COMMENTARY

An occasional column on scholarly issues relating to Christian Science

SEPTEMBER 2008

Church of Christ

by Thomas Johnsen

When Mary Baker Eddy and her students took the first steps toward forming a church in 1879, they called it simply the "Church of Christ." Later that year she added the word "Scientist," in parentheses, to distinguish the name from that of other congregations nearby, but the change in name did not signify a change in the nature of the new church.

Eddy called it the Church of Christ because she saw it first and foremost as a congregation of followers of Christ. It was, for her, part of the Church established by Jesus. It belonged to the larger "body of Christ" referred to in St. Paul's letters to churches of the early Christian era. In that important sense it was not a new church at all, merely a new congregation within the larger Church that, as Protestants like Eddy believed, encompassed genuine Christians in all denominations. No less than Methodists or Baptists or the Congregationalists among whom she was raised, she identified her fledgling congregation with the Christ-centered churches described or envisioned in the Gospels, the Book of Acts, and the writings of the apostles.

In that important sense, too, the church organized in 1879 was emphatically not the "Church of Mary Baker Eddy," though some among her followers missed the significance of her insistence on that point. The congregation's founding purpose was "to commemorate the word and works" of Jesus, referred to in the original members' motion as "our Master." Like a succession of Protestant reformers and denominational founders since Martin Luther, Eddy connected this purpose with the "reinstatement of "primitive Christianity," a term widely used by Protestants of her day to describe Christianity as practiced in the early Christian era. After establishing a broader organizational structure for her growing denomination in the 1890s, she included this original statement of purpose at the beginning of the new church by-laws.

Eddy embraced the Reformation view that the practice of the early Christians was more consecrated and spiritually more alive - more demanding of both inward devotion and outward fruits - than the later religious practice prevailing in most denominations as they evolved into worldly institutions. From her perspective, the fruits most conspicuously missing in traditional church life were the tangible healing works that occupied a major place in the New Testament narratives.

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Church of Christ, cont.

She came to see such healing as the element which gave the early Christian movement "divine force and its astonishing and unequaled success in the first century." Healing through prayer quickly became the most distinctive and publicly controversial of the denomination's practices, yet it was always, she insisted, only one aspect of a larger understanding of Christian mission and discipleship.

The impulse that led Christian Scientists to the founding of a church receives little attention in medical historian Rennie Schoepflin's 2003 study, Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America, published by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Professor Schoepflin, who teaches at Loma Linda University in California, is primarily concerned with the legal and medical controversies engendered by Christian Scientists' practice. But his discussion also raises more basic questions about the nature of Eddy's movement that have been intensely debated by scholars, clergy, and Christian Scientists themselves for over a century.

The book's thesis is that Christian Science in its early decades was not primarily a church or even a religious movement, but what Schoepflin calls "a medico-religious hybrid," essentially an alternative healing movement with spiritual overtones. Christianity, in this view, was distinctly secondary in Christian Scientists' motives and concerns. The "nineteenth-century origins and early twentieth-century development" of Eddy's movement "were just as much entwined with the theories and practices of medicine as with Christianity." Eddy's teaching was merely a "Christianized version" of psychological healing techniques and theories of the period.

The book links Christian Scientists' practice of religious healing not with the Protestant church traditions from which most of Eddy's early followers came (and which many of them, like Eddy herself, left only reluctantly), but with the nineteenth-century subculture of assorted "mind curists, mental curists," and occult teachers whose affinity Eddy expressly disavowed. As the opening paragraphs of the Introduction describe it, the movement she established was notable less for any connection with Christianity than as an antecedent to late twentieth-century New Age practices ranging "from crystal therapy and shamanic healing to therapeutic touch, spiritual massage, and charismatic healing."

This linkage is not new. The majority of academic treatments of Eddy's movement over the past century have started from similar assumptions. The most acclaimed survey of American religious history a generation ago, Sidney Ahlstrom's A Religious History of the American People (Yale University Press, 1972), pictured Christian Science as a therapeutic movement related only superficially to the teachings and values of biblical religion. Ahlstrom's magisterial History, reissued in a new edition in 2004, described Eddy's teaching as an example of "harmonial religion" emphasizing health and material success achieved through "rapport with the cosmos."

Christian Science on Trial takes this description a step further. Schoepflin portrays the Christian Scientists' emphasis on Christian teaching as emerging more from public relations strategy than genuine religious conviction. He suggests that Eddy and her followers began to emphasize the religious nature of their movement only because of legal pressures from the medical community on Christian Scientists' practice of healing.

