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111 - Update on Christian Science |
Update on Christian Science
AFTER decades of being quiet and respectable, you people are becoming controversial again. These words, spoken to a Chrisit tian Scientist friend of mine at an academic convention are, if anything, an understatement.
During no time since the death of its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, in 1910, has the Christian Science movement been embroiled in controversy on so many fronts. Not only is it being harassed by internal "dissidents" and savaged by fundamentalists, but its practice of spiritual healing, especially for children, is being subjected to serious legal challenge.
I
The internal problems of the movement may be of less than cosmic concern to the bystander. But its place within the Christian community, especially with respect to spiritual healing and the theology which undergirds it, bears on some of the most critical issues with which Christians are grappling.
That Christian Science has any place in this community at all is being strongly challenged by the Christian right. There is nothing novel about conservative Christian opposition to Christian Science; it has been more or less staple for nearly a century. But the Guyana massacre of November, 1978, furnished the Christian right with a pretext to apply the "cult" label, much in the manner of a racial slur, to any group which it felt merited public opprobrium. A predictable and helpful backlash against such labeling has made mainstream Christians more aware of the problem-without doing much to mitigate it. Christian Science remains surprisingly high on the hit list of fundamentalist vigilantes, whose propaganda has penetrated mainstream thinking more than may be apparent.
Why this effort to stem the influence of so small a denomination? The church publishes no membership statistics in deference to its founder's not unreasonable (and in the age of TV evangelism, not unattractive) view that numbers are no measure of spiritual vitality. To be sure, many who are not church members would identify themselves as Christian Scientists. But the drop of over 50% in the number of Christian Science
Stephen Gottschalk is a Christian Scientist who works as an editor and consultant for the Church of Christ, Scientist. He is the author of The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (1973) and of major articles on Christian Science in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, the Encyclopedia of Religion, and the Encyclopedia of the American Religious Experience.
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practitioners over the last quarter-century (from approximately 8300 to just under 3500) suggests that actual church membership in the United States is considerably less than the 269,000 listed in a 1936 census for the military-or, to take another relevant gauge, probably no more than what the Mormon church gained through conversion last year alone.
The intensity of the religious right's opposition to Christian Science may well lie in the refusal of these "distant relatives" to be written off as marginal Christians. Conservative critics have maintained for years that Eddy's book, Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures, was intended to supplement biblical revelation. The truth of the matter is actually more of an affront to conservative sensibilities than if this had been the case. Steeped as she was in the New England Puritan tradition, Eddy thought of her book neither as supplementing or supplanting the biblical revelation but as uncovering the full power and meaning of Scripture which the overlay of church traditions had obscured.
It would never have occurred either to Eddy or her followers to question what they saw as core convictions of biblical Christianity: belief in a sovereign, purposeful God; in Jesus' uniqueness as humanity's Savior; in his virgin birth; and in the crucifixion and resurrection as the pivotal events in human history. If this point seems surprising, it might be because there is a significant-at points, even a vast-disparity between what Christian Science really is and what it is generally taken to be.
That Christian Science is not a form of positive thinking, that it has a strong doctrine of sin (so strong that it sees mortality itself as the consequence of sinful blindness to God's reality); that it urges healing only as an aspect of full regeneration from "the flesh"; and that it views such healing as attainable through the abnegation of human will rather than the exercise of it-these propositions may come as a surprise to those with only a hazy conception of the movement and its theology. They may even come as a surprise to some nominal Christian Scientists. But they are amply substantiated by serious attention to what Eddy actually wrote.
II
The haze itself can be explained in part as a kind of residue of the clouds of controversy that have surrounded the movement from its inception. In the ecumenical atmosphere that prevailed during the 1950s and '60s, they were to some extent dispelled through exchanges at various levels-from theological discussions between representatives of the Christian Science Church and mainline Protestant leaders, to informal "getting to know each other" sessions in hundreds of churches. In today's more contentious climate, however, such progress has been largely arrested and, to a degree, reversed.
This is especially ironic, since the concerns of Christian Scientists and those within mainstream Christianity who are exploring the question of spiritual healing have never been closer to converging. Whatever their
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differences otherwise, Christian Scientists are allied with other Christians who see God's creative will as actively ranged against suffering, and spiritual healing as integral to a living Christianity. By this very fact, they are united in de facto opposition to the increasingly influential concept of a limited but loving God who comforts us in pain that cannot be prevented.
The degree to which Christian Science healing has helped to foster the resurgence of spiritual healing in other denominations remains something of a moot point. But the impression one gains from scattered comments on Christian Science in the literature on Christian healing is one of a certain embarrassment in acknowledging a debt which is probably real. This impression is reinforced, by the omission of explicit reference to Christian Science where in historical terms it would have seemed almost unavoidable.
The lack of more fruitful contact between Christian Science and other denominations is due partly to the evaporation of the liberal-ecumenical consensus in which it flourished. But Christian Scientists have given sometimes unwitting support to misreadings of their theology. During the middle decades of the century especially, they often sought and attained a measure of respectability oddly at variance with the unconventionality of the theology they espouse and the demands it implies, at points trying to practice Christian Science "for the loaves and fishes."
