Christian Science

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CHRISTIAN SCIENCE

CHRISTIAN SCIENCE is a religious movement emphasizing Christian healing as proof of the supremacy of spiritual over physical power. Founded by Mary Baker Eddy, a New Englander of predominantly Calvinistic background, Christian Science emerged as a distinct phenomenon in American religious life during a period of both social and religious crisis. The dramatic conflict between science and faith, as witnessed in battles over Darwinism and critical biblical scholarship, was only the most obvious aspect of a developing breakdown in a Christian cosmology that pictured experience as split between a natural and a supernatural order. Christian Science, however, rejected traditional cosmology and was therefore free to address religious issues in a way that was limited neither by creedal formulas nor by assumptions based on nineteenth-century natural science.

Eddy from her earliest years showed a deep-seated longing for the divine that was broadly characteristic of the Christian tradition and especially prominent in Puritanism. She found it impossible, however, to reconcile her deepest religious feelings with the theology of a then decadent Calvinism. Yet while other revolts against Calvinism, such as those of Unitarianism and Transcendentalism, led to an attenuation or even an abandonment of Christian convictions, Eddy's Christianity was so deeply ingrained that she found it impossible to think of any ultimate answer to what she called the "problem of being" outside of a theistic, biblical context. In her own words, "From my very childhood, I was impelled, by a hunger and thirst after divine things—a desire for something higher and better than matter, and apart from it—to seek diligently for the knowledge of God as the one great and ever-present relief from human woe."

Running parallel to this search, and contributing heuristically to it, was Eddy's own long quest for health. She had exhausted the healing methods of the time, including homeopathy, and the techniques of the Maine healer Phineas Quimby, to whom she turned in 1862, and although she found useful hints concerning the mental causes of disease, she never found the permanent health for which she was looking. Her growing disenchantment with all curative methods returned her to her spiritual quest, which led to a radically different perception of God and creation from that held by Quimby, namely, that reality is, in truth, wholly spiritual.

Eddy identified the advent of this conviction with her "instantaneous" recovery in 1866 from the effects of a severe accident while reading an account of one of Jesus' healings. She described the event as follows: "That short experience included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence." This passage is reminiscent of much mystical writing, but Eddy saw the experience as the point at which she discovered a spiritual truth so concrete that it would be "scientifically" provable in the experience of others.

There can be no doubt that this moment of recovery marked an important turning point in Eddy's life, impelling the development of the theology and metaphysics to which she gave expression in her major book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, first published in 1875. The primary purpose of the book was not to set forth a new systematic theology, but rather to serve as a textbook for religious practice. The focus throughout was on awakening the capacity of its readers to experience the presence of God directly; the "honest seekers for Truth," to whom the book was dedicated, were invited to explore the saving and physically healing effects of that experience.

A key point of Christian Science is that the understanding of God must include a changed view of reality itself. In effect, Science and Health challenged the traditional Christian view of God as the creator of a material world—not on philosophic grounds, even though Eddy's conclusions are partially articulated in philosophic terms—but on the grounds of a radical reinterpretation of the meaning of the gospel. Christian Science takes the works of Jesus, culminating in his resurrection and final ascension above all things material, as pointing to the essential spiritual nature of being. Accordingly, his life exemplifies the possibility of action outside of and contrary to the limits of a finite, material sense of existence. From the standpoint of traditional Christianity, Jesus' works constituted supernatural interruptions of natural process and law; from the standpoint of Christian Science, they resulted from the operation of divine power comprehended as spiritual law. In biblical terms this meant the breaking through of the kingdom of heaven—of the divine order of things—into ordinary sense-bound experience.

Nineteenth-century Protestant orthodoxy associated the kingdom of heaven with a realm in the beyond and the hereafter; Christian Science, however, views it as the spiritual potential of present experience to be actualized once sinning mortals cease to identify their own limited, erring perceptions as reality. Regeneration or spiritual awakening occurs as one sees through sense appearance to what Eddy called "the spiritual fact of whatever the material senses behold." The spiritual fact for her was not an otherworldly phenomenon, but a transforming power—a reality drastically obscured by the misconceived sense of life, substance, and intelligence, apart from God. So great is this error of misconceiving, or fundamental sin, that a revelatory breakthrough from outside material existence is required in order to manifest the true spiritual nature of creation. The advent of Jesus, according to Christian Science, constitutes the decisive spiritual event that makes possible the salvation of humanity from the flesh.

Christian Science does not deify Jesus, a point that its severest critics have sometimes said separates it conclusively from traditional Christianity. Yet Jesus' actual role in the achievement of humanity's salvation is as important to its theology as for traditional Christianity. His life of obedience and sacrifice is understood as the means through which the reality of being for humankind has broken through in the midst of ordinary human experience. This true spiritual selfhood is identified as the eternal Christ, as distinct from Jesus, although uniquely and fully incarnated in him. His mission is viewed as opening up the possibility for all men and women to make actual their own spiritual union with God. He did this by proving practically that neither sin nor suffering is part of authentic spiritual selfhood, or Christ.

