle with all that the human language is capable of, and it is still but a principle.

It is simply a principle evolved from a human being and is no greater than its source.

No wonder we cry: "They have taken away my Lord and I know not where they have laid him."

I can tell you where He is hidden - within the empty verbage of a senseless theory that robs God of His glory, and man of his redemption.

A person only can create; a person only, can have love; a person only, can have wisdom.

There can be no Father-God, if there is no person.

We believe that He is a person.

We believe that all that personality involves is enwrapped in this Father-God who loved us and gave His Son to die for us.

God is the source of every form of life in whatever realm that life may be discovered.

He gives life to the earth so that it has within it, life to impart to the vegetable creation.

He gives individual life to the plants.

He gives life to the chemical realm.

He gives a higher form of life to the animal realm and a still higher form of life to the human realm.

We have come to believe that electricity is a form of life.

Call it, if you wish, mechanical life, because of its peculiar relationship to mechanics.

Yet it pervades the atmosphere.

How far it reaches beyond our atmosphere no one knows, but it is a form of life.

Man has learned how, by the friction of chemicals to produce it; yet it is in the air and earth and water already produced.

Man has simply discovered ways and means of bringing it to where he can control it and harness it and make it run his mills, carry his messages, warm his home or light his streets and houses.

God is not electricity; God is not life; but God has life.

The Scripture declares that God is love.

That is not an attribute - but is God's nature; God's being.

God is the fountain and all life heads up or fountains in His personality.

He is a spirit.

He is A spirit and IS spirit.

A spirit is a being that can live independently of a physical body.

He can live in a physical body or out of a physical body.

He has intellect, sensibilities and will.

The great Father of spirits, which God is called is the great Creator spirit of the Universe.

When God created man in His own image and likeness, He made him a spirit being.

He gave Him a human body.

Jesus in His incarnation represents to us the possibilities of an uninterrupted communion and fellowship with God.

By the redemption that is in Christ man is to become united with God.

You see when God created man He created a being to whom He could reveal Himself and one that could become a partaker of His nature and so enter into His realm; into His family; into the fulness of His life.

When we are born again, we are born into the family of God; into His realm; into His fellowship where He can communicate His will to us and work in us and through us His love.

Man becomes the medium, if we can use that expression safely, through which God makes contact with needy souls about us.

Jesus is the medium between God and man and through Jesus Christ man can come into vital contact with God.

This spiritual life into which we are born and which becomes a part of us, surrounds us.

We live and move and have our spiritual being in it.

It impregnates the atmosphere where a number of those who have been born again congregate.

Take the morning worship in our church.

When these like-minded men and women gather, who have been led into the deep truths of communion with God the Father and have come to believe in the presence and power and love of the Father - as we gather here, about the Christ, the very air becomes saturated, impregnated with His presence.

We are conscious of it.

We feel it.

The sick in spirit, the sick in soul and the sick in body are healed simply by sitting in His presence and breathing in the atmosphere impregnated with Himself. This is not a theory.

This is a divine and holy Reality.

You can say, as a child of God, "I am now breathing into my body, His life."

Your faith in the Word makes the contact between you and your Father and His life. His healing life comes pouring into your body, soul and spirit, refreshing your whole being.

The Scriptures speak of our walking in Him; walking in love.

We do. We have been translated out of the kingdom of darkness into the kingdom of the Son of His love.

We live in this realm, or sphere.

In Ephesians it is called "The Heavenlies".

Now in the heavenlies where we as believers live and hold our conversation, His life impregnates our very flesh, and renews it and fills it with quietness, health and rest.

That great Scripture, "Greater is He that is in me than he that is in the world" passes out of the theory realm into the realm of Reality.

He makes my body, my very being - His home.

This miracle life in me sets me free from the limitations of pure human contacts.

By faith, He lives and works in me; His eternal, omnipotent life is health and life and liberty in me.

He is about me as the atmosphere; He is in me; He breathes His very life into my blood.

This frees my blood from the poisons that are in the air.

I live in God; I walk in God; He lives and walks in me.

His love and grace fills all the space that surrounds me.

I feed upon His Word; my spirit nature revels in the life of the Word.

The Word is the eternal Logos; the very Christ Himself, enwrapped, if you please, in the human language.

But, to the spiritual mind it is life and health and peace.

The God who made the world, with its beauty in every flower, in every drop of rain, in every cloud, in every ray of light, intended that that beauty, the beauty of His life should fill us with beauty.

The very spheres swing to the beat of rhythmic time.

There is a music made by the whirling suns that fill the Universe.

That music - that rhythm is the rhythm of the perfection - of the fulness of God.

That music fills the spirit - enchants the soul as we live and walk in unison with the heart-throbs of love.

The beauty of nature is the life of God manifest.

Life is ever lovely.

Life proceeds from God.

The spirit life is above all other kinds of life, so it has a beauty all its own, far surpassing the beauty of roses or of the sunset or of the glory of the sunlight on mountains and valleys.

It has a higher order of music than the music of the planets or the music of life in nature.

