Scripture Is Read as Metaphysical Allegory

Charles Fillmore, who co-founded the Unity School of Christianity with his wife Myrtle in 1889, produced the fullest working example of New Thought's approach to scripture in his Metaphysical Bible Dictionary, published in 1931. The book takes the biblical text word by word and place by place and assigns each proper name a meaning in the interior life of the reader rather than in outward history: Adam names the natural, unillumined mind; Eve names the soul's feeling nature; Egypt names a state of bondage to sense consciousness rather than a country on a map. On this reading the value of a scripture passage has nothing to do with whether the events it narrates actually happened; the text is read as a map of psychological and spiritual states available to any reader in the present moment, regardless of whether Adam or Moses or the Exodus itself has any independent historical reality at all. The same principle reaches the New Testament and its central claim: Unity teaching interprets the resurrection of Jesus not as a singular event in the first century but as the awakening of a divine consciousness every person carries within, which the Gospel narrative dramatizes rather than merely records. Religious Science and Divine Science, the two other major bodies within the New Thought movement, share this same metaphysical hermeneutic even where their institutional histories diverge from Unity's own.

The metaphysical reading of scripture New Thought bodies share today traces back to a single figure who never founded a church of his own. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a nineteenth century mental healer working in Portland, Maine, taught that sickness and error alike were products of wrong belief rather than physical fact, and that scripture, read correctly, taught the same lesson about the power of mind over matter he was demonstrating in his own healing practice. Quimby left no organized institution behind him at his death in 1866, but his students and their own students went on to found the movement's separate branches, each institutionalizing his method independently: Charles and Myrtle Fillmore founded Unity in Kansas City in 1889; Ernest Holmes founded Religious Science, now known as the Centers for Spiritual Living, in Los Angeles in 1927; and Divine Science organized somewhat earlier still, in the 1880s, under Malinda Cramer and the Brooks sisters in Denver and San Francisco. The three bodies never merged and today maintain separate headquarters, publications and ministerial training, but all three continued Quimby's basic move of reading the Bible as an account of inward, mental states, which is why a doctrine first worked out by a single healer with no seminary training became, within two generations, the shared scriptural method of an entire family of American denominations.