Theology and healing
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Origins and early development

The First Church of Christ, Scientist in Boston (the Mother Church).The Christian Science church and independent historians differ about the origins of Christian Science. The former ascribes the creation of Christian Science solely to Mary Baker Eddy's own efforts, while historians point to her longstanding association with a prominent mystic of the time.

Several years before founding Christian Science, Eddy was a follower and patient of a "mind-healer," Dr. Phineas Parkhurst Quimby. Quimby practiced a form of mesmerism (i.e. hypnotism) and the laying on of hands, sometimes with magnets.

The state of nineteenth-century medical science was so crude that such self-proclaimed doctors commonly found a following and made a living from their practices, as they often were no worse than their medically trained counterparts. They also brought the added benefit of the placebo effect, because these various mystics were willing to make promises of recovery that medical doctors of the time could not make, due to their widely known failures. The ineffectiveness and unreliability of medicine at that time was a major factor in Eddy's theological rejection of medical science, and in the early, explosive growth of her church.

In 1862, Eddy traveled to Portland, Maine to study with Quimby, who introduced her to the idea that would eventually be the bedrock of Eddy's religion: that disease is merely a belief, and that if the belief of disease is dispelled, then so is the disease itself. His writings also contain several specialized words and phrases that continue to be used in Christian Science today.

For a time, Eddy wrote enthusiastic letters to New England newspapers extolling Quimby and his theory, although she and her followers would later deny that Quimby had any positive role in the development of Christian Science theology, much less a formative one. Indeed, in Science and Health, Eddy writes that "[a]s early as 1862, she [sic] began to write down and give to friends the results of her Scriptual study, for the Bible was her sole teacher" (p. viii, emphasis added).

Shortly after Quimby's death in 1866, Eddy fell on a patch of ice and sustained an injury. Though Eddy called it life-threatening, some independent biographers have disputed the severity of her wounds. Eddy later wrote that she spent several days reading and praying on a Bible passage, resulting in a complete healing, and in what she called the discovery of Christian Science. Later, Eddy was to grant herself the title, "Discoverer and Founder of Christian Science."

To this day, the Christian Science church continues to deny Quimby's role in the religion; it says only that Eddy gained temporary relief from Quimby's methods, but that she ultimately rejected them because they were not based on any "divine principle" (see the "1862" entry on Quimby on the church's official timeline (http://www.marybakereddylibrary.org/...ineflash.jhtml) of Eddy's life).

However, Christian Science was not the only major movement to grow out of Quimby's teachings. Several of his students went on to found the New Thought movement, which itself spawned other movements such as Religious Science and the Unity Church. These movements are considered precursors of the contemporary New Age movement.

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Theology
In Science and Health, Eddy argued that given the absolute goodness and perfection of God, sin, disease, and death were not created by him, and therefore cannot be truly real. This led her to conclude that the material world was an illusion that obscures God's world of spiritual "Truth," which she felt was the true reality. Eddy came to believe that this misperception, which she called "error," could be remedied through a better spiritual understanding of humanity's relationship to God, and contended that this understanding was what enabled the biblical Jesus to heal.

This teaching is the foundation of Christian Scientists' belief that disease – and any other adversity – can be cured through prayerful efforts to fully understand this spiritual relationship. It is encapsulated in Science and Health as "The Scientific Statement of Being," a kind of Christian Science creed that is arguably the most cited textual passage in Christian Science practice; it is also read aloud in churches and Sunday schools at the end of every Sunday service:

There is no life, truth, intelligence, nor substance in matter.
All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all.
Spirit is immortal Truth; matter is mortal error.
Spirit is the real and eternal; matter is the unreal and temporal.
Spirit is God, and man is His image and likeness.
Therefore man is not material; he is spiritual. (p. 468)
This belief in the unreality of imperfection is the basis of Christian Scientists' characteristic reliance on prayer for traditional medical care, often with the aid of Christian Science practitioners, who are, with the permission of the church's Board of Directors, listed in the Christian Science Journal, their only form of official recognition by the church and among the Christian Science laity. (Some "unlisted" practitioners maintain active practices as well, but they do so without the prestige that a Journal listing brings.)

Practitioners "treat patients," in Christian Science parlance, through prayer. Such treatment usually, though not always, is for health-related problems, and a practitioner's patient may request help for personal problems as well, such as relationships, workplace difficulties, and so on. Practitioners may also charge modest fees for their services.

Christian Science's focus on the idea of spiritual healing led to some measure of stir in the theological realm at first. Under the eye of the scientific revolutions of the 19th century, many mainstream denominations had relegated spiritual healing to the realm of a one-time dispensation rather than a modern practice. During Christian Science's early days of rapid growth, claims of healing under its influence became a subject of heated debate at Christian conventions, but for the same reason it also became a subject of reawakened interest in the 1960s and 70s.