A Teacher
Eric Butterworth
The divinity within and spiritual economics
The transmission
Eric Butterworth was a Canadian-American Unity minister, broadcaster, and author who for decades led a large congregation in New York City and reached a wide audience through radio and books.
His best-known work, Spiritual Economics (1983), reframes prosperity not as accumulation but as the outward expression of an inner consciousness of abundance, while Discover the Power Within You (1968) presents Jesus as a teacher of the indwelling divinity available to all.
Butterworth’s significance lies in his intellectually serious, Emersonian rendering of New Thought, which distinguished his work from cruder prosperity teaching. He stressed that the “kingdom” is an inner state of consciousness and that genuine prosperity flows from spiritual alignment rather than acquisitive striving.
He is frequently cited by Oprah Winfrey as a formative influence, a connection that helped carry his refined Unity metaphysics into the mainstream spiritual-self-help conversation of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
What they gave
Indwelling divinity: Foregrounded the “divinity within” as the operative spiritual reality and source of human potential.
- Spiritual economics: Reframed prosperity as the expression of consciousness rather than external acquisition.
- Emersonian depth: Grounded New Thought in Transcendentalist idealism, giving it intellectual weight.
- Mainstream transmission: Influenced Oprah Winfrey and, through her, a broad popular audience.
In their words
God can do no more for you than He can do through you.
Every person is a spiritual being. Every person is innately good. Every person is a potential Christ.
But the greatest mistake is in believing that we are ‘only human… ’ We are human in expression but divine in creation and limitless in potentiality.
Man is not in the world to set it right but to see it rightly, and right seeing is the passport from illusion to the heaven of accomplishment. If you want to change the world, or to be an influence for such a change, you must begin within yourself by changing the way you see the world.
You must still believe that I AM, and then work tirelessly to act the part. You must claim your freedom, realizing that it does not mean doing what you like, but becoming what you should.
The child who is taken only as he is—whose potentiality is ignored or slighted—remains where he is, or even slides backward. But the child who is treated as if he is already what he should be, often begins to make the most startling progress to what he can be.
In Jesus’ concept, prayer is not for God, but for you. You pray, not to change something in God-Mind, but in your own.
The peace that we desire and need in the world is that which “passeth understanding.” It cannot come by treaties or agreements, or by wars and boundary lines. Peace can only come when men become receptive to it and become peacemakers in the process of expressing it from within.
The first step is—they must call themselves sons of God. This is the action step: call yourself a child of God. Affirm for yourself that you are divine in potential.
The line they stand in
Influenced by: Unity and the Fillmores; Ralph Waldo Emerson; New Thought metaphysics.
- Influenced: Oprah Winfrey; contemporary abundance and consciousness teachers; the Unity ministerial tradition.
Revelations they taught
Orders & Societies
Essential Works
- Discover the Power Within You1968
- Spiritual Economics1983