God Is Omnipresent and That Presence Is the Only Reality

Divine Science, the oldest of the organised New Thought denominations, takes God's omnipresence literally and without the qualifications more conventional theology often attaches to it: if God is wholly good and genuinely present everywhere without remainder, then no place, including a sick body or an empty account, can be a place that presence has failed to reach. Catherine Albanese's history of American metaphysical religion traces the doctrine to Malinda Cramer's teaching in San Francisco converging with the Brooks sisters' parallel teaching in Denver in the 1880s and 1890s, both arguing from the same premise that recognising an already-present reality, rather than petitioning for one that is absent, is the entire work faith requires. Because a presence this complete leaves no genuine gap for illness or lack to occupy as a separate reality, Divine Science teaches that such conditions are appearances to be seen through by right recognition rather than external facts to be corrected by appeal to a distant deity, the same logical structure the wider New Thought movement builds its practice of affirmative prayer on. This premise, shared with the movement's other denominations, functions in Divine Science literature as a metaphysical starting point rather than a conclusion argued to from first principles, the plain consequence of taking two already-accepted claims, God's goodness and God's omnipresence, at their full strength rather than leaving them softened by exception.

Divine Science predates Unity and Religious Science as an organised body, its convergence in San Francisco and Denver in the 1880s and 1890s coming before either the Fillmores' Kansas City ministry or Holmes's Los Angeles institute. Albanese's history situates Divine Science, alongside those two younger denominations and older still Christian Science, as members of a single loosely organised New Thought family, sharing enough doctrinal ground, an omnipresent, wholly good God and a confidence in the practical power of recognition, that an umbrella body, the International New Thought Alliance, has coordinated among them since the early twentieth century despite each denomination keeping its own separate ministers, congregations and institutional leadership. The Encyclopedia of American Religions records that this shared network has meant a practitioner or teacher trained in one New Thought denomination can often move into ministry within another with comparatively little friction, the underlying metaphysics being close enough that institutional boundaries have mattered more to organisational history than to doctrine itself. Divine Science's own distinct contribution within that shared family has been less a difference in teaching than a claim to priority, presenting itself in its own literature as the first of the organised New Thought bodies to state the omnipresence doctrine in a settled, congregational form rather than only in the writing of an individual teacher.