[This article is originally published in the booklet Ecumentical Papers – Contributions to Interfaith Dialogue, compiled by the Office of the Manager Christian Science Committees on Publication, published by the Christian Science Publishing Society in Boston, Massachusetts]
This paper is adapted from an article “Why should it be thought a thing incredible?” published in The Christian Science Journal, April, 1965
Today the resurrection of Jesus Christ is widely discounted. Many sincere and thoughtful people, including theologians and natural scientists, regard the story as wholly false, as harmful superstition. Others accord it value only as myth or metaphor. Still others accept its truth but explain it as the return of a ghost or spirit or as a subjective experience by Jesus’ followers.
Christian Scientists accept the resurrection of Jesus in its most literal meaning, as including resurrection of Jesus’ physical body, the same physical body that had been crucified. They regard this to be the plain meaning of the Gospel record. They understand the resurrection in this sense to have been historically at the center of the Gospel message from earliest times. They regard it as of key importance today.
As a first step, it will be helpful to consider the nature of life. Life, as Christian Scientists understand it, is fundamental. It is not by-product or end-product. Life is substance, original, self-existent, self-sustaining.
So understood, Life is God, Spirit, the divine Principle of existence. Life is not dependent on something other than itself for existence or a medium external to itself and unlike itself for expression.
Life expresses itself in living. Its expression is in individual spiritual identities, in spiritual man and spiritual universe. That the universe exists in Life is a more accurate statement than that Life exists in the universe.
Life, as so understood, does not enter existence by birth nor leave it by death. It does not come or go. It is eternal. And the individual living identities, created by Life, God, coexist with Him, indestructible and inviolable.
And Life is complete, perfect. It does not become quantitatively more or less, qualitatively better or worse. Yet Life is always new, always unfolding in fresh ways within the infinitude of its own completeness, its own perfection.
These statements are not philosophical abstractions. As we see them, they are spiritual facts, demonstrable in present human experience to the extent that the individual yields his thinking and living to the Christ. Centuries ago these changeless truths of Life were made flesh in the career of Jesus. Today they are again being made flesh in Christian healing.
We understand Christ Jesus to be a figure in actual history, born in the year of a Roman imperial census, crucified when Pontius Pilate was Roman procurator of Judea. Jesus permitted men to condemn him, crucify him, and lay his body in a sepulcher. Then with this same body he reappeared to companion with his disciples, comforting and giving instructions for the future.
The records in the four Gospels and in the book of Acts may differ in detail; but their tenor is, we feel, clear. The stone was rolled from the tomb’s entrance, and the body was gone. The risen Jesus walked and talked and ate, using mouth, hands, feet. He provided the physical evidence of identity asked by Thomas. Between resurrection and ascension he had unique control of this physique, but it was no apparition; it was human flesh and bone. Resurrection may properly be used as a metaphor to designate individual awakening from an earthly material sense of existence to a higher spiritual sense of living. But the resurrection of Jesus was not a metaphor or a myth or a mere psychic experience of his disciples. It was a physical event, concrete in time and place, dated and localized.
It may be hard to fit such an event into today’s secular outlook which bases its hypotheses and reasoning upon measurements by the physical senses or by their instrumental extensions. An increasing number of Christians, influenced perhaps by the intellectual climate of this secular world view, have concluded that the risen Lord had no human corporeal presence. They correctly recognize the precedence of revelation, or faith, over the evidence of history, yet they may underrate the necessity that understanding faith must manifest itself in history, fully and plainly.
In various fashions the demythologizers regard the resurrection appearances as having occurred solely within the hearts and minds of the disciples; they claim that if the disciples did see an outlined figure, this was a projection of their own inner experience conforming to the current state of thought, prepared to see visions of angels, demons, or spirits. Students of the New Testament who accept this view feel that they find the textual and other Scriptural evidence that proves them right.
The Christian Scientist in his study of the Bible brings to scholarship a very different spiritual experience and insight, and he makes a different assessment of the Biblical record. We gratefully avail ourselves of the useful inventions and technological achievements of the natural sciences. We honor qualities promoted by study of these sciences, dedication, integrity, perseverance, precision. But we challenge the conclusions of natural scientists when these extend into areas outside the competence of natural science or when they discount evidence merely because their limited instrumentation is inadequate to test it. Similarly, we challenge theological conclusions directly or indirectly influenced by such pseudoscientific attitudes in the natural scientist.
