Article February 26, 1966 Issue

"The Revelation of Jesus Christ"

ARMELLE BÉLICHON HAND

The last book of the Bible, referred to as either Revelation or the Apocalypse, opens with the phrase, "The Revelation of Jesus Christ." In documenting his revelation, John said (1:3), "Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand." And in Science and Health, Mrs. Eddy states (p. 561): "John saw the human and divine coincidence, shown in the man Jesus, as divinity embracing humanity in Life and its demonstration,—reducing to human perception and understanding the Life which is God. In divine revelation, material and corporeal selfhood disappear, and the spiritual idea is understood."

The book of Revelation, though reaching into the depths of human consciousness, remains a purely spiritual characterization throughout. As interpreted in Christian Science, its features point both broadly and suggestively and with unsurpassed clarity to tremendous mental upheavals and unprecedented spiritual enlightenment, to the utter depravity and unreality of the carnal, or mortal, mind, and to the actuality, sublimity, and infinity of the divine Mind.

An approach to the study of the book must necessarily be wholly free from material speculation about the meanings of the metaphors in which it abounds, for neither specific physical personality nor human circumstance figures in an understanding of this presentation of reality and its supposititious opposite. Mrs. Eddy states in her Message to The Mother Church for 1900 (p. 12), "The Revelation of St. John in the apostolic age is symbolic, rather than personal or historical."

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