Science and Health
and the
Church Manual

Jesus: Pentecost: Mary Baker Eddy: Today

W. Gordon Brown

PART I SCIENCE AND HEALTH

Key to the Scriptures
Key to the True Idea of Church

Chapters 15,16,17,18: Genesis, The Apocalypse, Glossary, Fruitage

Clearly the four final chapters, "Genesis," "The Apocalypse," "Glossary," "Fruitage," which make up the Key to the Scriptures, relate metaphysically with the Word, Christ, Christianity, Science (the four sides of the holy foursquare city) as the ultimate truth about body, or church, and therefore as the timeless reality of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

The two consummate chapters, "Genesis" and "The Apocalypse," signifying the beginning and end of the entire Scriptural development, not only conclude the textbook's first sixteen chapters (that comprise the main body of its foursquare structure) but they also open the "Key to the Scriptures" where, in conjunction with "Glossary" and "Fruitage," they bring the book to its triumphant close.

Let us note how the Tenets, which conclude the fourteenth chapter "Recapitulation," are the single statement which Science and Health and the Church Manual have literally in common, and how, therefore, they can be said to be the actual spiritual link that unites the two books. Where they are placed in the textbook, and where they are placed in the Manual, signifies, in each case, qualification for church membership - on the one hand, membership of the church as it divinely and forever is (membership that is, of the universal Christ-body), and on the other hand, membership of the humanly organized sense of church which, rightly understood, is the church's temporal and preparatory symbol. The relationship, self-evidently, is that of Jesus to John the Baptist.

In the case of the textbook, what the Tenets do is to open the door to the "inspired Word of the Bible as our sufficient guide to eternal Life" (S & H 497:3) — that is to say, they lead to the Key to the Scriptures. In the case of the Manual, they form the creed to which every aspiring member of the church in Boston subscribes, and to which he signs his name, before being admitted to membership.

Is it not apparent, therefore, that when, from the basis of the Tenets, we identify with the textbook's last four chapters, we are finding our unity with the divine reality of church (or body), and that in identifying with the Manual, on the basis of these same Tenets, we are subscribing to the eventual dissolution of the organic symbol, or to its translation into the reality that not only lies behind the symbol, but which itself actually produces the symbol.

But we must remember that membership of a centralized organization applied only to the period of Mary Baker Eddy's leadership, and not to the period of the hierarchical counterfeit of this leadership which prevails in Boston today. In advancing thus from "John" to "Jesus," we allow the one to "decrease" and the other to "increase" (John 3:30).

Spiritual Conception of the Church of Christ, Scientist

That the textbook's last four chapters do indeed pertain to the ultimate divine idea of church is made clear when we examine the state of consciousness to which the "Key to the Scriptures" is given - that is, when we turn to the text from Revelation 3 (quoted S & H 499) on which all four chapters are based, namely:

"These things saith He that is holy, He that is true, He that hath the key of David [the Key to the Scriptures], He that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works: behold, I have set hefore thee an open door, and no man can shut it.""These things saith He that is holy, He that is true, He that hath the key of David [the Key to the Scriptures], He that openeth, and no man shutteth; and shutteth, and no man openeth; I know thy works: behold, I have set hefore thee an open door, and no man can shut it."

Taking this citation within the context of Revelation 2 and 3, we see that the Key to the Scriptures (called the key of David) is awarded only to the sixth of "the seven churches which are in Asia," to whom the message of Revelation as a whole is sent. The church in question is the church in Philadelphia, which is, by interpretation, the "church of brotherly love."

Note therefore that it is this same church of brotherly love with which Mary Baker Eddy identified her own exemplary branch church in Concord, when she wrote (My 153): "The healing and the gospel ministry of my students in Concord have come to fulfil the whole law. Unto' the angel of the church in Philadelphia,' the church of brotherly love, 'these things saith He that is holy.'"

Architecturally, like the Mother Church itself in Boston, this model branch church, in Concord, embodied what was called its own "mother's room," signifying that the quality of birth-giving motherhood must become subjective to each individual consciousness, once the early necessity for being mothered from outside itself has served its temporary teaching and disciplinary purpose.

