What is Christian Science?

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered and founded Christian Science, defined it as “the law of God, the law of good...” (Rudimental Divine Science). This deeper understanding of God as infinite Love and unchanging goodness leads to prayer that can heal, redeem, and restore anyone.

In 1866, a life-threatening injury compelled Mary Baker Eddy to turn wholeheartedly to God. She opened her Bible to an account of Jesus healing a man quickly and completely. A new sense of God, Spirit, as the only reality flooded her thought, and she was healed spontaneously. But she yearned to know how and why. For the next several years, she continued to search and find in the Bible the underlying laws of God that would form the basis of her teaching and practice of Christian Science.

Since then, many have found that when they better understand their relationship to God through this Science of Christianity, their health is restored and character transformed. And each healing inspires a heartfelt desire to help others know and experience how loved we all are by God.

The origins of Christian Science

The Bible, from Genesis to Revelation, is the foundation for the theology and practice of Christian Science. In particular, Jesus’ ministry illustrates that healing and regeneration are experienced as we recognize our true nature as spiritual and made in the image and likeness of God. Examples of this can be seen in the biblical accounts of Abraham, Jacob, Moses, the prophets, Jesus, and his immediate disciples and followers.

Mary Baker Eddy’s lifelong spiritual search led to what she later characterized as a discovery. She saw that God’s laws are powerful spiritual mandates, always present and operating to heal, to redeem, and to bless humanity. To her, it was the practical Christianity that Jesus taught.

Of her developing practice of Christian healing, Mary Baker Eddy wrote that she was called to a patient whom a well-known attending physician had pronounced dying of pneumonia. “On seeing her immediately restored by me without material aid, he asked earnestly if I had a work describing my system of healing. ... he urged me immediately to write a book which should explain to the world my curative system of metaphysics” (The First Church of Christ, Scientist, and Miscellany).

At that time, she was already writing notes that would develop into her primary work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, which contains the full explanation of Christian Science and its practice of spiritual regeneration and healing.