Being a Christian Scientist

I’ve been doing an ecumenical discussion group using a video series called Living the Questions. The first segment we did was on the subject, “Thinking Theologically.” Among the people there, there was at first an amount of the obligatory hand-wringing about the state of the world, but I think as we progressed, a sense of the Spirit entered the room. The joy we had in our experience of God, and the value we placed on it, was something we could share and feel together.

The next two sessions were on “The lives of Jesus.” In the first of those sessions, I found that others in the group shared the same perspective we have in Christian Science, that Jesus was not God, but a man, and that the Christ is the everpresent truth of grace for man – our way of sensing God’s presence. There was one woman who seemed to hold a more deified perception of Jesus, but the rest of them seemed to embrace the Jesus/Christ distinction, and to agree that Jesus was not God. Again, what we all had in common was the experience of the inspiration that comes to us from the Christ presence, the sense of the divinity of all God’s children, and our ability to access the Christ here and now. It seemed clear to me that Christ was real to these people, and at hand.

In the next session, I discovered that many of those people didn’t believe that Jesus had actually been resurrected, or that he had raised Lazarus or Jairus’ daughter. They believed that what the disciples had experienced after the crucifixion was “visions of Jesus”. They would say that those visions were real and true, just not a physical presence of Jesus. And they say the accounts of miracles performed by Jesus were things people made up to help convey the importance of what Jesus was and how life-altering it was to follow him.

One of the women relayed how her husband, as a young minister, had come to the place where he felt he couldn’t believe in the literal resurrection of Jesus, and that his senior pastor had told him that, if he couldn’t believe that, he wasn’t a Christian. My heart went out to this woman and her husband. I agreed with her standpoint that you could be a Christian without believing in the literal resurrection. After all, you can’t just decide to believe something, and it is crucial to be as honest as possible about what you actually believe. Later, you might become convinced. Meanwhile, it seems right to affiliate yourself with that which resonates as deeply important, and to follow, as much as you’re able, the example of the one your heart is called to follow.

As a Christian Scientist, I have been taught to pay attention to all of Jesus’ words. He himself said that his works were what testified of him. So it makes sense to me to follow him in healing as well as in love for our fellow beings. I had wondered, before, how other Christian denominations managed to get around that clear directive from Jesus. I knew that some of them got around it by declaring that he was God incarnate, and that was why he could do the works. We as mere sinners shouldn’t expect to come anywhere near that. This, of course, contradicts what Jesus said about himself and his healings, and about the sinless nature of man.

So it turns out the other way to get around it is to say that he didn’t really do the works. To say that he modeled authentic living, and that that model is compelling, and that is why everyone followed Jesus. To me this subordinates the message of God’s kingdom to the kingdom of our society and current technology. It’s not unreasonable to do so – we can only believe what our world view allows as possible. It was not so long ago that people were saying that supersonic flight was impossible, or that it would kill anyone trying to accomplish it. This is what they believed, based on what they understood of scientific principles at the time. And you can’t just choose to believe something that is outside of what you think is possible. In order to believe in supersonic flight, someone had to have a change in paradigm so they could consider it possible. Then they would be able to go ahead and prove it. And then other people could become convinced.

We don’t get any points as Christian Scientists just for having a textbook that declares that healing is not only possible, but to be expected. We don’t get any points for adopting that as a belief because Mrs. Eddy says so. But as we experience healing, and as our world view shifts such that healing seems possible to us, we do really believe in it. And then we are in a position to convince others in a way that no doctrinal points can do – by having them see for themselves. Then we are in a position to be a bridge between people who believe Jesus did the works and people who believe that Jesus was not God. “The works that I do shall ye do also.”