The interesting point is that Christian Scientists themselves are becoming more aware of this fact and more willing to talk about it frankly. When a Mother Church official can stand before 2500 young Christian Scientists at the conclusion of a meeting for college students and say, "we just can't go back and live the traditional, conventional human life, trying to hide out in middle class values," it is clear that cracks are appearing in the usually staid surface the Christian Science movement has presented to itself as well as to the world.
III
A new spirit of realism among Christian Scientists was perhaps first traceable in the willingness of the movement-not without some strong minority grumbling-to digest the honest and detailed portrait of its still-controversial founder, Mary Baker Eddy, in Robert Peel's trilogy on her life, completed in 1977.1 But the current controversies in which the movement is embroiled are making honest confrontation with the issues it is facing a clearcut necessity.
To be sure, a close tracking of recent denominational literature and developments shows that these controversies have prompted an assortment of responses: "quick fix" save-the-movement schemes, calls for retrenchment, and a kind of bemused bewilderment that refuses to
1Robert Peel, Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery; Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Trial; Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Authority (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966, 1971, 1977).
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concede anything unusual is going on. Yet Christian Scientists are also beginning to recognize that their church is going through as severe a testing time as it has ever experienced. In particular, the three prosecutions in California of Christian Scientists who have lost children under spiritual treatment has confronted the movement with deeply disquieting human tragedies, as well as possible restrictions on their healing practice.
Emphasizing the long-term healing experience of the movement, Christian Scientists maintain that such restrictions are really unwarranted. As one church member commented in a citizen's opinion column in U.S. News and World Report, "My own family has relied on Christian Science healing for four generations. I never considered prayer a gamble. I'm not speaking here about some crude kind of 'faith healing' that implores God to heal and says it was his will if nothing happens. I'm speaking of responsible spiritual healing practiced now over a century by many perfectly normal citizens and caring parents."2
Christian Scientists insist that Christian healing must have broader dimensions than simply petitioning God to intervene in natural processes. In her excellent book, Every Whit Whole: The Adventure of Spiritual Healing, Michael Drury speaks of Jesus' healing as proceeding from "a different evaluation of what was going on-what life is, what humanity is, what disease and health are, how things work."3 Christian Scientists think of healing in terms of this kind of transformed outlook which, they claim, is a natural, if largely unexplored, consequence of Christian discipleship. This, of course, implies that effective healing will be in proportion to that discipleship. But they maintain that there has been enough evidence of both to support the claim that Christian healing can be rationally practiced on a consistent basis.
It will be highly interesting in the coming months to see how our society is prepared to evaluate this claim. At a time when medical assumptions occupy a position of dominating authority, is it possible for serious attention to be paid to the massive evidence of Christian healing in this century? Will objective consideration be given to Christian Scientists' claim that prayer as they understand it constitutes an effective form of therapy, or will it be assumed that orthodox medical treatment should be the only legally recognized form of care?
This, and not the issue of religious freedom per se, is the real question underlying the current dispute over whether reliance on Christian care for children should be proscribed by law. There is no distance whatever between Christian Scientists and others on the legal and moral duty of parents to care effectively for the health of their children. A church socially conscious enough to publish The Christian Science Monitor would hardly be the kind of church to dispute this point. The actual argument turns on the issue of whether spiritual treatment can conceiv-
2Lois O'Brien, "Prayer's Not a Gamble," U.S. News and World Report (April 28, 1986), p. 8 1.
3Michael Drury, Every Whit Whole (New York: Dodd, Mead, & Co., 1978), p. 22.
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ably constitute such care. An ancillary question is whether it would be unconstitutional for laws to be framed so as to recognize such treatment, or whether it would be predjudicial enactment not to recognize Christian Science healing, just because it is religious.
This constitutional issue may well enter into the pending decision of the California Supreme Court as to whether the cases involving Christian Scientists must go to trial. As has repeatedly been the case in American life, court decisions function as a kind of litmus test for the way society is grappling with larger, as yet unresolved issues. The issue here is very large indeed, since it has implications that transcend the interests of a single denomination.
As a Christian Science spokesperson put it in the course of a sharp exchange in the Lutheran periodical Update, "The debate over Christian Science healing for children involves far more than the specifics of Christian Science theology or the evaluation of its very substantial healing record and impact on Christian healing in general. It involves the whole question of what the gospel itself means to the world if the spiritual healing it teaches is a sham and if the love supremely exemplified by Jesus cannot make a healing difference in present experience."4
The assumption behind this rather impassioned statement is that Christian Scientists and other Christians share common ground. The current controversies over Christian Science healing should impel some acknowledgment of this fact.
However the relation of Christian Science to mainstream Christianity is evaluated, it is clear that Christian Scientists are swimming upstream against the currents of an increasingly medicalized society. In this respect, they find themselves more visibly at odds with this society than at any time since the early years of the movement. But this is very much as the founder of the denomination expected. As she wrote, "To suppose... that Christianity today is at peace with the world because it is honored by sects and societies is to mistake the very nature of religion"5 If Christian Scientists have made that mistake in the past, it is one they are now less likely to repeat.
4Stig Christiansen, "Christian Science Dialog," Update: A Quarterly Journal on New Religious Movements (Sept. 1985), p. 62.
5Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (Boston, 1906), p. 28.