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The challenge of writing poetry, T. S. Eliot once said, is dealing with "undisciplined squads of emotion." The problem of writing about evangelicals, liberals and fundamentalists in today's world of religion is one of undisciplined squads of definitions. I live and work at a seminary whose former president, Henry Sloane Coffin, gave to its theological tradition the name "liberal evangelical." Such a description is sure to raise storms of protest in many sectors of American Christianity today. What evangelical wants to be called a liberal? What liberal, an evangelical'?

Rather than devote a great deal of space to getting the definitions straight, I will leave them for implicit explication in what follows. I believe myself to be both evangelical and liberal in my disposition as a Christian; but I know what my friends mean when they call me "liberal" and what my enemies mean when they say that a liberal is really a "radical," just as I know what they all mean when they voice either admiration or suspicion of "the evangelicals." On all sides of conversation between people who prefer one or another title for themselves, I hear claims that make sense to me as one Christian among many. I also hear claims that may have gotten neglected in my own sector of the Christian movement. But my sector has claims that it is unwilling to abandon in any debate with those who are most critical of it. In short, I think that so-called liberals and so-called evangelicals have important truths to urge upon each other.

What can liberal Christians learn from evangelicals?

1. Humans hunger for elevated significance in their lives. To the skeptical eye of anthropologists, religious story, religious ritual and religious theory all make astonishing claims about the ultimate importance of a human life. Liberal secularist critics of "creationism" sometimes seem oblivious to the assault which they are making not upon a theological theory, but upon the sense of worth that evangelicals derive from profound meanings associated with the biblical story of creation. The great God of so vast a universe, focusing divine attention upon the human creatures of earth? It is possible to make it seem an absurd claim. But the very essence of biblical religion (and some other world religions as well) has to do with just this apparent absurdity. People need to think that their lives amount to something. There are enough forces in history, especially in the 20th century, to convince any observant individual that we do not amount to much.

The eminent and eloquent paleontologist Loren Eiseley wrestled throughout his life with the apparent clash between the human cry for meaning and the new time and space-scales of the post-Darwinian account of the universe. Wrote Eiseley in 7he Immense Journey:

Armed with science, sociology and pluralistic awareness, liberals sometimes seem to offer rational reasons why evangelicals should take less seriously their talk about God's self-revelation on behalf of a lost human world. People want to be saved from the undertow of sin, death and insignificance that so regularly undermines us. Evangelicals know this. Liberals, if they mean to be Christians, should know it too.

2. What one does believe, not what one does not, best defines a faith. H. Richard Niebuhr used to quote F. D. Maurice to the effect that "thinkers are more likely to be right in what they affirm than in what they deny." This is a rule that applies both to liberals and to evangelicals, and especially to the debate between them. The classic liberal tradition (represented in such thinkers as Hume, Jefferson and Kant) prided itself on its critical" spirit. It criticized the importance of one set of facts by calling attention to other facts. Learned Hand was expressing classic liberalism in his great dictum, "The spirit of liberty is the spirit that is not too sure it is right. " But vital religion has never been chiefly a way of grounding our uncertainty in yet more uncertainty. The very logic of not being too sure about one's own rightness may require a positive measure for detecting the right itself. In a word, evangelicals are at their best when they are preaching a positive message of Good News to people mired in bad news.

Is liberalism grounded in rational philosophic skepticism? Its critics often suspect that it is. Another kind of grounding is to be found in the famous plea of Oliver Cromwell to a cantankerous Scottish regiment: "I beseech you by the mercies of Christ, think that you may be wrong!" The Christ who is the way, truth and life for Christians will always stand as judge and critic of all our truths and works. But for Christians there is a great difference between the judgment of God and bare rational criticism, just as there is a great difference between meeting God in an idea and meeting God in Jesus of Nazareth. Among many liberals and evangelicals whom I know, the latter seem to grasp this simple principle better than do the former. In this they are the theologically wiser of the two.

