It is an apparently audacious, majestic, sweeping statement that Mary Baker Eddy, the Founder of Christian Science, makes when she writes in the Message to the Mother Church for 1902: "Christian Science stills all distress over doubtful interpretations of the Bible; it lights the fires of the Holy Ghost, and floods the world with the baptism of Jesus. It is this ethereal flame, this almost unconceived light of divine Love, that heaven husbands in the First Commandment." Message for 1902, p. 5.
Yet for someone who has had spiritual experience that flows from Christian Science, it is a statement that seems, simply, true.
Christian Science does light "the fires of the Holy Ghost" because it makes known the sheer reality of God, Spirit. The Scriptural words have been on the page for generations: "Ye have received the Spirit of adoption, whereby we cry, Abba, Father. The Spirit itself beareth witness with our spirit, that we are the children of God." Rom. 8:15, 16. But Christian Science breaks through the mesmeric impression of the material senses that would have us forever taking the measure of ourselves within a material world. This assumption of material reality so limits and voids people's understanding of God that there is no serious understanding of what it would mean for man to be made in God's image, the child of Spirit. Because of prevailing mental assumptions about the way things are, the words don't open up, don't live. But Christian Science causes them to live, and it gives back to us the revolutionary power of the Bible. Scientific Christianity doesn't impose yet another personal or academic theory on the Scriptures; it truly discerns what underlies them and what has been the source of their force and significance for humanity.
"The Bible was my textbook," Mrs. Eddy writes in connection with the search she undertook to learn why she had been suddenly healed of the effects of an accident. The physical change had come about wholly through a tremendous sense of inspiration gained through turning to a verse in the New Testament. She said that the Bible answered her questions and that the Scriptures had for her "a new meaning, a new tongue. Their spiritual signification appeared ..." Retrospection and Introspection, p. 25. Mrs. Eddy referred to this as the Science of the Bible, or its spiritual interpretation.
By its very nature, Christian Science causes increased inquiry into the Scriptures. Students of Christian Science often find themselves using a variety of study aids, from Bible dictionaries, commentaries, and analytical concordances to various versions and translations of the Holy Bible. They may attend classes on the Bible, ranging from informal lecture series to university courses. Some visit the Holy Land. Many return year after year to the Bible Exhibit in Boston and make use of the Bible library, films, and audiovisual exhibits there. Now this exhibit, in its tenth anniversary year, is taking on new and expanded life through enlarged service to the community. (See p. 11.)
The fact is that the spiritual meaning and veracity of the Bible is not in doubt, and this spiritual meaning has more practical impact on our lives than any other single thing.
Yet the real core of a Christian Scientist's Bible study—and the reason it continues to be meaningful and enlivening year after year—is that spiritual signification of which the Founder of Christian Science spoke. In the midst of growing attention to occasionally useful academic commentary on the Bible, there is nothing more important—or more revolutionary—than this spiritual study of the Bible which makes God so evident in people's lives that there is a healing effect.
Such study is very different from the prevalence of "doubtful interpretations" that has been partly responsible for the deadening of interest in the Bible. Even people who revere the book may begin to doubt their capacity to sort it out. And individuals in a society that is hellbent on getting somewhere by means of the latest econometric analysis or psychological profile of market share may fail to recognize the truly revolutionary nature of "the greatest book."
The fact is, however, that the spiritual meaning and veracity of the Bible is not in doubt, and this spiritual meaning has more practical impact on our lives than any other single thing. Anyone can find this out for himself or herself through study of the Bible in its spiritual, or scientific, meaning. The result is to produce a new, energized sense of the Bible that does more than all else to make the Scriptures central and to keep them from falling into utter disuse or occasional use as a mild religious flavoring for certain public events.
What if, for example, Bible narratives could be seen as representing the action of the most basic laws of the universe at work in human experience, God's actual laws rather than infractions or interruptions of those laws? What if the Bible showed that the real nature of man isn't at the mercy of so-called bodily laws and material circumstance but is spiritual, expressed by a divine creator who is literally Love? According to Christian Science, that's exactly what you can find in the Bible—and more; and this is why it moves the human heart so powerfully, why it inspires and brings healing of physical illness.
How do you embark on this study of the spiritual significance of Scripture? There's probably no better place to begin than with the Bible Lesson outlined in the Christian Science Quarterly. Each section of Science and Health references lifts thought to apprehend the spiritual reality behind the verses and stories of Scripture. The study of the Key to the Scriptures, the one-hundred page addendum of specific commentary on verses of Genesis and Revelation, including the Glossary of Biblical names and topics, can help further.
The real need, though, is to get a clear sense of the radical change of standpoint that is involved in this spiritually scientific interpretation of Scripture. This then makes all the difference in our own lives.
Take as an example the account of the disciples' inability to catch any fish when they had gone back to their old occupation after Christ Jesus' crucifixion. As it does for every part of the Bible, spiritual interpretation illumines this incident and makes the account vastly more than a familiar New Testament story. Christian Science explains how the disciples had returned to the old sense of material, human existence and so they felt not only sadness but emptiness and lack of fulfillment. But then, as Mrs. Eddy writes in Science and Health, "Convinced of the fruitlessness of their toil in the dark and wakened by their Master's voice, they changed their methods, turned away from material things, and cast their net on the right side." Science and Health, p. 35.
Because there is a universal truth, or spiritual law, involved here, we find in the Bible story a lesson we ourselves can use. How often we've gone off fishing in the dark sense of life in matter without any results. Then we've realized that Christ, Truth, hasn't been lost and isn't absent. We've responded, and so have seen once again the naturalness and abundance of good in a creation completely governed by God, Spirit. Inevitably we get a much keener understanding of the spiritual interpretation or signification of Scripture as we have our own healing demonstrations of Science, through the experience of the Christ and Holy Ghost.
There are many other examples and explanations of the spiritual interpretation of Scripture throughout Mrs. Eddy's writings. For example, she gives the scientific interpretation of Bible references to soul (see, e.g., Science and Health 481:32–12), to devil (see, e.g., Science and Health 584:17), and to resurrection (see, e.g., Science and Health 593:9). Another helpful illustration is found in the discussion of the Bible's reference to the fact that "God is love." It is eye-opening to realize how one tends to think of love only as an attribute of God when in fact divine Love is the very Principle of being that can be seen to be at work in the healings and deliverances described in the Bible. (See Science and Health 319:21.)
While the purpose of the Bible Exhibit is not to give the spiritual interpretation of the Bible, it is carefully designed to bring thought to that level of realization. There is only one quotation from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures prominently displayed, but it is this one, at the apex of the exhibit, on the wall of the theater: "The Scriptures are very sacred. Our aim must be to have them understood spiritually, for only by this understanding can truth be gained. The true theory of the universe, including man, is not in material history but in spiritual development. Inspired thought relinquishes a material, sensual, and mortal theory of the universe, and adopts the spiritual and immortal." Ibid., p. 547.
That is a very different proposition indeed from a limited, vague sense of the Bible as something one "probably ought to read." It gives convincing new dimension to saying that Scripture is sacred.
