Cults No.7 Christian Science

Well, now we, this evening in this series of studies which we're continuing as a leftover from last year, we come to the subject of Christian science. And you should have received, as you came into the church, a little pracy of notes which I shall not rigidly follow, but rather just offer you these as something that you can check up on later. I've never felt during this course of Bible studies, the study of the sects and relating what they teach to the Word of God, I've never felt just how inadequate our leaflets really are.

In as much as all these sects that we have looked at, they produce book upon book and magazine upon magazine, and very often they have quite a prolonged and tortuous history for one to follow. And to try to summarize the beginnings of a sect, to track its story, to evaluate its teaching, all in the compass of four sides of A4 paper, is not easy. But nonetheless, it perhaps does help us later on when we come back maybe to look at this series just to bring to the forefront of our minds some of the things that we have been considering.

I have in front of me here just a sample of the literature of Christian science. These books that look like New Testaments actually are the inspired writings of Mary Baker Eddy. I have been reading her for quite a long period of time during these past weeks in particular, trying to distill some of her teaching.

I found it very, very difficult indeed. I have also in front of me the Christian Science Journal, in which there is at the back a compendium of all the societies and churches in the world. So that's been very interesting to get to grips with the actual strength of the movement worldwide.

I also have the Christian Science Sentinel, which I believe is a monthly magazine put out by the headquarters of Christian Science, which is in Boston, USA, if you didn't know. So these have been my sources, along with other books that I have consulted, and particularly one by a man called Hokema, the four major cults. Hokema has done a study on the Jehovah's Witnesses, Christian Science, and the Mormon Church in particular, along with Seventh-day Adventism, and where I haven't been able to do my own personal research, then I've had recourse to his book and have full confidence in it, as all the conclusions he makes are related to passages from the authorized work of these cults.

Well, I say that just to clear the deck so that you know we have been trying as best we can to be honest in this particular study of this sect, as indeed of any group. It is not our wish to misrepresent any teaching at all, neither is it our wish to pour scorn or to be scathing with the members of the cults. I personally have great respect for some of these misguided people, and it is my prayer that perhaps God, in his grace, might even use this tape or some of the literature from evangelical sources to help people who, sincerely wishing to find the truth, have gone into a cul-de-sac and have discovered themselves to be in a situation which is far removed from New Testament Christianity.

Christian Science is really one of the older cults. I mean by that that it sprang really out of the 19th century, contrasted, say, with the Children of God organization and the Moon Unification Church, it seems to have been around for a long time. It has its birth almost in the same period as the Church of the Latter-day Saints, the religious organization founded by Joseph Smith.

Indeed, there seems to be, as far as I can work out, some common denominator, not between the teaching of these two groups, that is completely different, but between the background of the founders, Mary Eddy and Joseph Smith. These two people were reared in orthodox Christian circles, in churches of Calvinist persuasion, and they tended both to react against the hardline Calvinism which was preached in the churches that they attended as a boy and as a girl. By the time Mary was 12 years of age, apparently she was reacting against such a concept as of predestination, which seems to indicate that she must have had quite an agile mind at the age of 12, because not many youngsters at that age would have a clue as to what predestination was all about.

Well, we are looking at a woman who had extraordinary abilities in some way, and yet a woman who, as I shall seek to show you, was deluded and has, alas, deluded millions of people during the last 130 odd years or so, or 110 years or so, of Christian history. Let me just make one or two brief comments about the organisation of the church itself as it is founded around the world. You will know, to be more personal, that here in Worthing there are two Christian science churches and each Christian science church, according to the manual, the statement of the way church life is supposed to be conducted, should aim to have a bookshop, a reading room where people can turn in and examine the teachings of Christian science at their leisure.

It would not be a very good thing for a Christian science church in a town not to have available for use of ordinary members of the town a bookshop, and as you see here in Worthing we are enriched by having these bookshops available for people who might like to go in either to read about Christian science or, very commendable, to speak to the librarian about the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. These are opportunities that are open to evangelical people. For the folks who staff those bookshops are good people who have a concern for truth.

