by Robert M. Bowman, Jr.
One of the most controversial movements in Christianity today is a network of Pentecostal pastors and televangelists who are best known for their message of bodily health and financial prosperity through faith. If you believe—and if you confess, or say out loud, that you believe—these teachers assure us that you can and will enjoy both health and wealth. This idea of “confessing” that one has these blessings even in spite of appearances gave the teaching the name “positive confession.” Likewise, because of its idea of speaking “words of faith,” the teaching is known as the Word of Faith or “Word-Faith” doctrine.
E.W. Kenyon: Grandfather of the Movement
The origin of the Word-Faith movement is in itself a highly controversial question.1 The controversy centers on the roots of the teaching of Essek William Kenyon (1867-1948), an evangelist who originated much of the doctrinal substance, and even the terminology and expressions, of the Word-Faith movement. His influence was so great that both D. R. McConnell, one of his strongest critics, and William DeArteaga, who views Kenyon positively, agree that Kenyon was the “true father” of the Word-Faith movement.2 I think this might be a little too strong; I would prefer to call Kenyon the grandfather of the Word-Faith movement. But these writers are right about his importance.
Kenyon was a New Englander who lived in Boston during the early 1890s. During that time he was exposed to the teaching of various evangelical Christian and New Thought
leaders. (New Thought was one branch of the metaphysical or “mind science” movement which included Christian Science and the Unity School of Christianity, and is clearly heretical.) In 1893 Kenyon became a Baptist pastor, and in 1898 he started a Bible school. Although Kenyon was a Baptist and rejected the distinctives of Pentecostal doctrine, his teaching was well received among Pentecostals. Kenyon was also one of the first radio evangelists, his most famous program being “Kenyon’s Church of the Air” broadcast from Seattle in the 1930s.
Kenyon’s exposure to New Thought and his connections with the Pentecostal movement raise an important question. To what extent was his theology influenced by New Thought? Was it a cultic intrusion into Pentecostalism, or did it fit fairly comfortably into that context?
A Metaphysical “Trojan Horse”?
This question is now hotly debated. One school of thought sees the Word-Faith movement as simply an extension—if a more radical or extreme one—of the larger Pentecostal/charismatic movement. On this view the Word-Faith theology is an essentially Pentecostal one. This is the accepted view among adherents and friends of the Word-Faith movement. The Word-Faith teachers themselves view their teaching and movement as the latest “move of God” within the Pentecostal and charismatic tradition. Most of the critics of the Word-Faith teaching, on the other hand, trace Kenyon’s Word-Faith theology to the metaphysical or mind-science cults, specifically the New Thought teaching to which Kenyon was exposed.
There is no doubt that Kenyon exposed himself to the teaching of various persons espousing New Thought or other variations of metaphysical religion. During the 1890s, Kenyon lived in Boston and heard the preaching and teaching of various Unitarian, Transcendentalist, and New Thought leaders. He attended Emerson College, where Transcendentalism and New Thought dominated the curriculum, at the same time as the famed New Thought writer Ralph Waldo Trine. None of this is in dispute. The issue is not whether Kenyon sustained considerable exposure to metaphysical ideas, but what he did with them—how he responded to them.
According to Kenyon himself, he saw the metaphysical religions as producing some results on a natural, human level, but as ultimately failing to answer the need of the human spirit.3 What he therefore wanted to do was to develop “a new type of Christianity” without falling into the errors of “a new philosophy or a new metaphysical concept of Christ.”4 Thus, he did not see his teaching as rooted in the metaphysical movement but instead as presenting an alternative to it. But in trying to develop such an alternative, did Kenyon inadvertently make unbiblical concessions to metaphysical ideas?
This leads us to consider the actual parallels between Kenyon and the metaphysical teachings. The usual method is to search through the metaphysical writings for statements that have parallels to Kenyon’s writings, from which it is concluded that Kenyon was heavily influenced by New Thought. The problem with this methodology is that it fails to compare Kenyon’s teachings with New Thought teachings in a systemic fashion. Instead of comparing the whole of Kenyon’s system with the whole of the New Thought system, it compares select parts of one with select parts of the other. The result is that the comparison is inevitably biased toward finding New Thought influence in Kenyon.
