Editorial July 6, 1929 Issue

Claims True and False

Albert F. Gilmore

Belief in creation as material and in human personality as man is the seeming source of the false claims which mortals must deny and destroy in order to gain the true sense of man's selfhood. Belief in a mortal as man gives rise to many false assumptions, to myriads of erroneous theories which are to be laid off in order to grasp the facts of being, and to learn the truth about man in God's image. All the multitudinous relations of human experience are posited in the belief in a human selfhood as man, a belief which at once sets up the inference that man is separate from God; is the product of matter, into which he is born, and out of which he must pass through the experience termed death. It was of this false sense of man that Job declared, "Man that is born of a woman is of few days, and full of trouble."

It was ignorance of the truth about man that led Nicodemus to question Jesus. In the Master's answer is found the key to the riddle of existence. New birth, not of the flesh but of the Spirit, was the way out of the difficulty which the Prophet of Nazareth set before this Pharisee, who, although a ruler of the Jews, had been deeply impressed by the miracles performed by Jesus. The whole situation was set forth briefly and pointedly in these words: "That which is born of the flesh is flesh; and that which is born of the Spirit is spirit." Jesus thus set in direct opposition the true and the false sense of man: the false, a mortal born of the flesh; the true, man born of the Spirit.

This false sense of selfhood is the basis of so-called human existence, of material personality with all that term implies. Belief in human personality as man gives rise to all the claims of personal qualities and capabilities, and to the beliefs of personal weaknesses and imperfections as well. Since the assumption that human personality is man is wholly false, it follows that the claims postulated upon that belief, whether they be regarded as good or bad, are also false. Thus mortals have come habitually to claim for themselves both personal good and personal evil. Both classes of claims lead to false conclusions; for both tend to intensify the belief in a selfhood apart from God.

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