One point the Bible makes clear from the very beginning is that God has something to say. God wants to be known. God wants us to hear and be helped by divinity’s message. And yet, what’s also seen very early on in the Bible is that when God’s Word is given, there’s a human tendency to argue about it rather than listen to it. In fact, the Bible’s account of when God first wrote something down and gave it to humanity is when God gives Moses the Ten Commandments on two tablets of stone. When Moses goes to share God’s message with the Israelites, he finds that they are doing things that are so at odds with God that he flies into a rage and breaks the tablets into pieces. Sometimes it feels as though religions have been breaking into pieces ever since over disagreements about how God’s Word is to be understood and lived. 

The discovery of Christian Science shines a unique light on these biblical issues and brings needed reform to how the Bible can be read and understood. Mary Baker Eddy, its Discoverer, came to understand that the so-called miracles of the Bible, when taken together, actually reveal—announce—an underlying law of God’s goodness, power, and love. In fact, through her own experience of being healed and then healing others, she realized that the events of the Bible revealed God to be an ever-operative divine Principle. 

The action of this law of God, good, is evident throughout the Bible, especially in the Christianity that Jesus brought to light and taught to his followers. As Mrs. Eddy explains, “Jesus gave his disciples (students) power over all manner of diseases; and the Bible was written in order that all peoples, in all ages, should have the same opportunity to become students of the Christ, Truth, and thus become God-endued with power (knowledge of divine law) and with ‘signs following’ ” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 190).

Once it fully dawns on us that the power of Christ so evident in the Bible can be understood and applied in our lives today in a way that brings healing through the Science of the Christ, we read the Bible in a different way. We no longer read just to wrestle with what the text is saying, how it is translated, or the historical context in which it was written—all of which can be helpful but are secondary. Primarily, we read to experience firsthand the power of God that is being revealed to us through God’s love for us. This makes the Bible a friend and guide for these times and beyond.

At times it’s hard for people of faith to have an unvarnished conversation about the Bible. There’s a tendency to want to defend our own views about it. Or we may simply be inclined to avoid talking about those times when its message can seem so frustratingly impenetrable. If we can accept for a moment that there really is a spiritual meaning of the Bible that empowers us to live as God’s children, and that it includes the authority you’d expect the heirs of infinite Spirit to have over the sickness and limitation inherent in matter, then wouldn’t it be worth fighting for that understanding with our whole heart? 

We have to hunger for goodness. We have to thirst for Truth. We certainly can’t afford to be distracted by debates over the form of the message when the vibrant energy of the message is so close at hand. As Jesus once said, “Ye do err, not knowing the scriptures, nor the power of God” (Matthew 22:29). The Master didn’t just want us to have the words of the Bible; he knew that the important part was experiencing the actuality and power of God to which the words bear witness.  

Many years ago, when my wife and I were planning our wedding, we met with the minister who had agreed to perform the ceremony. While he was somewhat interested in hearing how much my fiancée and I loved each other and how much we had in common, he was mainly focused on one specific question, which has stayed with me in the forty-plus years of marriage that have followed. He asked us, “When disagreements come up, as they do in all relationships, how do you fight?” 

The question reminded us that how we would approach disagreements was far more important than who ended up being right about a particular issue. The whole reason we were making the commitment to marriage was to discover what we could build together out of selfless care for one another, shared joy, trust and support for each other’s perspective, and love. If the focus were ever allowed to devolve into one person winning while another lost, the real loser would have been the marriage itself. 

At a time when people are deeply yearning for spiritual answers to life’s challenges, those who have found comfort in the Bible’s message would do well to ask themselves, “When others have a view of the Bible or preference for Bible translations that is different than mine, how do we fight?” Odds are that forty-plus years from now, people looking back on today won’t be asking who won disagreements over Bible translations. They’ll be asking whether or not the people of today were able to prove that the Bible’s spiritual message brought actual healing to people’s lives. 

Scott Preller, Member of the Christian Science Board of Directors