Talk:Mary Baker Eddy

approach to this article

Since so much as been written about Mary Baker Eddy in more than two dozen biographical printed works, and so much is available on the web, the purpose here is only to provide links and pointers to some of the more objective, comprehensive sources of information. I don't anticipate this article becoming a sort of biographical sketch (like over in Wikipedia), as that would only be redundant.Pat Palmer (talk) 17:33, 27 July 2020 (UTC)

There were a few inaccuracies in the previous version of this article that I felt should be addressed. It’s not accurate to say that Eddy was poor and homeless for the first half of her life. As Robert Peel brings out, her father, Mark Baker, “was a moderately successful farmer, with five horses, eight oxen, three cows, nearly two hundred acres of farm, woodlot, and pasture” (Mary Baker Eddy: The Years of Discovery, p. 4). She was neither poor nor homeless during the first 22 years of her life. Following the death of her first husband, especially during times of invalidism, she sometimes experienced poverty and dependence on others for a place to live. Also, I feel it’s essential to at least make reference to the pivotal healing experience in 1866 that was indispensable in setting the course for the second half of her life as a renowned religious reformer. I also believe it would not be accurate to say that the first half of Eddy’s life was “for her times, unusual.” In the same volume quoted above, Peel observes: “The womenfolk spun and wove and baked and scrubbed, bore children and cared for them, while the men and the bigger boys went off to the fields to dig and hoe and plant and reap in the age-old fashion of the sweating sons of Adam. This is the elementary pattern into which the Bakers fitted, and there is no reason to suppose that their life in its physical essentials differed from that of any other good New Hampshire family” (p. 12).

While I think the point is well taken that Science and Health is a book of deep religious and philosophical significance, noting similarities between Christian Science and Buddhism without pointing out important differences ends up being misleading. See, for example, Amy B. Voorhees, A New Christian Identity, p. 155. I thought Eddy’s handling of the knotty problem of theodicy might serve well in bringing home the religio-philosophical significance of her chief work.

The outstanding quotation from Gill on Science and Health I believe is strengthened by removing the first sentence, which makes the odd and insupportable claim that Christian Science loyalists attacked and avoided Science and Health. There are other changes that I believe will further strengthen this article, but this seems like plenty for now.Scott Thompson (talk) 15:50, 14 July 2021 (UTC)

another thing needed

I think this article would benefit by the addition of something (reasonably brief, if possible) about "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures", an important, often underestimated work of deep philosophical and/or religious impact.Pat Palmer (talk) 23:18, 28 July 2020 (UTC)

archiving some removed text here for the moment

• (21 biographies), beginning in 1907 (three years before her death). A 2021 book, A New Christian Identity: Christian Science Origins and Experience in American Culture by Amy B. Voorhees is at once a biography of Mary Baker Eddy, a textual and historical study of the evolution of Science and Health, and a social history of the beginnings of the Christian Science movement.
• (from personal life), Perhaps the most significant feature of Mary Baker Eddy's childhood, given where her life would eventually go, was the thoroughly Christian atmosphere she breathed in a household of devout Congregationalists and which engendered her lifelong love of the Holy Bible.
• (from section about her book), Although never a seminary student, her life experience and lively intelligence led Eddy to grapple with the problem of theodicy, and through Christian Science, to arrive at a logical, if broadly disputed, resolution to the Gordian knot that has bedeviled theologians across centuries: “If God and evil both exist in the same sense of the term, what alternative remains but to bargain away either divine sovereignty or divine goodness to resolve the dilemma of God’s presumed coexistence with unspeakably great evil on a mammoth scale?”

The Christian Science answer to the problem of theodicy is that because God is all good and is the sovereign source of all reality, evil must be uncreated by God and therefore can have no absolute reality, no place in God’s entirely spiritual creation. In Science and Health Eddy raises provocative questions: “Does divine Love commit a fraud on humanity by making man inclined to sin, and then punishing him for it? Would anyone call it wise and good to create the primitive, and then punish its derivative? ...In common justice, we must admit that God will not punish man for doing what He created man capable of doing, and knew from the outset that man would do. God is ‘of purer eyes than to behold evil.’”

Stephen Gottschalk’s article, “Theodicy After Auschwitz and the Reality of God,” in Union Seminary Quarterly Review includes these observations:

Critics of Christian Science have often pointed out that Eddy’s approach to the problem of evil does not deal with the question of how the very illusion of evil could be possible in a universe created by God…. If Eddy looked for any explanation of the origin of evil at all, it was in the limitation of the human mind and, accordingly, in a broadening of the Christian concept of sin. If one grants that humanity is “fallen” and in sin (a proposition quite congruent with her theology as far as human beings are concerned) then it is natural to assume that the human perceptual faculties are fallen as well. In this “fallen” state, we are simply unable to discern creation as God intends it. What human beings “see” is therefore only what their own perceptual limits enable them to see. This does not deny the reality of the universe of daily experience, but it does mean that materiality and destructiveness are not inherently in God’s creation. Rather, the sinful error of life apart from God operates through the presumed authority of “natural” law and material perception, blinding humanity to the supreme reality of God’s Kingdom, which is spiritually present to be brought to light. So hypnotic is this basic error of mortal or carnal mindedness that it required the revelatory breakthrough of Jesus’ life to make possible humanity’s recognition of the encompassing spiritual reality to which conventional perception remains blind. Eddy saw his life as a unique revelatory incursion into the perceptual limits of human experience of an authentic spiritual existence which defines the true being of all men and women as the sons and daughters of God.