3. Concrete love is the most powerful human truth. I suspect that the growth of many evangelical congregations has more to do with how members of those congregations relate to each other than with what sort of theology gets preached from their pulpits. The word "warm" often creeps into descriptions of evangelical piety, and at its most vigorous this warmth is likely to be present interpersonally. Not long ago I worshiped in a midwestern congregation which had its share of charismatics and other types of evangelicals. After the service a man approached me to say, "Six months ago I was in prison. When I got out, I visited around to various churches, but only here did they make me feel at home." Recent research on the electronic church strongly suggests that faithful viewers of the TV evangelists are overwhelmingly faithful church members. They find no substitute for churchgoing in tube-delivered inspiration. The truth here is not that preaching must appeal to "the heart," but rather that religion is a communal fact. Its vitality springs from concrete human relations between people who visibly care about each other. In their individualism, liberals may have missed this fact. In their congregations, evangelicals may have embodied it. It is hard to believe that one is important to God if one is unimportant to any group of neighbors.

4. There is a witness. Whatever else the word itself means, "evangelical" has to mean a testimony to Good News. In their preoccupation with critical thinking, intellectual clarity and tolerance, some liberal Christians forget that their only access to this historic faith is someone else's testimony. Nobody invents the Jewish or the Christian faith from the depths of his or her own mind. We are Jews or Christians because of something that happened, something worth reporting to generation after generation. Liberals have a right and an obligation to quarrel with many of the terms and techniques of witness employed by some evangelicals, but evangelicals are correct when they remind us that there is a faith "delivered to the saints," who in turn are responsible for delivering it to others.

There may be other elements of the evangelical perspective which its proponents wish liberals would take more seriously, but the above-mentioned are the ones that seem to me eminently worth commending.

What contributions do liberal Christians have to make in their dialogue with evangelicals?

A less self-serving and probably more ecumenical approach would be for liberals to wait for evangelicals themselves to answer this question. But we all have a right to think that we know our strengths as well as our weaknesses. Among the strengths of theological liberals in today's church, I would focus on the following.

1. Truth is as humanly important as meaning. There is no ultimate comfort in false meanings, or meanings whose base in reality is questionable. Ultimately the famous definition attributed to a bright Sunday school student -- "Faith is believing what you know ain't so" -- means that as an adult he will not show up in church. One inescapable point of debate here between liberals and evangelicals is their respective ways of understanding the Bible. Evangelical sermons abound in statements that begin, "The Bible says . . ." The "liberal evangelicals" to whom Coffin referred were ardent biblical scholars. They were determined to find out, as precisely as possible, what the Bible does and does not say. They made it difficult for anyone to ally the Bible unambiguously with any one theology -- e.g., millennarianism or Thomism or Calvinism. Modem religious liberalism, with its roots in the scientific spirit of the 18thcentury Enlightenment, took science seriously because it took the Creator of the real world seriously. No Marcionite or spiritualistic religion for them: the God of Israel and the God of Jesus, having made this world, inhabits it for our salvation. At stake is the issue over which the Nicene Council struggled mightily: Does God meet us in the real humanity of a historically real Jesus, "of one substance" with the real us, or not? Faith that ignores questions of reality will not long remain faith in the One to whom the gospel testifies.

2. 7he worshiping congregation is indispensable to the life of faith, but faithful life in the world is equally indispensable. Now that evangelicals have entered the political arena around issues such as school prayer, abortion law, and even the election of candidates, the old distinction that "liberals preach the social gospel and evangelicals a personal gospel" no longer holds. History, of course, is full of evangelical incursions into the issues of American society -- abolitionism and prohibition are two illustrations -- so the old saying never was very accurate. But many evangelicals still seem a bit uneasy in the push and shove of secular democratic politics. It is well that they do, for faithful discipleship in the midst of the world never was easy for Christians. The liberal readiness to see the world (with Calvin) as "the theater of God's glory" has its own tortuous history, and modem evangelicals have something to learn from that history for example, how "success" in secular society often demands compromise with that society.

One reason I respect Billy Graham's ministry is that he seems to have learned from the Watergate crisis not to hostage religion to power. Yet the liberal lesson here is not to send religion back into its gathered congregations. The lesson is that the withdrawal-and-return rhythm of the church's relation to the world is a rhythm of obedience, repentance and renewal. A decade ago research in Raleigh, North Carolina, demonstrated to some of us that the highest morale among citizens was likely to be found in those who had a sturdy religious faith, a community of friends who stood by them in thick and thin, and a track record, for persistent participation in the push and pull of politics. Liberals were apt to discover this truth as they went into the streets at the time of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam-era antiwar demonstrations. They did not think themselves into it. I hope that the newly political evangelicals discover the same truth.

