“WHAT’S MAKING US SICK IS AN EPIDEMIC OF DIAGNOSES” claims the headline of a recent New York Times essay (January 2, 2007; see also the Christian Science Sentinel, February 5, 2007). How will the public react to such a startling announcement? Maybe with a yawn. After all, publishing the harmful side effects of prescription drugs in recent years hasn’t exactly devastated the pharmaceutical industry!

Some Christian Scientists have read the Times article—or even just the headline—and wondered how this disclosure may relate to an observation by Mary Baker Eddy. She thought often in terms of underlying mental forces. And long ago she saw the connection between diagnosis and disease. She wrote, “A physical diagnosis of disease—since mortal mind must be the cause of disease—tends to induce disease” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 370). This statement, of course, substantially deepens the link between diagnosis and disease. It draws important attention to the fact that there is a mental, more than a matter, basis of disease. Mrs. Eddy pressed the view that both the diagnosis and the disease are driven by mental elements. To name a disease and to accept a disease were, for her, events within a mental realm. The medical power of an authoritative naming of disease can fix in thought a fear that yields to it and lives it.

Doctors warn in the article of “the medicalization of everyday life.” The parallel between an increased emphasis on finding disease, and an increasing development of disease, is, to some readers, growing more obvious. Of particular concern by the authors is “the medicalization of childhood.” They ask, “… what are we doing to our children …?” Those who worry about the welfare of children could easily wonder if we might look back in future decades at today and see “the medicalization of childhood” as the child abuse of the early 21st century.

The article describes how, as a society, we are drifting into “making people into patients.” This tendency contrasts strikingly with Christian Scientists who are making a genuine effort to identify themselves not as patients but as a Church of healers. Could this be a new model—a positive shift in perspective for the public struggling with the pressures to diagnose itself as sick? Consider the implications of having a whole society of healers!

The Bible calls on us “to be absent from the body, and to be present with the Lord” (II Cor. 5:8 ). It isn’t always easy to thrive spiritually in an environment where so much of the media are persistently educating everyone into what might be called this consciousness of medicalization, a constant emphasis on the body and its potential disorders. In such a coercive atmosphere, people don’t always do what is most spiritually natural. It’s much easier to simply yield, to be drawn into a more medical or material view of ourselves and how we are thinking about our body, and even our existence.

Kids easily feel the persuasiveness of just following the gang. Adults may feel more sophisticated. But we really aren’t. We tend to think and do what others think and do—and assume we’re following our own thoughts. If others dwell on existence as primarily material, we will too—unless we actively defend our right to think more independently, more spiritually. For example, while Christian Scientists may feel an honest and reasoned desire to rely on prayer as a way of dealing with problems, they aren’t immune to feeling the gravity of thought that is pulling society into this mind-set of medicalization. Sometimes they are successful in maintaining a spiritual direction. Sometimes not.

Many would ask why we would even resist—why not follow the crowd? Contrary to the general assumption that we have some kind of strange aversion to doctors, Christian Scientists are likely to appreciate the good efforts of doctors more than many of those who regularly rely on the medical profession! Yet it is true that Christian Scientists tend to rely on prayer rather than medical remedies. And there’s good logic. Their life experience has given them reasonable evidence that reliance on scientific prayer (practiced in both the Old and New Testaments) is generally safer and surer than modern medicine. And there is even more to their conviction. They honestly feel that healing through prayer—through divine transformation and regeneration—also makes them better morally and spiritually. Makes them better neighbors, employees, parents. It makes them better participants in a society that badly needs moral and ethical stability. That’s part of why Christian Scientists resist the influences that insist everyone must become part of the medical system—a system that says it has the only realistic way to name what ails us.

And yet there is a reason for this resistance to medicine that is even more significant. In fact, it’s vastly more important. The reason goes right to the heart of Christian Science theology. Ultimately, the reason defines who Christian Scientists deeply believe they really are. Here is a group of people, now an international community, who actually believe that every individual is spiritual. Wholly spiritual now. Not a combination of spirituality and materiality, but purely spiritual. Not eventually, on the other side of the grave, but here and now.

They are not naive about all the evidence to the contrary. They recognize what appears to be such a solid world of matter around them, just as everyone else does. Still, they are thoughtful and levelheaded people, integrated throughout society, who are finding evidence in their daily lives that what they believe confirms this theology. They feel a strong assurance that the Bible, and especially the ministry of Christ Jesus, is calling for an awakening to the God-given reality that every individual is God’s spiritual child, whole, innocent, good. They feel this is provably true, step by step through spiritual healing.

