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| From a commentary
by a leading historian of American religion, Martin E. Marty, on the contribution that scholarly "efforts
to tell the truth" can make to a religious tradition such as Christian Science. Marty was writing in the Bulletin of the Park Ridge Center (July/August 1988) 3:1, 11, on the Park Ridge
Center's book, Health
and Medicine in the Christian Science Tradition. |
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"The scholar who knows a tradition tries
to go back to the sources of its flow. You can see that we think of tradition not as a stagnant pool but as a flowing
stream. . . . But the sources are important, and we must return to them to have a standard for judging the more
recent past and assessing future prospects. . . .
"The Greek roots of the word dynamite have to do with power, with 'being able,' with 'having
strength.' A tradition—once we can get at its sources and follow its flow—has power, is able to bring strength
for understanding. . . .
"We examine traditions not to embarrass those who are currently its custodians. . . . Once we realize the
dynamite in tradition, we will find that it can blow apart encrustations, loosen what was hardened, make room for
new flow, new growth.
". . . Petty academic disputes or bureaucratic debates are of little interest. The dynamite in tradition says,
'Take a longer look, and you will find riches that contribute to human well-being.' "
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| From Robert Peel,
Mary Baker Eddy: The
Years of Authority
(New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1977), 365-366. |
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"By this time it should be possible to look
back across the intervening decades of war, holocaust, revolution, depletion, pollution, across the constantly
accelerating cultural change and moral ferment of society, to see Mary Baker Eddy in something other than the terms
of either the yellow journalism or the denominational hagiography of her day.
"[H]er unique contribution to Christianity was her concept of the lifework of Jesus Christ as an illustration
of demonstrable Science rather than a miraculous or magical interruption of the natural (i.e., true) order of things. Only demonstrated facts, she insisted, could give authority to
words that proclaimed the kingdom of God. . . .
"To rescue the world from its tragic somnambulism, its passage from daydream to nightmare, there must be community,
organization, united effort—in short, a church—but the measure of the church's success would not be its size or
prestige but the quality of the Christianity demonstrated by its members. . . ."
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| From a perceptive
early scholarly discussion of Christian Science, written in 1916 by the renowned German historian of religion Karl
Holl. Reprinted under the title "Der Szientismus" in Holl's Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Kirchengeschichte (Tübingen: J.C.S. Mohr, 1921-28) 3:460-479. |
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"Jesus [Christian Science teaches] wanted
followers; followers who would emulate him in all his ways and,
according to his explicit command, should imitate his great works. The command he gave his disciples to heal the
sick is as valid today as it was centuries ago.
"Starting from this point, Mrs. Eddy understands her experience as a divine commission. She feels called to
rouse dormant Christendom and to restore the original, the whole Gospel.
"She has not—it must be admitted—handled her task superficially. She does not mean that people merely need
to be told that there is no reality in either sin or disease. . . . She insists upon the fact that the understanding
she is talking about includes a moral
task as well. . . .
"True prayer [in Mrs. Eddy's teaching] is a silent yielding of self to God, an ever closer relationship to
God, until His omnipresence and love are felt effectively by man. . . . To her, the only valid prayer is that which
bears within itself the resolve to live a life consistent with that prayer. . . . The person who understands
God as Spirit and goodness knows that . . . the will to heal [is] always present with Him. . . .
"The puzzling question is really how this kind of healing could have originated side by side with a highly
developed medical science. This would be utterly impossible if cures had not actually been accomplished through
Christian Science, and that not only in cases of imaginary disease."
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| From the chapter "The Advance of Woman," in Mary Burt Messer,
The Family in the
Making: An Historic
Sketch (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1928), 351-355. Messer, an activist in the campaign for women's suffrage
and later a Christian Science practitioner, was a sociologist who taught at the University of Wisconsin and the
University of California at Berkeley. |
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"[T]he movement of Christian Science stands
forth as a conception of the Christian religion drawn from woman's insight, quietly advancing woman to a position
of equality with man in the Christian church, and conceiving the spiritual or creative principle in feminine as
well as in masculine terms. The maternal attribute of the divine is thus advanced in connection with the paternal
attribute—not as in the poetic overtones of Virgin worship, but with the living potencies of an operative truth,
a conception intimately associated with the restoration to Christianity of its lost power of healing. . .
.
