The True Jesus vs The New Thought Jesus

By Doreen Virtue

“See to it that no one takes you captive by philosophy and empty deceit, according to human tradition, according to the elemental spirits of the world, and not according to Christ.” (Colossians 2:8)

I was born and raised in the New Thought belief system, and spent 33 years as a member of the three main New Thought church denominations: Christian Science, Unity, and Religious Science. For the Christian Science and Religious Science church, I had to take membership catechism classes to become a member. So, I know New Thought from decades of real-world experience, and not just research.

New Thought teaches a sugar-coated false version of Jesus. He’s portrayed as a created human who studied spiritual laws that anyone can use to manifest miracles. In that system, Jesus is revered but not worshiped. He’s seen as a highly evolved role model and teacher and not as the crucified and risen Lord.

At first glance, New Thought seems harmless, since it uses Christian words, speaks about love, and encourages kindness. Yet underneath that pleasant surface lies a deadly heresy that replaces God’s sovereignty with human control. The true Jesus saves while the New Thought Jesus merely teaches.

New Thought began in the late nineteenth century, influenced by metaphysical idealism and occult philosophy. Like Egyptian Hermeticism, its founders believed the mind could shape physical reality. They taught that Jesus’ chief purpose was to teach us to perform healing miracles like He did. They believe the Bible offers us formulas to heal like Jesus.

They took Jesus’ words out of context and reinterpreted them as metaphysical formulas. For example, when Jesus said, “Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24), New Thought teachers twisted that verse into a technique for manifesting desires rather than a call to faithful prayer in submission to God’s will.

When Jesus exhorted us to “seek ye first the Kingdom of God and all these things shall be added unto you,” New Thought twisted His words into a manifestation formula. We used to sing these words in the New Thought Unity Church where I was a member, as if it was a positive affirmation to memorize to manifest physical rewards.

New Thought theology permanently camps upon Genesis 1:26 which says that we humans were made in God’s image and likeness. While it’s true that we are Imago Dei image bearers, the New Thought churches teach that this means we cannot be sinful since God isn’t sinful. They overlook Genesis 3 and the crucifixion as a myth or a misunderstanding, and they insist that since God is eternally sinless so are we.

This is the basis for the New Thought false gospel and false Christ. Instead of acknowledging that we’re all sinners as proclaimed in Romans 3:23, the New Thought Church overlooks the topic of sin altogether.

The true Gospel is that humanity’s sin has disrupted our relationship with our holy God. Jesus came to earth as fully God and fully man to take the punishment for the sins that we’ve all committed. Through Jesus’ shed blood upon the cross and His bodily resurrection from the dead, He conquered sin and death on our behalf.

Those who believe in Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection and put their trust and faith in Him and turn away from sin, are saved. This means their relationship with God is reconciled, their sins are forgiven, and they’re cloaked in Jesus’ righteousness.

Yet the false Jesus of New Thought is nonjudgmental and inclusive in a woke sense. He doesn’t confront sin, since they only believe in “errors in thinking” and holding onto Neo-Gnostic “spiritual truths” about the unreality of physical matter.

The New Thought false Jesus doesn’t die for the ungodly, because the cross is seen as symbolic rather than redemptive. He doesn’t return in glory to judge the world, because judgment would violate the New Thought ideal of universal harmony.

This false Jesus can’t save anyone’s souls or forgive their sins, but according to New Thought that’s okay because there’s no need for salvation or forgiveness. They instead chant the mantra that they’re “perfect, whole, and complete.” When you go to a Unity Church and they sing “Amazing Grace,” they won’t sing the lyric, “to save a wretch like me” as that’s considered to be a negative affirmation.

Jesus is blasphemously presented as a created mortal human who discovered hidden spiritual laws that anyone can use, rather than as the eternal Son of God who created all things. The biblical Jesus calls people to die to self; the New Thought Jesus tells them to glorify self.

My Early Exposure to the False New Thought Jesus

I grew up in the Christian Science church, which is one of the four New Thought denominations (the others are Unity, Religious Science, and Divine Science). Sometimes people confuse the word “Science” with Scientology, but that’s a completely different system. The word “Science” in New Thought refers to their belief that they’ve cracked the code on the formula in the Bible which empowers us to be just like Jesus while we’re here on earth.

My mother, brother and I attended the Christian Science church twice a week. We read daily the “Mother Church’s” assigned Bible verses from their weekly lessons. We were taught to put just as much faith in Mary Baker Eddy’s heretical book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures as we did to the Bible itself. The denomination is King James onlyist, so that’s the only translation I read until I was an adult and finally read the New King James Bible. It felt like I’d donned a pair of reading glasses, as I could finally understand the Bible’s words. A few years later, as I read from the New Living Translation Bible, God opened my eyes to my sins and false beliefs and led me to repentance and salvation. These days, I prefer reading the New King James translation for my daily Bible reading.

New Thought is Neo-Gnostic, which means a modernized version of the ancient heresy of Gnosticism based upon the belief that there’s hidden secret knowledge people can attain through mystical means. In the Christian Science Church, the Gnosticism is based upon Mary Baker Eddy’s “Scientific Statement of Being” which we all recited together at church. This statement proclaims that physical matter is unreal and temporal, and that only spirit is real and eternal.

Whenever we got hurt or injured, we weren’t allowed to state that we were hurt or injured because proclaiming that you had a body that could get sick or injured would go against the Scientific Statement of Being. This wasn’t about “positive” or “negative” thinking. New Thought is about denying that anything negative even exists!

Even though we read the Bible daily and went to church twice a week and I went through church membership classes, we never learned about Jesus’ humanity, suffering, or anguish on the cross. Everything was homogenized and santized so that we’d never have to think about material issues. We weren’t allowed to take classes about health, anatomy, or biology in school because the church forbade us from learning about physical matter. Instead, the school excused us from those classes on a religious basis and we took extra art classes instead.