When we compare the whole of Kenyon’s teaching with the whole of New Thought, we find that the two have little resemblance. Characteristic beliefs of New Thought include:
+ pragmatic, experiential epistemology
+ absolute rejection of the creeds
+ esoteric approach to interpreting the Bible
+ impersonal, monistic view of God as Principle n denial of sin and a corresponding optimistic view of human goodness as innate
+ the view that Jesus showed the way to attain metaphysical power for ourselves rather than atoning for our sins by his death
+ rejection of petitionary prayer
+ the idea that heaven and hell are present states of mind rather than future destinations
+ universalistic view of all religions as valid and all people as destined for perfection
Kenyon rejected all of these ideas. He held a literal view of the Bible as the unerring and final authority for religious faith, viewed God as a personal Father, taught that human beings are sinners who can be saved only through faith in Jesus Christ as our atoning sacrifice for sins and literally resurrected Lord, and regarded all non-Christian religion as condemned by God.
Kenyon’s theology, then, was not a simple recycling of New Thought, “a ‘baptized’ version of metaphysics,” as McConnell put it.5 Kenyon differed radically from all of the metaphysical cults on a number of essential theological and philosophical matters. Thus, we cannot classify his teaching as belonging in the metaphysical tradition. The most that could be said is that Kenyon was significantly influenced by metaphysical teachings.
McConnell identifies four doctrinal matters on which he argues that Kenyon’s doctrine is a cultic heresy rooted in the metaphysical tradition. These four doctrines are (1) revelation knowledge, the idea of a higher knowledge that contradicts the senses; (2) identification, the idea that humans are or become divine; (3) faith as a spiritual law or force used by God himself; (4) healing and material prosperity as divine rights obtained exclusively through spiritual means.6
However, Kenyon’s views on these subjects, while in some cases sharing points of contact with metaphysical thought, are at bottom fundamentally different from the views of the metaphysical writers (e.g., Ralph Waldo Trine and Mary Baker Eddy) quoted by McConnell.
(1) In the metaphysical cults, the senses are misleading because the physical is not real (Christian Science) or is merely a manifestation of Mind (New Thought). In Kenyon, the senses are misleading only insofar as they do not have access to the truth that there is a supernatural realm beyond the physical from which miracles can and do occur.7
(2) In the metaphysical cults, humans are divine in that they are intrinsically one with the Mind that is ultimately the only reality. In Kenyon, humans were created to be “divine” as children of the heavenly Father.8
(3) In the metaphysical cults, an impersonal Divine Power exists that can be tapped by observing the spiritual laws that describe how that Power operates. In Kenyon, a personal God has set in place spiritual laws to which we are subject.
(4) In the metaphysical cults, health and wealth are accessible by people of all religions if they observe the spiritual laws of their own nature. In Kenyon, health (and material needs—not wealth) are fully accessible through spiritual means only to those who have faith in Christ and in God’s Word in the Bible.
Please note that I am not defending Kenyon’s views on these matters (all of which I reject). I am simply arguing that these views are not metaphysical doctrines.
One of the problems with McConnell’s argument is that he quotes from Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, and other modern Word-Faith teachers to fill in the gaps of his picture of Kenyon’s theology as paralleling the metaphysical teachings. But everyone agrees that Hagin had no significant contact with the metaphysical cults and that any influence from them on Hagin came through Kenyon’s writings. If there is a metaphysical basis to the Word-Faith teaching, then, it should be documentable in Kenyon’s writings themselves. But it is not.
