The early Christians were healers. They were the go-to individuals for health care for many who witnessed or heard about cures of disease, injury, even death. Their teacher, Christ Jesus, trusted in a power that seemed beyond most people’s experience—a power that departed entirely from conventional dependence on matter-based approaches to health. He showed the might of God to heal and regenerate mankind. The difference was dramatic.
Today Christian Science healing also departs dramatically from traditional thinking. And it calls for the same shift in thought needed in Jesus’ day—the shift from matter to Spirit as our basis of reality. In this spiritual approach it becomes clear that matter (including both the body and material remedies) does not have the intelligence to act on its own, does not have the ability to animate the inanimate, does not have the capacity to think. This realization opens up a whole new world of possibilities.
The Discoverer of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, explains this mental reset: “To the material sense, everything is matter; but spiritualize human thought, and our convictions change: for spiritual sense takes in new views, in which nature becomes Spirit; and Spirit is God, and God is good. Science unfolds the fact that Deity was forever Mind, Spirit; that matter never produced Mind, and vice versa” (Miscellaneous Writings 1883–1896, pp. 217–218).
