Why does Christian Science treatment heal and how does it work?

Allison W. Phinney, Jr. | from the Christian Science Sentinel

You don’t have to read much about Christian Science before you realize that when Christian Scientists speak of “treatment,” they are talking about a specific kind of prayer that heals. They are not just “hoping” prayer will bring a positive response from God but they are clearly expecting prayer, or treatment, to have a healing effect.

Interestingly, this conviction isn’t based on some kind of “holier than thou” outlook but actually on just the opposite. One of the things you soon learn about Christian Scientists is that they don’t believe you have to have achieved some incredibly saintly status in order to be healed or to deserve healing.

It’s true that genuine spirituality is involved in Christian Science healing—not some kind of esoteric assertion of mental control over the body, not some sort of hyped-up willpower. A deep love for God and a desire to make progress in drawing closer to Him are required. But Christian Scientists believe ordinary people can find healing through prayer because of all that God is rather than because of building up some special human deserving.

Christian Science gives a thoroughly new idea of who and what we are as ‘made in God’s image.’

Actually, Christian Science gives a thoroughly new idea of who and what we are as “made in God’s image.” It doesn’t consider a dark, undeserving, imperfect, and sinful mortal a fair description of man but takes man to be far different from that. Most people, even those who are temporarily mired in a self-image of weakness and evil, have caught glimpses of a better selfhood in moments of love and inspiration. Christian Science says that this glimpse of something better is an indication of the man God really made, a man who is full of goodness and light and who truly expresses what God is.

This is the “perfect man” the Bible refers to (see Psalms 37:37). It is not a mortal who is trying desperately to perfect himself but rather is the spiritual and wholly good man, the “perfect man,” whom it is reasonable to expect God would have created in the first place.

Jesus is the supreme example of this man who is wholly the reflection of what the Father is doing. He demonstrated actual spiritual manhood. John the Baptist, the prophet in Biblical times who was most perceptive about Jesus’ coming, said of Jesus: “A man can receive nothing, except it be given him from heaven …. For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for God giveth not the Spirit by measure unto him” (John 3:27, 34). Jesus himself confirmed this, saying, “He that sent me is true; and I speak to the world those things which I have heard of him …. I do nothing of myself; but as my Father hath taught me, I speak these things” (John 8:26, 28). The Master urged all who followed him to know themselves as sons of God, finding their lives in Spirit.

The reason that Christian Science treatment, or prayer, heals is that it opens human thought to what is actually there, to God’s infinite goodness, which includes no sickness, evil, or fear, and to God’s man, who is deserving of all good. Christian Science treatment persists in affirming the presence of God and the man made in His image and likeness.

A supremely good and intelligent God would not have created a man who right from the beginning was vulnerable to illness and bodily defect.

A supremely good and intelligent God would not have created a man who right from the beginning was vulnerable to illness and bodily defect, and the fact is that God did not create such a man. Therefore sickness is not a hopeless reality that has a right to overwhelm and destroy or that operates according to a genuine law of the universe. It is a lie and an unreality, without basis in God’s law of good. Because Christian Science treatment specifically opposes what is a lie, it uplifts thought so that one can become conscious of divine Truth, and this has a healing effect.

Mary Baker Eddy, who discovered Christianly scientific healing and established it through a lifetime of teaching and writing, tells of what is needed in this comment in Rudimental Divine Science (p. 9): “To heal, in Christian Science, is to base your practice on immortal Mind, the divine Principle of man’s being; and this requires a preparation of the heart and an answer of the lips from the Lord.”

Christian Science treatment could not possibly heal as it does if everything were as solidly material as it appears. But since it isn’t, and what we see and experience so vividly and sometimes painfully is a subjective mental impression, this fear and false impression about God and His man can be changed by the omnipotence of divine Mind.

Numerous instances of healing, in which so-called material disease does not follow its supposedly natural course after Christian Science treatment has been introduced to the case, help to make this more apparent. Malaria, typhoid fever, cancer, pulmonary tuberculosis, for example, have been arrested and healed in this way. Or when massive injuries to the body have been far more quickly overcome than was predicted, through entirely spiritual treatment—not in a single rare instance but in hundreds of cases—it leads thought to become more willing to explore the possibility that the impression of matter ruling and determining all is not accurate.

God is more fundamental to us than we have ever imagined.

It is not accurate, Christian Science shows, because God is more real, more substantial, more fundamental to us than we have ever imagined. The Bible gives many hints of this Science of being and its spiritual law of restoration and healing in the acts of prophets and apostles and, above all, through the works of Christ Jesus.

The scientific direction of the future, far from making God an outmoded superstition, will more and more verify the significance of divine Spirit as having everything to do with the life and health of man. The present bias of science toward materialism will gradually change and give way to a better conception of man’s nature as spiritual and to Spirit as indispensable to mankind’s health and fulfillment. It is a change already underway.