Kenyon’s Evangelical Faith-Cure Roots
The real roots of Kenyon’s teaching and ministry were in the evangelical faith-cure tradition. Faith-cure was a popular movement in the last half of the nineteenth century that was itself rooted in the Holiness tradition but drew leaders and adherents from most Christian denominations. A key figure was Charles Cullis, an Episcopal physician in Boston during the 1870s and 1880s who popularized the idea that salvation or redemption was intended for the body as well as the soul or spirit. He also brought to America the practice of establishing “faith works,” ministries that eschewed soliciting funds and relied instead entirely on God to supply their needs through faith and prayer. Cullis found his models for such a ministry in various European faith works ministering to the sick and the homeless, including the famous orphanage of George Müller (1805-1898) in Bristol, England.
Among the teachers of divine healing inspired by the teaching and example of Cullis were A. J. Gordon and A. B. Simpson. Gordon (1836-1895) was the pastor of a Baptist church in Boston, the founder of Gordon College, and an associate of Cullis. In 1882 Gordon authored The Ministry of Healing as an apologetic for the faith healing movement, arguing that the testimony of both Scripture and church history supported the practice of seeking supernatural healing in prayer.9 Simpson (1844-1919), a Presbyterian pastor in New York who experienced healing at one of Cullis’s “faith conventions,” went on to establish the Christian and Missionary Alliance. More radical than Cullis or Gordon (though not critical of them), Simpson taught that divine healing through prayer was the only appropriate means of healing for the obedient Christian.
As we have seen, the healing movement cut across the theological spectrum to include Episcopalians, Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and people of various other denominational groups. Kenyon, then, cannot be excluded from the faith cure tradition simply by noting the fact that his theology was not squarely in the Wesleyan tradition.10
Kenyon’s connections with the Holiness, faith-healing, and Pentecostal movements throughout his ministry years were many and varied. In the early and middle 1890s, Kenyon lived in Boston, where for a brief period he attended Emerson College of Oratory, a fact that McConnell emphasizes to establish a metaphysical connection. One difficulty with making so much of this aspect of Kenyon’s Boston experience is that Boston arguably was the American intellectual and cultural center of Kenyon’s day. Thus, besides being exposed there to metaphysical thought, Kenyon was exposed to a wide variety of religious traditions.
In 1893 Kenyon attended A. J. Gordon’s church and recommitted his life to Christ. Within a few months Kenyon had decided to become a Baptist pastor.11 In 1900 he founded the Bethel Bible Institute in Spencer, Massachusetts, about fifty miles west of Boston. As McConnell himself reports, “Kenyon
patterned Bethel after the ‘faith works’ of George Mueller’s orphanages and Charles Cullis’ hospices.”12 Kenyon had read a biography of Cullis as well as Müller’s autobiography, and he sought to operate his school as a faith work.
The Pentecostal movement began in 1901, and within a few years Kenyon was beginning to forge ties with various Pentecostal leaders, particularly during his visits to Chicago. Kenyon also enjoyed good relations with non-Pentecostal faith cure leaders. For example, Kenyon was invited to preach at an Easter service at A. B. Simpson’s church, Gospel Tabernacle, in New York.13 From 1924 to 1931, Kenyon lived in California, where he was frequently invited to speak at Pentecostal evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson’s church.
Despite the misgivings Kenyon had expressed about Pentecostalism in its earliest years, then, by the time he began ministering in California he had, as McConnell aptly puts it, “made his peace with the Pentecostals.”14 Thus, although Kenyon was a Baptist and was non-Pentecostal in certain key respects, he felt comfortable ministering to Pentecostals and his ministry was well-received by them.
Theologically, Kenyon belonged squarely in the faith-cure tradition. Not only did he share that tradition’s generic evangelicalism and its emphases on faith, holiness, and healing, but his more controversial teachings—his disputed views on faith, healing, confession, spiritual laws, the human spirit, the nature of the believer, and the like—can to a great extent be traced to the evangelical faith-cure tradition. We may, for example, note a number of close parallels in these matters between Kenyon’s teaching and that of A. B. Simpson.