3. To worship God in spirit and in truth is-to confess the inadequacy of our worship, spirit and truth. Liberal piety at its best has always stood firm on this insight. Karl Barth was always difficult to classify as either liberal or evangelical because he insisted that the divine Word was never coterminous with the words of Scripture, nor was the whole panoply of religion a sure instrument of that Word. Religions right, left and middle become captive to human pride when their adherents forget that "the sacrifice acceptable to God is a broken spirit" (Ps. 51:17).

Ironically enough, the liberal democratic tradition feared the incursion of religion into politics because its proponents did not particularly experience religion as a contributor of "the spirit that is not too sure it is right." Insofar as they mean to be Christian, why should the assorted political advocates of today's churches ride so high a theological horse when they enter the public political arena? Those who ride in on a high horse usually return as pedestrians: that is the ordinary democratic experience. One might even hope that this truth was discovered by the social-action-oriented evangelicals who came to the fore in the early '80s. On the basis of what Paul Tillich called the Protestant Principle, we can predict that in politics we will always be somewhat wrong even when we are somewhat right. "All have sinned and come short of the glory of God" (Rom. 3:23). Liberal pride and evangelical pride are neither liberal nor evangelical.

4. 7he freedom of God transcends every human freedom, and this truth is the hope of the world. Contemporary liberation theology has shown us what exploitative purposes the doctrine of God's transcendence can serve in hierarchical churches and societies. Its principal doctrine has been that the God of Israel and Jesus exercises divine freedom in taking up the causes of the world's poor and exploited. Most liberation theologians have more work to do if they are to make clear that this exercise of the divine freedom, too, can never be theologically identical with any particular political claim. But liberationists have no monopoly on this temptation. "Freedom" is one of the words that binds them rhetorically to both the evangelicals and the liberals. Ecumenical dialogue among these theological parties would be more likely if all three more consistently distinguished between the freedom of God and the creaturely freedoms of humanity. On the basis of that distinction, one might write confessions of this sort: God was free to protect Israel of old from the freedoms of Pharaoh; and the continued existence of the Jewish people in the 20th century exhibits that same divine freedom over against all the human freedom-including that of Christians-which has been exercised in history to obliterate the Jews.

God was free to preserve the word, the witness and the power of Jesus from the powers of Pilate; as a people created by the resurrecting Spirit of God, the church owes its continuing existence, too, to just that divine freedom.

God is still free to reform the religion of those who swear by the name of God in history, through persons and powers that do not swear by that name.

God is free to be kinder to humans than ever they were or will be to each other, even in the nuclear age.

Perhaps no major theological issue divides liberals and evangelicals so momentously as that concerning the relation of divine judgment to divine love. In the modern era, liberals have emphasized the love and de-emphasized the judgment of God. They have sought with some consistency to keep divine judgment and grace equally accessible to all. They shy away from those heaven-and hell divisions of humanity which lead to we-they splits in religious people's views of other people. In this, many liberals seem more authentically biblical than many evangelicals. The latter seem as preoccupied with the bad news as with the good, though such a preoccupation betrays the Bible's central message. To say that there is something central and something peripheral in the Bible is, of course, to state a liberal view of Scripture which elicits contempt from some evangelicals. But this is where 2,500 years of living with the Scriptures, in the synagogue and in the church, seems to require some choices of emphasis in Bible interpretation -- choices which we may call the principles of theology.

With Jonah and against Nahum, must we not side with the God who yearns for the salvation of the Assyrians'? With Paul and against the millennarians, must we not look forward to a great human reconciliation at the end of time more fervently than to a great divine vengeance upon all the sinners who have ever lived? In the inbetween times, must we not worship the Creator of all things, who forbids us to trample in the vineyards where the grapes of wrath are stored? Do we not know that whatever vengeance for destruction belongs to God, it does not belong to us? Are we ever authorized as Christians to threaten all the earth with a vengeance that God may be too kind ever to unleash? In the nuclear age, who are we to think that we hear the rumble of divine anger unless inside that anger we, like Hosea, hear the sound of tears?

Frankly, I am not sure that the word liberal or the word evangelical is the right tag for what I would covet for both liberals and evangelicals to learn in any future dialogue on this last issue. We live in a world whose creatures, though called to community, have practiced the arts of hostility and enmity -- to the vast neglect of the arts of love. The Scriptures, and especially the gospel, call us to be forgivers of each other's sins, not judges of all the earth; call us to be respectful of each other's strange ways, because we are all strangers enough to the transcending ways of God; call us to be faith-full enough to ascribe to our living Redeemer the right to love our enemies though we, in our finitude, have not yet learned to love them. "God is not the enemy of my enemies," said Martin Niemöller, recounting the spiritual lessons of his eight-year imprisonment under Hitler. "God is not even the enemy of God's own enemies." Even when they see each other as enemies, liberals and evangelicals must find their fundamental hope in that kind of assertion.

