Editorial February 23, 1987 Issue

The sine qua non of scientific Christianity

Michael D. Rissler

Always the unexpected. That might be the way we would have characterized the life of Christ Jesus if we'd been among those who were in Galilee or Jerusalem when he was. Just when you might have thought you had seen it all, something new would happen. When an angry mob was about to throw Jesus over "the brow of [a] hill," he walked through the midst of them. When he was in the house of a high-ranking member of the community, it was a woman of low rank that he praised. Men and women who had been bound to disease for years were told to walk or see or stretch forth a limb long withered by paralysis—and they did!

If you didn't expect such changes and didn't have the foggiest notion of the spiritual power and law that were being demonstrated in those events and experiences, Jesus' very presence would have been startling. In fact, at least once he was asked to leave a region because he had healed a man there. These events seemed to defy conventional reason.

Reason and logic are very strong in human thought. We are accustomed to ordering our experience according to what we've seen and known before. When something comes along that dramatically departs from past experience, there's disorientation, which we instinctively feel must be corrected. The reason and logic of the human mind—the material senses —can be a tremendous opponent to metaphysical healing under such circumstances.

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