The Missionary Era · 1875-1906 · N. America
Christian Science
An open theological question
Historians and Christians themselves are divided on whether this group's core beliefs fall inside the historic Christian creeds.
About This Movement
Mary Baker Eddy was a New England woman in poor health for most of her early life who, after a recovery in 1866 that she attributed to reading the Gospels, spent nine years working out what she had understood and published it in 1875 as Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. Around the book she organized a church in 1879, a college to train practitioners, and a set of periodicals that carried the healing testimonies of ordinary members. Its congregations have no ordained clergy, no sacraments and no sermons in the usual sense. Two lay readers read aloud from the Bible and from Eddy's book, the same lesson in every branch church in the world on any given Sunday. Eddy governed the movement closely through the Manual of The Mother Church, written in 1895, until her death in 1910. And the practitioners who did most of its actual work were, then as later, overwhelmingly women.
Sources
- Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875; revised to 1910) and the Manual of The Mother Church (1895) (primary) — The movement's own foundational confession, in Eddy's own words.
- The church's own record and testimony genre: The Christian Science Journal (1883-) and Sentinel with the printed healing testimonies; Mother Church records; the Mary Baker Eddy Library papers (primary) — The testimony genre is this movement's own native form of ordinary-voice literature — self-selected by those who wrote in, worth reading as that.
- The hostile record: the McClure's serial (1907, Milmine/Cather); Mark Twain, Christian Science (1907); the Next Friends suit record (1907) (primary) — Hostile from three directions at once — journalism, literature, and an adversarial lawsuit. Eddy's winning that suit is part of the record too.
- Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy (Perseus, 1998), with Stephen Gottschalk, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (California, 1973) (secondary) — The current standard biography, written from an explicitly feminist-revisionist position, paired with an insider scholar's own standard account.
- Cambridge History of Christianity vol. 8, ch. 22 'Christian America' and 'Christian Canada' (Noll) (reference)