Article November 28, 1931 Issue

Your correspondent is bold in saying of a Christian Science...

Charles M. Shaw, Committee on Publication for Lancashire, England,—Rochdale

Observer

Your correspondent is bold in saying of a Christian Science lecturer, "Now if he had read the Bible," for few people study it as much as Christian Scientists.

The important matter is how the Bible is read. Your correspondent is evidently one of those literalists who assume that the Bible is "all of a piece" and that every part of it is equally valuable, a method which obscures its meaning. The Bible contains revelation, but not all of it is revelation. Your correspondent illustrates the weakness of his method of interpretation when he states, "It is true that Adam was formed in the image of God." Except to those who cling to a preconceived theory of the Scriptures it is undoubted that the accounts of the creation of man in the first and second chapters of Genesis are not only different but contradictory. The first declares that man was made in the image and likeness of God, Spirit. Obviously, then, the likeness of Spirit could not be made of dust, as the second chapter asserts. But there is another explanation of this serious difference. Biblical scholarship has disclosed that these two accounts are taken from two very different documents. The first chapter is derived from the one presenting a higher concept of God than the second, which is a Jewish legendary and allegorical account. The character of this second document is evident from its account of the origin of woman. Christian Science bases its assertion that man is immortal and indestructible on the revelation that he is the eternal image and likeness of God.

All the Scriptural statements, given by your correspondent, Christian Scientists accept, but they give them a different interpretation. Christian Science interprets these different accounts of creation in terms of consciousness. The first describes man as the likeness of God who is Mind, Spirit, which means that man is idea, the image of Mind. The second account is the material concept of man—a concept which implies material origin and existence, liable to sin and sickness, ending inevitably in death. Christian Science admits that this last is a belief that has dominated mankind; hence the universality of mortal experience. And it holds that when human thought is spiritually enlightened, sin, sickness, and death will be abolished; for it does not regard what is called death as the cessation of individual being, but as a phase of mortal experience.

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