From its inception in 1879, the Church of Christ, Scientist has had but one agenda: the practical implementing of a theology in which the healing of sin is primary and the healing of disease indispensable. Indeed, there is a built-in limit, rare in our time, to the degree to which Christian Scientists can compromise this commitment without invalidating the very reason for the existence of their church.

It’s no secret that this church is facing tough times today. Judging by such objective indicators as the number of branch churches and of practitioners (those in the spiritual healing ministry), its membership has been declining at about the same rate as, or slightly faster than, that of several mainline denominations. Questions about the practice of Christian Science healing for children have been raised in such forums as the New England Journal of Medicine. The media have brought to public attention several cases in which Christian Science parents have been prosecuted for the deaths of their children while under spiritual treatment (cases, which the church argues are unrepresentative of its healing record). And fundamentalist literature targeting Christian Science as a cult has been circulating in unprecedented volume over the past several years.

At the same time, however, Christian Science has a clearer relation to issues before the Christian world than it has had for many decades. The opening up of the whole subject of feminine spirituality in recent feminist literature, for example, has led to a marked increase in attention to the character and social role of founder Mary Baker Eddy. And the revival of interest in spiritual healing among many denominations is making the historical role of Christian Science in stimulating this development an issue which cannot be ignored.

Though most Christians would probably agree with William H. Willimon that Christian Scientists are "part of the family, distant relatives at least" ("Are There Cults at Furman?" January 19, 1983, Christian Century), it is unlikely that they would have more than the vaguest notion of the contours of Christian Science theology. Quite possibly, they would not think of it as having one. In this respect, they may be the unwitting inheritors, and perhaps perpetuators, of the viewpoint that a woman cannot have anything serious to say, at least not about theology. A recent study in a feminist periodical presents considerable evidence that reductionist stereotypes of Eddy that are still current, even among feminists, sprang to a surprising extent from resentment directed toward her as a woman making serious truth claims in a male-dominated society (Jean McDonald, "Mary Baker Eddy and the Nineteenth Century ‘Public’ Woman: A Feminist Reappraisal, "Journal of Feminist Studies in Religion [Spring, 1986], pp. 89-112).

In the late 1960s and early 1970s, there were substantial ecumenical contacts between Christian Scientists and mainstream Christians at various levels. In 1968 and 1969, for instance, representatives from the Mother Church met with mainline leaders in New York and other cities for a series of intense and fruitful theological discussions, which resulted in a booklet of position papers called "Ecumenical Papers" (still available from the Christian Science Church). At the grass-roots level, Christian Scientists articulated their faith before hundreds of religious education groups in mainstream churches yearly.

Such exchanges have declined precipitously in recent years. Indeed, it requires an act of historical imagination to recapture the atmosphere in which they occurred, so fractious has the religious environment become. Useful theological distinctions have too often been overridden in textbook rehashes of Christian Science that try to make it "lie down" in some prefixed category (idealism, "Harmonialism," Gnosticism, etc.). It seems an appropriate occasion, then, to try to revive an honest theological dialogue between Christian Science and mainstream Christianity.

On the crucial theological point of the deity of Jesus, there is a clear and unambiguous difference between Christian Science and traditional Christian doctrine. For example, the fact that Christian Scientists do not believe in the deity of Jesus precludes their church from membership in the World Council of Churches. But their position is seriously misread if it is not understood that in Christian Science, Jesus is regarded as the figure through whom, supremely and uniquely, God’s nature was manifested to humanity. In Eddy’s theology, Jesus’ virgin birth, crucifixion and bodily resurrection were the pivotal events in human history, absolutely indispensable to human salvation.

However distinct the metaphysical context in which she defined the meaning of these events, Eddy saw them as having revelatory meaning precisely because they were historical events. In an age when church leaders can dismiss the virgin birth and question the resurrection without seriously rattling theological teacups, this conviction is bound to seem positively conservative. The first step in grasping Christian Science is to recognize that it not only accepts but builds upon these events, as well as upon the healing stories. As Eddy put it, "The life of Christ is the predicate and postulate of all that I teach" (No and Yes, p. 10).

