Many years ago a meteor fell into the forests of Siberia, but not until much later, when the region had been completely explored, was the vastness of the impact understood. In a sense, the impact of Christian Science on theology has been made, but its significance has not yet been widely explored or acknowledged.
In the Preface of "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures," Mary Baker Eddy, the Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science, writes, "A book introduces new thoughts, but it cannot make them speedily understood." She adds, "Future ages must declare what the pioneer has accomplished."Science and Health, p. vii;
It is plain from Mrs. Eddy's exchanges with clergymen of her day and from her many references to theology that she knew the magnitude of the challenge Christian Science presents to the mode of thought she sometimes called "scholastic" or "speculative theology." Inspired theology, on the other hand—the clear, healing reasoning on God's allness which flows forth from having that "mind...which was also in Christ Jesus"Phil. 2:5;—she recognized as the keystone of the Science of Christianity.
The subject of theology is by definition God. But the theologian has no special access to divinity. Only radical yielding to God can illumine thought and bring forth lightness and healing in human experience. This is as true for the individual who is a professional theologian as for the housewife, the engineer, or the businessman.
For centuries Christian theologies have reasoned academically about God. In effect they have dealt with Him as one aspect of a material cosmos which proceeds otherwise along the lines the material senses suggest. God has been taken as a logical starting point for creation. His influence has been seen primarily in long-range terms. He has been held to be setting His creation gradually right after mankind chose sin and fell from paradise.
God has been considered to be transcendent, unknowable, except in rare mystic experiences. To most Christians, He has been known primarily through a supernatural event in the past, when He supposedly took on flesh in the form of Christ Jesus, sacrificed the Son to cancel the debt of sin, and restored the possibility of salvation to those who would faithfully confess the fact of this event.
One can see that this is a thin outline which those might construct who felt remote from the immense, convincing truths and healing experiences of the Word made flesh. It persists in varying forms today because it is the outcome of thought which begins with matter as the most basic aspect of reality and then reasons toward God.
Mrs. Eddy explains that prior to her discovery of Christian Science the illusion of security in material birth, life, and death had been shattered. In the experience which led directly to her discovery, she turned wholly to God. She writes, "That short experience included a glimpse of the great fact that I have since tried to make plain to others, namely, Life in and of Spirit; this Life being the sole reality of existence."Miscellaneous Writings, p. 24; The divine was no longer felt to be waiting above and at the end of human history. It was seen as Immanuel, or "God with us," breaking forth into human experience inevitably in transformation and healing!
In selfless, fearless moments great religious figures had caught sight of the Principle, or Love, at the heart of being. But evil had claimed overpowering immediacy, and the sense of God's presence had seemed to slip away. Through revelation, reason, and demonstration, Mrs. Eddy learned that evil is never real. She saw objectively (as much so as in a natural scientist's study of molecular behavior) that evil exists entirely within mesmerized, fearing, unperceiving thought, or that which St. Paul termed the carnal mind, which is "enmity against God."Rom. 8:7; To the question "What is the cardinal point of the difference in my metaphysical system?" Mrs. Eddy replies, "This: that by knowing the unreality of disease, sin, and death, you demonstrate the allness of God."Unity of Good, pp. 9,10;
The influence of Christian Science was felt first by the pure of heart, who responded openly to the spirit of the Christ and for whom dogma and ecclesiasticism were not authoritative.
As one sits quietly in the original edifice of The Mother Church today and sees as through the eyes of those who first attended services the inscriptions on the walls from the Bible and Mrs. Eddy's writings, one can easily experience again the impact of the coming of Christian Science. The healing touch of the Christ was being felt as in the time of the Master. This was no weighing of theological pros and cons but the direct experience of a totally new reality which once seen would not permit one to see the world in the same way as before. It was not mystical, theoretical, nor emotional. As today, it was the breaking of fear and limitations, the bearing onward of spiritual insight, the fading of the dissonance and chaos of material living as unnatural, unreal.
Mrs. Eddy writes, "Jesus established in the Christian era the precedent for all Christianity, theology, and healing."Science and Health, p.138; The Gospel of John tells of the meeting of the disciples with a man who had been born blind. They fell into discussion of a theological question, attributing the man's blindness to sin. The question of whether the man or his parents had sinned was taken to the Master. But Jesus, so filled with the compelling reality of man's unity with the Father, moved immediately to restore the man's sight. The irresistible truth of God's presence eliminated any dark supposition of His absence. The mistaken perspective in which the disciples' question arose had ceased to exist.
