Article April 22, 1911 Issue

Our critic objects to the statement that to admit that sin...

Frederick Dixon

South London (Eng.) Press

Our critic objects to the statement that to admit that sin and disease can originate in God would be equivalent to saying that God contained an element of self-destruction. He says that this contradicts the teaching of Genesis, that God allowed Eve a choice in taking His word or listening to the devil, and he adds that nothing delights the devil so much as people saying he is unreal. As a matter of fact, it would be truer to say that nothing delights the devil so much as the people who, like the critic, insist on his reality. These people present the devil with a pedigree traced back to God, since if the devil is real, and as the Bible says God created everything that was made, God either created the devil or created evil out of which the devil was evolved. There is no possible escape from this. It makes God responsible for sin, and for death, which Paul says proceeded from sin, and the devil and his angels become in turn the sons and daughters of God. Now if God created the devil, He certainly created evil, and if He created evil, did He not create an element of self-destruction? Furthermore, the Bible record declares that God made all things and described them as good; consequently, if the devil is real, God certainly made the devil and described the devil as good. The argument is irrefragible, and the critic's only way out of it is to admit that there are two creators, and that good and evil have different origins; therefore, that God is not infinite. The position, in a word, if he had only known it, is simply that which led to the adoption of Gnosticism in the primitive church.

The Gnostic saw evil all about him, yet he was asked to believe that all creation was the creation of God. To reconcile all this evil with the fact that the creator was entirely good, and also omnipotent, was the first problem the Gnostic set himself. The second was like unto it. God, the Bible told him, was Spirit, and this Spirit, men told him, was imprisoned in matter. This matter was subject to discord and decay, profited nothing, in the words of Jesus, and, in the words of Paul, could not please God, yet it had been created as a prison for Spirit by an omnipotent Deity who had given man eternal life, and who had declared that all that was created was good. This dilemma of the Gnostics is the dilemma of orthodox theology today.

Christian Science denies the very premises which led to Gnosticism, and therefore is not driven to the illogical position of what is called orthodox Christianity, nor to the methods by which the Gnostics strove to escape from it. In spite of this, it is orthodox, because its orthodoxy is based on the teaching of Jesus, and of the apostles in the days before Gnosticism became a problem in Christendom. Jesus taught that sin, disease, and death were unreal, that is to say, that they were no part of the creation of God. Had they been the creation of God, they could not have been destroyed, since you cannot blot out of omniscience the knowledge of something which actually exists. He was not, however, satisfied with merely asserting this, he proved it from one end of his ministry to the other, by what are known as the miracles. The miracle itself is not a super-natural occurrence; it is, as the Greek words translated miracle prove beyond question, merely something wonderful, or else a sign. To the Jewish people, believing in the reality of sin, disease, and death, the miracle was distinctly wonderful. None the less it was the sign or proof to them of the truth of the theology which denied the reality of the phenomena.

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