It might be said that Eddy "demythologized" the healings of Jesus and his resurrection—but in an opposite sense from the way that Bultmann did. She did not deny that these events occurred, but she denied that they should be understood under the category of "miracle." Christian Scientists see these events not as supernatural interruptions of the natural order but as a revelatory appearance of a spiritual reality, shaking the very foundations of human perception.

For Christian Science, this spiritual reality is the Kingdom of God revealed through Jesus’ life of obedience and sacrifice. Jesus showed that this spiritual reality is not merely an ethical ideal to be realized, or a future state to be attained; if God is really God, if he is present and supreme, his kingdom must be a present reality. As Eddy wrote, "Our Master said, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’ Then God and heaven . . . are now and here; and a change in human consciousness, from sin to holiness, would reveal this wonder of being" (Unity of Good [First Church of Christ, Scientist, 1887], p. 37).

In a sense, the theology of Christian Science takes with radical seriousness the classic Christian doctrine of sin and what the change "from sin to holiness" must include. But it believes that the gospel offers the data of a new reality which, far from being some abstract metaphysical ultimate, can be progressively realized through Christian discipleship. Jesus’ emphatic command to heal the sick indicates that this discipleship leads to freedom from disease as well as from sin.

In spiritual healing as Eddy understood it, the human mind does not "do" something to another mind; rather, it witnesses through prayer and self-purification to the presence of the God supremely revealed through Jesus Christ. With the greater apprehension of that presence comes the dawning through "spiritual sense" (a term Eddy adapted from her "New Light" Puritan heritage) of what life in Christ even now can include. The love of God becomes more substantive; more palpable; the distortions and pains which plague human existence less necessary and authoritative. The new reality which broke into human experience in the person of Jesus becomes more distinct not through new conceptions about a transcendent reality, but through the growing experience of the power of that reality to bring transformation and healing in daily life.

A recent editorial in a Christian Science periodical proclaims that "healing, after all, is the name for how God is known and expressed in human experience" (A. W. Phinney, "What do you think about Christian healing?" Christian Science Sentinel [February 4, 1985], p. 195). But the purpose of this healing is not human improvement so much as it is the renewed God-experience it makes possible. Thus, the complaint that some people use Christian Science in order to attain secular ends of health, wealth or success is a wholly valid one from the point of view of Christian Science itself.

Many involved in Christian healing share the Christian Scientists’ belief in spiritual healing as an integral part of a living Christianity, and they share the renewed sense of God’s presence that issues from healing. They also share the conviction that God’s will is actively ranged against suffering and disease.

What other Christians do not share is Christian Scientists’ conviction that God is absolutely not the author of the conditions of finitude—meaning material existence—which give rise to suffering and disease. This may well be the most significant nonnegotiable difference between Christian Science and traditional Christian theology. Christian Scientists understand God as the sovereign creator, absolutely distinct from his creation. However, they see the finitude of God’s creation not as his creative will but as the way creation appears within the habitual limits of human perception.

This does not mean that Christian Scientists deny the intensity of the human experience of disease and pain. Eddy herself had far too deep an immersion in the fires of human suffering and spoke too feelingly of its importance in Christian experience to believe that the tribulations of what she once called "the ghastly farce of material existence" (Science and Health, p. 272) could be minimized or ignored. Yet her theology does maintain that sin and finitude are not part of authentic being in Christ, and that a deeper experience of God’s presence and our relation to him effectively diminishes and will eventually destroy the conditions of suffering which God does not sanction and never made. We might, therefore, speak of the theology of Christian Science as at once a theology of God’s presence and of God’s absence. For it holds that all the evils of the human condition are, in the final analysis, traceable to the drastic human failure to acknowledge and experience the reality of his presence.

From this standpoint, the question of whether Christianity is a healing religion is no minor speculative issue. It is a question about the very reality of the God whom the Bible reveals. Christian Scientists see their special role as that of pioneering in the spiritual healing which they see as a natural, though as yet largely unexplored, consequence of Christian discipleship. For them, such healing is the necessary and decisive proof of the revolutionary power of Christianity to transform human experience as a whole.

