Mary Baker Eddy And The Christian Science Church Essay ⋆ History Essay Examples ⋆ EssayEmpire

The Church of Christ, Scientist (official name) was established in 1879. However, the notion of Christian Science was cultivated by Mary Baker Eddy after her instantaneous recovery in 1866 from severe injuries sustained in an accident, in her words, “which neither medicine nor surgery could reach.” What did reach her serious condition were the healing words of Jesus, which became the foundation of her method for achieving authentic health. Born in a small New Hampshire village in 1821 to Congregational parents who were devoted to her education and her study of the Bible, Mary Baker had always been an unhealthy child and adolescent. Over the course of her life, she married three times: first to George Washington Glover in 1843, who died suddenly six months later; then to Daniel Patterson in 1853, whom she divorced 20 years later after tolerating his numerous infidelities; and, finally, in 1877, to Asa Gilbert Eddy, who died in 1882. Mary, having survived ill health, marital tragedy, and injuries, lived into her 90th year, dying in 1910.

Mary Baker Eddy’s discovery of Christian Science is documented in her book Science and Health, a title that she later extended to include With Keys to the Scriptures. This book, first published in 1875, was quickly adopted as the textbook of a new religious movement. Besides a short autobiographical sketch of her recovery, it offers practical advice on family relationships and engages in analyzing literary issues such as the Genesis creation stories and scientific discussions on subjects such as Darwinism. But what sets her book apart as a new religious text is its exploration of a philosophy of radical idealism, in which only the divine mind exists, while matter is mere illusion. This illusion is what leads to intellectual error and ill health, and ultimately evil and death. Awareness of this illusion and the salvific need for a sense of “at-one-ment” with the divine mind of the biblical God is what leads to both spiritual and physical health.

Eddy sustained considerable critique of her philosophy from both Joseph Pulitzer, who accused her of senility, and Mark Twain, who made her the target of his stinging wit, as well as numerous Christian theologians, who believed she had abandoned essential orthodoxy. Deeply influenced by her encounter in 1862 with Phineas P. Quimby, the famous mentalist and ridiculed progenitor of the mind-over-matter philosophy, Eddy’s resolve was more than enough to withstand a lifetime of criticism, which allowed her to publish several books and to found the Boston Mother Church, the Massachusetts Metaphysical College, the Christian Science Journal, and a world-class newspaper, the Christian Science Monitor. Each local branch church, without the benefit of ordained clergy and guided by Eddy’s Church Manual, conducts simple Sunday services that consist of hymn singing and the reading of biblical texts and complementary passages from Science and Health. While the membership of the church is difficult to assess, given its prohibition on publishing statistics (though it claims 2,000 worldwide Branch Churches and Societies), and while the movement has faced legal challenges, given its practice of a strict form of faith healing that encourages the avoidance of hospitals, it is generally believed to have well over 300,000 American adherents and a growing European and Asian mission.

Bibliography:

Gill, G. Mary Baker Eddy. New York: Perseus Books Group, 1999;
Gottschalk, S. Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy’s Challenge to Materialism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005;
Schoepflin, R. B. Christian Science on Trial: Religious Healing in America. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press, 2002;
Wilson, B. Blue Windows: A Christian Science Childhood. New York: Picador, 1998.

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