The Life of Hannah Hurnard: From Inspiration to Apostasy

By Elizabeth Prata

Hannah Hurnard (1905-1990) wrote a book that became famous. As time went on it settled into a classic in Christian publishing. The book is “Hind’s Feet in High Places”. It is a 1955 Christian allegory in the vein of John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Hurnard’s main character even has the same name as one of Bunyan’s characters, ‘Much Afraid’. Hinds’ Feet was inspired by Habakkuk 3:19 and explores a young woman’s spiritual journey and God’s faithfulness, discussing the importance of trusting in God even during difficult times. It is still in print, and new editions are being issued even today. It is a beloved book, along with its sequel, Mountain of Spices. A cottage industry has sprung up around Hurnard’s book Hinds’ Feet, with merchandise such as devotionals and calendars based on it.

And yet Hurnard was apostate. She held to wildly unorthodox heresies. While not immediately evident in her first book Hinds’ Feet, or her second book Mountain of Spices, her upbringing before she wrote the book and her writings afterward confirm that her apostasy seed became fully bloomed in the end.

How can this be? You may have heard of the idioms ‘a broken clock is right twice a day’ or ‘throw spaghetti at the wall and some of it sticks.’ All false teaching has truth mixed into it. Indeed, Hurnard herself may have thought she was truly saved when she wrote Hind’s Feet. But though she rose a bit, she eventually sank back into her Quaker upbringing and again believed what she should not believe.

False Doctrine

Hurnard later in life believed in and taught reincarnation. She even claimed that Jesus taught this and it’s found in Exodus 34:6-7 and also in John 9. This aberrant and mystical view of reincarnation is expounded in her book The School of Earth Experiences.

Hannah repudiated the notion that God would ever condemn his created creatures to an enteral hell. She wrote in Unveiled Glory, a book about her conversion and testimony, that “I am now fully persuaded that as God is Love there can be in Him no wrath such as we conceive of wrath, or any possibility that He will condemn His own creatures to unending destruction, but I must still ask, What am I to do with all the passages of Scripture which seem to assert the very contrary? The Scriptures, of course, do teach that there is a hell…yet there are many other passages which most emphatically state that, in the end, God will completely triumph over evil. I discovered that there is not one single verse in the Scriptures which uses the words “everlasting,” “eternal,” or “for ever and ever” in connection with hell.”

This belief is obviously wrong, but the nature of apostasy is that people are endlessly creative with the scriptures in seeing in them what they want to see, or twisting them into that they want to believe. Acts 20:30 and 2 Peter 3:26 warn that people would come along and distort and twist the scriptures.

In the end, Hurnard believed that hell’s purpose was a sort of purgatory, forcing people through pain to repudiate their sin. She thought that since death and hell are to be thrown into the Lake of Fire, that hell is to be destroyed and thus is only temporary for those souls inside of hell.

Her view of the Fall of Man is oddly stated too. In her book “Eagles’ Wings to the Higher Places” she wrote that “Mankind fell from God-consciousness and awareness of goodness only into self-consciousness and awareness of evil in the most frightful and agonizing forms.“

Yet in Romans 1 we know that all humankind continues to have a ‘consciousness’ about God, but we suppress it in unrighteousness. Our ‘self-consciousness’ is due to the fact that the Fall plunged us wholly (spiritually and bodily) into sin.

She advocated for vegetarianism, because she said, God is immanent, which to her meant He is IN every living thing, The Lord and Savior “is actually immanent, by His Spirit, in all the living creatures we wrong [eat]. What is done to them is done to Him, too, and nails Him with them to their cross of suffering.” Eating a hamburger does not nail Jesus to the cross again. All food was declared clean (Acts 10:9-16). If God is immanent (actually IN everything) would it not also mean He is in plants and shellfish and insects? By Hannah’s account we should not eat anything. We know the unsaved’s thinking is futile (Romans 1:21).

Hannah also returned to her Quaker roots toward the end of her life, believing in universalism. Universalism, or universal reconciliation, teaches that in the end, everyone will be saved and dwell in heaven.

Christianity Today did a short bio of her life. They ended with this paragraph:

Despite this awesome witness, later in her life Hannah showed the ever-lurking danger of trusting inner voices. She veered away from sound doctrine, embracing universalism (denying God’s wrath), pantheism (God is everything) reincarnation and many new age ideas. Her last book is sold in New Age stores.

Here is a longer treatment of Hannah’s life, “FROM HIGH PLACES TO HERESY: Evaluating the Writings of Hannah Hurnard“, by G. Richard Fisher.

From Good theology to Bad Theology

I remember purchasing, reading, and enjoying Jen Wilkin’s first book in 2014, Women of the Word. However she soon became a rebel, preaching and usurping and advocating for female preaching.

It was the same with Aimee Byrd. I was surprised and delighted when her first book in 2013, Housewife Theologian, was well-received and she was subsequently invited to become a co-host on the Alliance of Professing Evangelicals’ Mortification of Spin podcast with Todd Pruitt and Carl Trueman. However it was only a few short years later Aimee apostatized, showing her true colors in her book Recovering From Biblical Manhood and Womanhood which was a painfully tortured explanation of why God didn’t really mean that men and women have different roles. Aimee rejected the female role, and was fired from the podcast. She then parted loudly with her denomination the Orthodox Presbyterian Church, and wound up joining a liberal Methodist church with a female pastrix.

Again, we are familiar with the idiom “A broken clock is right twice a day”. It’s a witticism that makes sense…until you give a gift of a broken clock to someone and expect them to use it to tell time. It is the same with an apostate author. Just because Hurnard wrote two books that resonated with what we know to be Christianity, they are only right twice a day. The rest of the time, Hurnard’s beliefs are just plain wrong. We do not read or follow someone whose emergence into apostasy became fully formed, because her heart was not right even as she wrote earlier things that seemed OK. The apostasy was always in her heart, poisoning it, even while on the surface she said and did and even wrote a book containing ‘good’ things.

Apostasy is serious. If a person is actually saved, he or she can never be lost. If they spout error, it will be only for a time, and the Holy Spirit dwelling in them will correct it.

However, a person can wrongly believe she is saved, write a good book or two, and eventually adopt unorthodox views and stray from Jesus, to their eternal woe. It happens. Sadly that was case with Hannah Hurnard and her Hinds’ feet, her theology eventually most likely brought her to low places.

Further Reading

Apostasy from the Gospel, book by John Owen

Apostasy and how it Happens, essay by Sinclair Ferguson

What is an Apostate? short answer by John MacArthur