The focus on healing explains the relative de-emphasis in Christian Science—at least as contrasted with mainstream Protestantism—on the social dimension of Christian witness. But the term "relative" must be used here not only because the Mother Church has for years contributed substantial sums to relief efforts in wartime and emergency situations, such as the recent earthquake in Mexico, but because it continues to publish the Christian Science Monitor, in itself a far from negligible social commitment. For nearly seven decades the newspaper has helped orient Christian Scientists’ concerns to the practical problems of the world. Its four-part series "Hunger in Africa" (November 27-30, 1984), which concluded with a list of relief agencies to which donations could be sent, and the recent series "Exiles Among Us: Poor and Black in America" (November 13-20, 1986) are instances in which it has contributed significantly to public understanding of social problems.

The specific purpose of the church Eddy founded is to be an effective agency for the spiritual awakening upon which, as Christian Scientists see it, the solution of humanity’s manifold problems ultimately rests. Christian Scientists generally would agree that bringing prayer to bear on human tragedy and suffering does not preclude taking other practical steps to alleviate them. As a Christian Scientist said recently in response to a medical student’s question as to how she would help starving children in Africa: "I suspect if I were there I would do what you would do—cradle as many as I could and feed them with all the food I could lay my hands on. I hope I would remember to turn sincerely and expectantly to God for guidance as to how to do more—intelligently—to meet the immediate human needs of the multitude, but to take practical inspired steps for healing the fears, hates, misunderstanding, and cruelties that bring suffering to humanity" ("Some Questions and Answers about Christian Science," Christian Science Sentinel, September 2, 1985, pp. 1508-09). The underlying question about Christian Scientists’ social stance, therefore, is not whether they are too little committed to social action, but whether spiritual healing as they understand it can actually happen and whether it means what they think it means for Christianity.

How should one evaluate the healing efforts of a denomination which has been committed to Christian healing for over a century, and which endeavors to practice it amid a secular climate in which medical assumptions are axiomatic?

Christian Scientists point to their century-long healing experience as evidence that cannot be ignored. If this evidence is dismissed out of hand on the basis of rigidly reductionist standards, what does that say about our attitude toward the gospel? And if it is taken seriously, what are its implications for Christian faith?

Obviously, these questions have relevance that far transcends the interest of a single denomination. Christian Scientists remain rather like distant relatives who insist on raising uncomfortable questions—questions the rest of the family might prefer to ignore. There is still much for the family to discuss.

In May a young Christian Science couple pleaded Innocent in a Boston courtroom to charges of manslaughter in the death of their two-year-old son. Ginger and David Twitchell had sought to treat their son’s bowel obstruction through spiritual means. The case may not go to trial, for the Twitchells’ conduct appears to fall under a Massachusetts statute that, according to an attorney general for the Commonwealth, "expressly precludes imposition of criminal liability as a negligent parent for failure to provide medical care because of religious beliefs." The district attorney can prosecute the couple only by finding a way around this statute.

Prosecutions of Christian Science parents are also pending in California and Florida, but the charges against the Twitchells have drawn special attention, being brought in the very shadow of the dome of the Mother Church, world headquarters of the denomination. Some media covering the case have tried to exploit this dramatic aspect. Yet the breadth of the coverage -- from tabloids and radio talk shows to wire-service stories and TV discussion forums -- has also allowed legal thinkers, medical ethicists and church spokespeople to begin sorting out opinions.

Terms such as "complex," "dilemma" and "far reaching" have studded more informed discussions of the case. In Harvard law professor Arthur Miller’s words: "The courts have to balance the rights of the parents, the rights of religion, and the rights of the state," and this is "almost impossible to do with any precision and consistency." A widely quoted church statement asserts, "It is obvious that what is being put on trial here is not the action of individual parents but a public policy, a healing practice, and a way of life in many families."

Even some of those who oppose laws accommodating Christian Science healing for children (in Massachusetts and most other states) hold that prosecutions of already grieving parents makes little sense. In a strongly worded statement condemning such laws, the American Academy of Pediatrics declared that it did not "advocate punishment of offending parents as a solution." Of the Twitchell case specifically, Kenneth Simmons, law professor at Boston University, said, "I think there is a very good argument that this is an illegal prosecution, and beyond that I also believe it’s an unwise prosecution because Christian Scientists looking at that law would quite reasonably believe that they are protected."

