CHRISTIAN SCIENCE, THE NEW AGE, AND DOREEN VIRTUE

 

In Deceived No More: How Jesus Led Me out of the New Age and into His Word, Doreen Virtue writes about her Christian Science upbringing, her life as a popular New Age writer, and her deliverance through Jesus:

·       This is my story of learning to trust God after nearly wasting a lifetime being independent and willful. I stopped trying to predict and control the future and instead learned to lean on God’s sovereignty. Jesus saved my soul from deception and opened my eyes to His truth. I’m grieved over what I experienced and did during my time as a New Age teacher. I’m a wretched sinner, as you’ll read in these pages. My life was a train wreck because I previously followed New Age principles.

Virtue had become a New Age celebrity:

·       I gave sold-out workshops around the world and appeared on countless television programs, including Oprah, The View, CNN, Richard and Judy (UK), and more. Celebrities freely promoted my products. I don’t say all of that to boast, but to give glory to God for His miracle in saving me out of extreme depths of deception.

Embracing the New Age required Virtue to only take one baby-step forward from the religion with which she had been raised, but she jumped into it with both legs:

·       I’d followed all the New Age prescriptions for healthy, happy living: I’d done yoga for twenty years, cleared my chakras, carefully spoken only positive words, avoided signing contracts during Mercury retrograde, saged and feng shuied my home, consulted my angel cards, said positive affirmations, meditated daily, and cleared my crystals during the full moon.

Virtue now regrets her past beliefs and commitments, which had once taken her captive. She explains:

·       I was born and raised in a false religion (Christian Science), which led me into the New Age. Christian Science was invented by the false prophet Mary Baker Eddy and her teacher, Phineas Quimby. Eddy heretically declared that she’d received personal revelation of the Bible’s true meaning; then she proceeded to shred the gospel. Christian Science belongs to a movement called “New Thought.” The Religious Science and Unity Church organizations also belong to the movement. New Thought is a cousin to New Age teachings, with common roots and beliefs. It’s also related to the “prosperity gospel.”

How is Christian Science like the prosperity gospel? Virtue explains that:

·       The whole focus of our religion was to learn how to spiritually heal disease and injuries. It was like the prosperity gospel, except that instead of praying to acquire wealth, we used formulaic prayers to acquire health.

In both cases, the emphasis is upon our power instead of God’s power:

·       But the Christian Science formula, like the prosperity gospel, puts the focus on our own human power instead of God’s power. It teaches that if you have enough faith and can get your mind above the physical plane, then your health will automatically shift back to being in God’s image of perfect, whole, and complete. If you didn’t heal, it meant that your mind was holding a negative or “mortal mind” belief. You didn’t have enough faith.

Virtue maintains that Christian Science hardly has anything to do with Christianity. The founder:

·       Mary Baker Eddy was practiced as a spiritualist, clairvoyant, and medium, according to her biographers, who have recorded that she would go into trance states and deliver messages from the biblical apostles, Abraham Lincoln, and Jesus Christ.

Consequently, her teachings denied the Gospel:

·       I was also taught that there was no crucifixion, no devil, no sin, and no hell, and anyone who said otherwise was just being negative. The only “sin” was being unkind, fearful, or negative.

Admittedly, Christian Science uses the Scripture. However, they twist them to agree with their beliefs:

·       we thought “Be still and know that I am God” (Psalm 46: 10) meant to quietly meditate on the fact that we ourselves were little gods in training to be masters like Jesus. Yet, that verse is actually God’s voice saying that He is God, and that we should relax and trust Him.

Virtue offers other examples of Scripture twisting:

·       an ambitious person wants to amass great wealth and fame, so he uses Philippians 4:13, “I can do all things through Him who strengthens me” as his proof text that God will help him succeed in the worldly sense.

Virtue grieves that she too had been a false prophet who had led many astray:

·       Like Mary Baker Eddy, I was a false prophet who taught and wrote whatever entered my mind. As time went on and my popularity grew, I became narcissistic and never questioned the validity of what popped into my head. Anyone who criticized my work was wrong, in my old mindset.

According to Virtue, she has become hated by her former admirers, but she is not surprised by their reaction and even anticipated this, after she had a vision of Jesus when she was 58. This led her to read the Bible, which answered many of her questions, which the New Age had failed to answer.  During her readings, she became intoxicated with Jesus’ love, which compensated for her many losses, as Paul also had written:

·       I once thought these things were valuable, but now I consider them worthless because of what Christ has done. Yes, everything else is worthless when compared with the infinite value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have discarded everything else, counting it all as garbage, so that I could gain Christ and become one with him. I no longer count on my own righteousness through obeying the law; rather, I become righteous through faith in Christ. (Philippians 3:7-9 NLT)