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Church of Christ, cont.

From the 1880s onward, doctors sought to suppress that practice through the courts and legislatures, claiming that it violated medical licensing laws and care requirements which the profession hoped to make universal. The book argues that, in a tactical response to these challenges, Eddy and her followers increasingly presented Christian Science as the practice of religion rather than of medicine. The former is constitutionally protected; the latter is not. Christian Scientists "wanted to be seen" by the public as "freedom-loving Christians," asserts Schoepflin, in order to claim the protection of the First Amendment. This "self-chosen public image" required them to rewrite their past and deny their roots in "medical sectarianism." Legal pressures thus led Christian Scientists "to abandon much of their medical identity."

There are obvious chronological contradictions to the thesis that Eddy and her followers belatedly "got religion" in response to legal pressures on their healing practice in the 1880s. Her establishment of a church predated those pressures, after all. The by-laws adopted at the founding powerfully reflected Eddy's conviction of the connection between revitalized Christian worship and healing works.

Dated August 9, 1879, and entitled "Rules and regulations of the Church of Christ," the by-laws began with a pronouncement ordinary enough for a church but hardly a priority for a group that saw its purpose in medical terms: "This church shall meet for public worship on the Sabbath."

It was to feel like and to be a real church, the first by-law made clear. The members were to "provide a place for public worship, shall provide singing books, and support Church music." They were also to provide for a pastor, who "must be able to heal the sick after the manner of Christian Science[,] must be strictly moral, and an earnest and devoted follower of Christ." If the ability to heal the sick was a requirement not normally found in the job descriptions for pastors in other denominations, it was natural enough for one which interpreted the "full salvation" proclaimed by Jesus as including the healing of sickness as well as sin.

The second by-law, which concerned the new congregation's observance of the sacrament of communion, conveyed something of the spirit and values behind healing "after the manner of Christian Science" as Eddy understood it:

"The sacrament shall be observed once in two months by a short interval of solemn and silent self-examination by each member as to his or her fitness to be called the follower of Christ[,] as to his real state of love towards man and fellowship and communion with Christ, – As to whether he is growing in the understanding and demonstration of Truth and Love, coming out from the world and being separated from error, growing less selfish, more charitable and spiritual, yea, walking worthy his high calling. By silent prayer, after the manner that casts out error and heals the sick, for these church members, and by sacred resolutions to partake of the bread that cometh down from heaven, and to drink of his cup of sorrows and earthly persecutions patiently for Christ's Truth's sake, knowing that if we suffer for righteousness we are blessed." (Mary Baker Eddy Library, Boston)

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Church of Christ, cont.

These are not the values of health and success religion. They reflect no New Age sensibility. The tone and character of the by-laws grow directly out of the church tradition in which Eddy was raised as a Congregationalist in New Hampshire in a period of fervent religious revivals.

These by-laws weren't written for public consumption; they were provided to members. Their fervency cannot be dismissed as mere pious posturing. It was actually the "posturing" quality of much of conventional religious practice that Eddy sought to avoid in substituting "solemn and silent" inward communion for the outward ritual of sacrament or communion as performed in most other denominations. In this church, she was telling her followers, religion would not be for show.

It is only honest to recognize that Christian Scientists have been no more successful than other denominations in sustaining this kind of fervent simplicity and genuineness over the first century-and-a-quarter of their history. Yet such by-laws represent the founding ideals of the church, and the impulse behind them cannot be left out of the historical record.

Nor can it be said that these fervent ideals were disconnected from Christian Scientists' practice of healing. "Whenever primal piety reemerges, the link between health and spirituality emerges with it," Harvey Cox of Harvard Divinity School has observed. Cox was writing on the Pentecostal movement of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but his observation also applies to the experience of Christian Scientists.

Cox could have pointed to any number of Christian movements – George Fox's Quakers in the seventeenth century, for example, or John Wesley's Methodists in the eighteenth – which in their early, most radical stages have reported significant experiences of healing. Eddy differed from Fox or Wesley in her conviction of the centrality of healing to Christianity, but not in her recognition of the link between healing and "holy, uplifting faith."

Her earliest teaching manuscripts from the previous decade were full of the Christian emphases that Schoepflin suggests came only in a later period. One of her first teaching manuscripts, for example, a series of handwritten questions and answers composed in 1869 or 1870, included this characteristic response to a question on how to "cast out error with truth" so that "a healing shall be wonderful and immediate":

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Church of Christ, cont.

