We Believe in God

The first statement of belief:

WE BELIEVE in God, the Living Spirit Almighty; one, indestructible, absolute and self-existent Cause. This One manifests Itself in and through all creation, but is not absorbed by Its creation. The manifest universe is the body of God; it is the logical and necessary outcome of the infinite self-knowingness of God.

This is a big gulp and it has wide-reaching implications. First of all, it matches the beliefs of most of the world’s great religions. Ernest Holmes clarifies this statement in What Religious Science Teaches:

“The sacred books of all people declare that God is One; a unity from which nothing can be excluded and to which nothing can be added. God is omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient.”

But, it goes beyond these simple concepts into something a little more fundamental.

The statement says that God is omnipresent, because God is everything! It says that the manifest universe (including you and me) is the body of God. It also gives the universe a reason for its existence:as “the logical and necessary outcome of the infinite self-knowingness of God.”

The statement also says that God is “indestructible” and “absolute” giving powerful attributes to the omnipotent characteristic of God.

Finally, it says that there is more to God than just the “universe.” If God and the universe were the same thing, then the Science of Mind philosophy would be considered pantheist. Instead Holmes says that God is “not absorbed by its creation,” meaning that there is more to God than just the physical universe. This equates to the philosophical construct of panentheism. The Wikipedia has this to say:

Panentheism is the belief that the divine intersects every part of the universe and also extends beyond space and time. The term was coined by the German philosopher Karl Krause in 1828. Unlike pantheism, which holds that the divine and the universe are identical, panentheism maintains an ontological distinction between the divine and the non-divine and the significance of both.

In panentheism, the universal spirit is present everywhere, which at the same time “transcends” all things created. While pantheism asserts that “all is God”, panentheism claims that God is greater than the universe.