New, not Made Over

John B. Willis

PAUL'S appealing counsel, "Be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind" (Romans, 12:2), as etymologically interpreted in generally accepted theology, has given rise to the belief that regeneration, the new birth, is a process in which the old man is simply cleansed and reclothed; the form, appearance, condition, and activities are all new, but the substance is preserved. That which was "conceived in sin and brought forth in iniquity," has been made pure and Christlike; the obdurate sinner is metamorphosed into a child of God!

This commonly entertained belief resolves itself into the simple declaration that evil can be fashioned into good, and the self-contenting materialist expresses himself in very kindred terms. He says, "Evil is but good in the making," it belongs to the cycle of things in which there are no absolute values, but only relative, and in which each factor has its necessary place and function. The Christian believer can but see that the logic of the materialist's position involves the giving up of moral discriminations, and he may vigorously protest, and yet if man was constituted by his Creator with the capacity to fall into sin, that capacity must be natural; i.e., it must belong to the divine ordering. Furthermore, if the resistance of and final escape from sin is essential to character, effects a fine, high quality of manhood which, as we have been taught, is to be secured in no other way, then surely evil has a necessary place in the believer's cycle no less than in the materialist's, and in this respect they are legitimately classed together.

The study of St. Paul's teaching as a whole makes it clear that by "transformation" he meant the realization of that spiritual manhood in Christ which not only presents an entire contrast to the old man, in character and conduct, but which is wholly different, the change being effected not by the renovation of "the old man" but by his elimination. Again and again he emphasizes the thought that there is no good whatever in "the carnal man," and no good to be made out of him; that he is to be denied, "put off" and wholly separated from; and in all this he maintains the teaching of the Master and of the prophets, that evil is in its every sense, aspect, and degree "an abomination unto the Lord," for which he has, and can have neither use nor tolerance.

Human consent to the admixture of good and evil is the "forbidden fruit" of Eden, whose eating was to entail an unspeakable sorrow and loss, and the outcome of this false interpretation of the meaning of "transformation" as Paul uses it, fully justifies the woeful prophecy of the early chronicler; the error is so fundamental and determinative as to bring disorder and consequent disease into every domain of human thought and experience.

In opposition to this religious teaching, which has obtained for centuries, Christian Science takes unequivocal ground in asserting that there is no transformation of evil into good, of error into truth; that it is as impossible to think that any element or feature of the man of sin can be retained and incorporated in the man of Spirit, as it is to think that darkness can be transformed into light, or a plausible fallacy into a demonstrable truth. If we have been thinking that the shortest distance between two points is a curved line, we are compelled to give it up, in toto, when we come to apprehend, through mathematical processes or actual measurement, that this distance is a straight line. A false sense asserted its place in an unenlightened consciousness—that is all. From right consciousness it is utterly and forever excluded. So also in the teaching of Christian Science, the revamping of evil so that it becomes a part of good—the transference of some relic of the old self into the new—is entirely disclaimed and discarded, and for the fundamental reason that God, good, is all in all, and therefore to spiritual consciousness there is and has been no evil.

In the awakening to truth, the uncovering of error begets a sense of good and evil which leads to the interpretation of the universe and of man as of dual nature,—a view very generally accepted by those whose creed affirms the existence of but one God, who is the only cause and creator. The sense of duality and consequent struggle, so remarkably set forth in the seventh chapter of Paul's letter to the Romans, succeeds the torpidity of absorption in error, in contrast with which it is an "improved belief," but it must pass away and forever ere Jesus' prayer for the establishment of true spiritual consciousness, "that they may be one as we are one," can be realized. The idea that God's man is endowed with a dual nature and capacity is rendered impossible by the infinity of God and His manifestation, and it is further denied by the fact that in the measure of our attainment to the Mind that was in Christ Jesus, in that measure evil disappears from consciousness. It is apparent that to him who can know no evil has no being. It is but a false sense, having no relation, not even that of oppositeness, to good.

The apprehension of this vital truth effects a transformation indeed: viz., the appearance in consciousness of the Christ man who "knew no sin," and in whose guileless presence evil with its claim to prestige and power disappears. This is the renewal of our mind in Christ Jesus, through Christian Science. John B. Willis.

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