Annotations Related to Protestantism

Christian Scientists from Chicago would convince a skeptical Mary Baker Eddy to participate in the 1893 World’s Parliament of Religions with its message of unity among all religions. Although the address was enthusiastically received, its overall negative impact was the association of Christian Science with theosophy and Vedanta, and the crystalizing of opposition from the more traditional Christian Churches.

Voorhees offers new scholarship on a broad array of topics related to Christian Science identity focusing on reception history. With attention to fully resourced details and modern scholarship, Voorhees outlines the reception history of Christian Science in fields of religion, women studies, American history, politics, medicine, and metaphysics. She probes Mary Baker Eddy’s relationships with contemporary scholars, religion leaders, and students.

Eder finds in Mary Baker Eddy’s writings about masculinity that Christian Science could not be practiced only as an ethereal form of religion (caricatured as a woman) but reflect “a discernible and repeated thrust to extend the reach of Christian Science thought and practice beyond the sheltered sphere of nineteenth-century feminine religiosity into the proving grounds of the public realm.”

Frederick documents Eddy’s diverse childhood education and touches on broader issues in the education of girls in early America. Eddy’s home was full of newspapers and many educated visitors and ministers. She was tutored by a brother who graduated from Dartmouth, and at age twenty, Eddy was enrolled in Sanbornton Academy where she studied natural philosophy, chemistry, rhetoric and logic.

Siewers, of the Russian Orthodox faith and briefly, a National Correspondent for The Christian Science Monitor, observes there are no longer any prominent, mostly Republican, Christian Scientists in the U.S. Congress or White House, or visible in the arts and entertainment industry. He argues that the disappearance and decline of Christian Science is a precautionary tale for more traditional Christian communities.

Stahl’s study of the intertwined relationship between religion and the military opens a unique but revealing window on the role of religion in society. The distinctive role of Christian Science is sprinkled throughout the book. Hempstead Lyons, a Christian Science practitioner, sought to offer services, but the military’s failure to distinguish Christian Science from other groups resulted in excluding him.

Paulson provides a defense of Christian Science as Christian, citing two main points: 1) from earliest times there have been many Christianities of which Christian Science is one expression; 2) Eddy’s Christianity was born out of her difficult life experiences and search of scripture. She became “a Christian reformer, seeking to revitalize the Bible’s practical, transformative power.”

Willsky claims Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health (among other 19th-century works) was a reaction to the dogmatism of the Plain Bible ethos of American Protestantism. The predominant interpretation of the Bible as ‘plain’ meant its message, as understood by Reformed and evangelical Protestant culture, was authoritatively true. Eddy made the best attempt to modify this notion with divine healing revelations.

In an ecumenical context, Paulson illustrates common ground between the healing mission and Christian salvation of Christian Science which results in a transformed soul and body. But the lack of fellowship between Christian Scientists and other Christians could be due to lack of respect for women’s leadership on the one hand and arrogance on the other, resulting in isolation.

…her textbook as co-pastor in 1894. Finally, she profiles those who studied Eddy’s textbook and practiced “the principle or science behind the healing in the Christian Scriptures” (14).   Access…

This article was an address for The Mother Church in Boston, July 9, 2012. Although Kinnamon’s prior exposure to Christian Science was based on stereotypes, he welcomed an opportunity to bring the Christian Science Church into ecumenical relationship. He explained that ecumenism is based on relationships of trust and witnessing the grace of God in one another—not striving for homogeneity.

Rapport argues that both Christian Science and the Unity School of Christianity came into being during an emerging scientific worldview, and implemented their “scientific rationale and language as a strategy to validate themselves in late 19th-century America.” But, whereas Unity used science to complement Protestantism, Eddy employed scientific language to defy mainstream science and religion.

Choi’s and Huff’s chapters explore how two 19th-century Christian women, Lucy Rider Meyer and Mary Baker Eddy respectively, interpreted Pauline and deuteron-Pauline texts to validate women’s empowerment in the Church. Hogan then details striking similarities between Meyer’s and Eddy’s approaches to these texts, and that of many recent feminist and womanist scholars.

Waldschmidt-Nelson meticulously presents, in German, the history and status of Christian Science in Germany from its beginnings to the present. It is based on a documented examination of historical records, published and unpublished writings ranging from panegyrical to dismissive, interviews and correspondence with representatives of the Christian Science church, the medical profession and the Christian clergy (both Protestant and Roman Catholic), and conversations with private individuals.

Weddle compares Jonathan Edwards’s, Ralph Waldo Emerson’s, and Mary Baker Eddy’s views on how each understood the connection of divinity with the human and natural world. In response to Emerson, Eddy asks from her Christian Science perspective: How could divine spirit bring forth from itself a world entirely opposite to itself? Either God is material or the world is spiritual.

The focus of Klassen’s study is the healing practice of mainstream Christians in the US and Canada during the early 20th century. She argues that it was unabashedly medicalized and modern and was supported by the therapeutic role of written texts. Christian Science enters the discussion as a perceived opponent with its innovative reading of biblical texts.

Michell examines the influences, and theological connections and differences, between the teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, Emma Curtis Hopkins, the 19th-century Woman’s movement, and the New Thought and New Age movements. Hopkins, unlike Eddy, would see Truth in all religions, not limited to Christianity, and focused more on a prosperity gospel.

Nineteenth-century technological advances, credited to a superior Protestant-Enlightenment heritage, empowered women (physically the weaker sex) to rule by intellectual and religious power, even as they held on to the carefully crafted ideology of female spiritual exceptualism which gave them a kind of knowing beyond the knowledge of the material world.

​​Braude looks at how the flourishing of Spiritualism in the mid-19th century intersected with the inception of the women’s rights movement in the same period. She documents that the most serious challenge to Spiritualism and mediumship came from the new religious movement Christian Science. However, although Mary Baker Eddy rejected Spiritualism outright, Braude finds many sympathetic Spiritualists in Eddy’s initial audience.

Schoepflin includes short sections on the Seventh-day Adventists, Mormons and Christian Scientists, seeing them as movements which used science as a “tool for apologetics.” He shows how Mary Baker Eddy combined the tools of science (reason and empiricism—in the evidence of bodily healing) with “the spiritual and immaterial dimensions of Christianity” (311).

This book’s study on the history of Christian theology in America includes Mary Baker Eddy’s contributions. Eddy’s theological treatise, Science and Health, distanced itself from literal interpretations of the Bible, interpreting central Christian elements in terms of mental experience. Porterfield finds Eddy’s theology coherent and more fairly understood as a remarkably creative if unschooled form of American Protestant thought. 

Robertson writes a comprehensive historical survey of music in the Christian Science faith. She explains the invaluable role music played as a spiritual foundation for Mary Baker Eddy’s founding of her Church. Robertson positions Eddy’s Church in the context of New England theological thought and praxis, demonstrating how it incorporated already existing music before creating its own new tradition.

In her chapter, “Alternative Religions in Nineteenth-Century America,” Lindley shows how this period of fermentation and experimentation fostered new Christian sects which challenged social, economic and religious orthodoxy. Christian Science is one of the four she highlights. Mary Baker Eddy, its founder, was a model of women’s revelatory and authoritative leadership who maintained overall control of her 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.

Knee presents one of the most accurate and scholarly explanations then (1994) available on the relationship between Christian Science, Eddy’s former mentor, Phineas P. Quimby, and other American metaphysical religions. Knee also assesses the reactions of other faith communities toward Christian Science, especially Jews, Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Protestants, and Swedenborgians.