The following represents something that I found rather surprising in Barth’s Church Dogmatics. In a context where Barth is discussing the strength and weakness of the human body, he goes into a small-print excursus on Christian Science and Mary Baker Eddy. As I have been reading through the CD what I have found is that many of the themes Barth is known for, while present, only really represent a fraction of his overall corpus. Indeed, those themes (election etc.) are contextually conditioning for all of his work, even his thinking on the human body and physicality. But still, Barth is far more interesting than many folks might imagine, within their caricatured and reductionistic picture of him.
For the remainder of this post, I am going to quote Barth’s full excursus on Christian Science, if nothing else to illustrate the types of exposures Barth had to the broader world of ideas in his 20th century Swiss milieu. Ironically, here Barth is engaging with a fringe American “thinker,” in the person of Mary Baker Eddy.
The tenet that sickness is an illusion is the basic negative proposition which in the seventies of the last century the American Mary Baker Eddy said that she did not lay down but “discovered” through the authoritative inspiration of a book now regarded as canonical, namely, Christian Science. What was at first a small group of adherents has since spread to all parts of the world in the form of religious societies which are particularly popular among the upper and middle classes and more especially among women. Karl Holl has depicted and done it almost too much justice in a careful study entitled “Scientismus” Ges. Aufs. Z. Kgsch. III, 1928, 460 f.). The positive basis of this teaching is that God is the only reality, that he is Spirit and that the whole creation is only a reflection of his spiritual essence. Apart from God there are only powers, which in reality are only thoughts. All matter as such represents a mere appearance, and the same is true of all such associated features as sin, sickness, evil and death. Man as the image of God always was and is and shall be perfect. Everything that contradicts this perfection is in reality only an illusion and misunderstanding rooted in the forgetfulness of God, which in turn evokes fear. And fear is the true basis of all illness; indeed, it is actually illness itself. For fear creates a picture of illness which then falls externally upon the body. “You maintain that an ulcer is painful; but that is impossible, for matter without mind is no painful. The ulcer merely reveals by inflammation and swelling an appearance of pain, and this appearance is called an ulcer.” The true and psychical man is not touched by it. He is only as it were enveloped in a mist and has disappeared from consciousness. Evil is unreal. “Take away fear, and at the same time you have also removed the soil on which sickness thrives.” Jesus was and is the embodiment of truth which scatters and breaks through the mist of these false appearances. The power bestowed and the task presented by Him consist in recognising that God is Spirit. It thus consists in freeing oneself from the false appearances of sin (which even Mrs. Eddy regards as particularly evil, is replaced by “mind-reading,” which is possible at a great distance and in which the thought images which only be a matter of acknowledging the cure already effected by God, of understanding His completed work and of initiating it in the patient. The “healer”—the name given to the active members of the Christian Science Association—is not then to rouse and fortify the will of others through his own, but simply to make a free path in the sufferer for the divine operation. “Call to mind the presence of health and the fact of harmonious existence, until the body corresponds to the normal condition of health and harmony.”
This doctrine has several features which remind us of the message of the New Testament, and which are of course derived from it: the recognition of fear as the basic evil in man’s relation to God; an unconditional trust in the efficacy of prayer; and bold reference to a work already completed by God. But these are all devalued by the fact that they are related to a view which has nothing to do with that of the New Testament but in the light of it can only be described as utterly false. The fact that Christian Science can undoubtedly point to successes in healing—as well as disastrous failures—cannot of itself commend it to Christians. As is well-known, the magicians of Pharaoh could do quite a number of things. And the concession that Karl Holl (loc. cit., p. 477) is willing to make, namely, that its positive presupposition at least is correct, is one which cannot really be made to it. God is indeed the basis of all reality. But He is not the only reality. As Creator and Redeemer He loves a reality which different from Himself, which depends upon Him, yet which is not merely a reflection nor the sum of His powers and thoughts, but which has in face of Him an independent and distinctive nature and is the subject of is own history, participating in its own perfection and subjected to its own weakness. As the coming kingdom, the incarnation of the Word and the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in His true humanity are not just an appearance, so it is with man in general, whether in his nature of perversion, in his psychical being or his physical, in his divine likeness or his sin and transgression. It is because Mrs. Eddy did not understand this that sin, evil and death—in conquest of which Jesus Christ did not “disappear from our level of consciousness” but actually died on the cross—are for her mere “appearances” of human thinking, and redemption is only the act of man in which he submerges himself in God and leads a life submerged in God in order that God may work in him, putting an end to those “appearances” or thought images and bringing to light the perfection of psychical essence which was never lost, the presence of health and the fact of harmonious being. On this point we can only say that both the Old and New Testaments regard not only God and man, not only sin, evil and death and their conquest, but also sickness in a different light. They certainly do not see it as an illusion, and its conquest as the dispelling of this illusion. Whether Christian Science is really “science” need to occupy us here. But there can be no doubt that it is not “Christian” science.[1]
As Barth describes Christian Science vis-à-vis Holler, what we get is a type of pantheistic, Eastern monistic, neo-Gnostic mind cult, that today, and in a broad sense, fits well with the New Age ideology that is almost absolutely pervasive; even among professing Christians (Yoga, “Best Life Now,” self-actualization, therapeuticism etc. etc.). Surely, there are still Christian Science centers here and there, but they are mostly dilapidated signs of a past long been surpassed; except, ideologically. The New Age seeks to liberate and control the mind by abdicating it to the universal soul, the universal mind, the ancient secrets of the forever cosmos. And so that remains the universal thread that attaches something like a Christian Science with the New Age, as a broader category of the same thing.
What I found interesting about this engagement with Barth is that he felt compelled to engage it at all. But I’m glad he did. What this ought to help illustrate is that, indeed, there really is “nothing new under the sun.” Ideas and their ideologies are cycled and re-cycled over and over again; just in newer shinier packaging. Underneath it is the same old jalopy. Christian beware! As noted, these types of psychical mind cults represent the precise thing Christ came to save us from; our inward curved selves (homo incurvatus in se). There is no inner-salvation latent in our supposed Caspar-like-ghosts; the universe has no soul; there is no Word of God from within. There is only God extra nos (outside of us), and His iustitia aliena (alien righteousness) in Christ pro nobis (for us). Without Him in-breaking and disrupting our lives with His ‘militant Grace,’ we are simply enslaved in bondage to the hooks of our own thoughts and intellects and hearts. We might attempt to construct a way of salvation within the tempests of our own self-possessed cathedrals of grey matter, as Mrs. Eddy attempted to systemize in her own self-deluded way. But in the end without the transposition of our ‘bodies of death,’ into the grave with the body of death Christ took for us, and then our transposition of new life and resurrection with Christ’s elect body of ascension, we are of all people the most to be pitied.
[1] Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics III/4 §55 [364-5] The Doctrine of Creation: Study Edition (London: T&T Clark, 2010), 39-41.