While surfing the Internet, I ran across a fairly recent critique of Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy written by an evangelical Christian. He said Mrs. Eddy probably never really thought of Christian Science as being a Christian teaching. Rather, what she developed was an essentially non-Christian metaphysical system. Her problem, he thought, was how to market this system in New England's Christian culture. According to him, Mrs. Eddy's solution was to take New Testament Christian terminology, distort its meaning, and insert it into her metaphysics. He concluded that if she were founding Christian Science in today's more pluralistic religious environment, she wouldn't bother calling it Christian at all.
This claim that Christian Science bears little resemblance to genuine Christianity has been around for a long time. In fact, it got started fairly early in the history of the Christian Science movement. During the 1880s, for example, when Christian Science was becoming better known in Boston and around the United States, some of the orthodox clergy of the period were pretty vocal with their attacks, and strong opposition from Christians of a conservative theological bent has continued up to the present time.
The historical record, though, shows that Mary Baker Eddy was a deep student of the Bible and a devout Christian from childhood. Her early writings on Christian Science contain many references to the Bible and to Jesus Christ. She was convinced that Christian Science and its healing work were thoroughly Christian, and she loved Jesus. She wrote in 1875: "... I love Jesus more than all men of the past or present ages, treading alone a path of thorns, up to the throne of Wisdom, in speechless agony exploring the way for others, yet I cannot see that he has spared us one individual experience, or that we have not the 'cup' to drink in proportion to our fitness to drink it and demonstrate God ...." Mary Baker Glover, Science and Health (First Edition), p. 299 .
