The Bible speaks to you
He didn’t hand the students in the class a Bible commentary when she asked them to “translate for me into the new tongue some passages from the Bible,” one of those in attendance remembered. In fact, she didn’t give them time to do any academic research at all. Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, expected the pupils in that class to grasp the inspired sense of the Bible passage she shared with them based on their own spiritual sense and understanding of God and His creation as explained in Christian Science (see We Knew Mary Baker Eddy, Expanded Edition, Vol. 1, pp. 298–299).
This doesn’t mean that it’s not helpful at times to understand the historical background and context of Bible passages, stories, and characters. That’s why, for over ten years, the Sentinel offered a weekly column titled Bible Lens, which provided such context for key passages in that week’s Bible Lesson from the Christian Science Quarterly. But the number of passages in the Bible is finite, and, of those, relatively few appear in the Lesson-Sermon. Because so many Bible passages and stories can illumine so many Lesson subjects, many have appeared in the Lesson-Sermon quite often, and after ten years, Bible Lens had “spoken to” most of those passages, often more than once. Although the Bible Lens column has been discontinued, all past Bible Lenses are still available on the Sentinel website. Subscribers to JSH-Online.com can enter passages from the Bible in the site’s search function, and past Bible Lens comments on those passages will be among the entries that come up.
But to truly grasp what the Bible is saying, we need to go beyond the mere historical context. We need to grasp the spiritual sense of the Scriptures. The first tenet of Christian Science is, “As adherents of Truth, we take the inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life” (Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 497). Elsewhere in that same book, Mrs. Eddy writes, “The spiritual sense of the Scriptures brings out the scientific sense, and is the new tongue referred to in the last chapter of Mark’s Gospel” (p. 272).
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