Part 9 (2/2)

which give to Mrs. Eddy a certainty in this region which Jesus Himself did not possess. He falters where she firmly trod. No need to dwell upon the significant omissions which such an interpretation of the historic Jesus as this demands. The immensely laborious and painstaking scholars.h.i.+p which has sought, perplexedly enough it must be confessed, to discover behind the Gospel narratives the fundamental facts and realities of His life, is entirely ignored. Mrs. Eddy has no place for the social aspects of the teachings of Christ, indeed His whole system of ethic could be ”blacked out”; as far as her teaching is concerned it would make absolutely no difference.

Mrs. Eddy distinguishes, in theory at least though there is no consistency in her use of terms, between Jesus and the Christ. ”Jesus is the human man, and Christ is the divine idea; hence the duality of Jesus, the Christ” (page 473). ”Jesus is the name of the man who, more than all other men, has presented Christ, the true idea of G.o.d, healing the sick and the sinning and destroying the power of death” (page 473).

”In an age of ecclesiastical despotism, Jesus introduced the teaching and practice of Christianity ... but to reach His example and test its unerring Science according to His rule, ... a better understanding of G.o.d as divine Principle, Love, rather than personality or the man Jesus, is required” (page 473).

It is difficult enough to know just what this means, but as one stands far enough back from it all it seems to reduce Jesus historically to the first outstanding Christian Science teacher and healer. ”Jesus established what He said by demonstration, thus making His acts of higher importance than His words. He proved what He taught. This is the Science of Christianity. Jesus _proved_ the Principle, which heals the sick and casts out error, to be divine” (page 473). He is, therefore, historically of chiefest value as the demonstrator of Christian Science, the full philosophy of which apparently awaited a later revelation.

”Christ is the ideal Truth, that comes to heal sickness and sin through Christian Science, and attributes all power to G.o.d” (page 473). ”He unveiled the Christ, the spiritual idea of divine Love” (page 38). The Christ of Christian Science, then, is an ideal Truth, a spiritual idea, apparently an abstraction. But Mrs. Eddy is not consistent in her use of these two names. On one page Christ is ”the spiritual idea of divine Love”; on the next page ”we need Christ and Him crucified” (page 39), though how an ideal truth or a spiritual idea could possibly be crucified we are not told. In many of her pa.s.sages Mrs. Eddy uses the familiar phrase, Jesus Christ, in apparently its ordinary connotations.

_The Incarnation: Christian Theology and Christian Science Belong Really to Different Regions_

The Incarnation is disposed of in the same vague way. ”Those instructed in Christian Science have reached the glorious perception that G.o.d is the only author of man. The virgin mother conceived this idea of G.o.d and gave to her ideal the name of Jesus.”[50] ”The illumination of Mary's spiritual sense put to silence material law and its order of generation, and brought forth her child by the revelation of Truth. The Holy Ghost, or divine Spirit, overshadowed the pure sense of the Virgin-mother with the full recognition that being is Spirit.”[51] ”Jesus was the offspring of Mary's self-conscious communion with G.o.d.”[52] Now all this is neither honest supernaturalism nor the honest acceptance of the normal methods of birth. It is certainly not the equivalent of the Gospel account whether the Gospel account be accepted or rejected. To use a phrase which has come into use since ”Science and Health” was written, this is a ”smoke screen” under cover of which Mrs. Eddy escapes the necessity of either accepting or denying the testimony of the Gospels.

[Footnote 50: Page 29.]

[Footnote 51: Page 29.]

[Footnote 52: Page 30.]

Something of this, one must confess, one may find in not a little religious teaching old and new, but it is doubtful if there is anywhere so outstanding an instance of what one may call the smoke screen method in the consideration of the Incarnation, as in the pa.s.sages just quoted.

As a matter of fact all this is simply the attempt to fit the idealistic dualism, which is the real philosophic basis of Christian Science and which, in so far as it is capable of explanation at all, can be as easily explained in two pages as two hundred, into the theology in which Mrs. Eddy was nurtured and which was a background common to both herself and her disciples. Christian Science would carry far less weight in the race it is running if it frankly cut itself clear of a theology with which it has fundamentally no affinity. This indoctrination of an idealistic dualism with a content of Christian theology probably heightens the appeal of the system to those who are most at home in a new faith as they discover there the familiar phrases of their older faith, but it weakens the fundamental Christian Science apologetic. I think, however, we ought justly to recognize this as simply an inevitable aspect in the transition of Christian Science from the orthodox faith and experience of historic Christianity to a faith and experience of its own.

