Through the centuries many a religious congregation has worshiped with its back to the future. Too often it seems easier to venerate a past revelation than face up to a present need.
When the need becomes overwhelming, however, the result is sometimes a wild scramble to adapt to the new situation and prepare for the threatened shock of further change. In such a scramble, revealed truth may be thrown out along with obstructive tradition—the essential be lost in the expedient, the spiritual in the psychological, the timeless in the merely current.
This is the situation faced by many of the Christian churches today. In the rush to make religion relevant, they have tended to find God irrelevant. Yet the initial impulse in their effort to modernize has been a good one—to bring religion down from the sky and focus it on the actual needs of men.
That, in fact, is just what the Founder of Christianity did two thousand years ago. And it is what Mary Baker Eddy has done for the modern world through her discovery and founding of Christian Science.
In opening up the scientific implications and infinite possibilities of a Christianity understood rather than merely believed, Mrs. Eddy has driven home the fact that eternal Truth is fully as available and exactly as applicable to human needs today as when it was embodied in the life of Christ Jesus. The world may be far from recognizing this fact, but the Christian Scientist—to the extent that he has demonstrated it—knows it is true.
So far, so good. But can Mrs. Eddy's statement of Truth, largely shaped in the nineteenth century, be expected to remain abreast of a world changing so drastically from day to day? Can the Church she founded in its present form in 1892 be expected to survive the mounting worldwide crisis of religion?
She herself wrote her infant Church at the start of the twentieth century: "We err in thinking the object of vital Christianity is only the bequeathing of itself to the coming centuries. The successive utterances of reformers are essential to its propagation. The magnitude of its meaning forbids headlong haste, and the consciousness which is most imbued struggles to articulate itself." Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 30;
No one with any real understanding of Christian Science could suppose for a moment that Mrs. Eddy's own work must be "reformed" or supplemented by further revelations of basic Truth. But successive reforms in both the utterances and the deeds of those who are practicing Christian Science are clearly necessary. Yesterday's understanding or demonstration is never sufficient of itself to meet today's need.
There is a constant demand for deeper insight, broader outreach, straighter thinking, purer selflessness. Neither standpat conservatism nor headlong haste to be "with it" is a sign of the spiritual understanding that measures the magnitude of Christian Science. It is a mistake to believe either that Mrs. Eddy has done our work for us or that her work as Discoverer and Founder must be revised and reoriented to meet today's onrushing needs.
Well aware of the recurrent tendency of religion to fall into a worship of the past, Mrs. Eddy was determined that her Church should not freeze into such a pattern. With a clear perception that divine Principle is changeless, timeless, and therefore infinite in its adaptation to shifting human needs, she saw Church as an eternal idea, fixed but not static, inviolate but always unfolding.
This is what makes her Manual of The Mother Church so remarkable. The form of organization it provides is not so much that of a building as of a wave—one might even say the wave of the future. Instead of restricting movement, it guides, propels, and articulates it, keeps it from frittering itself away on self-important little ventures and fashionable enthusiasms.
Within the broad guidelines of the Manual, there is room—indeed necessity— for constant development, resilience, enterprise. Above all, there is inescapable demand for demonstration based on increasing spirituality. As Mrs. Eddy writes bluntly, "If Christian Science lacked the proof of its goodness and utility, it would destroy itself; for it rests alone on demonstration." Miscellaneous Writings, p. 365;
Here is a built-in safeguard against both institutional rigidification and the substitution of human energy or ingenuity for reliance on divine means and methods. A healing church that did not heal would be an anomaly. And a church that moldered into mere formalism or raced off into mere novelty would not remain for long a healing church. This is why it is vital that Christian Scientists in their prayers for the development project of the Christian Science Center in Boston translate it into its basic spiritual terms of compassionate, healing outreach to the world. The wave of the future is moved by the dynamics of pure Spirit, the energies and disciplines of Love.