Another interesting thing about Christian science, as I made mention on Sunday morning during my address, is that as far as I can gather it certainly doesn't warrant the description an international organisation. I mean by that that though I've scanned the pages of the Christian Science Journal and all the various societies and churches that exist, I can find very little evidence of Christian science in what is generally known as the third world, India, the subcontinent of Africa. Where you do come across it in Africa it tends to be where Europeans have settled.

There does not seem to have been a universal acceptance of Christian science. Rather it is predominantly American. It would seem to me though, I wouldn't suggest that this is a hard and fast statistic, that three out of every four Christian scientists are found in the United States of America and a large proportion of those are women.

Indeed Christian science has been described as the cult of American ladies. That used to worry Mary Eddy, the fact that so many women were dominating the movement and you will find in the books under her name, which are claimed to have inspiration behind them, she is at one point bemoaning the fact that there don't seem to be so many men who are interested in this revelation of Christian science. The preponderance of churches even in America is interesting to locate.

They're very much in the state of California, which has known the emergence of some rather strange religious cults and still does seem to produce some bizarre claims for a religious lifestyle and new gospels. And in California you can pinpoint the strongest hole. It is, as though you couldn't have guessed, Los Angeles, where there are over 40 Christian science churches.

Well, all this by way of passing. The main thing that I'm trying to argue at the moment, not argue, but the main fact that I'm bringing to your attention is that it is basically American and it has not found universal acceptance in the third world. There are many countries in which Christian science seems to have no following whatsoever.

Let me talk to you a little longer about the founder of the church, Mary Ann Morse Baker. Or, as she used to be called in the prime days of her ministry, Mother. But she stopped being called Mother at her own request because it was felt that this term could be misinterpreted and maybe too much was being accorded to her and her powers.

But Mary Baker Eddy did retain, right until her death, the harness, or rather she did maintain the strings of authority in the religious organization. She was a woman who had been married some three times. In one sense, her life in the marital stakes was rather unfortunate.

The first man that she married died in the first 12 months and left her with a little child to look after. I say look after, according to studies that I have done, she didn't seem to bring up the child herself, but seemed to pass it out to members of her family. As one person rather cynically comments, Mary did not seem to look after her lamb very well at all.

She went on to get married for the second time and that too was tragic. Not because the husband died quickly, rather he divorced her. Or it could be argued that she divorced him.

Apparently on her claim later on for adultery, as far as he was concerned, he just couldn't stand being with her any longer. Her third marriage seemed to have been more successful. Unfortunately her husband preceded her in death and the fact of his death was something that seemed to shake Mary.

She did not like to think that any disease could have influenced her husband at all. That would have been against Christian science teaching concerning the body and sickness, as I shall endeavor to show. So she claimed that her husband died as a result of arsenic poisoning.

But in the terminology of Christian science, in the terminology of Mary, this was mentally administered. It was as a result of the evil thinking of some of the people in Boston who were against her and the Christian science church. She did seem towards the end of her life to be very concerned about those who were against her and kept moving from one home to another.

Well there we are. That's something about this lady. She died, if memory serves me right, in 1910.

That was rather a tragedy as far as Christian scientists were concerned, as there were those who believed that such a woman as Mary Baker Eddy would never really die. You will see later on how death does present quite a problem in the scheme of Christian science, quotes, theology, unquotes. But let's come back to what Mary actually was saying and what Christian science is claiming.

And you discover that that could be well defined in terms of a new revelation, a new revelation. Now this is one of the things that you find in common, do you not, with all the cults. The Mormons, the JWs, the Moonies, the children of God, and so one could go on.

All claim that they have had a person, a man or a woman, who has received from God something new. As a result of this, the revelation is written down and a new book is placed in the hands of the faithful. A book which will be authoritative, as authoritative if not more so than the Bible.

And this is precisely the case with our friend Mary Baker Eddy, who wrote a book called The Major Work, Science and Health, with a key to the Scriptures. And I think it's perhaps on the last part of the title that the emphasis needs to be placed. The book that she wrote, which is produced in the form of a Bible, at least to look at it, it looks like a Bible, is the key to the Scriptures.

That means to say that you can't really understand the Bible without having Mary Baker Eddy's major work. You come to the Bible as a Christian Science and you have that book in your left hand and you have Mary's book in your right hand and you consult what Mary has to say and then you relate that to a corresponding passage in the Bible. And Mary will enlighten you, or so it is claimed, where you might find difficulty in the former.