While Christian Science holds that evil has no God-derived existence and therefore can be regarded ontologically as not real, it strongly emphasizes the need for healing rather than ignoring the manifold manifestations of the carnal mind, defined by the apostle Paul as "enmity against God," and as operating with hypnotic intensity in human experience. Such healing is to be accomplished not through personal will or effort but through yielding to the action of the divine Mind. Salvation, while seen as the effect of divine grace, requires prayer, self-renunciation, and radical, unremitting warfare against the evils of the mortal condition.

Salvation includes obedience to Jesus' command to heal the sick. Sickness is one expression of the fundamental error of the mortal mind that accepts existence as something separate from God. Healing, therefore, must be predicated on the action of the divine Mind or power outside of human thought. In Eddy's words, "… erring, finite, human mind has an absolute need of something beyond itself for its redemption and healing." Healing is regarded not merely as a bodily change, but as a phase of full salvation from the flesh as well. It is the normalization of bodily function and formation through the divine government of the human mentality and of the bodily system that that mentality governs.

The emphasis in Christian Science upon healing—primarily of sin, secondarily disease—is based on the concrete issues of everyday lived experience. The healing emphasis differentiates Christian Science from philosophies of idealism with which it is often carelessly identified, including the Emersonian transcendentalism that was part of its immediate cultural background. Indeed, departures from Eddy's teaching within the Christian Science movement itself have tended generally toward metaphysical abstraction, wherein her statements almost completely lose their bearings on daily experience.

In the context of Eddy's writings, however, such statements almost always point to the demand and possibility of demonstrating in actual experience what she understood as spiritual fact. Her abstract statement that "God is All," for instance, taken by itself could imply a pantheistic identification of humankind and the universe with God. Taken in the full context of her teachings, it indicates that God's infinitude and omnipotence rule out the legitimacy, permanence, and substantiality of anything contrary to God's nature as Principle, Mind, Spirit, Soul, Life, Truth, and Love, an assertion that is taken to be demonstrably practical in concrete situations, to some degree at least.

The radical claim as to the ultimate unreality of matter is to be assessed in these terms. Christian Science asserts that matter is not the objective substance it appears to be, but is rather a concept of substance shaped by the limitations of the human mind. This assertion no more denies the existence of humankind or natural objects than the challenge posed in physics to conventional views of perception and to the substantiality of matter denies the existence of the universe. But it does point to the necessity of bringing the true spiritual nature of humanity and the universe to light through progressive demonstration.

With this emphasis on practical regeneration and healing, one sees the clearest link between Christian Science and the American Puritan tradition. An undue emphasis on the practical aspect of Christian Science by some followers has sometimes led to a secularization of its teaching, with healing regarded as an end in itself rather than as one element of a full salvation. This tendency clearly characterizes the mind-cure and New Thought movements. These movements, in some respects akin to Christian Science, use similar terms, which, however, bear a notably different meaning.

As with any religious movement, the motives of those who call themselves Christian Scientists vary. Of the 350,000–450,000 who might so identify themselves, it is likely that a majority are not formal members of the Christian Science denomination. While many have made Christian Science a way of life and joined, others have sought it, sometimes intermittently, for comfort and support. There may be limited truth, too, to the hypothesis that activity in the Christian Science movement, in which women have been numerically predominant, has provided an outlet for women in a society that has otherwise restricted their role—particularly in the religious world. On the other hand, such an argument may reflect an unconscious male stereotyping that seeks reductionist explanations when women advance or espouse ideas.

Evidence of the religious experiences of long-term, committed adherents of Christian Science suggests that it may have survived for more than a century because it has met a more basic religious need. Disaffected Protestants, particularly, have seen in it a release not just from bodily suffering but also from spiritual malaise—an alternative to the attitude that accepts with Christian resignation the tragedies of present life in hope of compensation either in a life beyond or according to some transcendent scale of eternal values. Christian Science, however, regards the ultimate spiritual victory over evil prophesied in the Bible as requiring confronta-tion with all aspects of evil and imperfection in present experience.

Although Christian Science is explicitly committed to universal salvation, it focuses initially and primarily on the potential for transformation and healing within the individual. This focus, deviant as it has often seemed to conservative Christians, tends to associate it with the traditional Protestant concern over individual salvation, giving it a conservative cast in the eyes of more liberal Christians who wish to transform the social order. The identification of Christian Science with a conservative, well-to-do, middle-class ideology may be as misleading in a sociological sense as it is theologically. In fact, a greater segment of the movement comes from rural or lower-middle-class backgrounds than most outside accounts would suggest.

