Resources by Simmons, John K.

Mary Baker Eddy would transform her prophetic charisma into a set of bylaws (Manual of The Mother Church) which was meant to ensure institutional perpetuity, and act as a legal covenant for its members. Simmons highlights one British Church member, Annie Bill, who saw her own role as restoring charismatic leadership to the movement and creating an independent ‘Parent Church.’

Simmons’s chapter on Christian Science in the context of America’s 20th-century religious culture begins with an acknowledgment of Mary Baker Eddy’s “insight into a primary religious impulse of her time”–a time of social upheaval and challenge to the biblically oriented self-understanding of America’s destiny.

Christian Science and New Thought both conveyed a “metaphysical perfectionism” in sync with late 19th-century American can-do spirit and the golden glow of California culture with its promises of prosperity. Key women in Christian Science left the movement to become teachers and prime movers of New Thought in California. Other reasons for the decline in both movements today are discussed. 

Simmons contextualizes Mary Baker Eddy amidst the late 19th-century era of revolutionary change showing how her forebears (Swedenborgianism, Mesmerism, Transcendentalism and Spiritualism) “prepared the psychic way” by making explicit to “the American spiritual imagination the connection among physical, psychological, and spiritual health” (94). He reviews Eddy’s theology, the influence of Quimby, and the evolution of Christian Science as an institution.

This essay on Christian Science is one of many descriptive introductions of various religions and their relation to evangelical Christianity. Simmons notes that the ‘Christian’ element in Christian Science involves a radical reinterpretation of Jesus and his role in the New Testament. Mary Baker Eddy stressed the practical nature of her ‘science’ in human challenges, thus highlighting the focus on healing. 

​​According to Simmons, Eddy’s eschatology is understood in its original sense of an unveiling—sometimes conflicting unveiling: an earth-shattering disintegration of the ego. Both ‘catastrophic apocalypticism’ and ‘progressive apocalypticism’ (the journey of progressive unfoldment) can bring about authentic transformation, and revelation of all good, harmonious spiritual reality, or ‘ethical eschatology.’ Simmons seeks a balance on the journey from apocalyptic to paradise.

Based on a hypothesis from neuroscience—that the human brain is wired for spirituality—Simmons posits a universal process of spiritual transformation in three stages and claims that Mary Baker Eddy has experienced the third: experiencing mystical unity with God. But she retreated at times to a paradoxical duality when forming her theology and church organization.

Simmons explores the reasons for the parting of ways between Mary Baker Eddy and one of her followers, Emma Curtis Hopkins. He speculates that the Hopkins-Eddy relationship embodied the second and third stages in the process of spiritual transformation where Hopkins moved through Christian Science and “graduated” to a higher spiritual level.