Is Christian Science still relevant?

Occasionally I’ve heard someone say that there has been so much progress in the medical field since Mary Baker Eddy’s time that there is no need for Christian Science today.

Christian Scientists certainly have no quarrel with anyone who chooses medical treatment and who is no doubt grateful for whatever these medical means do to alleviate or manage illness. But the beauty of Christian Science is that it depends wholly on God, who never changes, and “who healeth all thy diseases” (Psalms 103:3). As I and many others have experienced, we can expect not just relief from pain or management of symptoms but complete and permanent healing.

Christ Jesus proved the healing power of God in the thousands of healings he performed, and he promised that those who believed in him would do the works that he did and that this healing work would grow and expand. And when Mrs. Eddy discovered the divine laws that undergirded Jesus’ healing works—what she termed “the Science of Christian healing” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 144)—she demonstrated their continued dependability by healing, through prayer alone, diverse cases of physical and mental disorder, many of which had been deemed hopeless by medical doctors.

The beauty of Christian Science is that it depends wholly on God, who never changes.

Since the first Christian Science magazines, the monthly Christian Science Journal and the weekly Sentinel, were launched in the late 19th century, week after week, month after month, they and their sister publications have been filled with fresh accounts of people putting into practice the same laws of God that Jesus demonstrated.

In my own family, five generations have relied on the unchanging availability of God’s healing power. My father’s instantaneous healing, as a toddler, of a malformed organ that had been medically diagnosed as inoperable and terminal was the beginning of our family’s tentative exploration of Christian Science. Later, my grandfather’s quick healing during the 1918 influenza pandemic sealed the family’s commitment to what became to them a way of life and blessed four more generations with confidence in and proof of the value and relevance of Christian Science practice. The healings our family has experienced through reliance on prayer are too numerous to recount here, but they shine as reassuring beacons when challenges arise.

One afternoon I was suddenly struck with an internal pain that literally brought me to my knees. I called my mother, who was a Christian Science practitioner and teacher, and she came quickly to our house. My initial prayer drew on Jesus’ promise “The kingdom of God is within you” (Luke 17:21). The pain was unrelenting, and I began to firmly declare aloud truths from the Bible and Mrs. Eddy’s writings. These truths affirmed God’s allness and perfection, the perfection of His creation—including me—and the impossibility of my being subject to debilitating physical symptoms.

The question “Where did this pain come from?” came to thought, and I realized that this question was based on accepting the false notion that something unlike God, who is Love and Life, could have generated an attack on my health. I confidently answered with the assertion that “Christian Science shows clearly that God is the only generating or regenerating power” (Mary Baker Eddy, Message to The Mother Church for 1901, p. 9).

These thoughts felt like angels surrounding me. I also knew I could lean on every Christian Science healing I had ever experienced as proof that my deliverance was assured.

As I became quiet, my mother said, “You have pleaded your innocence and presented your evidence; now, rest your case in the court of Spirit.” This made me think of this counsel from Science and Health: “Meet the incipient stages of disease with as powerful mental opposition as a legislator would employ to defeat the passage of an inhuman law. Rise in the conscious strength of the spirit of Truth to overthrow the plea of mortal mind, alias matter, arrayed against the supremacy of Spirit. Blot out the images of mortal thought and its beliefs in sickness and sin. Then, when thou art delivered to the judgment of Truth, Christ, the judge will say, ‘Thou art whole!’ ” (pp. 390–391).

Having prayed deeply and diligently, I felt a powerful peace. A small substance came up in my throat and was easily expelled. The pain was gone. What followed was great exhilaration and a sense of well-being as well as overwhelming gratitude for another proof of the power of Christian Science to heal perfectly and permanently. This was many years ago, and there has never been another such episode.

Science and Health defines Christ as “the divine manifestation of God, which comes to the flesh to destroy incarnate error” (p. 583). That healing power of Christ, exemplified in Christian Science, is evidence of God’s eternally undiminished love for His creation. It remains essential and available to us throughout time as the fulfillment of Jesus’ promise “Lo, I am with you alway, even unto the end of the world” (Matthew 28:20).