By Gary Topping–
One of my grandmothers was a Christian Scientist. I remember when I was a kid she used to explain it to me and extol its virtues, but it fell on stony soil and I never converted. What I did get from her was the beginning of a love for the Bible and for the English language. I can almost hear her voice as she reverently intoned the King James phrases of her favorite psalm, the 91st. But Christian Science passed me by.
I recently spent a week in my ancestral homeland, the southern Oregon coast. A nice part of the trip was a visit with my 82-year-old cousin. We are the last survivors of our branch of the Topping family. To my delight, she presented me with our grandmother’s personal copy of Mrs. Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures, the founding document of Christian Science. It is a well-worn copy, with the page gilding mostly gone, a loose binding, and dog-eared pages. When I got back to our lodging that evening, I poured myself a drink, cracked open the book, and sat down to bone up on Christian Science.
I didn’t get very far. On page viii of the Preface, Mrs. Eddy describes, in the third person, her initial explorations that led to the new religion and the methodological approach she followed: “As early as 1862 she began to write down and give to friends the results of her Scriptural study, for the Bible was her sole teacher. . . .” Really? My Catholic eyebrows must have bounced off the ceiling. For what conceivable reason would one begin an extensive study of the Scriptures by turning one’s back on the collective wisdom of the Church developed over nearly two millennia? No doubt Mrs. Eddy wanted to reassure her readers that her doctrines were Scripturally sound and not just some novel theory. But the devil himself based his temptation of Jesus in the desert on what he regarded as sound Scriptural interpretation. And we don’t have to listen to many televangelists to realize that anyone can make the Bible support almost any position without the collective wisdom of those who have been studying and debating all manner of Scriptural interpretations ever since the Scriptures were written.
This is not the place to mount a discussion of the validity of Christian Science, even if I were qualified to do so, which I’m not (I only got to page viii, remember). I’m even open to the possibility that Mrs. Eddy contributed something worthwhile to our understanding of sin and illness. My sainted grandmother went to her grave convinced that Mrs. Eddy was really onto something. But as for me—gimme that old time religion!
