ALL that we correctly know of God comes through revelation. Knowledge of God is not gained through theories or philosophies formulated by men to fit the evidence of the material senses or to satisfy human reasoning. Through their spirituality men receive God's revelation of Himself. The Bible is a record of divine revelation, and, as such, contains the divine message from God to humanity. Peter in his second Epistle wrote: "No prophecy of the scripture is of any private interpretation. For the prophecy came not in old time by the will of man: but holy men of God spake as they were moved by the Holy Ghost" (1:20, 21). Any divine revelation, however, when clothed in human language, must be spiritually understood.
The revelation of God contained in "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" by Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, must also be understood spiritually, since trying to understand the letter of it only intellectually may give rise to confusion. Yet Science must satisfy both reason and revelation, and so Mrs. Eddy devotes a whole chapter in Science and Health to answering some of the leading criticisms leveled at Christian Science in her time. In this chapter, entitled "Some Objections Answered," she writes thus concerning the charge of inconsistency: "The opponents of divine Science must be charitable, if they would be Christian. If the letter of Christian Science appears inconsistent, they should gain the spiritual meaning of Christian Science, and then the ambiguity will vanish" (pp. 354, 355).
At first sight, the Bible may appear to contain many contradictions. But understood spiritually, it gives an increasingly clear and consistent unfoldment of God's revelation of Himself to humanity from the Old Testament to the New. Through history and prophecy, song and narrative, the writers of the Bible have recorded for mankind the revelation of God that came to them—a revelation, which was very often accompanied by what are called miracles and which reached its culmination in the life and works of Christ Jesus.
