Every Name in Scripture, Read as a State of Mind

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.