Christian Science

Christian Science, religious denomination founded in the United States in 1879 by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910), author of the book that contains the definitive statement of its teaching, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875). It is widely known for its highly controversial practice of spiritual healing.

History, organization, and development

Christian Science emerged in late 19th-century America, when Darwinism, biblical criticism, and other secularizing influences weakened the supernaturalist structure of Protestant orthodoxy. Troubled Christians, divided between what Eddy called a “stern Protestantism” and a “doubtful liberalism,” were drawn to Christian Science because of the practice of spiritual healing and the promise of renewed faith.

Reared in a strict Congregationalist home in rural New Hampshire, Mary Baker (Eddy is the last name of her third husband) broke with the hellfire determinism of her father’s stark Calvinist theology. Yet she retained from that heritage a Bible-centred, though somewhat unorthodox, piety that prevented her from accepting the attenuated Christianity of Unitarianism and, later, of Transcendentalism. Personal misfortune and ill health contributed to Eddy’s preoccupation with the question of God’s responsibility for human suffering.

Eddy’s own search for health led her to experiment with various alternative healing methods, including homeopathy, hydrotherapy (water cure), and the therapeutic techniques of Phineas Parkhurst Quimby, a charismatic healer from Maine. Her association with him from 1862 to 1865 strengthened her belief, acquired by her experiments with homeopathy, in the mental nature of disease. It also spurred her own search for the meaning of New Testament healing stories.

The extent of Quimby’s influence on Eddy is a question of great controversy that first emerged when Eddy published her teachings and later sued a former student for plagiarism. He defended himself by charging that Eddy had merely copied Quimby’s material. The court ruled in Eddy’s favour, but Quimby’s papers were not made available for public scrutiny. As Eddy became increasingly controversial, she was condemned by her opponents as a derivative thinker. Moreover, as New Thought (a metaphysical healing movement) became established in the second decade of the 20th century, it looked to Quimby rather than Eddy as the fountainhead of its work. Only with the publication of Quimby’s papers in 1921 was it possible to see Eddy’s (and New Thought’s) radical departure from Quimby’s main emphases. Recent evaluations of Eddy recognize that Quimby was an important stimulus to Eddy’s development but that the religious teaching of Christian Science as it finally emerged was essentially foreign to Quimby’s thought.

The origins of the Christian Science movement can be traced to 1866, shortly after Quimby’s death. At that time, while reading about one of Jesus’ healings in the New Testament, Eddy suddenly recovered from the effects of what may have been a severe accident. Controversy has surrounded the details of this incident, but it was a turning point in her life, prompting several years of intense scriptural study and writing. Eddy also claimed to have had further healing experiences through which she tested her developing conclusions. In 1870 she taught her first Christian Science class, based on her work The Science of Man by Which the Sick Are Healed; or, Questions and Answers on Moral Science (1870), and attracted a following in the mill town of Lynn, Massachusetts, near Boston, where she remained until 1882. In 1875 she published Science and Health, which she repeatedly revised over the next 35 years to make it more effective as the “textbook” for the study and practice of Christian Science.

In 1879 Eddy and a group of 15 followers founded the Church of Christ, Scientist, with the aim of reinstating “primitive Christianity and its lost element of healing.” It was not until her years in Boston (1882–89), however, that the movement began to grow, largely through the healing work performed by Eddy’s students from the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, which she chartered in 1881. By the end of the 1880s, almost 100 Christian Science congregations had formed, mostly in the Atlantic states and the Midwest. By 1895 there were about 250 Christian Science congregations and by 1910 more than 1,200.

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Eddy devoted the last two decades of her life to developing a coherent institutional structure for the movement. Leaving Boston in 1889, she suspended operation of the movement’s national organizations in preparation for a thorough restructuring of the church. This began in 1892 with the reorganization of the Church of Christ, Scientist, into its present form as the Mother Church (i.e., the First Church of Christ, Scientist, in Boston) and the branches around the world.

The church government was outlined in Eddy’s Manual of The Mother Church. First published in 1895 and revised over the next 15 years, it was designed to be the authority in the church after Eddy’s death. She entrusted execution of the provisions of the manual to a five-member, self-perpetuating board of directors, while establishing the “distinctly democratic” character of the self-governing branch churches that were part of the federal framework outlined in the manual.