Stephen Gottschalk, “Critic’s Corner: Update on Christian Science,” Theology Today, April 1987, 111-115.
Another important effort to put in perspective the relation between Christian Science and historic Christianity:
“…The intensity of the religious right’s opposition to Christian Science may well lie in the refusal of these ‘distant relatives’ to written off as marginal Christians. Conservative critics have maintained for years that Eddy’s book, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, was intended to supplement biblical revelation. The truth of the matter is actually more of an affront to conservative sensibilities than if this had been the case. Steeped as she was in the New England Puritan tradition, Eddy thought of her book neither as supplementing or supplanting the biblical revelation but as uncovering the full power and meaning of Scripture which the overlay of church traditions had obscured.
“It would never have occurred either to Eddy or her followers to question what they saw as core convictions of biblical Christianity: belief in a sovereign, purposeful God; in Jesus’ uniqueness as humanity’s Savior; in his virgin birth; and in the crucifixion and resurrection as the pivotal events in human history. If this point seems surprising, it might be because there is a significant – at points, even a vast – disparity between what Christian Science really is and what it is generally taken to be.
“That Christian Science is not a form of positive thinking, that it has a strong doctrine of sin (so strong that it sees mortality itself as the consequence of sinful blindness to God’s reality); that it urges healing only as an aspect of full regeneration from ‘the flesh’; and that it views such healing as attainable through the abnegation of human will rather than the exercise of it – these propositions may come as a surprise to those with only a hazy conception of the movement and its theology. But they are amply substantiated by serious attention to what Eddy actually wrote….”