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Study
Topics
For
more information on the teachings of Christian
Science, explore the following study
topics:
Angels
Animal
Magnetism
Baptism
The
Bible
CS
vs. Evolution and
Creationism
Christ
Jesus
Death
Devil
God
Heaven
Hell
Holy
Ghost
Marriage
Mortals
and Immortals
The
New Tongue
Purity
Salvation
The
Term "Science"
"Science
and Health"
Stages
of Advancement
The
Tenets of Christian
Science
The
Trinity
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An Introduction to Christian
Science
CHRISTIAN
SCIENCE VERSUS
EVOLUTION AND CREATIONISM
God's
Creation Spiritual, Not Material
Creationism teaches that God created man
materially, but Jesus said, "That which is born of
the flesh is flesh [material]; and that
which is born of the Spirit [God] is spirit
[spiritual]" (John 3:6). Paul said, "...the
flesh lusteth against the Spirit, and the Spirit
against the flesh: and these are contrary the one
to the other ..." (Galations 5:17). Though Jesus
and Paul clearly taught that Spirit and flesh are
contrary, creationism holds to an opposite view and
attributes the creation of matter to
Spirit.
Evolution
is based on the belief that matter, not Spirit, is
real substance; that nothing can evolve into
something; that non-intelligence can become
intelligent. Evolution may describe the illusion of
material existence, but it does not explain the
real, spiritual creation.
References
for Study
The following passages are from the Bible (King
James Version) and the Christian Science textbook,
Science and Health with Key to the
Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy.
Genesis
1:26-27
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after
our likeness: and let them have dominion over the
fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and
over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over
every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
So God created man in his own image, in the image
of God created he him; male and female created he
them.
Genesis
2:6, 7
But there went up a mist from the earth, and
watered the whole face of the ground. And the Lord
God formed man of the dust of the ground, and
breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and
man became a living soul.
Science
and Health, pp. 521:23 - 522:17
The Science and truth of the divine creation
have been presented in the verses already
considered, and now the opposite error, a material
view of creation, is to be set forth. The second
chapter of Genesis contains a statement of this
material view of God and the universe, a statement
which is the exact opposite of scientific truth as
before recorded. The history of error or matter, if
veritable, would set aside the omnipotence of
Spirit; but it is the false history in
contradistinction to the true.
The
Science of the first record proves the falsity of
the second. If one is true, the other is false, for
they are antagonistic. The first record assigns all
might and government to God, and endows man out of
God's perfection and power. The second record
chronicles man as mutable and mortal, — as
having broken away from Deity and as revolving in
an orbit of his own. Existence, separate from
divinity, Science explains as
impossible.
This
second record unmistakably gives the history of
error in its externalized forms, called life and
intelligence in matter. It records pantheism,
opposed to the supremacy of divine Spirit; but this
state of things is declared to be temporary and
this man to be mortal, — dust returning to
dust.
Science
and Health, p. 523:14-30
It may be worth while here to remark that,
according to the best scholars, there are clear
evidences of two distinct documents in the early
part of the book of Genesis. One is called the
Elohistic, because the Supreme Being is therein
called Elohim. The other document is called the
Jehovistic, because Deity therein is always called
Jehovah, — or Lord God, as our common version
translates it.
Throughout
the first chapter of Genesis and in three verses of
the second, — in what we understand to be the
spiritually scientific account of creation, —
it is Elohim (God) who creates. From the fourth
verse of chapter two to chapter five, the creator
is called Jehovah, or the Lord. The different
accounts become more and more closely intertwined
to the end of chapter twelve, after which the
distinction is not definitely traceable.
Science
and Health, p. 537:19-26
No one can reasonably doubt that the purpose of
this allegory — this second account in Genesis
— is to depict the falsity of error and the
effects of error. Subsequent Bible revelation is
coordinate with the Science of creation recorded in
the first chapter of Genesis. Inspired writers
interpret the Word spiritually, while the ordinary
historian interprets it literally.
Science
and Health, p. 532:5
All human knowledge and material sense must be
gained from the five corporeal senses. Is this
knowledge safe, when eating its first fruits
brought death? "In the day that thou eatest thereof
thou shalt surely die," was the prediction in the
story under consideration. Adam and his progeny
were cursed, not blessed; and this indicates that
the divine Spirit, or Father, condemns material man
and remands him to dust.
Science
and Health, p. 543:18-21
If man is material and originates in an egg,
who shall say that he is not primarily dust? May
not Darwin be right in thinking that apehood
preceded mortal manhood?
Science
and Health, p. 551:12-14 (to ,)
Evolution describes the gradations of human
belief, but it does not acknowledge the method of
divine Mind, ...
Science
and Health, p. 172:3-22
Theorizing about man's development from
mushrooms to monkeys and from monkeys into men
amounts to nothing in the right direction and very
much in the wrong.
Materialism
grades the human species as rising from matter
upward. How then is the material species
maintained, if man passes through what we call
death and death is the Rubicon of spirituality?
Spirit can form no real link in this supposed chain
of material being. But divine Science reveals the
eternal chain of existence as uninterrupted and
wholly spiritual; yet this can be realized only as
the false sense of being disappears.
If
man was first a material being, he must have passed
through all the forms of matter in order to become
man. If the material body is man, he is a portion
of matter, or dust. On the contrary, man is the
image and likeness of Spirit; and the belief that
there is Soul in sense or Life in matter obtains in
mortals, alias mortal mind, to which the apostle
refers when he says that we must "put off the old
man."
Science
and Health, p. 551:24-28
Darkness and doubt encompass thought, so long
as it bases creation on materiality. From a
material standpoint, "Canst thou by searching find
out God?" All must be Mind, or else all must be
matter. Neither can produce the other.
Science
and Health, p. 550:10
Of what avail is it to investigate what is
miscalled material life, which ends, even as it
begins, in nameless nothingness? The true sense of
being and its eternal perfection should appear now,
even as it will hereafter.
Science
and Health, p. 555:16-23
Searching for the origin of man, who is the
reflection of God, is like inquiring into the
origin of God, the self-existent and eternal. Only
impotent error would seek to unite Spirit with
matter, good with evil, immortality with mortality,
and call this sham unity man, as if man were
the offspring of both Mind and matter, of both
Deity and humanity. Creation rests on a spiritual
basis.
Science
and Health, p. 295:5
God creates and governs the universe, including
man. The universe is filled with spiritual ideas,
which He evolves, and they are obedient to the Mind
that makes them. Mortal mind would transform the
spiritual into the material, and then recover man's
original self in order to escape from the mortality
of this error. Mortals are not like immortals,
created in God's own image; but infinite Spirit
being all, mortal consciousness will at last yield
to the scientific fact and disappear, and the real
sense of being, perfect and forever intact, will
appear.
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