Now I don't say this in an egoistical fashion, at least I trust you folks here in the tabernacle won't take it this way. But I've read many books and I've studied for quite some time a lot of philosophical writings which are not necessarily from a Christian premise. I had to battle in London for a long period of time in the whole area of philosophy and later on in psychology.

And I would, I think, go as far as to say this, that in all my readings I have rarely come across anything so incomprehensible, so shifting in logic, so prone to move from one premise to another than Mary Baker Eddy's Science and Health with a Christian premise. The key to the scripture. I've sometimes had her page open and stared at the sentence and asked myself, in the name of sanity, just what does that mean? Now this comment I offer sincerely and not caustically.

I like to follow an argument even when I don't agree with it. I love in the political realm, for instance, to listen to Enoch Powell, or in another category to listen to Malcolm Muggeridge. Both these men have brilliant minds and a tremendous gift of eloquence and oratory.

And I can enjoy what they are saying as I follow their argument. But I must confess from someone who has read quite a few books that I find Mary Baker Eddy in part quite incomprehensible. Not that she alone can be blamed for Science and Health, though maybe she could be blamed for the key to the scriptures.

Because this particular book seems to have other people at its source. You sometimes discover this again with the leaders of the sects. They don't always write their own holy book.

Some are prone to pinch ideas that already are in circulation and suggest that they are belong to themselves. I would argue that the Book of Mormon owes its origin not exclusively, for instance, to Joseph Smith. But I won't go down that particular alleyway this evening as we're thinking in terms of Christian Science.

But before I make reference to Mary's sources, let me tell you very briefly what I think very plainly. That unless you come to grips with her book on Science and Health, with a key to the scriptures, then you can't really grasp properly what the Bible is saying. You see, Mary goes so far as to say in this book that her writings are inspired by the Bible.

She has looked into the heavenlies, so to speak, and she has brought to bear in a book a clear revelation of who God is and what he requires from you and from me. It cannot be denied that as far as Christian Science goes, Mary Baker Eddy's book on Science and Health is not only equal to the Bible, it is superior. I may have, though I haven't got a copy of the notes with me this evening, oh yes I have, I may have actually quoted from two passages of her writings, yes I have there, in which she makes the claim for outside inspiration for the book that she has written, or the books that she has written.

Look at the bottom, for instance, of the second page of my notes. A Christian Scientist requires my work, Science and Health, for his textbook, and so do all his students and patients, because it is the voice of truth to this age. I should blush to write of this my book, were it of human origin, but I was only a scribe echoing the harmonies of heaven in divine metaphysics.

Well, that's a blatant appeal to the inspiration of her books. And again, that I am not exaggerating, I think is demonstrable, if you were to, but I'm not advising this. Go along to one of the two Christian Scientist churches here in town on a Sunday morning, and you would find that in their very rigid service form, the first reader will come along and read from Science and Health, and the second reader will presumably go to either the same or a different lectern and read from the Bible.

And that is a major part of their service, the reading from the Bible and the reading from Mary Baker Eddy. Both works, you see, put on a par. Well, let's come back to dear old Mary just for a moment or two longer.

Temperamentally she seemed to have had problems in her early days, and maybe her second marriage broke as a result of these. Also she had physical problems, and she rightly endeavored to seek relief from some of her ailments. On one occasion she got in touch with a gentleman who rejoiced under the name of Phineas P. Quimby.

He was a healer, a sort of doctor. In those days, doctors in the United States of America, at any rate, did not necessarily have to go through an accredited course at some medical college or university. Now, Brother Quimby had great success with Mary, with her problems.

When she consulted him, he immersed his hands in water, and then he laid his hands on her, and she got a lot better. She went into a swoon, she slept, and when she woke, she felt fine. And as a result of this, she was very indebted to Dr. Quimby, and she studied his own teachings, which could well be called Quimbyism.

For a while she was quite a good friend of Dr. Quimby. He, incidentally, had produced a book, which, surprise, surprise, was entitled Science and Health. He'd also got in his book, and quoted at the time, the phrase, Scientific Christianity, which doesn't seem far removed from the phrase, Christian Science.