Consider now the Gospel record. Jesus’ resurrection did not occur in isolation. It was the natural climax of what preceded it. The conception of Jesus had not followed accepted human modes, although at the time of the virgin birth only Mary and Joseph knew this. In his ministry Jesus cured mental and emotional disorders, he healed organic and deteriorative diseases, he revived a newly dead child, a young man being carried out to burial, Lazarus four days dead. Only then did he himself, after exhibiting the usual physical evidences of death and being laid in a tomb, emerge on the third day, as the Gospels record, with an active human body. Step by step he had demonstrated the spiritual authority of the Christ over a physical sense of life. His own resurrection was the logical crown to this progressive demonstration.
But did this progressive demonstration of spiritual power, in fact, take place? Those who deny Jesus’ physical resurrection usually accept his casting out of devils as comparable to the work of modern psychiatrists, working sometimes with religious counselors. But in general they reject or suspend judgment on healings of organic conditions and restorations of the dead. If they accept them, it is with reservations; they explain them as perhaps on a level with those rare inexplicable cases of spontaneous recovery which now and then puzzle the medical profession.
Christian Scientists, on the other hand, are satisfied that they have good grounds for accepting in full the healing record of Jesus. For us it is an integral part of the founding of basic Christianity. Furthermore, in our own experience we have seen the Christ exercising its authority over physical conditions. We have seen mental and emotional disorders cured; many of us have seen serious organic diseases healed. Some have seen beloved relatives and friends restored to health and vigor after medical opinion has adjudged death to be imminent or even already present. We are not acquainted with this healing work just by hearsay. We bear witness to that “which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked upon, and our hands have handled, of the Word of life.” ( I John 1:1 )
Such healings are not just rare inexplicable phenomena. Christian Scientists agree in modesty and humility that they have much to learn and far to go in making their demonstration of spiritual healing uniformly effective. But many individuals and families gladly testify that they have found the power of Christ sufficient to meet their health needs through long lives and successive generations. Such certainly do not find the healing record of Jesus and his physical resurrection hard to accept.
The contemporary world is seeing a notable increase in longevity. Many experts agree that there is no apparent biological necessity for aging and death. Some natural scientists feel there are good grounds for hope that, within a not-too-distant future, healthy physical life will be prolonged indefinitely, accompanied by greatly enhanced intellectual powers and more acute aesthetic sensibilities.
We welcome this increasing longevity and the waning fear of death; but we do not regard indefinite prolongation of physical and temporal life, however enriched, to be humanity’s final destiny. This may or may not be a step along the road; but humanity’s final destiny is, as we see it, a complete mastery and laying aside of the whole limiting concept of life in matter. It is the demonstration of Life as God and of Life’s individual expression as spiritual and eternal, not subject to birth, to passage through time, or to death.
So, for us, the resurrection of Jesus with a physical body provides supreme and unique evidence that the individual manifestation of divine Life, self-recognized and self-identified as such, cannot be driven from the human scene by even the most concentrated and determined physical attack upon it. His subsequent ascension points to humanity’s further and final achievement, its rising above the whole space-time continuum.
Paul put this question to King Agrippa: “Why should it be thought a thing incredible with you, that God should raise the dead?” ( Acts 26:8 ) Christian Scientists do not find such a thing incredible. In the light of what they have glimpsed in regard to ever-present divine Life and of their own experiences of Christ-healing, they readily accept the Gospel record of Jesus’ resurrection in what they understand to be its full and plain meaning. His reappearance was not that of a spirit; nor was it a subjective experience by his disciples; nor is it myth or metaphor. Jesus reappeared with a physical body, the same physical body which the Romans handed over to his friends after they were satisfied he was dead.
Of Jesus’ immediate disciples Mrs. Eddy writes: His resurrection was also their resurrection. It helped them to raise themselves and others from spiritual dulness and blind belief in God into the perception of infinite possibilities ( Science and Health, p. 34 ). This can be true of his followers today. Unqualified acceptance of the Gospel record of Jesus’ physical resurrection and the conviction of indestructible divine Life that flows from this acceptance are of incalculable moral and spiritual value. They establish for the Christian the victory of life over death, of spirit over flesh, of love over hate, of good over evil. And they enable him to share in this victory.