Stories & Scripture — Christian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)

Christian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)

Movement·Founded 1879 CE·The church does not publish membership figures and is forbidden to by its own Manual, Article VIII, Section 28. Independent estimates for the late twentieth century range from under 100,000 to several hundred thousand and are not reconcilable. What can be counted is public: practitioners and teachers listed in the Christian Science Journal in the United States fell from 4,965 in January 1971 to fewer than a thousand, and branch churches from roughly 1,800 to about 1,000.

Judaism → Christianity → Catholicism → Protestantism → Christian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)

Stories

the narratives it tells itself

The fall on the ice at Lynn. On a February evening in 1866 Eddy slipped on ice, was carried to a house and, on the third day, read the healing of the palsied man in Matthew 9 and got up. The attending physician later disputed how badly she had been hurt, and the argument over that disputed fact has run for a hundred and fifty years. Read it in full — context →

The Scriptures

the texts that carry the stories — and everything else

The Bible

Mary Baker Eddy, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures (1875)

Manual of The Mother Church (1895)

Prose Works and Miscellaneous Writings