And Science and Health, as a book, doesn't seem removed very far from Science and Health with a key to the Scriptures. So, one person who's done far more study of this subject than I have, makes the appropriate comment that if Mary was the mother of Christian Science, then Phineas P. Quimby was certainly the father. She also came into contact with the philosophy of a very great thinker by the name of Hegel.

It's not for me this evening to introduce you to the intricacies of Hegel's philosophy, though they are very interesting, and, incidentally, had quite a sway over the young Karl Marx, as he was in Germany and then in England, but we'll not get involved in him this evening. We've got enough, at the moment, on the stage already. She did not, as far as I'm aware, study Hegel himself directly, but she came into contact with him through one of his students, a doctor, Leiber.

Now, this man had written a book on Hegel and his philosophy. And would you believe it that sometimes, when you read some of Mary's books, she has remarkably, by chance, I'm sure, repeated almost word for word, sometimes paragraph for paragraph, what Dr. Leiber had to say in respect of Hegel's philosophy and religious thought. So, it would seem that this revelation that Mary received was not exactly dynamically given to her.

Some of it may have done, but some came horizontally from these two men, neither, incidentally, of which, could it be suggested, were endeavouring to found a religious organisation. Well, after her healing in 1862, Mary was an evangelist for Quimby. He died in 1886, when, incidentally, Mary slipped and fell and was in very great pain.

Not because Quimby had died, the two things were not linked together. And she reckoned that she was miraculously cured. A verse of scripture came to her that she was to get up and to go into her own house.

And Mary Baker Eddy came to an appreciation that what Quimby had been teaching about mind over matter was indeed practical. To use a word that I used on Sunday, pragmatic. That means it could be proved, it could be put into practice, and she definitely needed to tell others about it.

So, she did. She had a healing practice, a sort of mini medical college, in which, for $300, you could get 12 lessons from Mary on this whole approach to mental therapy in healing. That seems a lot of money, $300 in those days for 12 lessons.

And indeed, it was a lot of money. And she did very well, thank you. Out of Christian Science, time precludes me from telling you about the $3 million that she made from some of the sales of her literature, but we'll pass over that.

I'm not suggesting that this is a dominant note amongst the average Christian Science. By far, is that not an accurate reflection on the ordinary person. But some of these cultists, the founders of the cults, they made a bum, a real packet out of what they were saying.

And so here is Mary with her little band of students, who in turn, having gone through her course, could set up as doctors, you see. And they could charge her quite a sum of money themselves. By 1875, she completed the first writing of her book, Science and Health with a Key to the Scriptures.

It was to know many revisions. Indeed, she put it to one Unitarian minister to revise, and what he had to say about the book is very interesting, and not very complimentary, but I think he said it after she died, so at least that wouldn't have upset her. By 1879, she'd gone to Boston, which really became the headquarters of Christian Science.

And there, to this day, if you were to go to Boston, you would find the first Church of Christ Scientist, which I'm told is a wonderful structure architecturally, and continues to exercise the organization within that church, an influence in Christian Science which is second to none. Troubles, however, were to come to the Church. Troubles are always coming to the sects.

You may think that the sects sometimes seem to have a charmed existence, but if you were to read, for instance, the history of Mormonism, you'll find that it has at times almost been broken in two, three, four, five different fragments as a result of feuding within and without. Well, Christian Science has known its own particular difficulties in this area. Sometimes when ladies start religious groups, they get themselves into predicaments, when other ladies also get something of a, I use it in the orthodox sense, a charismatic personality, and they start to get results.

Well, there was one Augusta Stetson, who was head of the New York Church, and she got excommunicated because she became something of a threat to Mary. And then Mary, who had placed such tremendous influence on the mind, found that her own teaching was taken to an extreme by some women, one in particular, who was suggesting that if everything could be conditioned by the mind, then possibly another virgin birth was on the cards. And so, in 1890, Josephine Woodbury had a child who she claimed was virginally conceived.

This really created problems for Christian Science. You can imagine what the Sunday newspapers in this country would have done to such a claim. Well, presumably the same thing happened in the United States, and as a result, poor old Josephine got thrown out of the church, and when the little boy who was born, who incidentally was named Child of Peace, endeavored to get into Sunday school, he was declared persona non grata.

