Resources Discussing Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures

Countess Dorothy von Moltke was a devoted Christian Scientist and strong advocate for the German translation of Mary Baker Eddy’s textbook Science and Health. Throughout her life, she worked to make Christian Science more accessible to German-speaking followers by providing English lessons and by serving on the translation committee that ultimately completed the first foreign language translation of Science and Health.

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.

Henniker-Heaton’s meaningful life and Christian Science healing of ten years of paralysis are accompanied by selections from his poetry and other writings. The book’s purpose is to “present the spiritual ideas of this prolific writer in chronological order, setting them in the context of his life.”

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.”

McNeil’s extensive research of all the original papers of Phineas P. Quimby in conjunction with the vast holdings of The Mary Baker Eddy Library has brought resolution to the complex questions about the alleged influence mental healer Quimby had on Eddy’s later founding of Christian Science. McNeil also covers other important 19th-century figures as well as other relevant subjects, such as Mark Twain and Christian Science and early animal magnetism in 1830s and 1840s America.

…and its ineradicable link to her personality” (123), a concept that presaged her later appointing Science and Health (along with the Bible) as Pastor of the Christian Science Church. Responses…

…the “Apocalypse,” and a “Glossary” of biblical terms. Eddy appointed the Bible and Science and Health the dual pastor of her Church, which “publicly yoked the Bible to Science and…

The structure of this dissertation is a critical theological conversation between Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health and the 2nd-century Christian text, the Secret Revelation of John. It uses methodology from Practical Theology to highlight epistemological contrasts and similarities between the two texts and between their worldviews and orthodox worldviews. A common theological foundation lies beneath healing practices for both texts.

Petersen has made a paraphrase revision of Mary Baker Eddy’s 19th-century textbook, Science and Health, with the purpose of elucidating divine Science for the 21st century. In her Preface she avows her great efforts to keep Eddy’s original meaning of divine Science intact, while using more current (and inclusive) language and illustrations, and quoting from modern Bible versions.

Implementing feminist rhetorical criticism, Tencza examines Mary Baker Eddy’s strategic use of rhetoric to create meaning in her writings, reinforced by the integrity of her character. Tencza sees Eddy working within three frameworks: an ethic of care [mother-like pathos], extreme utilization of ethos [her character integrity], and logos [ability to make meaning]—all of which coalesce into her rhetoric of confidence.

Moses’s 1916 book intended to foster a Jewish spiritual renaissance and to prove that Judaism long held what appears so attractive to the early 20th-century Jewish converts to Christian Science: divine healing, affirmative prayer, and a religion of love and law. He catalogs Jewish scripture illustrating healing and divine love, and contrasts Christian Science tenets with Jewish faith.

In this brief paper, Rider compares theological interpretations of biblical texts between Christian Science and Christian orthodoxy, arguing for a radical difference. The texts he selected include creation stories in Genesis, the Lord’s Prayer, the miracles of Jesus, and his crucifixion and resurrection.

This beautifully crafted book is essentially a compilation of the writings of Stephen R. Howard, who served as director-curator of Longyear Museum from 1997 to 2014. (The museum is an independent historical institution dedicated to the understanding of Mary Baker Eddy’s life and work.) Nearly every page includes multiple photographs, facsimiles, artwork, Illustrations and portraits representing the holdings of the museum.

Kramer’s well-researched critique on Christian Science makes her arguments easier to understand than most critics. She grasps the fundamental teachings and history of the religion well, but she left it for doctrinal reasons. Most of Perfect Peril describes her emotional and intellectual struggles with doctrinal issues. Following a crisis of faith, she concluded that Christian Science is a dangerous mind control. 

Gallagher examines Mary Baker Eddy’s and Helen Schucman’s (A Course in Miracles) interpretation of scripture and development of their own canons. Gallagher sees Eddy’s Science and Health as a Bible companion which has the power to heal the reader and requires deep study. Similarly, Gallagher sees Schucman’s ACIM as indispensable to understanding the Bible, providing a mystical interpretation of scripture.

Gallagher highlights four American alternative Christianities able to maintain continuity and gain legitimacy by retaining elements of the dominant Christianity and texts of its day, while also engaging in a “creative exercise of interpretive ingenuity” that resulted in a novel message evoked from familiar symbolic capital.

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.

…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…

Although written for young readers, “A World More Bright” contains details for those interested in the personal side of Mary Baker Eddy’s life story. For those more familiar with other biographies on Eddy, this book offers new facts that may be useful for filling in gaps of historical interest. Typical biographical controversies are mentioned but not critiqued by the authors.

Dorothy von Moltke’s letters to her parents contain significant insight into Christian Science in Germany from 1902 until her death in 1935, with a focus on troubles within Germany after WWI. Dorothy and her husband, Count Helmuth, served on the 1912 committee translating Science and Health into German, and Helmuth was the church’s designated liaison with the German government during early phases of Nazi control.

This brief encyclopedic entry, written at the request of The Mary Baker Eddy Library, offers in three pages a succinct outline of Mary Baker Eddy’s life and a clear and accurate portrayal of her importance as a student of the Bible and religious thinker. “Her unique method of biblical interpretation will be of interest to biblical scholars… independently of the religion she founded and the healing-system she established.”

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.

Specific to Eddy, Ingham relates feminist themes to her groundbreaking textbook, Science and Health, as well as many of her earlier writings and sensibilities. Specifically, Ingham lays out Stanton’s and Eddy’s exegesis of the first and last books of the Bible, thereby providing an interpretive space from which to challenge a singular definition concerning creation in Genesis and prophecy in Revelation.

In the late 19th-century era, when the Pauline corpus was often quoted to legitimize women’s subordination, Mary Baker Eddy presented in her writings a rereading of the Pauline tradition as liberating for women. Huff shows how Eddy made the case and modeled in her life that women as well as men have legitimate dominion and must not be dominated.

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.