Divine faith . Both held that faith is a present tense taking or living in what we already have in Christ (including physical healing).15 Strikingly, Kenyon’s unusual view that in Mark 11:22 Jesus was saying, not, “Have faith in God,” but rather, “Have the faith of God,” turns out to have been previously taught by Simpson. For both men this meant that God (in Christ) was the one who believes in and through us as we yield to his divine indwelling.16
Divine life. To prove that Kenyon’s theology was cultic, McConnell quotes statements from his writings that attribute to man God’s nature. For example, Kenyon taught that man was created “in God’s class of being” and in the new birth receives “the nature and life of God in one’s spirit.”17 However, Kenyon’s ideas here and even his way of expressing those ideas are much closer to the healing and Pentecostal traditions than to the metaphysical cults. A. B. Simpson, for example, wrote that God “gave divine strength to Abraham and Sarah, something that was a part of God Himself, because He wanted it to be of a higher order.”18 Simpson’s idea here is no different from the standard Holiness teaching that the believers’ strength is never their own but is rather God’s strength experienced as God himself fills and empowers them.
Spiritual forces and spiritual laws. One of the major criticisms of the Word-Faith teaching is that it tends to depersonalize God by speaking of spiritual “forces” (a term used especially by Copeland with reference to faith) and of “spiritual laws” governing the universe including mankind. These ideas were also part of the evangelical faith-cure tradition. Simpson, for example, wrote about “the laws of the Holy Ghost” and “the great law of faith” that “commands all the forces and resources of the throne.”19
Positive confession. The idea of “positive confession”—that what we believe and say is what we get—has parallels in the healing and Pentecostal traditions as well as in the metaphysical tradition. But the understanding of positive confession in Kenyon’s thought is rooted directly in the evangelical Holiness tradition. Rather than waiting for some overt manifestation or evidence of the fullness of the Spirit before being confident of its possession, some Holiness teachers urged Christians to “confess” that they had that blessing as soon as they had fulfilled the biblical conditions for receiving it. The model for this confession in the absence of palpable evidence was the evangelical doctrine of justification by faith. We can believe that God forgives us and reckons us as righteous solely on the basis of his promise to do so if we believe. If we can believe God for justification, these Holiness teachers argued, we can and should also believe that God gives us the fullness of the Spirit and perfect holiness simply because he has promised to do so if we repent and believe.20
Thus, A. B. Simpson frequently focused on what Kenyon would later call “negative confession,” bringing trouble on yourself by verbalizing fears or worries. “It is a serious matter to complain, for it may bring the thing we fear, or worse.”21 Also like Kenyon, Simpson taught that to receive blessings from God (particularly healing) one must verbalize one’s faith and not merely think or feel it: “We must confess Him as our Guardian and Deliverer. . . . We must say it as well as feel it.”22
Disease and healing. The basic presupposition of Kenyon’s doctrine of healing is the belief known as “healing in the atonement.” This idea originated in the nineteenth-century evangelical healing movement and is often associated with A. B. Simpson (though he did not originate it). “Christ has come to destroy the works of the devil, and His blessed Gospel includes the healing of our diseases as truly as the forgiveness of our sins.”23
That healing is just as much a part of Christ’s atoning work—and therefore just as much a part of the gospel—as forgiveness of sins is standard Pentecostal doctrine. The official statement of faith of the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination, states: “Deliverance from sickness is provided for in the atonement, and is the privilege of all believers (Isa. 53.4-5; Matt. 8:16-17).”24 Walter Holleneweger, the historian of Pentecostalism, observes that “it must not be forgotten that the healing evangelists do not represent any more extreme a view than what was known until a short time ago in the Assemblies of God as ‘the full gospel’”—a fact sometimes indeed forgotten by critics of the Word-Faith theology.25
Some of the other most often-criticized aspects of Kenyon’s teaching on healing were already being taught in faith-cure circles. For example, Kenyon and the Word-Faith teachers are (rightly) criticized for teaching that those who would have faith for healing from God must ignore their symptoms.26 Yet this teaching was common fare in the faith-healing movement and in the Pentecostalism of Kenyon’s day. Simpson, for instance, told Christians, “Keep your eyes off your symptoms and on Christ.”27
The metaphysical cults as counterfeits.