On the whole, the church does not share the social activism of many mainstream denominations, but its purpose in publishing the Christian Science Monitor —an international newspaper of recognized excellence—indicates a substantial commitment to an interest in the public good. Eddy founded the Monitor in 1908 as the most appropriate vehicle for the political and social expression of the practical idealism of her teaching. In addition, it was intended to educate Christian Scientists about the need for the healing of society at large, not just the individual.

The character of the Monitor, to a degree, reflects the educational purpose of the church that publishes it. Eddy, surprisingly sensitive to the dangers of institutionalized religion, conceived of the church in instrumental rather than ecclesiastical terms, shaping it to provide practical means for the study, communication, and teaching of Christian Science as a way of life. It was not part of her original purpose to found a separate denomination; rather, she and a group of her students founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, in 1879, when it became clear that other Christian churches were not disposed to accept her teaching. The overall structure of the church was laid out in a document of skeletal simplicity, the Manual of the Mother Church, which Eddy first published in 1895 and continued to develop until her death.

The central administrative functions of this "mother" church, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston, are presided over by a five-member, self-perpetuating board of directors. The Mother Church, with its branches, including some 3,000 congregations in fifty countries, constitute the Church of Christ, Scientist; the congregations are self-governing within the framework provided by the Manual.

Taken as a whole, the church's activities can best be understood as vehicles for disciplined spiritual education. These include the Bible "lesson-sermons" consisting of passages from the Bible and the Christian Science textbook studied by members during the week; the religious periodicals published by the church; and Christian Science lectures, Sunday schools, the intensive two-week course of class instruction, and follow-up refresher meetings attended by those seriously committed to the religion.

The absence of an ordained clergy, ritualistically observed sacraments, and all but the most spare symbols point to the almost Quaker-like simplicity of the Christian Science concept of worship, in which silent prayer has an important role and the sacraments are conceived of as a process of continuing purification and quiet communion with God. Spontaneous sharing of experiences of healing and spiritual guidance marks the Wednesday "testimony meetings."

Christian Science practitioners, listed monthly in the Christian Science Journal, are members who devote themselves full time to the ministry of spiritual healing, and a significant body of testimonies of healing—amounting to some 50,000 published accounts—has been amassed in Christian Science periodicals over the years. There is good evidence that this sustained commitment of an entire denomination over more than a century to the practice of spiritual healing has been a significant factor in the reawakening of interest in Christian healing among many denominations in the 1960s and 1970s.

By the 1979 centennial of the founding of the church, the Christian Science movement found itself experiencing greater challenges from the currents of secular materialism than it had encountered since the early days of its founding. The increasing secularization of Western society worked against the kind of radical Christian commitment it required, while at the same time its healing practices encountered new challenges in an increasingly medically oriented society.

The history of the church, however, confirms that it is no exception to the general tendency of religious movements to grow or decline according to inner vitality rather than external pressure. Nor are external signs of growth in themselves altogether valid indicators of spiritual strength; indeed, it was because of this that Eddy forbade the publication of church membership statistics at a time when the movement was growing rapidly. The great numerical growth of the movement in the decades after Eddy's death may well have been attributable more to sociocultural factors unrelated to and, in some respects, opposed to the specific religious and redemptive purposes of the church itself.

It is too soon to assess the long-term significance of some signs of decline of the Christian Science movement. Indeed, these signs must be qualified by other factors, among them the erosion of the insularity and complacency evident to some degree in the church's posture in earlier decades, the maturing of the movement, its willingness to position itself in relation to the rest of the Christian world, and the significant growth it has experienced in some developing nations.

Bibliography

The basic document of the Christian Science movement is Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875; reprint, Boston, 1914), which contains the full statement of its teaching. Extensive historical background on Christian Science can be found in Robert Peel's trilogy, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, The Years of Trial, The Years of Authority (New York, 1966–1977). Peel's earlier Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture (New York, 1958) places Christian Science in its New England cultural context, relating it to both transcendentalism and pragmatism, while my own The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (Berkeley, 1973) gives a full account of Christian Science within the context of American religious development. An early, pathbreaking study of the theology of Christian Science is the essay by Karl Holl, "Szientismus," in Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte, vol. 3 (Tübingen, 1921–1928). A representative though reductionist treatment of Christian Science from a sociological perspective is the section on Christian Science in Bryan R. Wilson's Sects and Societies: A Sociological Study of the Elim Tabernacle, Christian Science and Christadelphians (1961; reprint, Westport, Conn., 1978). Charles S. Braden's Christian Science Today: Power, Policy, Practice (Dallas, 1958) attempts an overview of organizational developments, drawing largely on dissident sources. One reason for the paucity of adequate academic accounts of Christian Science is suggested in Thomas C. Johnsen's article "Historical Consensus and Christian Science: The Career of a Manuscript Controversy," New England Quarterly 53 (March 1980): 3–22. A popular but slapdash history of the early phases of the movement is Norman Beasley's The Cross and the Crown (New York, 1952). Basic documentation on Christian Science healing is given in the church-published A Century of Christian Science Healing (Boston, 1966).