What, then, of the textbooks of our Church—the Bible and Science and Health by Mrs. Eddy? Does not any unalterable formulation of truth deny the inevitability of human change and thereby doom itself to eventual obsolescence?
Not if it is really the expression of Truth! For Truth, by its very nature, acts on human consciousness. It brings change; it corrects, transforms, revolutionizes. And the real spiritual revolutions never wear out. They bear within themselves the seed of their own perpetual renewal.
Take, for instance, the discovery by Moses that God is the one I am. To his fellow countrymen the revelation came as a revolution, literally emancipating them from the bondage of the past. But the exodus from Egypt and the reordering of Hebrew life under the Mosaic law did not exhaust the revolutionary potential of the discovery made at the burning bush.
The vision of God as I am is fully as radical in its implications for the twentieth century as it was for the second millennium B.C.—or, for that matter, as it was when Jesus made those startling and still largely unexplored announcements, "Before Abraham was, I am"John 8:58; and "Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world."Matt. 28:20;
To the religious conservatives of his day, with their fixation on the letter of the Mosaic law, the man who could make such statements seemed a reckless upstart threatening the sacred authority of the past and the religious continuity of the future. He, on the other hand, pointed out that it was the traditional guardians of the law who had "made the commandment of God of none effect"15:6; by their tradition. He had not come to destroy the law but to fulfill it—through his demonstration of man's divine sonship.
We shall be exploring till the end of time precisely what his demonstration means for our own lives, and in this exploration the Bible and Science and Health will remain our two fixed points of reference. Where traditional Christianity found it easier to deify Jesus than to follow his example, Science and Health leads us progressively to appropriate that example—to eat his body and drink his blood—so that the Word may again and again become flesh in all the variable conditions of human life.
We need not imagine that with unprecedented new developments in human thought we shall "outgrow" a textbook rooted not merely in past revelation but in reality itself. Language and life-styles will certainly change, as they have from the days of Jesus. Greater demands will be made upon us as our very demonstration of Truth drives mortal mind—the belief in a limited mind separate from God—to take new positions and assume fresh disguises. But with each developing phase of experience, we will find Science and Health opening up to us with unexpected dimensions of power, depth, and precision.
Mrs. Eddy herself would certainly not be abashed by the sweeping changes in contemporary life, since she foresaw exactly this kind of upheaval. In fact, many of the prophecies she made in her writings have more meaning for our own day than for hers—and will have still sharper relevance for the future.
Though she may not always use the terminology of today, I have found with wonder in my own study of her writings the extraordinary illumination they throw on such problems as environmental pollution, population control, extrasensory perception, space exploration, genetic engineering, the roots of war and racism. There is no more thrilling research than into the metaphysical truths that hold the answers to these and all the other burning issues of our time.
But research in Christian Science can never be merely academic—any more than was Moses' investigation of the burning bush, his impassioned but God-inspired concern for the freedom of his people. Understanding comes to the heart aflame with love, and each time we penetrate further into the meaning of Mrs. Eddy's words we find new demands on us for self-denying demonstration. With characteristic realism our Leader tells us, "Centuries will intervene before the statement of the inexhaustible topics of Science and Health is sufficiently understood to be fully demonstrated." Retrospection and Introspection, p. 84;
Our advancing demonstration is needed at all times in order to help wake the world to the immense but neglected resources of good in her writings. Humanity needs to see both a broader range of healing by Christian Science and a fresh relating of its truths to the changing scene. Responding to this need, we will not be satisfied to clothe our deepening sense of Science in a dowdy imitation of Mrs. Eddy's language —or, for that matter, in a smart argot that will be outdated almost before it reaches print.
The greatest joy on earth is to yield to the momentum of Truth. As we learn to do this more unreservedly, we will see the realization of our Leader's prophetic announcement: "Many years ago the author made a spiritual discovery, the scientific evidence of which has accumulated to prove that the divine Mind produces in man health, harmony, and immortality. Gradually this evidence will gather momentum and clearness, until it reaches its culmination of scientific statement and proof."Science and Health, p. 380.
