Hannah Hurnard’s Hinds’ Feet in Low Places
August 22, 2023
David Cloud, Way of Life Literature, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061
866-295-4143,
fbns@wayoflife.org
The following is excerpted from “From High Places to Heresy,” Personal Freedom Outreach Quarterly Journal, April-June 1996:
Image: Hinds
Hannah Hurnard’s book Hinds’ Feet on High Places was written in 1955 and from all appearances is mainstream and orthodox. It is still stocked in Christian bookstores and there are over a million copies in circulation. ...

If Hurnard had only written Hinds’ Feet on High Places, she would have made a lasting impact for good. However, the twists and turns in her thinking brought her at last to some very strange, Gnostic, unorthodox and even occultic views. Few are aware that her views changed drastically in the late 1950s. At that time, Hurnard left the ‘‘High Places’’ and mountains of orthodoxy and headed for the lowlands of gross error. ...

In a 1994 biography by Isabel Anders (
Standing on High Places), there are frank and honest admissions regarding Hurnard’s shift from sound biblical doctrine:

‘‘The view that she strongly sets forth is one of universalism, or a belief that all will be saved in the end. This was an understanding that caused Hannah to reconsider all of her early evangelical zeal, as well as look with new eyes at the meaning of life and death. ... When she voiced other, even more questionable viewpoints in her public speaking engagements, door after door would close to her. Eventually, all invitations to speak to evangelical Christian groups virtually came to an end. ... Her lifelong conviction that God would speak to her personally, giving her deeper and deeper insights and ‘light’ that was to be widely shared with others, led her to believe that there could be no spiritual authority over her or her speaking and writing except the Lord Jesus Christ himself’’ (Anders,
Standing on High Places, pp. 154, 155, 161, 170).

Hurnard died on Marco Island, Fla., in 1990 refusing conventional treatment for her cancer. Before her death, her home had been open every Monday evening for those who came to hear her share her form of strict vegetarianism, reincarnation and New Age thought. ...

In Hurnard’s ‘‘garden of Eden’’ [in her 1981 book
Eagles’ Wings in the Higher Places] man only fell from ‘‘God consciousness,’’ so Hell turns out to be only Purgatory. ...

Hurnard teaches vegetarianism, not for health reasons but because she believes God is in animals and in animal flesh. This is a necessary corollary to Pantheistic belief (ibid., pp. 91-96, 117). ...

The capstone of her heresy is a low view of Jesus Christ. On page 124 she teaches that Jesus rose through an ‘‘angelic level of God consciousness’’ to a ‘‘Son of God consciousness’’ which is where all mankind is headed anyway. ...

In another of Hurnard’s books,
Way of Healing, a man by the name of Othniel receives a visit from Peter and Mark. ... [W]e find that Jesus did not turn water into wine. Hurnard has the Apostles saying that Jesus secretly waved a heavenly wand) and changed his listener’s thoughts and attitudes so that they thought they were drinking wine in a kind of a mass hypnosis. ... What we are actually dealing with here is a neo-gnosticism that she calls ‘‘new consciousness’’ and ‘‘Holy Wonder.’’ ... We are told that Jesus did not really feed the 5000. That is the old orthodox view. The real insight is that there may have been some kind of mob psychology that made selfish people actually want to take out the lunches that they were hiding and share. ...

Another strange suggestion on pages 44-45 is that the miracles of Jesus, along with truth, direction and instruction can be found in fairy tales and fables. Along the way, the Apostles instruct Othniel in ‘‘Jack and the Beanstalk,’’ ‘‘King Midas,’’ ‘‘The Goose that Laid the Golden Egg,’’ ‘‘Ali Baba,’’ and ‘‘Beauty and the Beast.’ ...

In 1988, Harper and Row, released another biographical attempt by Hurnard,
Thou Shalt Remember — Lessons of a Lifetime. ... She blatantly expresses favor for such things as aura reading (pg. 148), and out-of-body experiences (pg. 180). These things are the stock in trade of spiritism and occultism, yet they sit on the shelves of Christian bookstores. She also objects to the Old Testament sacrifices, saying that God hated them (pg. 157).



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