"As contrasted with other movements making for woman's political, educational and professional advancement,
this movement . . . proceeds without a gesture of discrimination between the case of woman and that of all humankind.
. . . Moreover it is a movement not based on a petitioning of men, but one which has marched steadily along its
straight—and derided—path without support or favor from the administrators of life as organized. . . .
"Here on the whole is an undertaking . . . which by virtue of its magnitude alone should compel the thoughtful
consideration of the social student, especially the student of the history of woman—the more indeed that it is
a movement defying appraisal according to the standards habitually applied to the work of men. . . . [A] movement
involving such new attitudes and devoted so largely to the elemental work of healing requires in the nature of
the case more than half a century to realize its own implications. . . .
"In any case we discover here a movement . . . which does actually advance spiritual values palpable to woman
and which does force a breach in the historic wall which has so long excluded her from free expression in the Christian
church. . . ."
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| From a sociological
analysis of the policies and practices of the denomination in its interface with the public, Lee Z. Johnson, Christian Science Committee on Publication:
A Study of Group and Press Interaction
(Ph.D. dissertation, Syracuse University, 1963), 63-66, 69. |
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"Like most minority groups, the Christian
Scientists have more in common with, than distinct from, their fellow citizens. They share not only a common religious
heritage, in Protestant countries at least, but also common cultural outlooks in favor of free institutions, the
rights of the individual, the dignity of labor, the expectation of progress. . . .
"Also, like other minority groups, Christian Scientists hold views that conflict at points with the majority
outlook. In their case, the majority-minority disagreement is a conceptual problem, a Weltanschauung, with broad implications, turning on fundamental questions of materialism and spirituality, especially
whether this dichotomy can meaningfully and practically be defined in terms of human experience. The best known
side of the disagreement concerns choice of healing method. . . . Other churchmen pray, but the Scientist
virtually alone 'treats' by prayer in lieu of other remedies. . . . A social analysis of the Christian Science
Church must account for its radical position on treatment by prayer."
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| From a column
by the Massachusetts Department of Public Health, "Christian Science and Community Medicine," The New England Journal of Medicine (February 14, 1974) 290:401-402. |
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"The Church of Christ, Scientist, has attracted
adherents throughout the Western world with the belief that diseases both of the mind and of the body are mental
in origin [and] can, in consequence, be cured by a full understanding of Christian teaching. . . . The course to
health ultimately requires finding the wholeness of man's relation to God. In the conventional medical world, interest
has focused recently on the needs of the whole patient rather than on his immediate symptoms. . . .
"The Church of Christ, Scientist, was founded and has its headquarters in Boston. Although Massachusetts has
not always led in accommodating the beliefs of minorities, it has respected philosophic and jurisdictional limits
through regulation by state and local health departments. In part, this mutual tolerance owes much to the original
teaching of Mrs. Eddy. In modern practice, the Church has also drawn a careful distinction between what the individual
may be forced to do against his own beliefs and what society may reasonably expect him to do for the general good.
. . .
"These exemptions and balancing requirements are a reminder of the Department's philosophical mandate not
so much to treat disease as to ensure the protection of other citizens. Indeed, remembering this philosophy, public-health
personnel may be saved the temptation of trying to coerce every reluctant citizen to undertake certain health procedures.
. . .'' '
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| From "Christian Science:
A Comment," an address by Thomas Johnsen at the 27th Annual Postgraduate Symposium on Medicine and Religion,
University of Kansas Medical Center, October 1991. |
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"Obviously, not just the legal but the medical and religious
climate has changed enormously in the last thirty years. There has been a hardening of attitudes. Christian Scientists
have experienced this hardening not only in the highly visible legal prosecutions directed against them but also
in more subtle and insistent pressures for conformity in everyday life. . . .
"Where one comes out on specific questions of law regarding religious healing depends on one's perception
of truth. If one feels that religious healing as Christian Scientists practice it is simply mythical, a superstition
held over from a prescientific era, and that any healings reported, if they happened at all, are the result of
normal remission, or a placebo effect, or just luck—if one feels this way, then of course
one can feel quite morally justified in attacking any suggestion that there's something here, something substantial
in Christian Scientists' experience that needs to be considered.