The coming of Christian Science placed old theological arguments in a clear, intense light. Throughout history theologians as well as natural scientists had taken matter as self-evident. Mrs. Eddy drew the issue with the point of a sword. She writes thus of the dilemma of matter: "To seize the first horn of this dilemma and consider matter as a power in and of itself, is to leave the creator out of His own universe; while to grasp the other horn of the dilemma and regard God as the creator of matter, is not only to make Him responsible for all disasters, physical and moral, but to announce Him as their source, thereby making Him guilty of maintaining perpetual misrule in the form and under the name of natural law."Science and Health, p.119;
Academic theologians and philosophers had considered this issue before. But in men's experience in the twentieth century it was to be sharpened to a cutting edge.
From the time of the Renaissance, academic theology was progressively forced to give up its comfortable province of discussing a supernatural and highly imaginary cosmogony. Then in the mid-nineteenth century the pressure of natural science suddenly increased. Work in the fields of anthropology, psychology, astronomy, physics, and genetics steadily pushed back the claims of religion to describe the workings of even the visible material world as God-directed. With the twentieth century came more universal concepts of love and justice, together with such an overwhelming knowledge of the extent of mankind's suffering that few could link it any longer with a coherent divine plan.
Religious thinking was heavily influenced by the apparent darkness of the human situation. Existential philosophy probed the anxiety and absurdity of mortal life. The dominant theology of these years, known as neoorthodoxy or "crisis" theology, emphasized men's hopelessly sinful plight. Man, it is said, could only throw himself on the mercy of the distant historical event of God's coming to earth in Christ Jesus.
Other theologians currently stress the suffering of Jesus and his love for others, suggesting that it is God's purpose to make man live a supremely unselfed life in the world without resting on any hope of intervention by God. The "absence of God" or the "death of God" so far as modern men are concerned is widely discussed. Long-established concepts of a supernatural God have been shaken for many religious thinkers.
Mrs. Eddy writes, "As the finite sense of Deity, based on material conceptions of spiritual being, yields its grosser elements, we shall learn what God is, and what God does."The People's Idea of God, p. 2; At present the spiritually awakening thought of humanity wrestles desperately with the supposition of a tragically imperfect material universe in which there seems so little evidence of an infinitely good and omnipotent God. But great changes in theology in only a century's time foreshadow the outcome of this long conflict.
Today increasing numbers of religious men readily conceive of God as Love and are reluctant to attribute anthropomorphic attitudes to Him. The concept of the atonement has moved from that of satisfying a wrathful God's justice toward that of reconciling man to God, to his true relationship with the Father. Heaven and hell are now widely understood as states of thought, not as distant localities in which reward and punishment are to be administered. Prayer is more frequently recognized as the awakening of men to God's healing ever-presence, rather than as obtaining His change of heart toward a human situation.
There is greater readiness to accept the possibility and the necessity of apprehending the meaning of Jesus' teachings through the illumination of the Christ in one's own life. Profession of a creed is seen as a less and less adequate expression of Christianity. There are constant demands for demonstration of the spirit of the Christ in some way in the midst of the human experience.
Perhaps most significant is the breakdown of the ancient artificial line between the so-called sacred and a secular. Two of the theologians in modern times who have received the greatest response to their writings—Paul Tillich and Martin Buber —have stressed the divine as a dimension of reality which is always present in every human activity and in which "all things are become new."II Cor. 5:17; To a limited extent, they have turned from the external world and a supernatural imposition upon it and looked within to their own deepest intuition of Love and of Spirit.
As Mrs. Eddy discerned would be the case in the twentieth century, Christian Science has led to the recovery of healing through spiritual means in the Christian churches. Calvinism had considered the New Testament healings the evidence of "miraculous powers" of "temporary duration." Clergymen turning anew to the Gospel accounts are becoming convinced of something far different.
One recent denominational report on "The Relation of Christian Faith to Health" observes: "He [Jesus] regarded the healings which took place as so many signs of God's power breaking in upon the kingdom of evil....He [Jesus Christ] regarded illness as something to be overcome. He did not acquiesce to it. He did not ignore it....He coped with illness, and he conquered it. It was his teaching that God wills healing." Similar reports specifically mention the part Christian Science has played in a reawakening to the "New Testament teaching about God's will for us to be healed and to be whole."
Healing services are carried on regularly in hundreds of Episcopal and Methodist churches in the United States. Other denominations have established commissions to investigate the possibility of spiritual healing. Extreme differences remain between the theology and practice of Christian Science and that of other denominations. But for any awareness of the healing presence of "God with us," Christian Scientists feel the most earnest gratitude.
Mrs. Eddy points out, "The confidence inspired by Science lies in the fact that Truth is real and error is unreal."Science and Health, p. 368.The impact of the Science of Christianity will be continuously explored in our time and in centuries to come. The lesson of its unequivocal statement of the allness of God, Spirit, the nothingness of matter, and the perfect or new man as the present scientific fact will be learned. The deep Christianity of its insight into the hypnotic, illusory nature of evil will be gained. The joy and good which men have thought fragile and fleeting will be found again and again the essence, the structure, the entire substance of real being.
