Article September 6, 1913 Issue

A recent critic asks, "Could anything be found more preposterous...

Frederick Dixon—Ashford, England

Kentish Express

A recent critic asks, "Could anything be found more preposterous than to seek to pervert the teachings of the Bible to that of a cast-iron science?" This inquiry is an excellent text on which to base an explanation of Christian Science. All science is cast iron in just so far as it is scientific. To put it quite simply, law is that in which no variation ever has been or ever can be.

A broken law, says Huxley, never was a law. The more absolute, then, from a relative standard, any observed fact becomes, the more scientific it appears to be; but it is only if it is entirely absolute that it is absolutely scientific. This is, of course, what the deepest of medieval thinkers, the Franciscan, Thomas Aquinas, meant when he insisted that the only absolute science was the science of theology, or the Word of God; every other so-called science being based on human knowledge, and therefore relative. Science, wrote Huxley five centuries later, is the answer a man makes to the question, What do I know? Now the most absolute, and consequently the most scientific, knowledge a man can obtain is a knowledge of absolute truth. Jesus of Nazareth put this with scientific exactness when he said, "Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free;" free, that is to say, from ignorance of every kind. A knowledge of absolute truth, then, is a knowledge of the gospel, and it is the most scientific, or, to use the critic's word, "cast-iron" knowledge conceivable, for the truth about God is the spiritual fact in which there is "no variableness," and the law of God that in which is no "shadow of turning."

This teaching of Jesus is, of course, emphasized all through the New Testament. Greek is not the language of "the old homeland," to which the critic so feelingly alludes, in spite of the fact that he will find no support for sentiment of that nature in the gospel. It was, however, as his "reading and study" may have convinced him, the colloquial tongue of the Mediterranean basin in the first century, and so naturally the tongue in which Christianity was spread. It may possibly shock the critic to hear it, but there is a word in the Greek language, quite commonly used by New Testament writers, which is instinct with this very "cast-iron" sense that so revolts him. The word is epignosis, and, in contrast to gnosis, means a full, an exact, and so scientific knowledge, as opposed to ordinary knowledge. It occurs in the phrase in Romans, "a zeal of God, but not according to knowledge," and again in Colossians, in the phrase, "knowledge of his will;" and worst of all, in both Colossians and the epistles of Peter, it is used in conjunction with the word theos, in the phrase epignosis tou theou, a scientific knowledge of God.

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