“Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: ‘…to gyve science & helthe to his puple…’,”

Peel, Robert. “Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures: ‘…to gyve science & helthe to his puple…’,” Pages 193–213 in The Bible and Bibles in America. Edited by Ernest Frerichs. Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1988.

The editor, Ernest Frerichs, brings together scholars writing about all things biblical in America: a history of Bible translations, Jewish Bible scholarship, the Thomas Jefferson Bible, and the Book of Mormon. In the last chapter, Robert Peel documents the key role of the Bible in Mary Baker Eddy’s life story and the Christian Science tradition, evident especially in Eddy’s textbook Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Peel describes how the Bible featured in every part of Eddy’s challenging life journey: from suffering widow “impelled by a hunger and thirst after divine things” (109, quoting Eddy, Retrospection and Introspection, 39) to Eddy’s focus on the Bible which distinguished her from Phineas P. Quimby and his mental cure, to her miraculous recovery from a near-fatal accident while reading a gospel healing of Jesus, to her formative nine years of Bible study immersed in “the newly discovered world of Spirit” (197, quoting Eddy, Science and Health, viii). Peel also documents Eddy’s 35 years of multiple revisions of Science and Health—resulting from Eddy’s own maturing experience which lent to a fuller expression of her Bible-based vision. He also covers some of the criticisms, including Mark Twain’s both hot and cold reactions to Eddy and her book. Lastly, he clarifies that any authority given to Science and Health is derived directly from the Bible, which permeates both her textbook and her Church’s worship, study and practices.

ISBN-10: 1589834119
ISBN-13 (Softcover): 978-1589834118
ISBN-13 (Hardcover): 978-1555400965