McConnell argues that Kenyon protested too much, as it were, that his teaching was not metaphysical, citing such disclaimers from Kenyon as these: “We are not dealing with mysticism, philosophy or metaphysics,” or, “This is not a new metaphysics or philosophy.”28 But the faith-curists and early Pentecostals also found it necessary to issue such disclaimers. Simpson, for example, admitted, “The same results as are claimed for faith in the healing of disease are also said to follow the practices of Spiritualism, animal magnetism, clairvoyance, etc.”29
A Pentecostal historian, Edith Blumhofer, has observed that “evangelical considerations of physical healing [toward the end of the nineteenth century] can be understood as a partial response to Christian Science, Unity, and other mind cure movements. Evangelicals concluded that such movements thrived precisely because Christianity failed to offer hope for physical renewal.”30 This observation applies equally to E. W. Kenyon. He saw his own work as a response to, not an adaptation of, the metaphysical cults.
William Branham and Oral Roberts
The Word-Faith teaching in its core concepts about faith does go back to E. W. Kenyon. But this doctrine was filtered through a particular strain of Pentecostalism known as the Latter-Rain movement, a revivalist tradition originating in the late 1940s. William Marrion Branham (1909-1965) was influenced by and helped to spread Kenyon’s message, especially through the teaching of two evangelists associated with his ministry. F. F. Bosworth had developed his thinking on faith with significant influence from Kenyon. In turn, Hagin knew Bosworth and was influenced by him directly, even assigning Bosworth’s book Christ the Healer to all students at Hagin’s RHEMA Bible Training Center.31 The other evangelist associated with Branham was T. L. Osborn. Osborn openly preached on many occasions directly from Kenyon’s books, even reading chapters of Kenyon in place of sermons.
Branham and the other Latter-Rain revivalists taught a number of ideas that became part of the contemporary WordFaith movement. As did many in both the faith-cure tradition and early Pentecostalism, they taught a form of restorationism in which Christianity was having supernatural manifestations— especially healing—restored before Christ’s return. The Latter-Rain view of healing is that we should expect God to heal— indeed, that God has an obligation to heal in order to make good on his promises. Kenyon’s “word of faith” concept was also taught. Branham himself promoted this doctrine and connected it to Mark 11:23, a key text in the modern Word-Faith theology. In these and other respects, the Word-Faith televangelists are heavily indebted to the Latter-Rain movement.
Another key transitional figure is Oral Roberts. Despite holding somewhat different views on faith, Roberts made critical contributions to the rise of Pentecostal health-and-wealth televangelism. He helped establish the Full Gospel Business Men’s Fellowship, a Pentecostal association that promoted William Branham as well as other healing evangelists. In 1955 Roberts began his television broadcasts, and by 1969 he was airing prime-time broadcasts featuring healing services. Roberts really helped to pioneer what is now known as televangelism.
Although in some respects Roberts differed theologically from the Word-Faith teachers, he both prepared the way for much of their teaching and has supported them in their ministries. He lent direct support and encouragement to the Word-Faith teachers and even gave them platforms to speak at Oral Roberts University.
Kenneth Hagin’s Word of Faith
The man responsible for developing Kenyon’s teachings into the contemporary Word-Faith doctrine was Kenneth E. Hagin (born 1917). Hagin is the man who put it all together and has led the Word-Faith movement for a generation.
