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"...The church of the living God, the pillar and ground of the truth."
I Timothy 3:15
The Anti-Christian Unscientific Cult
Dean Robinson
Several weeks ago the Associated Press printed a story about a jury returning a $5.2 million dollar wrongful death judgment in a lawsuit brought by a father against his eleven year old son’s mother and stepfather, a nurse, the First Church of Christ, Scientist, and three others affiliated with the church. The boy died as he laid in a diabetic coma with his mother praying at his bedside and a Christian Science nurse jotting notes about his condition. Doctors testified the boy could have been saved up until two hours before his death.
The news article states the damage award was the first of its kind against the Christian Science Church, which teaches that prayer and Bible reading can cure illness and are incompatible with medicine.
The Christian Science cult is a powerful force to be reckoned with and God’s people need to be aware of its teachings which are in dire contradiction to the Word of God. It is a cult that appeals to a wide range of people of intellect, wealth, and notoriety. Like William W. Orr once said:
"Here is one of the strangest, most ridiculous and at the same time one of the most inconsistent religious systems ever to be offered to an intelligent people. It is an odd mixture of some principles of mind healing, some ancient Hindu philosophy of denial of reality, some queer quirks of a semi-hysterical mind, and some totally unrelated truth stolen from the Scriptures....Christian Science is neither scientific nor Christian."
The Beginning of Christian Science
Mary Baker Glover Patterson Eddy, better known as Mary Baker Eddy, is the mother and leader, the discoverer and founder of Christian Science. In his book entitled, The Kingdom of the Cults, Walter Martin gives the following explanation of how Christian Science was started:
"According to an authorized statement published by the Christian Science Publishing Society of Boston, Mrs. Eddy, after a fall on a slippery sidewalk February 1, 1866, was pronounced ‘incurable’ and given three days to live by the attending physician (Dr. Alvin M. Cushing). The third day, allegedly her last on earth, Mrs. Eddy, (the statement makes out) cried for a Bible, read Matthew 9:2 and rose completely healed. Thus the statement claims ‘she discovered’ Christian Science."
It is sad and tragic that the life of a eleven year old boy was snuffed out into eternity because his parents were duped and deceived by false teaching of this religious cult. One must keep in mind that while they use the terms of the Bible and of Christians, the meaning Christian Science attaches to those terms are completely different from the meaning given to them by the Bible. Their meaning of God, Jesus Christ, prayer, the Bible, etc. has nothing in common with the true Biblical teaching. As Walter Martin says:
"Christian Science, it should be noted, claims that it holds the Christian position, and Christian Scientists violently repudiate any attempts to show that their teachings are the opposite of what Jesus taught; yet in every possible sense of the Biblical record, all things having been considered, there is not the slightest possibility that the theology of Christian Science resembles even vaguely the revelation of the Bible concerning the teachings of Jesus Christ." Keep in mind, II Cor. 11:13 tells us: "For such are false apostles, deceitful workers, transforming themselves into the apostles of Christ."
The Healings of Christian Science
The Christian Science Church claims to teach that prayer and Bible reading can cure illness and are incompatible with medicine. If that is true, then we must tear I Timothy 5:23 out of our Bibles where Paul, who no doubt believed in prayer and Bible reading, told Timothy to "...use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities." Now I will admit that Paul was not a doctor but he at least had enough sense to know that whatever they had available in that day for medicinal purposes, they were to use it. This did not mean that Paul no longer believed in prayer or in the power of God but it does mean that it is not always in the plan and purpose of God to heal everybody.
Even Paul himself had some type of physical problem, "a thorn in the flesh," in which he went to the Lord in prayer about on several occasions (three times to be exact) but the Lord’s reply was: "My grace is sufficient for thee..." (II Cor. 12:9). There were others that God did not choose to heal like Epaphroditus who was sick and almost died (Phil. 2:25-27) and Trophimus who was "left at Miletum sick" (II Tim. 4:20).
Mrs. Eddy and Christian Science claim to have restored to Christendom the power of healing lost since the days of the early church. She claims to have succeeded Jesus Christ as the great healer of our age and even boldly asserted that she healed all types of diseases including cancer, tuberculosis, and diphtheria.
"Mrs. Eddy’s claim of the power to heal presents us with a challenge. Since she denied all of the cardinal doctrines of the Christian faith, we know that her so-called power to heal did not come from God. We are left, then, with two alternatives. Either the so-called healings were not supernatural at all (being actually fraudulent, spontaneous, psychosomatic, etc.) and Mrs. Eddy stands condemned as a fraud; or they were accomplished by the power of Satan...