So what does such a theology have to do with the rest of society that is moving fast track into more and more diagnoses that result in more and more disease? Much more than most people may realize. Christian Scientists don’t question the motives of honest people in the medical world who want to allay suffering. But this wave of medicalizing society through diagnoses is a kind of symbol. It’s well illustrated in the Bible’s discussion of Adam. The Bible begins first by describing God’s creation as spiritual. He made man—every individual—in His image and likeness. He named us as good and perfect. Then follows the account of an “Adam” kind of man. Now man is made of matter, vulnerable and subject to disease.

This different kind of man renames creation as material and discordant. A medical diagnosis is symbolic of this Adam approach to describing who we are. It names us as vulnerable instead of perfect. It is a not so subtle way of affirming that an individual is material instead of spiritual. It is an affirmation of matter with all its vulnerabilities. This is a kind of denial that Spirit, or God, is infinite, omnipotent, omnipresent—an undermining of a theological teaching that every individual is the child or expression of God, perfect Spirit. It squarely challenges Mrs. Eddy’s affirmation that “Spirit names and blesses all” (Science and Health, p. 507). A diagnosis in today’s medical world increasingly affirms, not simply that God’s children are diseased. But in essence, it names them as material and therefore fundamentally vulnerable to disease. A diagnosis is too often felt as a curse instead of a blessing.

Worldwide, the community of Christian Scientists is modest instead of massive. It would appear that the world of medicine with its growing authority to define patients as sick is pretty massive. It does require some courage to believe in and practice a theology that defines an individual in a way that is radically different from all that is implied by the world of medical diagnoses.

How are Christian Scientists holding up under society’s pressures? Some may say it’s quite remarkable they are standing with so much commitment. Others may say that the jury is still out on this question. People who want to think more deeply about the Times article may ask themselves if the alarm it has sounded hints at these far deeper implications. Is the growing effort to diagnose really a kind of theology itself—one that, in the most intimate way possible, defines everyone as material organism, challenging, in effect, the Biblical account where God has made His entire creation spiritual and good? That may be quite a stretch for most people to comprehend. Still, it might at least be a call to consider more seriously a theology (with a credible and century-long record of healing through prayer) that has been raising questions for a long time now about the downside of medically diagnosing disease.

The Times article may have offered an important warning about whether this broadening effort to diagnose is actually broadening people’s sense of disease. But there’s a much larger issue here—whether there is a clash of two theologies, a battle over whether a matter-based view or a Spirit-based view really has the right to name us, define us, describe our well-being. Have you ever wondered if you might have a particular disease or medical condition? The weight of aggressive advertising and even conversations with friends can push us into a diagnostic mode, even if it’s only a self-diagnosis. Fears and doubts may accompany the name of a disease. And what if you’ve allowed that name to be fixed in your thought? Especially if a doctor has defined the name. Nothing based on a material view is fixed. You might ask, “What’s in a diagnosis? What’s in a name?” And then you might answer with the Bible’s promise that God will give you “a white stone [a permanent light], and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it” (Rev. 2:17 ). Think of that! A spiritual prescription. An acquittal from a false accusation. A written assurance of well-being that cannot be invaded. God names us as diseaseless and has the power to overturn an Adam-based name. He blesses us as free and whole.

Perhaps there’s an important lesson in the article for Christian Scientists themselves to ponder. Yes, it’s very encouraging to see evidence that some are recognizing a danger in a human activity that increasingly broadens its reach in defining people as sick and vulnerable matter. No doubt the authors and most readers would defend much if not most of medical practice involving the diagnosis of disease, just as they would defend the use of drugs regardless of the fact there are adverse side effects. A diagnosis is fundamental to the way disease is medically treated. But the issue isn’t the people involved in medical practice who deliver what can feel like a curse. It’s a general mentality imposed on any of us insisting on or accepting an Adam premise for naming who and what we are. And that’s a theological mistake.

Christian Scientists are thinking way beyond a particular medical activity. They are thinking about their relationship with God, the name and nature He gives them. Not an eventual relationship when people are supposed to hope He names them as heaven bound, but what they believe to be the present truth. Right now they see existence as entirely spiritual. They are perceptive about the pressures of the world that would oppose instead of support the relationship and the freedom to live something of God’s definition of existence.

They recognize that the medicalizing of society poses the danger of smothering a theology that denies matter. And so the spread of medical diagnoses means more to a Christian Scientist than whether it encourages or even induces more sickness in society. The larger question to him or her has more to do with moving out from under a growing mental impact that would restrict one’s ability to live his or her theology, to live more of spiritual reality. What’s in a name? The authority that God, good, puts into it. Claim that name!