Tuesday, June 8, 2010

The New Testament in The Science of Mind


The Fifth part of Ernest Holmes' The Science of Mind is taken up with a more in-depth exploration of the New Testament, dwelling particularly on the healing stories of Jesus. Citing chapter and verse, Holmes attempts a metaphysical explanation of these familar stories, stressing the ways in which they might show us that the healing powers of God are available to us all. Because Christ consistently healed the pathetic, the outcast and the seemingly unworthy, Holmes sees this as evidence that the Love if God is complete and all-encompassing - no-one is unworthy in the eyes of the Divine.
He says adamantly that "God knows no evil" (p. 438), and this kind of rhetoric is directly traceable to his teacher Emma Curtis Hopkins, who herself learned it from Mary Baker Eddy. Holmes says that Jesus was teaching this reality as he healed - by pointing out that people themselves laboured under the delusions of sin, sickness and unforgiveness. Jesus freed them from these self-imposed states of misery by making them realise that in God's eyes they were entirely perfect.
He reads Matthew 9:16 as an injunction to abandon old spiritual ideas. For Holmes the new is invariably the right, because the human is forever on an evolutionary path. Those new realisations we gain are to be embraced, and not mixed up with the old cloth of old, limiting beliefs.
This section is using the New Testament to reinforce Holmes' New Thought ideas about spiritual healing and the perfected self. he uses Christ healing sytories to reinforce the idea that our miseries are only ever illusory, and can be dropped in a moment with the right inspiration.