"By being like Jesus, by asking yourself am I honest? am I just? am I pure? and being able to respond with your demonstrations to let what you can do for the sick answer this, and not your lips. For if you are becoming what is required of you then are you a law to yourself and will ask am I doing to others as I would they should do to me? Am I seeking the praise of man or the praise of God?...if you are seeking money in your practice more than a growth of your own, more than you seek to be perfectly pure[,] honest, just, meek and loving, then are you asking of sense instead of soul for happiness and your patients will not recover as well...." (Mary Baker Eddy Library, Boston)

The woman here exhorting readers to be like Jesus and to be free from selfish or mercenary motives was an obscure, soon-to-be-divorced 48-year-old of small means and smaller apparent prospects. She had no stable home, no regular income, no family members who approved or supported her religious endeavors. She had few students. No onlooker at the time would have supposed that she would become the founder of a significant religious denomination, and when she did, she sometimes stumbled in the effort to live up to the pedestaled image many of her followers held of her. If she was not the tame, sanitized figure of legend, however, neither was her religion one that could thrive long in comfortable respectability. What her students felt in her teaching, and what gave force to their religious movement, was something of the primal piety of which Harvey Cox wrote.

This particular teaching manuscript presented only a rudimentary statement of the theology she would later come to call the Science of Christianity, but it was still a manuscript on theology, not alternative medicine. For Eddy, the practice of healing was applied theology. Healing in this perspective was both integral and natural to "Christ's Christianity," flowing from the new vision of life, God and humanity to which Jesus' life witnessed and the experience of union with God which she took to be the sine qua non of prayer. The "Science" behind Jesus' works was not an alternative healing method that happened to invoke biblical teaching, but biblical teaching that necessarily included healing works.

Christian Scientists themselves have not always recognized the difference. In the 1990's and the early years of this decade, church publications have at times appeared to encourage the association of Eddy's teaching with alternative medicine and New Age teachings, apparently in the effort to reach a more secular generation.

Still, many in the church itself have called these publications into question, and Christian Science on Trial can sustain its thesis only by downplaying or filtering out the pervasive historical evidence of the seriousness and centrality of religious concerns in Eddy's own teaching from the beginning of her movement.

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Church of Christ, cont.

As a conscientious scholar, Rennie Schoepflin does not entirely ignore these concerns. He refers in passing to the founding of the church and has made efforts to solicit the perspective of Christian Scientist scholars on his work. His acknowledgments mention Eddy's distinguished biographer Robert Peel, with whom Schoepflin corresponded in the 1980s. Nevertheless, his underlying assumptions have so conditioned his perceptions that he largely drops "out of serious consideration," as Peel himself wrote to Schoepflin in 1985, "the spiritual content that may actually be heart and soul of a given faith to those who practice it."

In 2007, the governing premise of academic discussion of Eddy and Christian Science is still, with occasional exceptions, the assumption that Christian Science is not to be understood as authentic Christianity, however those involved in the movement might themselves have understood or described the character and purpose of their enterprise. Countless religious polemics have started from this same premise since the denomination's beginnings. The rise of Eddy's movement met with an enormous volume of sermons, tracts, articles, and books by clergymen and others attacking her church and its teaching as a departure from Christian orthodoxy (and hence, in the view of the writers, from true Christianity). This view, though based on theological beliefs that few secular scholars today share, has deeply influenced academic as well as popular perceptions.

What has not been widely recognized by scholars is that this is a theological, not historical, judgment. While every scholar brings his or her own preconceptions to the table, the first obligation of a historian writing on religion is to learn, in effect, to see through the participants' own eyes – to understand the life of a religious faith as those living it understood and experienced it themselves.

This obviously does not require personally embracing a particular faith. (And insider history has its own perils, especially when the subject is religion.) It does require entering into the inner meanings of a given faith sufficiently to be able to grasp something of what Robert Peel called its heart and soul. Peel's mentor at Harvard, Perry Miller, one of the greatest American historians of religion of the past century and a self-professed agnostic, revolutionized the study of New England Puritanism by doing exactly that.

The need for a similar and equally comprehensive new perspective confronts historians in regard to Christian Science. Many over the years have sought to expose the contradictions of Eddy's upstart movement. Few have approached the subject with either the intention or commitment to understand what it has actually meant to those who have embraced it.

Ultimately, the scholarly community may not resolve these heart-and-soul questions until Christian Scientists themselves come to understand more fully the powerful spiritual impulse and values that brought their church into being. This will also make possible more mature and honest perspectives on the contradictions with which they, like others in the larger Church of Christ, have wrestled over the course of their history.

©2008 Thomas C. Johnsen

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