Hagin was raised as a Southern Baptist, but he considers himself not to have been a Christian during his childhood. As a teenager, he was bedridden with a terminal illness apparently related to heart problems. On the first evening of his illness, Hagin had three nightmarish visions of hell and was converted. Soon after, he began reading through the New Testament and came to Mark 11:24, “Therefore I say unto you, What things soever you desire, when ye pray, believe that ye receive them, and ye shall have them.” After several months of wrestling with the import of this text, Hagin became convinced that he should simply accept as fact that he was healed and get out of his sick bed despite the apparent symptoms.32
The young Hagin remained a Southern Baptist and began preaching divine healing, at the same time associating with Pentecostals, from whom he learned about speaking in tongues. In 1937 Hagin reports that he claimed the “baptism of the Holy Ghost” with speaking in tongues by faith, just as he had claimed healing, rather than “tarrying” for the baptism as Pentecostals had been urging him.33 From 1939 to 1949, Hagin pastored several Assemblies of God churches, focusing almost exclusive ly on preaching until 1943, when, Hagin reports, while walking into his kitchen for a drink of water a teaching gift “dropped down on me and inside me. It just clicked down on the inside of me like a coin drops inside a pay phone.”34
In 1949 Hagin begin an itinerant ministry to teach healing by faith. He was one of dozens of such itinerant faith healers that emerged at that time after the Branham crusades had sparked an enormous interest in such ministries. Hagin is sometimes at pains to separate himself doctrinally from most of the Latter-Rain healing revivalists. “They made some of the most stupid statements concerning the Bible you ever heard in your life.”35 For all that, Hagin may himself be regarded as a Latter-Rain healer and teacher.
In 1950, Hagin reports, God revealed to him to apply the same faith he had exercised for healing to finances, and he began preaching prosperity. At this time also God supposedly revealed to Hagin the idea that Adam was originally the god of this world and that his sin was an act of high treason against God which gave legal dominion over the world to Satan.36 Hagin claimed that these revelations came directly to him from God; but this was the same year that Hagin admitted to having first read Kenyon’s books, in which the same ideas are expressed.37 In fact, Hagin has plagiarized extensively from Kenyon’s books, a fact that McConnell has well documented.38
In 1966 Hagin moved his ministry to Tulsa, and in 1974 he founded Rhema Bible Training Center. In 1979 Hagin and several other televangelists founded the International Convention of Faith Churches and Ministers (headquartered in Tulsa), which functions as a virtual denomination for the Word-Faith movement.
Hagin claims to have had several visitations by Jesus Christ, an experience which seems to be a virtual requirement for a Word-Faith televangelist. On the basis of these visions, Hagin claims to be both teacher and prophet to the church for the last revival before the second coming of Christ.39 He is accepted as such by the entire Word-Faith movement and its leaders, who commonly refer to him as “Dad Hagin.” While it is true that he plagiarized Kenyon and took most of the defining beliefs of the Word-Faith teaching from Kenyon and others, he did synthesize Kenyon’s teachings with Latter-Rain Pentecostalism and has led in the creation of the modern Word-Faith movement and several of its institutions. These facts constitute Hagin the undisputed living patriarch, if not original father, of the WordFaith movement.
As Hagin presents it, the Word-Faith doctrine is an explicitly Pentecostal teaching. Admittedly Kenyon, Branham, and Roberts were all on the fringes of Pentecostalism. Hagin, by contrast, was an Assemblies of God minister who went on to found a new Pentecostal movement, complete with a church association, ministerial training schools, publishing houses, radio and television broadcasts. The Word-Faith teaching presupposes the necessity of receiving the Pentecostal “baptism of the Holy Spirit” and the importance of speaking in tongues and other charismatic gifts. Both institutionally and theologically, then, the Word-Faith movement is a segment of the Pentecostal/charismatic tradition.
Christian Roots, Questionable Results
Interpreting the Word-Faith theology as a development within the broad tradition of the evangelical faith-cure and early Pentecostal movements should not be viewed as vindicating it. Kenyon’s views were arguably in some respects an unhealthy development within that tradition—and may, as I have noted, been influenced in some fashion by metaphysical thought even though Kenyon was not himself a metaphysical cultist.
It is a strategic mistake, as well as a factual mistake, not to admit that some aspects of the Word-Faith teaching that often come under fire (say, healing in the atonement) are indeed authentically Pentecostal. If we attack the Word-Faith teaching as if it were a wholly alien intrusion into Pentecostalism, advocates of the Word-Faith teaching who know better will rightly reject our critique. Better to acknowledge the reality and deal with it candidly than to shift the blame to the metaphysical cults.
