When Jesus described himself as having existed before Abraham (John 8:58), he was referring to the Christ, his incorporeal, spiritual selfhood, the divine image which coexists with God as God's eternal manifestation. This was the Christ which the Master comfortingly promised would be with us always. Christian Science illumines his statements by revealing man's real individuality to be the incorporeal emanation of an incorporeal God, or Spirit. Man, the image of God, is no more anchored in flesh or subject to the strange vicissitudes of matter than is his Maker.
Mary Baker Eddy has refuted the false theological belief that man is a corporeal being. And in explanation of her position she writes in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 13): "Because of human ignorance of the divine Principle, Love, the Father of all is represented as a corporeal creator; hence men recognize themselves as merely physical, and are ignorant of man as God's image or reflection and of man's eternal incorporeal existence. The world of error is ignorant of the world of Truth,— blind to the reality of man's existence,—for the world of sensation is not cognizant of life in Soul, not in body."
False theology teaches men that they must die in order to attain an incorporeal, spiritual status, but Christian Science declares that this is man's normal status now, and that flesh is a mortal illusion and not the foundation of life. Christ Jesus was speaking from the basis of his own incorporeal, spiritual selfhood when he called himself "the Son of God" (John 10:36), and his scientific understanding of this spiritual fact brought into his human experience evidence of the Son's inheritance, namely, those Christly qualities which empowered him to dispel evil.
