A recent Christian Science Bible Lesson contained this statement from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, by Mary Baker Eddy: “The foundation of mortal discord is a false sense of man’s origin” (p. 262). It is an arresting sentence.
We tend to think of origins in a linear fashion on a time-oriented plane. When did life originate? When was I born? When was this or that invention discovered? That time-oriented, beginning and ending, mode of thought spills over into mankind’s thinking about spiritual origins. The Bible’s book of Genesis begins, “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth.”
Even though Mary Baker Eddy’s writings tell us that “the beginning” signifies the only (see Science and Health, p. 502), we might still hold on to the idea that God created the only universe, but that it was once upon a time long ago and still exists as the only reality. As I looked at it that way, I could see that there was still an implication of a beginning to the only, but the Bible and the Christian Science textbook, Science and Health, tell us that the infinite has no beginning. I could not reconcile these two concepts. How could there be an origin or beginning of the infinite?
