In the Christian Science Bible Lesson November 17, 2014 Issue

Not two, but one

For the Lesson titled: "Soul and Body" from November 17-23, 2014

Christa Kreutz

The human mind tends to divide everything into categories—good/bad, true/false, tangible/intangible, and so forth. It’s no surprise that from that perspective we think of ourselves as consisting of two parts: body and soul—the “material” and the “spiritual.” The ancient Greeks subscribed to this view, and it was adopted early on by traditional Christianity. For example, in the fifth century, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote and taught that a person consisted of two realities, and that the two were often in conflict with each other.

As this week’s Bible Lesson in the Christian Science Quarterly, titled “Soul and Body,” shows, Christian Science takes a radically different view—that there is one God, one Mind, and therefore one substance, one Ego, which each of us expresses. Our identity is the expression of God.

As Isaiah wrote to the Israelites, “And the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together” (Isaiah 40:5, citation 9). This was written after the Israelites had witnessed the destruction of Jerusalem, and many were living in exile in Babylon. It appeared that their identity had been taken from them, but this promise from Isaiah upholds the fact that the true, spiritual sense of self is man’s sole identity—not a spiritual sense and a human sense.

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