Book Comment: Edgar Cayce on Jesus and His Church

Edgar Cayce, a photographer by trade, and born in 1877 in Kentucky (USA), is known as the Sleeping Prophet.  He is represented today by the Association for Research and Enlightenment. 

In a trance state, Cayce gave thousands of “life readings” (over 14,000 documents) for individuals over a forty-three year career.  He claimed to be a Christian, read the entire Bible annually, and served as a Campbellite (Christian Church, Disciples of Christ) Sunday School teacher.  Those who knew him personally said that he was a gentle, kind, and humble man. Then, why is he considered to have been a heretic by the vast majority of Christendom?  Reading Edgar Cayce on Jesus and His Church (1970) will give you a good idea.

 

The book, by devotee Anne Read, is supposed to give us a “much truer and more complete understanding of the life of Jesus than the Bible alone.”  To the spiritually and intellectually awake Christian, this statement is a giant flashing red flag.

The vast majority of the Cayce “life readings” concern health, massage therapy,  and the treatment of disease states.  Cayce, though possessing only a seventh-grade education, is considered by many to have been one of the fathers of modern holistic medicine.

In other readings, starting around 1922, Cayce began to stray significantly from orthodox Christian doctrine.  His trance declarations began to include references to past lives, reincarnation, astrology, Atlantis, Akashic records, the Universal Mind, spiritual beings, prophecies of the future, and unorthodox declarations about the nature of God and Jesus.       

At first, Cayce himself was concerned about the turn his readings had taken, but soon, he became convinced he was imparting the truth to his followers.  Edgar Cayce said that he never actually heard his own readings because he was asleep when he gave them.  He read transcripts of the readings when he woke up.  His initial misgivings about the contents of the readings is obvious from what he said to Arthur Lammers when he awoke from one trance state and read what he had said.  

“But what you’ve been telling me today, and what the readings have been saying, is foreign to all I’ve believed and been taught, and all I’ve taught others, all of my life.  It ever the Devil was going to play a trick on me, this would be it.” Quoted in Thomas Sugrue, Stranger in the Earth, 1971, p. 210.

The worst deviation from Christianity in the Cayce teachings concerns who Jesus was.  This is the main point of Cayce’s heresy.  He taught that Jesus was a man, a created soul, a spirit child of God, who became the Christ.  He further taught that we are also the spirit children of God, the same as Jesus, and that salvation and enlightenment comes when we realize our true nature and return to God.  This is the New Age doctrine of the divinity of man mixed in with the ancient heresies of Adoptionism and Arianism.  Both heresies deny the full deity of Jesus.

One Christian response to Cayce is stated by William J. Petersen in his book, Those Curious New Cults, p. 46.

“For a good portion of his life, Cayce was a commercial photographer.  He understood very well the mechanics of his trade.  A blank film is inserted, the shutter is snapped,  and then the film is developed in the dark.  The nature of a photograph, whether it is a formal family picture or pornography, depends not on the film but on the photographer who uses the cameras.  During his trances, Cayce’s mind was like a blank film that would be developed in the dark.  I believe that Cayce allowed his camera to get into the wrong hands.”

Petersen is hinting at what many people believe: the person who was speaking during Cayce’s trance states was not Edgar Cayce, but someone else, something else.  Speaking in traces is a standard event for mediumship and spiritism/spiritualism.  The New Age teachings of Ascended Masters and spirit guides speaking through human channellers comes immediately to mind.  The messages given by these spirit guides invariably are at odds with orthodox Christianity.

 What I am about to say will sound very controversial to some Christians, especially those who have accepted the anti-supernaturalism of the modernist world view (there it is again).  Unless one accepts that the spirit guides are who they say they are, they must be someone else.  The obvious answer is that they are Satan himself, or more likely his demons.

The Bible is quite emphatic that Satan and his demons exist.  In fact, Jesus said so.  Either Jesus was ignorant, mistaken, or correct.  I would go with Jesus.

A detailed Christian Response

http://www.watchman.org/profiles/edgar-cayce/

More on Edgar Cayce tomorrow.