Robert M. Bowman, Jr. is President of Apologetics.com, an apologetics ministry located in San Pedro, California. He is also the author of the book The Word-Faith Controversy: Understanding the Health and Wealth Gospel (Baker).
NOTES
1 This article is, for the most part, taken from my book The Word-Faith Controversy: Understanding the Health and Wealth Gospel (Grand Rapids: Baker, 2001), 35-94, to which the reader is referred for more details and documentation.
2 D. R. McConnell, A Different Gospel: A Historical and Biblical Analysis of the Modern Faith Movement, updated ed. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1995), 3-14; William L. DeArteaga, Quenching the Spirit (Lake Mary, Fla.: Creation House, 1992 ed.), 200; (1996 ed.), 212.
3 E. W. Kenyon, The Hidden Man (1970), 35; Kenyon, The Two Kinds of Faith (1942), 17. All of Kenyon’s books quoted here were published in Lynnwood, Wash., by Kenyon’s Gospel Publishing Society.
4 E. W. Kenyon, The Two Kinds of Life (1971 reprint), 143; found in McConnell, Different Gospel, 15.
5 McConnell, Different Gospel, 20.
6 Ibid., chs. 6-10. I have combined McConnell’s fourth and fifth points (health and wealth).
7 Kenyon, The Bible in the Light of Our Redemption (1969), 18; Kenyon, The Two Kinds of Knowledge (1966), 50-53.
8 E.g., Kenyon, Hidden Man, 7, 26.
9 See A. J. Gordon, The Ministry of Healing, 2d ed. (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1961 reprint; orig. Chicago: Fleming H. Revell, 1882).
10 Contra McConnell, Different Gospel, 22, 24.
11 Ibid., 15.
12 McConnell, Different Gospel, 32.
13 Dale H. Simmons, E. W. Kenyon and the Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power, and Plenty (Lanham, MD, and London: Scarecrow Press, 1997), 101, 294.
14 McConnell, Different Gospel, 23.
15 Kenyon, In His Presence (1969), 121; A. B. Simpson, The Lord for the Body, rev. ed. (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1959), 123.
16 Kenyon, Two Kinds of Faith, 103; Simpson, Himself (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, n.d.), 7, 8; Gospel of Healing (Harrisburg, PA: Christian Publications, 1915), 142-43.
17 Kenyon, Hidden Man, 7, 26, quoted in McConnell, Different Gospel, 118, 121 (nn. 3, 40).
18 Simpson, The Lord for the Body, 17-18.
19 Ibid., 57; Gospel of Healing, 130-31.
20 See Simmons, E. W Kenyon, 154-57.
21 Simpson, Gospel of Healing, 98.
22 Simpson, The Lord for the Body, 66.
23 Ibid., 102.
24 AG statement of faith, quoted in Hollenweger, The Pentecostals: The Charismatic Movement in the Churches (Minneapolis: Augsburg Publishing House, 1972), 515.
25 Hollenweger, The Pentecostals, 35.
26 Kenyon, Hidden Man, 99.
27 Simpson, The Lord for the Body, 132; cf. The Gospel of Healing, 90, 91.
28 Kenyon, The Hidden Man, 35, 74 (also 137), cited in McConnell, A Different Gospel, 45.
29 Simpson, Gospel of Healing, 53.
30 Edith Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 19.
31 Kenneth E. Hagin, Understanding the Anointing (Tulsa: Faith Library Publications, 1983), 41-42.
32 Hagin, I Believe in Visions (Old Tappan, N.J.: Revell, 1972), 11-30.
33 Ibid., 30-39; Understanding the Anointing, 26-29.
34 Ibid., 53.
35 Ibid., 132.
36 Hagin, How God Taught Me About Prosperity (Tulsa: Faith Library Publications, 1985), 5, 10-15.
37 Hagin, Name of JesusName of Jesus 11 (preface); cf. McConnell, Different Gospel, 6.
38 McConnell, Different Gospel, 6-12.