Editorial March 25, 1991 Issue

Let's not belittle God!

Elaine Natale

Have you ever been in the midst of a challenge—a serious financial problem, for example, or a physical difficulty—and thought prayer wouldn't be enough to help you get out? Why is it that we'd doubt God could help us?

If we have a vague concept of God, or no particular concept of God at all, prayer probably would seem pointless. Or if our concept of God is that He is limited and material—if we think of Him as a magnified version of a human—it isn't surprising that we also see ourselves as essentially physical, trapped in material circumstances. With that sort of perspective, we wouldn't see how drawing closer to God could rescue us. If we go no further than what physical eyesight and material senses report, limited is how everything seems to be.

Commenting on a tendency to think of God in human terms, Mary Baker Eddy observes in her book Science and Health: "Mortal man has made a covenant with his eyes to belittle Deity with human conceptions. In league with material sense, mortals take limited views of all things." But then she concludes, "That God is corporeal or material, no man should affirm."

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