Resources Discussing Christian Science Theology

Mary Baker Eddy’s approach to the weather is the topic of research, including stories of how threatening weather and the laws of nature were made subordinate to God’s divine law. One student of Eddy’s explains how she instructed them not to try to control the weather. Rather, their prayers were to affirm that God, not outside influences, governs the weather.

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.

Peidle finds common ground between Christian Science and Vedanta (represented by Swami Vivekananda), by examining a speech written by Mary Baker Eddy for the 1893 Parliament of World Religions, as well as her other writings, and Vivekananda’s correspondence. Vivekananda first learned about Christian Science at the Parliament. His later ill health prompted an interest in the nature of healing and reality.

Booth seeks correlations between the field of Organizational Development, quantum physics, and Christian Science, with the intent of determining how the principles and practices of Christian Science, in sync with quantum physics, might align with, and be a resource for, business challenges. The thesis is based on interviews with fifteen Christian Scientists about their experience relating their theology to their business practices.

O’Brien’s interfaith reflections illustrate how sympathy can help bring heaven to earth—as evidenced in four women: Mary Baker Eddy, Emily Dickinson, Sarada Devi (wife and mission partner to Ramakrishna) and Simone Weil. O’Brien finds a basis for this sympathy in the common conviction found in many religions of “the experience of oneness between the supreme Spirit and everyday empirical reality.”

Mina Loy’s Christian Science faith with its views of the body, along with 19th-century spiritualism informed her poetry. She conceptualized in her poetry a non-binary kind of embodiment—away from body/soul or life/death—to life as beyond the body. Loy saw death and the physical as illusory and thereby able to break with biological determinism and personality.  

Writing in the context of ecumenical concerns, Paulson sees it as vital that science and religion work together to bring about climate justice and she sees the moral and theological perspective of Christian Science as a valuable contribution, with its “understanding of science in the context of salvation.”

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.

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.

Damaging newspaper accounts incentivized Mary Baker Eddy to found The Christian Science Monitor with the intent to be a more professional alternative sticking closely to facts and highlighting optimism rather than fear. Although this approach helped dampen the polemic around the church, critics found it lacking in illuminating systemic societal abuses of power.

In this brief article, Westbrook makes some comparisons between Christian Science and Scientology. In common both draw on a theological link between science and religion, and both refer to their main church body as their ‘Mother Church.’ But mainly Westbrook points out their dramatic differences in theology, organization and mission.

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.

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. 

This essay by an adherent of Christian Science accompanies the main article on Christian Science. Paulson describes her childhood experience and how her religious practice was her primary source of comfort and healing. She recognizes distinctions between Christian Science and orthodox Christianity and explains why she thinks the typical orthodox view of Christian Science’s similarity with Gnosticism is misleading. 

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. 

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.

Hutchinson defines New Thought as any American metaphysical religion affiliated with Phineas P. Quimby, Mary Baker Eddy and Emma Curtis Hopkins. They expanded from their emphasis on healing to a focus on prosperity theology; and Hutchinson observes that since Eddy rejected materialism, the New Thought emphasis on prosperity—while popular in mainstream Christian America—differentiated it from Christian Science.

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.

Written by representatives from a wide variety of Christian communions, the essays in this book seek Christian unity in mission. Unity is how diverse churches can agree to a common purpose. Mission is how the church’s purpose is transformational in both personal and social dimensions. The Christian Science chapter is: “Christian Science Christians’ Healing Practice: A Contribution to Christian Pilgrimage.”

​​Hines’s study on the relationship between illness, disability, and sin in the healing theologies of three American-born religions, including Christian Science, highlights the 19th-century context from which they came. Reacting against the prevalent Calvinist notion of illness and disability offering salvific powers, Christian Science argues that sickness is not God-made. But sick people can feel blamed for their infirmities.

Voorhees explains that Eddy never intended to become a role model for gender parity, but it emerged naturally as a by-product of her larger purpose and project of revealing the nature of Christian salvation. In contrast to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Voorhees illustrates how the ‘Woman Question’ for Eddy is emphatic and radical, yet qualified and ultimately subsumed by her soteriology.

Albanese’s undergraduate textbook explains Christian Science in the context of the evolution of religions and the meaning of religion in America. Christian Science was one of the 19th-century new religions that made considerable demands on its members, as new sects often did.  Albanese’s theological explanations of Christian Science are based on her thorough knowledge of the American metaphysical movement.

The commonly mischaracterized and consequently overlooked relationship between Eddy and her former student, Gestefeld, should be re-examined because of its rich theological and biographical potential. Voorhees’s closer look at their correspondence indicates a mutually respectful relationship before they parted ways on grounds of theological differences—Gestefeld’s theosophical eclecticism versus Eddy’s unorthodox Christian particularism, and not because of Eddy’s authoritarian reasons.

Campbell seeks to identify and critique three central issues concerning communities who practice Christian healing without medicine: their theological justification for such healing practices, medical practices as morally and metaphysically wrong from their perspectives, and their understanding of theodicy when healing does not occur. But a glaring problem for researchers of Christian Science is Campbell’s lack of distinction between groups.