However, these are just little aberrations in the rather intriguing story and development of the history of Christian Science. Let's come back to the mainstream. The church itself is a very authoritarian church.

Around the world, the same service, the same scripture reading, the same reading from Mary Baker Eddy is read in each particular church and society. There is in the manual that I've got here, I'm getting mixed up with all these books, I could play Happy Families, there is here the set procedure for becoming a member of the church. Even the Wednesday testimony meeting has its own particular order from which you are not to veer.

As I say, if you would go to a Christian Science church on a Sunday, you would find these two readings. You would also be invited to sing a hymn, a Christian Science hymn. You might say the Lord's Prayer, but if you did, you'd also have to either say or go through in your mind the Lord's Prayer spiritually understood or spiritually rewritten by Mary, which addresses our Heavenly Father and also our Mother and so on.

You may discover that there's a solo that's sung, but you wouldn't find extemporary prayer or worship in the sense that we might look forward to it on a corporate basis here in our midweek meetings and perhaps increasingly here on a Sunday. A very authoritarian structure is Christian Science indeed. Well, as I say, Mary Eddy died in 1910.

The notion was rife that she didn't really die as a result of bodily infirmity, rather she too was mentally murdered by those who thought evil of her. A rather strange claim. There were some Christian scientists who were very surprised that she did die because, as I shall seek to show you in a moment or so, death really is an illusion in Christian Science.

And one would think that if anyone was therefore to get over this obstacle, then the founder of the cult would be that person. I think it must also be said, and this comment we don't offer cynically or suggest in any way that she was addicted to a narcotic, but she was prone to take morphine from time to time because of her very real bodily pain. She had, like some other folks, to have recourse to dentures and to glasses and so on.

Now, these aren't petty little things that I'm bringing out. They need to be said because, according to the whole structure, the whole theology of the teaching of Christian Science, disease is something that is very, very much in the mind and can be overcome by mental therapy. So, let me spend the last ten minutes this evening doing something which I find to be extremely difficult, and that is to give a succinct summary of the doctrines of Christian Science.

Now, there may be some people here this evening I don't know who are from the Christian Science movement themselves. There may be some who have been involved at some time or other. And, again, if I have misunderstood this lady or the movement in anything, I should be glad of correction, and I tell you quite sincerely and honestly, it is not through lack of trying if I have made any error in what I'm going to say.

I've tried to quote mainly from the writings of Mary, but she really is like the philosophical butterfly that goes from flower to flower, and as you think you've got her in your net, you find that she jumped before you moved, and she's somewhere else in her particular rather difficult teaching. Now, as far as matter is concerned, reality, well, listen to her, there is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter. All is infinite mind, and its infinite manifestation.

For God is all in all. Spirit is mortal truth. Matter is immortal error.

You've got that clear, haven't you? That's direct from what she has to say, and I haven't extracted it from any context which would have helped us. I've taken the easiest bit, and you can go on to read further if you wish. I think what she's trying to say is that reality as I see it through my senses, through my eyes, as I touch it with my hands, that doesn't really exist.

That's an illusion. What really exists is the mind, the thought. In fact, mind and thought are very important in Christian science.

Let's go on a moment, having crossed that hurdle, and if you knock the hurdle down, well, try the second one. Sin. Well, there isn't such a thing as sin.

It never originated, nor existed as an entity. Sin is really false belief. Again, I'm stumbled.

I have to confess. When I try to relate that to what the Bible says about sin, I've really got problems. Now, I can understand the basic premise that someone may have a revelation that's inspired, and that revelation will help me to understand Scripture.

But when Scripture makes it so positively plain that Adam sinned in the Garden of Eden, and that sin has been reproduced in his species down the years, down the centuries, to the extent that Jesus had to come into this world to undo the problems of human sinfulness, when the Bible buttresses the concept of original sin and the devastation that this has brought into the world, and I read a book which is a key to the Scriptures that gives me understanding of what the Bible is saying, and discover the statement, sin doesn't exist at all, it's a false belief, then I wonder what, in the name of sanity, if words mean anything at all, has science and health got to do with the Bible? Where is the synthesis between this cult and Christian truth?