Article April 24, 1995 Issue

The Bible and Science and Health—the "sufficient guide" and its invaluable interpreter!

The Christian Science Monitor

Suppose you are a Japanese tourist visiting a beautiful city in Europe. As you tour the town you have a guide that knows the important details and is animatedly relaying all that she knows. Yet you only catch glimpses of her meaning. Why? Because your guide doesn't speak Japanese, and you understand only a little German!

There is an infinitely more important guide, a guide to the kingdom of heaven, which is often perceived as being as incomprehensible as a tour guide talking the wrong language. It is the Bible. Many drink in the beauty of the words, feel awed by the sense of its history, take in much of its moral meaning, but still feel as though the universe of divine Spirit it describes is indecipherable.

The Bible is a guide speaking in a very specific language. In Science and Health Mary Baker Eddy writes of "the inspired Word of the Bible" as " our sufficient guide to eternal Life." She does this in a sentence that presents one of the fundamental points of Christian Science: "As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life" (p. 497). The Bible speaks in the language of Spirit and declares the spiritual reality of God and of His creation, man and the universe. As God's Word, the Bible's highest purpose is illuminating to prayerful inquiry this spiritual reality of being. Paul's second letter to Timothy assures us, "All scripture is given by inspiration of God, and is profitable for doctrine, for reproof, for correction, for instruction in righteousness" (3:16).