Gnosticism, telephones-in-tombs, etc.! ...

Sometimes it's difficult to imagine the sheer variety of what other folks can suppose about Christian Science! A sampling of the items crossing the CoP desk might be quite an eye-opener to many Church members.

One report recently linked Christian Scientists and believers in flying saucers. Another related Christian Science to various kinds of quackery. Another picked up the often repeated old wives' tale about a telephone in Mrs. Eddy's tomb. (It helps one understand Mrs. Eddy's somewhat wry comment in Miscellaneous Writings 248:16-22!)

The letters below give just a small indication of the remarkably wide range of impositions on the public that require ceaseless attention.

In The Boston Globe Boston Massachusetts

There is not, never has been, and never will be a telephone in the tomb of Mary Baker Eddy in the Mount Auburn Cemetery.

The woman who founded Christian Science repeatedly and explicitly disavowed spiritualism or any possible communication between the dead and the living. We're sorry to see The Globe giving this silly piece of folklore further currency, but we hope you'll join us in burying the canard as it deserves.

A. W. PHINNEY Manager Committees on Publication

In The SpectatorLondon England

[The writer] understandably questions in his letter of March 22 the links between Gnostics and Quakers. A similar query can be raised in relation to Christian Science. While there are some areas in which on the face of it we might be thought to point in the same direction, the overriding feature of Gnostic thought was that the events of Jesus's life were symbolic rather than historic; a Christian Scientist is totally committed to the premise that Jesus's ministry, his crucifixion and bodily resurrection are the central events of history.

Perhaps the chief point to be taken is that the too frequent habit of association in one pigeon-hole of such divergent subjects as Quakerism, Christian Science and Scientology is at best meaningless, and at worst carries a whole range of inference that is entirely misleading.

RICHARD ROBINSON Committee on Publication

In the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Frankfurt Federal Republic of Germany

You wrote on July 16 in your interesting report about the ecumenical world congress "Faith, Science, and the Future" held in Cambridge, Massachusetts: "From the Conference only separated by the Charles River lies Boston, city of The Mother Church of Christian Science, which is probably the most typical American religion. It stems from Unitarianism."

There is no historical basis for the statement that Christian Science stems from Unitarianism. The religious roots of the Founder of Christian Science, Mary Baker Eddy, were in the Calvinist theology of New England's Congregationalism and she had almost no touch with the Unitarianism of Harvard and Boston.

This is clearly documented in a study of the relations of Christian Science with its early cultural milieu entitled: "Christian Science: Its Encounter with American Culture" (Henry Holt and Co., New York, 1958), by Robert Peel, of which the great Harvard religious historian Perry Miller wrote: "No student of the religious culture of America can afford to neglect this book."

Further documentation is to be found in a later widely acclaimed scholarly study "The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life" by Stephen Gottschalk, published in 1973 by the University of California Press. Incidentally both Messrs. Peel and Gottschalk, together with an official representative of the Christian Science Church, were present at the recent Conference at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

Dr. Jur. K. DIETER FÖRSTER Committee on Publication