In conformity with the fact that "Love fulfils the law of Christian Science" (S & H 572:12), Mrs Eddy's Concord church thus came, in her words, to "fulfil the whole law."

Understood spiritually, this church of brotherly love is seen to typify the very body of the divine Principle, Love, and as such, to represent the undying reality of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

The message in Revelation 3 to the church in Philadelphia continues in part as follows:

"Behold, I will make them of the synagogue of Satan... to come and worship before thy feet, and to know that I have loved thee... I also will keep thee from the hour of temptation, which shall come upon all the world, to try them that dwell upon the earth. Behold, I come quickly: hold that fast which hast, that no man take thy crown. Him that overcometh will I make a pillar in the temple of my God, and he shall go no more out: and I will write upon him the name of my God, and the name of the city of my God, which is new Jerusalem, which cometh down out of heaven from my God: and I will write upon him my new name . . ." (italics added).

Three fundamental names! - the name of my God, the name of the city of my God, and my new name.

What is the "name of my God "but the name enshrined in the Christian Science textbook - the name that is basic to the ultimate Science and system of Christian Science - the name of "Mind, Spirit, Soul, Principle, Life, Truth, Love" (S & H 465), teaching mankind what God is. And what is the name of the "city of my God" but the name of "the Word, Christ, Christianity, and divine Science" (S & H 577), teaching how God operates universally as man. And what, thirdly, is "my new name" but the name of Christian Science itself - the Science of Jesus' original Christianity - as this applies to the identity of the whole human race.

These three names, which identify thus the church in Philadelphia, the church of brotherly love, necessarily identify also the original and ultimate reality of the Church of Christ, Scientist.

But listen at the same time to what Jesus' beloved disciple, the same John the Revelator, says in the first of his three epistles regarding this need for universal brotherly love, and the glory which this ensures. He says: "We know that we have passed from death unto life, because we love the brethren" (I John 3:14).

What these words relate to surely is what Jesus called his new commandment," which he urged upon his disciples at the passover meal when he was about to prove to them the nothingness of death, or when he was about to pass from death to life. "A new commandment I give unto you," he said, "that ye love one another; as I have loved you, that ye also love one another" (John 13:34).

For us to love as Jesus loved is for us, like him, to pass from death to life - to pass from the material sense of church to the spiritual - and therefore to be the deathless Christ-body. And so it is that as the last four sections of "The Apocalypse" unfold this idea of living, deathless love (in relation to the last four chapters of the textbook) we find ourselves led to the 23rd Psalm at the end 0f the chapter, where we are represented as dwelling "in the house [the consciousness] of [LOVE] for ever" (S & H 578:17).

To denote the climax of her founding mission, Mary Baker Eddy was inspired to identify the Shepherd, or Pastor, of this 23rd Psalm with the union of the Bible and Science and Health, as signifying the reality of the Christian Science church, and as standing for the timeless, deathless "pastor" on which alone she bade us depend. She wrote: "Your dual and impersonal pastor, the Bible, and 'Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures,' is with you; and the Life these give, the Truth they illustrate, the Love they demonstrate, is the great Shepherd that feedeth my flock, and leadeth them 'beside the still waters'... though I be present or absent, it is God that feedeth the hungry heart, that giveth grace for grace, that healeth the sick and cleanseth the sinner. For this consummation He hath given you Christian Science..." (Mis 322:10).

She was preparing her followers for the time when they could no longer depend on her personally to lead them; when the organization of the Mother Church in Boston would be self-dissolved; when they would pass over to the divine Science and system of eternal Life itself, which she had found to be the deep spiritual meaning of the Bible, and which she had enshrined in Science and Health. In this case, obedience to the wedlock of these two books, operating in conjunction with the Church Manual, would lead the Christian Science movement safely forward under God's exclusive control.

In the words of John the Baptist: "This is he of whom I said, After me cometh a man which is preferred before me: for he was before me" (John 1:30 - italics added).

Published by
Gordon and Estelle Brown
England 1988
© Copyright W. Gordon Brown 1988
ISBN 0 904320 05 7
Printed by Villiers Publications Ltd 26a Shepherds Hill, London N6 5AH