Seen as a curious half-truth development made possible by a whole group of forces in action at the end of the nineteenth century, Christian Science is reasonably intelligible, but as a system of doctrine built upon the hitherto accepted bases of Christian fact and teaching, it is not intelligible at all and the long controversy between the Christian theologian and the Christian Science lecturer would best be ended by recognizing that they have so little in common as to make attack and counter-attack a movement in two different dimensions. The one thing which they have in common is a certain set of words and phrases, but these words and phrases have such entirely different meanings on the one side and the other as to make the use of them hopelessly misleading.

_The Atonement. The Cross of Christian Science and the Cross of Theology_

There are pa.s.sing references to the Cross in ”Science and Health,” but the word is used generally in a figurative and sentimental way. Mrs.

Eddy's cross is simply the pain of being misunderstood and criticised in the preaching and practice of Christian Science, though indeed the Cross of Jesus was also the outcome of hostilities and misunderstandings and a final and terribly fierce method of criticism. One feels that mainly she is thinking of her own cross as a misunderstood and abused woman and for such suggestion she prefers the Cup as a figure to the Cross. As for the Atonement ”every pang of repentance and suffering, every effort for reform, every good thought and deed will help us to understand Jesus'

Atonement for sin and aid its efficacy.”[53] ”Wisdom and Love require many sacrifices of self to save us from sin.” All this seems to be in line with the moral theory of the atonement until we see that in such a line as this there is no recognition of the fact that again and again we suffer and that largely for others, and when she adds that ”Its [the atonement] scientific explanation is that suffering is an error of sinful sense which Truth destroys, and that eventually both sin and suffering will fall at the feet of everlasting love” (page 23), those pa.s.sages cancel one another, for if suffering be ”an error of sinful sense” it is hard to see how any pang of it can help us to understand Jesus' atonement unless His suffering be also ”an error of sinful sense,” and this is to reduce the atonement to a like error.

[Footnote 53: Page 19.]

In another connection Mrs. Eddy finds the efficacy of the Crucifixion ”in the practical affection and goodness it demonstrated for mankind.”

But this turns out to be nothing more than that the Crucifixion offers Christ a needed opportunity for the instruction of His disciples to triumph over the grave. But since in another connection we are told He never died at all (chapter Atonement and Eucharist, paragraph ”Jesus in the tomb”) even this dissolves into unreality. Moreover the ”eternal Christ in His spiritual selfhood never suffered.”[54] Whichever road she takes here Mrs. Eddy reaches an impa.s.se. It ought to be said, in justice to Mrs. Eddy, that her treatment of the atonement reflects the difficulty she found in the theology in which she had been trained as a girl and that there are many true insights in her contentions. She was at least seeking a vital and constructive interpretation and doubtless her observations, confused as they are, have been for her followers a real way out of a real difficulty. Here, as in so many other regions, ”Science and Health” is best understood by its backgrounds.

[Footnote 54: A curious and far-off echo of early Docetism which also in its own way reduced Christ's suffering to a simple seeming to suffer.]

As a matter of fact there is in Christian Science absolutely no soil in which to plant the Cross as the Cross is understood in Christian theology. There is no place in Christian Science for vicarious atonement, whether by G.o.d or man; there is little place in Christian Science for redemptive suffering; there is a rather narrow region in which suffering may be considered as instructive, a guide, perhaps, to lead us out of unhappy or shadowed regions into the regions of physical and, maybe, spiritual and moral well-being, and to quench the love of sin.[55] Mrs. Eddy sometimes speaks of Christ as the Saviour but if her system be pressed to a logical conclusion she must empty the word of all the a.s.sociations which it has. .h.i.therto had and make it simply the equivalent of a teacher or demonstrator.

[Footnote 55: Page 36. But this is to recognize the reality of suffering. Mrs. Eddy is here on the threshold of a great truth--that suffering is an aspect of education--but she goes no further.]

_Sin an Error of Mortal Mind_

Sin along with sickness and death are the projections of mortal error, the creations of mortal mind; sin, sickness and death are to be cla.s.sified as effects of error. Christ came ”to destroy the belief of sin.” All this is to root sin simply in the mind. No intimation at all here of the part which a perverted will may play in the entanglements of life; no intimation of the immense force of the emotional side of life; no intimation here of the immense part which sheer selfishness plays.

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