My first four births didn’t leave me terribly excited to do it again. They were typical medically-managed hospital births with all the IV potions, ice chips, and monitors that come with it. My fifth hospital birth, however, left me fearful of childbirth. This birth was medically uneventful; psychologically, it was a disaster.

My Christian faith doesn’t allow for this kind of fear. Since it is not grounded in faith, it does not please God. (Hebrews 11:6) Therefore, I understand that I have two options: overcome fear or displease God. I’m choosing the former, though this leaves me with much work to do.

As part of my commitment to overcoming fear in childbirth, I’ve been educating myself with books on the subject as much as time will allow. Though I don’t buy into the phrase, “God helps those who help themselves,” there is a certain aspect in which God works while we work. Sometimes God steps in and changes everything, and sometimes He enables us to walk confidently on the path He’s called us to take. This is what the verse means when it says, “Work out your salvation with fear and trembling.” (Phil. 2:12) We work and God works.

There is one particular book, Supernatural Childbirth, I avoided reading because I didn’t buy into the concept of “painless childbirth.” I’d heard about women who had painless deliveries, but I kept my thoughts about the matter to myself. Upon a recent recommendation, however, I finally read it.

It was only a few pages into the book, and it was easy to tell where all the controversy surrounding the book came from. Author Jackie Mize makes some pretty bold claims, which I will address next. Before that, we need to understand the title, Supernatural Childbirth. We all know what “childbirth” means, her husband Terry Mize describes what is meant by “supernatural” in the book’s forward:

Something that Jackie and I want people to understand is that to us, supernatural childbirth is being able to believe God to get pregnant, carry that baby to full term, and have a healthy mommy deliver a healthy baby.

Yet, just a few pages later (p. 22), Jackie elaborates on what she really means with the concept:

When I refer to supernatural childbirth, I’m talking strictly about being able to conceive and to have babies with a pregnancy free from nausea, morning sickness, pain, moodiness, depression and without fear of any kind; then going through the entire labor without pain, and through the delivery without stitches and anesthetic. I’m talking about using the Word of God to overcome, change and make things better.

There are so many foundational doctrinal disagreements between the author and I that it is incredibly difficult to know where to begin. The author is coming from a “word of faith” perspective on Scripture. Some people refer to this as a “name it and claim it” theology, and my foundational disagreement with this hermeneutic is not merely traditional—as in, I’m a frozen chosen Presbyterian and therefore intolerant of the unknown—but substantive.

I began my childhood in the Assemblies of God, moved onto non-denominational churches, and then finally attended home churches as a teenager where everyone had secret names, prophesied, and waited for orders to move to the mountains for the end times. I’ve been “healed” by Benny Hinn, made faith promises to Robert Tilton, been prophesied over by a few of the big names, and received all my theological training as a child by these folks. I’m not a stranger.

One of the reasons I’m forever indebted to Elisabeth Elliot is because I locked myself in my room when I turned 16 and read all her books. This is how real faith took root and grew. She taught me that God is interested in me offering myself wholly to Him to use at His disposal. This is what He requires of me. The message I received from my childhood training was that God wanted to bless me with money, wealth, and happiness, and if He wasn’t (which He wasn’t), the problem was my lack of faith.

Hogwash.

Supernatural Childbirth is based on the erroneous presupposition that God exists to make us happy. There are Scriptures that we can pull out of context to support this belief, but it is not in line with the Bible’s whole counsel. Many of the great heroes of the faith, according to this logic, were terribly in want of faith: Job (who lost all his wealth and children), Stephen (who was stoned to death), and the apostle Paul (who suffered imprisonment, shipwrecks, and beatings)—just to name a few. Instead, when we understand that God exists for His glory, and that the chief end of God is to Glorify God, and God told us that working all things for our good is His good pleasure, we are able to endure these “light and momentary” trials, knowing that He has our good and His glory in mind.

If you remember the story of Joseph, Joseph’s brothers sell him into slavery, he is imprisoned, and eventually he becomes a ruler over Egypt. Then the Bible gives us the punch line in Genesis 50:20, “As for you, you meant evil against me, but God meant it for good.”

Where was Joseph’s deliverance? Could not God have prevented this? Was Joseph’s faith to blame? No, God did not merely use the events for good, but He ordained them. John Piper notes, “The word ‘it’ is a feminine singular suffix that can only agree with the antecedent feminine singular noun, ‘evil.’… Psalm 105:17 says about Joseph’s coming to Egypt, ‘[God] sent a man before them, Joseph, who was sold as a slave.’ God sent him. God did not find him there owing to evil choices, and then try to make something good come of it. Therefore this text stands as a kind of paradigm for how to understand the evil will of man within the sovereign will of God.”

Consider how the Scriptures teach us that God ordains all things:

In Deuteronomy 32:39 God says, “There is no god besides Me; It is I who put to death and give life. I have wounded and it is I who heal, And there is no one who can deliver from My hand.”

