Christian Science
Christian Science is a set of beliefs and practices which are associated with members of the Church of Christ, Scientist. Adherents are commonly known as Christian Scientists or students of Christian Science, and the church is sometimes informally known as the Christian Science church. It was founded in 1879 in New England by Mary Baker Eddy, who wrote the 1875 book Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which outlined the theology of Christian Science. The book was originally called Science and Health; the subtitle with a Key to the Scriptures was added in 1883 and later amended to with Key to the Scriptures.
The book became Christian Science's central text, along with the Bible, and by 2001 had sold over nine million copies.
Eddy and 26 followers were granted a charter by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts in 1879 to found the "Church of Christ "; the church would be reorganized under the name "Church of Christ, Scientist" in 1892. The Mother Church, The First Church of Christ, Scientist, was built in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1894. Known as the "thinker's religion", Christian Science became the fastest growing religion in the United States, with nearly 270,000 members by 1936 — a figure which had declined to just over 100,000 by 1990 and reportedly to under 50,000 by 2009. The church is known for its newspaper, The Christian Science Monitor, which won seven Pulitzer Prizes between 1950 and 2002, and for its public Reading Rooms around the world.
Christian Science's religious tenets differ considerably from many other Christian denominations, including key concepts such as the Trinity, the divinity of Jesus, atonement, the resurrection, and the Eucharist. Eddy, for her part, described Christian Science as a return to "primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing". Adherents subscribe to a radical form of philosophical idealism, believing that reality is purely spiritual and the material world an illusion. This includes the view that disease is a mental error rather than physical disorder, and that the sick should be treated not by medicine but by a form of prayer that seeks to correct the beliefs responsible for the illusion of ill health.
The church does not require that Christian Scientists avoid medical care—many adherents use dentists, optometrists, obstetricians, physicians for broken bones, and vaccination when required by law—but maintains that [|Christian Science prayer] is most effective when not combined with medicine. The reliance on prayer and avoidance of medical treatment has been blamed for the deaths of adherents and their children. Between the 1880s and 1990s, several parents and others were prosecuted for, and in a few cases convicted of, manslaughter or neglect.
Overview
Metaphysical family
Several periods of Protestant Christian revival nurtured a proliferation of new religious movements in the United States. In the latter half of the 19th century, these included what came to be known as the metaphysical family: groups such as Christian Science, Divine Science, the Unity School of Christianity, and the United Church of Religious Science. From the 1890s, the liberal section of the movement became known as New Thought, in part to distinguish it from the more authoritarian Christian Science.The term metaphysical referred to the movement's philosophical idealism, a belief in the primacy of the mental world. Adherents believed that material phenomena were the result of mental states, a view expressed as "life is consciousness" and "God is mind." The supreme cause was referred to as Divine Mind, Truth, God, Love, Life, Spirit, Principle or Father–Mother, reflecting elements of Plato, Hinduism, Berkeley, Hegel, Swedenborg, and transcendentalism.
The metaphysical groups became known as the mind-cure movement because of their strong focus on healing. Medical practice was in its infancy, and patients regularly fared better without it. This provided fertile soil for the mind-cure groups, who argued that sickness was an absence of "right thinking" or failure to connect to Divine Mind. The movement traced its roots in the United States to Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a New England clockmaker turned mental healer. His advertising flyer, "To the Sick" included this explanation of his clairvoyant methodology: "he gives no medicines and makes no outward applications, but simply sits down by the patients, tells them their feelings and what they think is their disease. If the patients admit that he tells them their feelings, &c., then his explanation is the cure; and, if he succeeds in correcting their error, he changes the fluids of the system and establishes the truth, or health. The Truth is the Cure. This mode of practise applies to all cases. If no explanation is given, no charge is made, for no effect is produced." Mary Baker Eddy had been a patient of his, [|leading to debate] about how much of Christian Science was based on his ideas.
New Thought and Christian Science differed in that Eddy saw her views as a unique and final revelation. Eddy's idea of malicious animal magnetism marked another distinction, introducing an element of fear that was absent from the New Thought literature. Most significantly, she dismissed the material world as an illusion, rather than as merely subordinate to Mind, leading her to reject the use of medicine, or materia medica, and making Christian Science the most controversial of the metaphysical groups. Reality for Eddy was purely spiritual.
