Mortals and Immortals

This is #24 in a series of posts looking at the 26 Christian Science Weekly Bible Lesson subjects, chosen by Mary Baker Eddy, and rotated twice per year. These lessons are the sermon at each Christian Science church worldwide, and are read by Christian Scientists daily. Today’s subject is “Mortals and Immortals”. Look for other posts in the category “Lesson Sermon Subjects“.

This subject follows on in order of appearance in the Lesson Sermon list of topics after my previous post in this series Probation After Death, Everlasting Punishment, and Adam and Fallen Man. They follow-on to each other, and they do relate. However, when I started this series, I just chose my subjects at random, not caring about the order.

In many ways, I feel like I could mash together most of what I discussed in the other three subjects, and therefore address this one fairly well. The subject name is pretty obvious and self-explanatory. It’s largely a compare and contrast.

If you know anything about Christian Science, you will know that there is a “spiritual” sense of the world and the universe that is supposedly what is true, eternal, and perfect; and then there is the false, mortal, and not-perfect world that we all live and experience. It is a duality that you learn to live with when you are a Christian Scientist. You don’t see or experience the nice perfect universe, you trust that it’s there–at the end of the rainbow or something like that.

As you can probably guess, Christian Science views what is called “immortal” man (human) as what is real and true, and “mortal” man (human) as what is false, or what you have heard me call “Adam”, as in the Adam and Eve story from Genesis in the Bible.

Immortality

IMMORTAL:
adjective
living forever; never dying or decaying.
noun
an immortal being, especially a god of ancient Greece or Rome.
(Oxford Languages Dictionary)

Immortality may not be as far-fetched an idea as most of us think it is. Now, I am not talking about the kind of immortality depicted in Highlander. However, there are some organisms that are considered to be “biologically immortal”, in that they are not subject to the hayflick limit, a point at which cells can no longer divide due to DNA damage or shortened telomeres. There are many species that live extraordinarily long lifespans, such as Greenland sharks, the oldest one documented is believed to be approximately 500 years old. There is a tiny jellyfish, known as Turritopsis dohrnii, otherwise known as the “immortal jellyfish”, that may actually be immortal. In experimental settings, it has been observed that these organisms, in all stages of life, are able to revert back to their polyp stage if subjected to sudden temperature change, starvation, reduction of salinity, or damage. This ability is thus far unique in the animal kingdom. This behaviour has not been observed in their natural habitat, however.

There are also trees and other plants that have documented ages of several thousand years, with Pando, a quaking aspen in the U.S. state of Utah, estimated to have an age of approximately 14,000 years. This is an example of a clonal organism. There are three bristlecone pines that are known to have lived in excess of 4,500 years, with the oldest (now deceased) that lived to 5,065 years.

Anyways, there are many animals and plants that live an extraordinarily long time, and maybe one that could potentially live forever. However, all of these started from a zero age point. They were all born or germinated in some way. Even most fictional depictions of immortals that I’ve seen, and I’m a huge fan of science-fiction and fantasy, involve characters that were born. Even Zeus had parents. Immortality, in the conventional sense, indicates something that is born, but never dies.

Immortality in Christian Science…

If man did not exist before the material organization began, he could not exist after the body is disintegrated. If we live after death and are immortal, we must have lived before birth, for if Life ever had any beginning, it must also have an ending, even according to the calculations of natural science.
(Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures p. 429: 19-24)

In the Christian Science idea of immortality, there is no birth. Life is therefore more accurately, eternal. Like I said in my post on the Lesson subject Probation After Death, in Christian Science, life and existence is on a continuum of sorts, much like in Buddhist teachings. According to the teachings of Christian Science, humans (Mary Baker Eddy uses the arcane generic term “man”) are the “reflections of God”, and as such have no beginning and no end.

Mortality

MORTAL:
adjective
(of a living human being, often in contrast to a divine being) subject to death.
noun
a human being subject to death, often contrasted with a divine being.
(Oxford Languages Dictionary)

So, what about mortals? Like it or not, all of us humans, and most other organisms are mortal, no matter what Mary Baker Eddy may think. We are all procreated in some way, and we all die. In science-fiction and fantasy, mortals are usually humans who lack superpowers or magical powers, and who live short and limited lifespans.

Jesus beheld in Science the perfect man, who appeared to him where sinning mortal man appears to mortals.
(Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures pp. 477: 32 – 478: 8)

Mortals, as viewed in the theology of Christian Science, are a false representation of what is termed by Eddy as the “real man”. In an absolute sense, mortals do not exist according to the theology of Christian Science. Like all things material (the stuff that we see, hear, touch, smell, or otherwise experience day-to-day), they are an “illusion” of so-called “mortal mind”.

Concluding thoughts

In the Christian Science worldview, immortals* are real, mortals are not real.

*Immortals, as in never being born either.