"Yet for others, the fact of healing occurring in real people's experience again and again keeps intruding
on this self-contained logic. . . . After all, if we accept the view that possibly these healing experiences happened
and cannot all be explained away, then we really have a problem—then perhaps religion
is not so marginal, and perhaps we will need to rethink the relationship between religion and medicine in much
more serious and far-reaching ways. . . .
"It is not always self-evident how mutual respect between human beings can or should translate into public
policy. But this mutuality, recognizing and feeling deeply the full humanity even of those with whom one has major
differences, is the necessary starting point for constructive policy-making."
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| From Stephen
Gottschalk's article, "Theodicy after Auschwitz and the Reality of God," Union Seminary Quarterly Review (Spring 1987) 41:77-91. |
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"[Mrs. Eddy's theological position] can
be understood as a radical answer to the problem of theodicy. . . .[S]he drove home again and again
what she saw as the fatal weakness in the theodicy of orthodox Christianity: the belief that a God who was wholly
omnipotent and good could be responsible for conditions of sin and suffering. . . .
"The theology of Christian Science has not generally been given significant attention within theological circles,
with the notable exception of [Karl] Holl's and [Karl] Barth's appraisals. Yet it has not only been embraced by
tens of thousands of adherents over the years but embodied through their commitment to spiritual healing—a commitment
which has been increasingly shared by other Christian bodies. If any one belief unites those who are presently
involved in this practice, it is the conviction that God's will is against
rather than for disease and the suffering it entails. The growing agreement on this point may itself be said to
constitute an incipient theodicy. . . .
"The healing practice of Christian Science proceeds from just this view of God's relation to human suffering.
Indeed, by virtue of its very radicalism on this matter, Christian Science defines options and raises questions
which have not been settled and which could hardly be so well articulated if its approach to theodicy is not taken
into account. One needs to be neither a Barthian nor an advocate of Christian Science to grasp the significance
of these questions and to begin thinking about them in different terms from those in which the problem of theodicy
has too long been addressed. . . .
"Jesus' own answer to the problem of theodicy lay in the very fact that he lived, as John Cobb put it, 'in
the white heat generated by the nearness of God.' . . .
"Given the critical spiritual situation of our time, how else can we avoid a theodicy that is a mere intellectual
exercise but by drawing nearer to that fire-source? May not the only possible advance in theodicy lie in taking
more seriously than ever before and without qualification . . . the demands of accepting the Kingdom in its fullness?
. . . In this renewal lies the only possible response to the dilemma of theodicy after Auschwitz."
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| From "Mary
Baker Eddy: Another View," commentary by The First Church of Christ, Scientist in American Heritage (February/March 1982), 110-111. |
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"One thing on which Mrs. Eddy's admirers
and critics agree is that she was a 'remarkable' woman. The fact that she founded a major American religious movement
in an age and at an age when she might have been expected, in her own ironic words, to be a little old lady in
a lace cap, justifies at least that much of a generalization.
"But remarkable people are more often than not complex. . . .
"One need not be a believer in [Mrs. Eddy's] teaching or even in Christianity itself to see that realism in
biography does not, cannot, exclude the religious dimension of human life. That was the attitude of the facile
iconoclasm in biographical writing which flourished a half-century or more ago. . . . But an interdisciplinary
approach generally opts for some understanding of the fuller dimensions of the subject.
"With an insight into the human spirit born of his own experience as a survivor of Auschwitz, psychiatrist
Viktor E. Frankl has written, ' . . . Humanity has demonstrated ad nauseam in recent years that it has instincts,
drives. Today it appears more important to remind man that he has a spirit, that he is a spiritual being.' Frankl
is not speaking of preoccupation with religion in the conventional sense but of that profound concern with the
meaning of life which is an irreducible part of the human spirit.
"Mrs. Eddy's wrestlings with this question simply cannot be excluded from any meaningful account of her life
and struggles. . . . To the end of her days she counted herself (as she figuratively put it) 'a willing disciple
at the heavenly gate, waiting for the Mind of Christ.' Her writings refer frankly to the intense struggles she
went through in carrying out what she felt to be her mission. . . .
"No more than the life of a Jonathan Edwards, a Mother Mary Seton, or a Martin Luther King, Jr., can Mrs.
Eddy's life be separated from the religious purpose that dominated it. Indeed, it is only by transcending their
own purely personal concerns and involving themselves passionately with man's quest for meaning that any such figures
attain the status which history—however reluctantly—grants them." |