Christian Science theology
Christian Science leaders place their religion within mainstream Christian teaching, according to J. Gordon Melton, and reject any identification with the New Thought movement. Eddy was strongly influenced by her Congregationalist upbringing. According to the church's tenets, adherents accept "the inspired Word of the Bible as sufficient guide to eternal Life ... acknowledge and adore one supreme and infinite God ... acknowledge His Son, one Christ; the Holy Ghost or divine Comforter; and man in God's image and likeness." When founding the Church of Christ, Scientist, in April 1879, Eddy wrote that she wanted to "reinstate primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing". Later she suggested that Christian Science was a kind of second coming and that Science and Health was an inspired text. In 1895, in the Manual of the Mother Church, she ordained the Bible and Science and Health as "Pastor over the Mother Church".Christian Science theology differs in several respects from that of traditional Christianity. Eddy's Science and Health reinterprets key Christian concepts, including the Trinity, divinity of Jesus, atonement, and resurrection; beginning with the 1883 edition, she added "with a Key to the Scriptures" to the title and included a glossary that redefined the Christian vocabulary. At the core of Eddy's theology is the view that the spiritual world is the only reality and is entirely good, and that the material world, with its evil, sickness and death, is an illusion. Eddy saw humanity as an "idea of Mind" that is "perfect, eternal, unlimited, and reflects the divine", according to Bryan Wilson; what she called "mortal man" is simply humanity's distorted view of itself. Despite her view of the non-existence of evil, an important element of Christian Science theology is that evil thought, in the form of malicious animal magnetism, can cause harm, even if the harm is only apparent.
Eddy viewed God not as a person but as "All-in-all". Although she often described God in the language of personhood—she used the term "Father–Mother God", and, in the third edition of Science and Health, she referred to God as "she"—God is mostly represented in Christian Science by the synonyms "Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love". The Holy Ghost is Christian Science, and heaven and hell are states of mind. There is no supplication in Christian Science prayer. The process involves the Scientist engaging in a silent argument to affirm to herself the unreality of matter, something Christian Science practitioners will do for a fee, including in absentia, to address ill health or other problems. Wilson writes that Christian Science healing is "not curative ... on its own premises, but rather preventative of ill health, accident and misfortune, since it claims to lead to a state of consciousness where these things do not exist. What heals is the realization that there is nothing really to heal." It is a closed system of thought, viewed as infallible if performed correctly; healing confirms the power of Truth, but its absence derives from the failure, specifically the bad thoughts, of individuals.
Eddy accepted as true the creation narrative in the Book of Genesis up to chapter 2, verse 6—that God created man in his image and likeness—but she rejected the rest "as the story of the false and the material", according to Wilson. Her theology is nontrinitarian: she viewed the Trinity as suggestive of polytheism. She saw Jesus as a Christian Scientist, a "Way-shower" between humanity and God, and she distinguished between Jesus the man and the concept of Christ, the latter a synonym for Truth and Jesus the first person fully to manifest it. The crucifixion was not a divine sacrifice for the sins of humanity, the atonement "not the bribing of God by offerings", writes Wilson, but an "at-one-ment" with God. Her views on life after death were vague and, according to Wilson, "there is no doctrine of the soul" in Christian Science: "fter death, the individual continues his probationary state until he has worked out his own salvation by proving the truths of Christian Science." Eddy did not believe that the dead and living could communicate.
To the more conservative of the Protestant clergy, Eddy's view of Science and Health as divinely inspired was a challenge to the Bible's authority. "Eddyism" was viewed as a cult; one of the first uses of the modern sense of the word was in A. H. Barrington's Anti-Christian Cults, a book about Spiritualism, Theosophy and Christian Science. In a few cases Christian Scientists were expelled from Christian congregations, but ministers also worried that their parishioners were choosing to leave. In May 1885 the London Times Boston correspondent wrote about the "Boston mind-cure craze": "Scores of the most valued Church members are joining the Christian Scientist branch of the metaphysical organization, and it has thus far been impossible to check the defection." In 1907 Mark Twain described the appeal of the new religion to its adherents: