CHRISTIAN SCIENCE teaches that man in God's image and likeness is deathless, eternal, and indestructible. It therefore denies the generally accepted belief that eternal life can be achieved only as the result of an experience called death.
The Bible clearly confirms the teachings of Christian Science regarding eternal and indestructible life and particularly in the following statements of Jesus (John 11: 26): "Whosoever liveth and believeth in me shall never die," and (John 17:3), "This is life eternal, that they might know thee the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom thou hast sent."
Mary Baker Eddy gives us this practical instruction on the subject of life eternal (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany, p. 242): "You can never demonstrate spirituality until you declare yourself to be immortal and understand that you are so. Christian Science is absolute; it is neither behind the point of perfection nor advancing towards it; it is at this point and must be practised therefrom. Unless you fully perceive that you are the child of God, hence perfect, you have no Principle to demonstrate and no rule for its demonstration."
Note that in these statements Mrs. Eddy refers three times to the activity of demonstration. We must not only declare ourselves to be immortal, she tells us, but we must demonstrate this fact. We must practice the absolute truth which we know of man's immortality.
Since God's man is revealed in Christian Science as coexistent with Him, spiritual, deathless, and indestructible, then it is correct to declare that there has never been one birth or one death in God's eternal kingdom. Therefore all of His ideas are now existent in the ever-present divine Mind. They are God's children, and they are all conscious of that fact. Birth and disappearance through death are understood in Science to be impossibilities for the sons of God.
Someone may say that birth and death are actual occurrences. Throughout the Bible and on permanent pages of history are many records of births and deaths. How does Christian Science reconcile this vast accumulation of evidence with its declaration that Life is eternal and indestructible and that God's entire creation is here and now existent in divine Mind?
Christian Science teaches that God is Life, the one and only eternal Mind. Therefore man, His image and likeness, reflects His indestructible nature. God cannot die, neither can His beloved children die, for He is recorded in the Bible as saying (Jer. 31:3), "Yea, I have loved thee with an everlasting love: therefore with lovingkindness have I drawn thee."
Christian Science teaches that the material sense of man, well or sick, young or old, is but a false concept of the perfect, spiritual, deathless idea of God's creating. This false concept is not a reality, but is merely the evidence of the material senses, which never testify to the truth of creation.
Every individual must ultimately demonstrate his eternal, deathless existence by laying off the false concepts which he entertains of himself, his body, and his environment. He must cease sinning and cease accepting material testimony. Both of these activities are mental processes. Thus one can demonstrate his perfect, deathless nature only through the purification and spiritualization of human consciousness.
That God's man has a material body which dies and returns to dust was proved to be false by Jesus. The Way-shower never accepted the belief that a material body can die or has died, even though according to mortal testimony and medical opinion his body was pronounced dead by his enemies, wrapped in a winding sheet, and sealed in a tomb.
Jesus' work was not primarily to raise a material body from death; it was to prove his dominion over the belief that mortals die or become extinct. He did this through the understanding that Life and its manifestation are eternal and ever present.
Because Jesus never accepted the mortal testimony of death, he was able to present to his disciples the same material body which had appeared to them before the crucifixion.
He told his disciples that he had existed before Abraham. In this statement he referred to his spiritual identity, not to a material presence. Thus he indicated that the Christ, his real manhood, had never been born into or confined in a material body. Therefore he could never die.
As we grow in the understanding of Christian Science, we too shall prove that a mortal body is but a false concept of the real man and that this false concept disappears as our thinking becomes spiritualized. Then the true body or spiritual identity is revealed to us as ever present and indestructible in divine Mind and coexistent with this Mind.
The true body or identity of the Master never left its eternal dwelling place in Spirit, nor did it ever return to it. This pure identity continued to exist in divine consciousness as a spiritual idea even while mortal testimony claimed that he lived on earth as a material person for a brief span of years. Of his spiritual and eternal identity, the Master said (Matt. 28:20), "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world," that is, unto the final demonstration of the fact that all material evidence of existence is unreal.
Mrs. Eddy writes (Unity of Good, p. 37): "Our Master said, 'The kingdom of heaven is at hand.' Then God and heaven, or Life, are present, and death is not the real stepping-stone to Life and happiness. They are now and here; and a change in human consciousness, from sin to holiness, would reveal this wonder of being. Because God is ever present, no boundary of time can separate us from Him and the heaven of His presence; and because God is Life, all Life is eternal."
The question, then, regarding the whereabouts of those who have passed on is clearly answered in Christian Science. Whether mortal testimony argues that we are alive or dead, here or somewhere else, the great fact remains that we are all immortal ideas of God. We are all inseparable from Him and from each other, always existing in a state of perfection in ever-present Mind, in eternal Life.
Mrs. Eddy writes (ibid., p. 46): "I do not deny, I maintain, the individuality and reality of man; but I do so on a divine Principle, not based on a human conception and birth. The scientific man and his Maker are here; and you would be none other than this man, if you would subordinate the fleshly perceptions to the spiritual sense and source of being."
We can begin today to prove this great fact of man's eternal existence in ever-present divine Mind.