In Exodus 4:11, God says to Moses, when he was fearful about speaking, “Who has made man’s mouth? Who makes him dumb, or deaf, or seeing, or blind? Is it not I, the LORD?”

When Job’s wife urges him to curse God for his calamities, he replies, “Shall we indeed accept good from God and not accept adversity” (Job 2:10). And then the author of the book commends Job by saying, “In all this, Job did not sin with his lips.”

Amos 3:6 says, “If a calamity occurs in a city has not the LORD done it?”

Satan is real but never, ever out of God’s control. Mark 1:27 says of Jesus, “He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey Him.” And Luke 4:36 says, “With authority and power He commands the unclean spirits and they come out.”

Isaiah 45:7 says God is the “The One forming light and creating darkness, Causing well-being and creating calamity; I am the LORD who does all these.”

Jackie Mize believes all infertility is not of God and is something to be remedied by more faith. (chapter 5) Though the Mizes do not mention stillbirths specifically, their words offer no hope to these sorrowful circumstances. Tragedy is not “supernatural childbirth” (per the definition)—as if God was absent from this hell or that the mother’s lack of faith is to blame.

While stillbirth is uncommon, many women experience a miscarriage sometime during their childbearing years. On page 43, Mize declares that she would not have a baby prematurely because “we paid our tithes.” (Mal. 3:10-11) Miscarriages, or “casting your fruit before its time”, will not happen to those who tithe, according to Mize.

Statements like the following lead one to believe that God exists to serve us, and not that we exist to serve Him: “You should have a perfect family too. Four may not be the perfect number for you, but however many you want, you can have them by using the Word of God. The Word will produce for you just as it did for us.” (pp. 55-56) As if the Word of God exists to do our bidding!

Throughout the book, the author cites her experience as proof that God works according to our faith. For example, she was told that she could never have children, but after standing on the Word of God, she did. The problem with most of the stories told here is that she never mentions any medical terminology, proofs, or whys. If she couldn’t have children, why not? Saying that God healed her from some mysterious disease is just ambiguous. Now, I believe that God can heal, but these stories, even from a non-critical point of view, lack substance.

The entire book hinges on the interpretation of Genesis 3:16, “Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and they desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Jackie Mize and many others believe that, “Jesus bore that sorrow, that grief, so that we don’t have to. Isn’t that good news? I don’t have to bear sorrow and grief!” (p. 26)

This road—the one that Jesus walked so you don’t have to—is the path Mize leads you down so that you can experience a painless birth. When you begin feeling pain, you need to curse the devil and get back to believing.

A quick look at many godly examples in the Scriptures show us that they bore sorrow and grief due to no lack of faith (think of Job), but to the greater purposes and good of the glory of God. There is no explanation in Supernatural Childbirth of Scriptures’ hard words: “take up your cross,” “the fellowship of His sufferings” or “in this world you will have trouble.” If you have trouble, it is because you do not believe enough.

Did Jesus break the curse? Yes. Yet, we live in the tension of the “already, not yet” in that Jesus triumphed over sin and death, but we don’t realize the fullness of that in this life. If it were so, we would not die. Death is a curse. Why not use The Power of Faith to triumph over your sin and impending death? Why just use it for childbirth?

The victory is ours in the end, but we experience the consequences of sin here in this life. We are reminded of the goodness of the glory of God whenever we have a toothache, a migraine, or a broken down car on a deserted highway in the middle of the night. Why is this a reminder? Because this place is not our Home! If we could escape sorrow and grief now, why would we long for heaven?!

So, the question must be asked, Who am I to critique this method of painless childbirth, when I obviously have no experience in the subject? Isn’t my bias toward pain influenced by my previous experience, thereby disqualifying me from being objective on the subject?

One does not need to experience a painless birth to have great faith. Faith is not measured by the intensity of contractions. Many factors influence the inherent ease at which some women give birth—size of the baby, pelvic capacity, fetal presentation, labor positioning. Many physicians and midwives note that women who are able to “let go,” “give in,” and “surrender” to the process typically have shorter, easier deliveries. In fact, head-strong women tend to have more trouble, as they don’t like to feel out of control and so resist the process.

Jackie Mize gets it right when she says this, “The pain women experience in childbirth comes mostly from fear and lack of knowledge.” (p. 32) If she began the book with this statement and spent its entirety educating women on the childbirth process, she’d have a book worth reading. Except for the vague references of the uterus being a muscle one must relax when it contracts, there is no real childbirth education. It is more of an education in substance-less faith—one that places it’s hope in what God can do for us and not in who He is.

In conclusion, there are many things a woman can do proactively to ease the pain of childbirth: acquire more education, seek the labor support of another woman, and decide on a safe, comfortable environment for starters. We should ask God to comfort us and to ease our pain in His mercy. This is good and right. Yet, the comfort we receive from our faith in God is not that He always takes away all our pain on our command, but that if we should make our beds in hell, He is there.