It is the music of the spirit of God and so we live and walk and have our being in the great Person; our God and Father; the Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, in whom we have our redemption from all our sin.

"For if he that cometh preacheth another Jesus whom we did not preach, or if you receive a different spirit which ye did not receive, or a different gospel which ye did not accept, ye do well to bear with him" (2 Cor. 11:4)

What Jesus do you worship?

Perhaps it would be better to say, "Which Jesus do you worship?"

The Jesus of the various cults has very little resemblance to the Jesus of the apostle Paul. They spell the name as Paul spelled it.

I think it might be well for us for a few moments to look at the different gospels that are preached and the different spirits that are received and the different Jesus's who are preached.

There is the Jesus of Unity, who did not have a pre-existence as a person; who was not conceived of the Holy Spirit, though he was born of the virgin Mary.

He did not die an actual physical death, and his soul and spirit did not go into the place of anguish and suffering for our sins.

He didn't satisfy the claims of Justice and did not set man right with God on the ground of Justice.

He is not the Lord Jesus Christ of whom Paul tells us.

He is the metaphysical Jesus.

Here is a statement by Fillmore [a Unity author]: "It is quite evident that Jesus did not die on the cross as other persons die. It is therefore not true that Jesus died. He appeared to die. His friends thought that he actually lost His body, and they came to the tomb to embalm it, but it was not there."

This is another Jesus!

It is not our sin-substitute; not the One Who died and rose again and with His physical body ascended into heaven and sat down at the right hand of God as our Mediator, Advocate and Intercessor.

No! Unity tells us that God is not "a being or a person having life, intelligence or power."

But "God is that invisible, intangible, but very real something that we call 'life'."

God, not being a person, not having live, intelligence, love, or power is simply a Principle.

Jesus was a manifestation of it - of that principle.

Jesus is a metaphysical, philosophical creation to them, -- to me he is the very Son of God conceived of the Holy Spirit, born of the Virgin, lived, suffered, died and paid the penalty of our transgressions; met Satan in mortal combat in the lower regions, conquered him, stripped him of his power and authority, and rose from the dead with the keys of death and Hades in His hands.

The Jesus of Christian Science is practically identical with the Jesus of Unity. They have emasculated Him.

They have taken away my Lord, and have given me a philosophical lithograph in His place.

The Unitarian has a Jesus, but He is not the Jesus of John, or Matthew or Mark or Luke.

He is not the Jesus of the apostle Paul.

He is the Jesus of the unregenerated human mind.

They begat him in their council.

They created their Jesus themselves.

He had no beginning and when Unitarianism is done there will be no future for their Jesus.

He is but the product of their philosophies.

The Jesus of Modernism is a sad caricature of the Jesus whom Paul knew.

He has no power to save men.

His name has no influence in heaven.

He was born in the study of a skeptic.

He was reared in the hostile atmosphere of a theological seminary.

He died, but never rose again.

The great messages of the real Jesus have been ignored.

I want the Jesus of Bethlehem; of Calvary; of Olivet.

I want the Jesus conceived of the Holy Spirit in the womb of the Virgin, rather than the Jesus conceived in the philosophical and darkened mind of the skeptic; or the apostate atmosphere of a theological seminary.

John's Jesus was the eternal Logos manifested in the flesh.

There is ever about Jesus as seen in the gospel of John the radiant atmosphere of Deity.

His pre-existence is a continuous confession.

His knowledge of the past experiences with the Father is reiterated.

He is the eternal Son on every page of that wonderful gospel.

No wonder the Modernists, Unitarians and skeptics have challenged that book!

If I were a skeptic, that book would be my first bulwark to destroy.

The Gospel of John is the very spring and foundation of orthodoxy.

The Jesus of the Gospel of John introduces to us for the first time the great Father-God.

He declares that Jesus came to introduce the Father.

All through the gospel the Father-God stands to the front.

But the Jesus of Paul has challenged the attention of the ages.

Paul did not see Jesus in the flesh.

Paul seldom refers to Jesus' thirty-three years of incarnate life.

The Jesus of Paul is seated at the right hand of God, having died for our sins according to the Word and after three days was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, ascended into the heavens and sat down at the right hand of the Father, having wrought a perfect redemption for man.

Paul sees Him now as the Mediator between God and man.

He sees Him as the Intercessor ever praying for us.

He sees Him as the great Advocate of the Church.

He sees him as Lord and head of the triumphant body of the church.

Paul always sees Him coming again in the glory and majesty.

Paul sees Him as our perfect redemption; as our perfect redemption; as our perfect righteousness; as our peace; our life.

He sees Him uniting all things in Himself; the head of the body; the triumphant, risen Lord.

I want to see Him only as Paul and John saw Him.

His three years of ministry is a source of great comfort, but His death and resurrection is my redemption.

John, Matthew, Mark, and the writer of the third gospel, Luke, saw Him as the great Healer of Israel.

I see Him as the Healer of the nations.

He is my Lord; He is my life; He is my strength; He is my hope; He is my rest; He is my peace; He is my refuge; yea, He is my all and all.

Which Jesus do you follow?