“Mrs. Eddy and her contemporaries have masqueraded to the world and to her gullible followers the legend of her miraculous curative power. This power, so widely trumpeted by Christian Science propaganda, history tells us she never exercised or demonstrated openly, for the obvious reason that it was a complete illusion, a phantom of Christian Science publicity and the delusions of Mary Baker Eddy." (The Kingdom of the Cults).
Most illnesses "cured" by Christian Scientists are imagined illnesses which lack medical documentation and are seldom thoroughly verified by anyone other than the Scientists or their sympathizers. The physical world to most Christian Scientist is an "illusion of mortal mind," but they are quick to seize every opportunity to avail themselves of all the comforts this same "mortal mind" conjures up.
The Bible teaches us to pray for the sick and pray that the will of the Lord be done, for God alone is able to heal if He sees fit. But this does not mean it is wrong or unscriptural to make use of medicine, doctors, and hospitals for God can use such things as His instruments to bring about healing. "Is any among you afflicted? let him pray...Is any sick among you? let him call for the elders of the church; and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord; And the prayer of faith shall save the sick, and the Lord shall raise him up..." (James 5:13-15). By the way, the "oil" mentioned here was a type of medicine widely used for health reasons particularly in cases of fevers and skin diseases.
The Heresies of Christian Science
In order for the reader to see and understand Christian Science as an anti-Christian cult, the following are quotations taken directly from official Christian Science books. The majority are taken from what is know as the text-book of the cult called Science and Health, written by Mary Baker Eddy in 1875 while living in Lynn, Massachusetts. Since then it has gone through many revisions, changes, and additions. On pages 361 and 331 in her book, she denies the doctrine of the Trinity and the deity of Jesus Christ when she says: "Jesus Christ is not God, as Jesus himself declared, but is the Son of God...Life, truth, and love constitute the triune Person called God." "Thus it was that with one sweep of an unblushing pen, a vindictive, ignorant, untrained, and egocentric old woman banished the God of the Bible from her religion forever." (Kingdom of the Cults).
On pages 332 and 347 the virgin birth of Christ is described and explained: "Jesus was the offspring of Mary’s self-conscious communion with God...Mary’s conception of him was spiritual." Concerning the blood atonement of Jesus Christ: "The material blood of Jesus was no more efficacious to cleanse from sin when it was shed upon ‘the accursed tree,’ than when it was flowing in his veins..." (Ibid., p.25).
In Christian Science theology, the term "God" is merely a relative one and the terms "life," "truth," "love," "principle," "mind," "substance," "intelligence," etc. are interchanged with that of God. Therefore Christian Science contends that God is impersonal, devoid of any personality at all. On page 465 in another book Mrs. Eddy wrote entitled "Miscellaneous Writings," she wrote: "God is incorporeal, divine, supreme, infinite, mind, spirit, soul, principle, life, truth, love."
Many other quotes could be given that denies the miracles, death, resurrection, ascension, and second coming of Christ, that denies the existence of evil, Satan, heaven, hell, sin, sickness, death, and the inspiration of the Bible, but this should provide more than sufficient documentation to prove that this ungodly, perverted cult came straight from hell itself. As Walter Martin says: "We must therefore be ever vigilant in our defense of the personal Jesus who is our personal Saviour, lest the impersonal Christ of Christian Science be allowed further opportunity to counterfeit the Christ of the Bible." I John 4:1 warns all of us: "Beloved, believe not every spirit, but try the spirits whether they are of God; because many false prophets are gone out into the world."
Beware of Christian Science
Christian Science is merely another false religion that masquerades under the banner of Christianity and attempts to subvert the true Christian faith. The late Dr. I. M. Haldeman, former pastor of the First Baptist Church in New York City, summed up this pernicious cult as follows:
"Christian Science has one supreme aim. Its aim is to take away Jesus Christ as the alone Saviour of men. It denies His actual birth, repudiates Him as the Christ, makes Him to be as full of errors as other mortals, rejects the atonement of the Cross, says He never died, never was buried and never rose, does not exalt His name above every name, refuses to bow to Him as Lord and God, teaches that He does not sit upon the infinite throne, and that He is not in heaven at all. In short, it turns His body into an apparition, His blood to nothingness, His cross to a myth, His death to a fiction, His burial to a mockery, and Himself to a personality that was never real and no longer exists."
We who know the truth and have been made free (John 8:32), may we, with God’s help and grace, do what Paul exhorted Timothy to do: "O Timothy, keep that which is committed to thy trust, avoiding profane and vain babblings, and oppositions of science falsely so called" (I Tim. 6:20).