Article September 27, 1982 Issue

The nature of prophecy

JÜRGEN KURT STARK

A prophet is someone who uses spiritual sense, who perceives that which is spiritually true. He comprehends that which spiritually is. And that which is never belongs to the future or to the past. It always belongs to the present, to the now. The definition of "prophet" in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, reads, "A spiritual seer; disappearance of material sense before the conscious facts of spiritual Truth."^{Science and Health, p. 593.}

Human belief in general holds prophecy as something that will either happen in a minute, a day, a month, or a year—but always in the future. This misinformed human belief has to be educated out of its erroneous assumption. For if a prophet perceives that which spiritually is, it must of necessity follow that what he has seen as spiritually real and present and has voiced as prophecy must never be relegated to the future. For that which is spiritually true is so today as well as tomorrow and forever. It is like the biblical statement, "Jesus Christ the same yesterday, and to day, and for ever."^{Heb. 13:8.} The Christ so completely demonstrated by Jesus can never become more true.

The essential truth of a prophecy, then, must be capable of being fulfilled at any time—even beyond the one-time historical fulfillment it may have had in the past. Thus true prophecy always includes spiritual reality and its inevitable fulfillment in human experience. And this inevitable awakening of human consciousness to the reality of being is then called a healing or demonstration. Thus healing is the true insignia of a deeply prophetic view. This awakening may be gradual, or it can come, as Paul put it when he was speaking of the last trump, "in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye."^{I Cor. 15:52.} But this does not affect the unalterable truth that what is spiritually true is already so now, even though to human sense evidence of this fact has not yet appeared. Hence the truth of a prophecy, which can be said to constitute a deep insight into the nature of God and man and into the illusory nature of evil, can be fulfilled at any time—as the result of prayer and spiritualization of thought.