The Unsystematic Theology of Kirby J. Hensley: Reading A New Life – Do You Want It?
Kirby J. Hensley, founder of the Universal Life Church, left behind surprisingly little in the way of documented theology. His 1983 book A New Life – Do You Want It? offers one of the fullest windows into his actual thinking, yet it resists easy classification. Rather than a single coherent system, the book presents a set of overlapping, loosely reconciled positions, each identifiable on its own terms but never fully integrated into a whole. What follows is an attempt to name those positions — and to suggest, in closing, the broader tradition they most plausibly belong to.
Christian Mortalism and Materialism
Hensley rejects any dualism between the spiritual and the material outright. Substance, for him, is eternal and self-sufficient: "I believe that substance is eternal and is only changed from one form to another. There is no beginning and no end." Heaven and Hell are correspondingly de-supernaturalized and relocated to the present, embodied world — "We can have Heaven here on Earth." This places him within the historical current of Christian mortalism, though he pushes further than most of its adherents by collapsing the very distinction between spirit and matter that mortalism typically leaves intact.
Immanentist Theology and Human Apotheosis
Where mortalism describes what he denies, two closely related claims describe what he affirms. The first is an immanentist, near-pantheist conception of God as indwelling substance rather than transcendent being: "God is everything... All substance from the smallest atom is three-dimensional. It has a body, the body has life and it has intelligence." The second, more radical, claim personalizes this: not merely that God pervades all things, but that the reader “is” God. Hensley narrates his own break from belief in an external deity through the same logic he used to outgrow Santa Claus and Uncle Sam: "After I became a man I began to think, read, and study for myself and found out that I was the only God there ever was or would ever be." This apotheosis theology is the load-bearing claim beneath the book's self-help apparatus — its mirror affirmations and instructions to "release energy" toward money, health, and desire all presuppose that divine causal power is already resident in the reader.
Heterodox, Separationist Christology
Hensley's treatment of Jesus is the book's most theologically startling move. He distinguishes sharply between the historical man Jesus, whom he identifies with a deceiving, Devil-adjacent figure, and "the Christ," an impersonal life-principle available to everyone: "We have to separate him from the Christ, because Jesus is our problem. He is dead, but people have resurrected him and set him up as a king, as an image." This bears a structural resemblance to ancient separationist Christologies that distinguished the human Jesus from a descending divine principle — though nothing in the text suggests direct familiarity with that history. The distinction reads as independently generated from an adversarial, verse-by-verse reading of the King James Bible rather than borrowed from comparative religious scholarship.
Christian Anti-Institutionalism
A sustained political theology runs alongside the metaphysics: Church and State are cast as twin, mutually reinforcing systems of control that have inverted their proper relationship to the people who created them. "The Church and the State were meant to be umpires to see that everyone gets a fair deal, but now they are the ones playing the game." This is argued at some length through Galatians and Ephesians rather than merely asserted, giving it a claim to being a genuine — if idiosyncratic — Christian anti-institutionalism.
New Thought Prosperity Technique
Running through several chapters is a practical doctrine of mind over material circumstance, borrowed in vocabulary from the New Thought and human-potential movements of the era (Ken Keyes Jr.'s "biocomputer," in particular, supplies the organizing metaphor for an entire chapter). Hensley presents this not as borrowed technique but as personal testimony: "I have been able to release energy to get money. To do that you have to think money and believe in it." Belief, imaged desire, and "energy release" function as a genuine causal mechanism within his worldview, not merely a rhetorical flourish.
Self-Referential Realized Eschatology
Finally, Hensley's eschatology collapses the Kingdom into the present and into his own moment of ministry. The Kingdom "doesn't come with observations... the Kingdom is within the individual," arriving not as a future supernatural event but as something his own book is actively enacting: he describes the text itself as "a baptism of fire, to burn out and purify the things that don't work in your life." This is eschatology with the author cast as an agent of its fulfillment, not merely its herald.
A Comprehensive Term
None of these labels, individually, is wrong — each is earned by specific, sustained argument in the text. But no single one of them describes the book as a whole, and attempts to force them into a unified system misrepresent how the book was actually produced: dictated by a man who had memorized much of the King James Bible in an oral, pre-literate mode of formation, and who absorbed contemporary psychology and self-help thought secondhand, in fragments, rather than through sustained reading. The result is closer to bricolage than to system-building — doctrine assembled from whatever materials were at hand, deployed as each rhetorical moment required, rather than derived from first principles toward a coherent whole.
If a single broader label is wanted, the most defensible one is “American metaphysical religion,” a term developed in the historical scholarship of Catherine Albanese to describe a current running from mesmerism through Spiritualism into New Thought and mind-cure — a persistently “this-worldly,” practically oriented American religious impulse that treats mind, body, and cosmos as continuous rather than separate, prizes personal experiential verification over institutional authority, and habitually recombines with mainstream Christian vocabulary rather than breaking off into a separate denomination. Hensley's book fits this current closely: its God-as-substance metaphysics, its confidence that belief materially shapes circumstance, its impatience with clerical mediation, and its readiness to fold biblical language into a fundamentally metaphysical rather than doctrinal project are all hallmarks of that tradition. Unlike Christian Science or Unity, Hensley's version never crystallized into an organized metaphysical denomination of its own — it remained personal, oral, and occasional, a sermon captured on the page rather than a system committed to it. But the family resemblance is real, and it is probably the closest thing to a home this book has in the American religious landscape.
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