Dialogue With The World October 15, 2018 Issue

The realism that heals

From the Office of Committee on Publication

It is the shortest verse in the Bible: “Jesus wept” (John 11:35). In this gospel narrative, the original Christian healer was on his way to raise Lazarus from the tomb. Jesus certainly knew, as those who were grieving didn’t, that mortal and material conditions did not define his friend’s, or anyone’s, life and identity.

Yet, the Master wept—“Behold how he loved him!” onlookers said (John 11:36). His utter certainty of spiritual reality and God’s boundless, present goodness did not make him less feeling or compassionate in responding to sorrows on the human scene. On the contrary, his life and example defined a deeper and much more radically selfless kind of love: a love that heals, and that many have recognized as reflecting the nature of God.

One of the most pervasive misconceptions of Christian Science is the assumption that, because it insists on God’s boundless, present goodness and love—and the illusory nature of all that’s contrary to this divine reality—its teaching represents little more than a form of sunny, superficial optimism in its view of human experience. But this is no more true of the actual perspective of Christian Science than it is of New Testament Christianity, as the two letters published here bring out.

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The realism that heals

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