Our Christian Science family didn’t go to doctors except for extreme cases such as when I shredded my knee in a skateboard accident, or when in adulthood during my pregnancies. New Thought denies the reality of sickness and injury, because it denies the reality of the physical body. The New Age channeled book, A Course in Miracles, also holds this Neo-Gnostic belief.

I memorized Bible verses, yet each verse was reinterpreted to fit the idea that matter wasn’t real and that everything physical was merely a projection of the mind.

At the time, I didn’t realize this was heresy. I didn’t even know what “heresy” meant! It sounded spiritual and uplifting and my mother and grandmother fully endorsed, followed, believed, and practiced Christian Science. Yet, it was the same lie that the serpent told Eve: “You will be like God.”

The Self-Deification Deception

The foundational core of New Thought is the idea that humanity shares the same divine nature as Christ. They quote verses like “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21) to support their claim, ignoring the context. But mostly, they would quote the New Thought human authors such as Mary Baker Eddy (Christian Science), The Fillmores (Unity), and Ernest Holmes (Religious Science) as if they were divinely-inspired idols and not human heretics.

However, the Bible doesn’t teach that humans are divine. It teaches that we’re created in God’s image but have inherited Adam’s sin nature. There’s a vast difference between being made in God’s image and being God. Only Jesus is “God manifested in the flesh” (1 Timothy 3:16).

New Thought turns the Creator-creature distinction upside down. Instead of worshiping God, it takes the attributes of God such as infinite wisdom and claims that humans as Imago Dei have these same attributes.

The Biblical Jesus

The real Jesus isn’t a created human metaphysical life coach as New Thought portrays Him. He’s the eternal Son of God, and the co-equal co-eternal second Person of the Trinity, who came in the flesh to redeem sinners.

The real Jesus performed miracles to reveal His divine identity as God, not to model what we humans are capable of doing. When He said that believers will do greater works (John 14:12), He was referring to the Great Commission with our increased ability to share the Gospel worldwide.

New Thought teaches that Jesus tapped into a universal principle available to all. In contrast, Scripture teaches that Jesus is the Living Word through whom all things were made.

So, you can see that New Thought principles are a variation of the Serpent’s lie that “you will be like God” in Genesis 3:5. New Thought teaches that we just need to adopt the “infinite mind of God” and then we will be like God in our abilities to heal and manifest. This isn’t simply “positive thinking” as some superficially portray the New Thought movement. This is actual conjuring like witchcraft, using twisted Bible verses and prayers with Christian language.

New Thought gains followers because it uses Biblical language while mixing in truth with error. It talks about love, peace, and forgiveness which are Biblical concepts, yet it twists their meaning to describe humanity as the locus of control instead of our sovereign God.

So, when New Thought teachers speak about “Christ,” they don’t mean the historical Jesus of Nazareth. They take the word “Christ” which means “the Anointed One” and broad brush it to mean an anointing that any human can potentially have. They elevate humans and try to demote Jesus Christ from His divinity, which is impossible yet what New Thought teaches. This blending of terms makes the deception difficult to spot because it sounds plausible to those who don’t know the Bible.

Studying the Bible, particularly the synoptic Gospels of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John help us to know the real Jesus Christ. These books were written by faithful companions and eyewitness accounts of those who lived and traveled alongside Jesus during His earthly ministry. Instead of a superficial New Thought caricature of Jesus, we meet the true Jesus in God’s Word and learn about His attributes and responses to the trails that He faced. We also read His encouraging and inspiring words within the pages of Scripture.

The False Gospel and Denial of the Cross

Perhaps the greatest heresy of New Thought is its rejection of the cross. It claims Jesus didn’t die as an atonement for sin, because sin doesn’t exist. Instead, His crucifixion is skipped over and dismissed. Mary Baker Eddy of the New Thought Christian Science shockingly taught that we can’t trust the Bible since it was written by illiterate fishermen. So she, like everyone in New Thought, disregarded the Bible and instead listened to their feelings and experiences.

Yet without Jesus’ sacrifice upon the cross, there’s no forgiveness, no reconciliation, and no salvation. “Without the shedding of blood there is no forgiveness of sins” (Hebrews 9:22). The cross exposes humanity’s depravity and God’s mercy.

To deny the cross is to deny Christianity itself. You can’t remove the blood of Christ and still have the Gospel. You’re left with a moral human teacher but no Savior.

When I segued from New Thought to New Age in the 1990’s, I carried my New Thought beliefs about Jesus with me. I really believed that I was a Christian who followed Jesus, yet I rejected the Gospel because New Thought had brainwashed me to believe that it was a “negative myth.” In my New Age books and seminars, I discussed Jesus. Yet, it was the false Jesus of New Thought. As time went on, I also blended in some of the New Age teachings about Jesus that we’ll look at in the next chapter.

As much as the New Thought Jesus seems to be so “positive” and “loving,” there is no peace nor salvation from following the false Jesus. When I was saved in 2017 and following the real Jesus Christ, I experienced true and lasting peace for the first time. Even though I went through some deeply painful trials after becoming a Christian, I was in the calm eye of the hurricane while the storm swirled around me.

The real Jesus doesn’t promise to make our lives a sugar-coated fairytale, but He does promise to be with us through our trials. He offers us wisdom, comfort, guidance and peace no matter how much we’re suffering.

Christian women need discernment because New Thought versions of the laid-back anything-goes Jesus have infiltrated devotionals, church conferences, and worship songs. Teachings about Jesus being our buddy instead of our Lord and Savior have replaced the language of repentance and dependence. Yet the Gospel never changes since salvation is found in Christ alone, not in the power of your mind.

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