The issue in the case appears to revolve around a conflict between the parents’ First Amendment rights to practice their religious beliefs and the state’s duty to protect the health of children. Most commentators hold that while adults have the right to practice spiritual healing for themselves, they have no religious right to endanger their children’s health. The most intriguing and least-noticed aspect of the debate is that Christian Scientists agree with this position. They do not emphasize their religious right as over against the state’s interest, but accept parents obligation to maintain their children’s health and the state’s interest in seeing that this is done. A fair estimate of Christian Science healing, they maintain, would show it to be an effective form of treatment which responsibly fulfills this obligation, with a support system including nonmedical nursing and care facilities for the sick. As a church member put it to an interviewer, "The refusal of medical care is because we have found through experience and demonstration of healing that spiritual means -- prayer and spiritual treatment -- work more effectively for us" ("Christian Scientists Say Prayer is Best Medicine," Lawrence Eagle Tribune, May 9)

It is important to establish what is meant by "spiritual treatment." Christian Scientists hold that behind all diseases are mental factors rooted in the human mind’s blindness to God’s presence and our authentic relation to God, revealed in the life of Christ. They hold that treatment is a form of prayer or communion with God in which God’s reality and power, admitted and witnessed to, become so real as to eclipse the temporal "reality" of disease and pain. Such treatment they see as actively and specifically ministering to human need. As one Christian Scientist explained it to a high-school group, "Healing happens when your sense of God becomes greater than your sense of the problem."

Christian Scientists do not claim that their practice of spiritual healing should be accommodated in law simply because it is religious, but rather that it should not be proscribed by law simply because it is religious, and in the absence of clear evidence that it is ineffectual. In view of laws requiring medical care for children, they assert that not accommodating their form of healing in law would be to proscribe it. But would such accommodations violate the establishment clause of the First Amendment? No, say Christian Scientists. Pointing to other statutes and court decisions recognizing special practices of the Amish, Roman Catholics, Seventh-day Adventists and Jews, among others, they argue that in their case also, such laws are necessary to implement the free exercise clause of the First Amendment. Remarked church spokesperson Nathan Talbot: "We abhor the idea that the Constitution gives anyone the right to martyr a child. But our approach to healing demands fair consideration. As with any form of treatment, Christian Science deserves to be judged on the basis of an overall assessment of its results, rather than on the a priori assumption that nothing but medical care should be acceptable by the state as a means of caring for the health of the young.

The question of the evidence for spiritual healing is a thorny one. An important exploration of the issue is Robert Peel’s recent book Spiritual Healing in a Scientific Age (Harper & Row, 1987) The core of the work consists of affidavits by Christian Scientists attesting to the healing of such disorders as spinal meningitis, compound pelvic fracture, broken vertebra, breast cancer, cancer of the uterus, double club feet, third-degree burns, acute rheumatic fever, polio, eczema, epilepsy, appendicitis, rheumatoid arthritis, tuberculosis, blood poisoning, diptheria and glaucoma. Each of the healings Peel cites, over half of which involve children, were medically corroborated either by diagnoses or follow-up medical examination or both.

In the March issue of Second Opinion exploring the relation of faith, medicine and healing, James P. Wind notes that "Peel’s book explores the dangerous zone between theology and medicine" and "asks readers -- especially those with reflexive skepticism about the subject -- to take seriously the revival of spiritual healing in our post-modern age." But with the exception of this rather adventurous issue of Second Opinion, there is little to indicate that such reflection is occurring. Wind cites Peel’s reference to a British physician’s judgment that serious scholarship in this zone of inquiry can be a form of "academic suicide." Peel’s book itself has received surprisingly few academic reviews, which suggests that the questions it raises are regarded by many as beyond serious consideration.

The militantly secular views that dismiss spiritual healing are known quantities. In the current debate over Christian Science, it is almost commonplace for those holding these views to write off accounts of spiritual healing with the reductionistic if not pejorative term "anecdotal," since they refer to real-life events rather than ones that occur in a laboratory context. (Even so, what is surprising about Peel’s book is how much medical corroboration there is for the healing accounts.)

From a Christian standpoint, the decision not to take seriously the evidence for spiritual healing has sobering implications. If one rejects out of hand the evidence for Christian healing, many would ask, is one not rejecting an aspect of Christian experience necessary to the realization of the gospel’s promise today? As Gordon Dalbey noted six years ago, "The ministry of physical healing stands in the center of our Christian faith. And yet, though the Gospels are filled with stories of healing, and the Church itself is born through an act of healing (Acts 3) , most church people seem anxious to disown these stories, as if they embarrassed us" ("Recovering Christian Healing," The Christian Century, June 9-16, 1982).

Probably fewer church people would be embarrassed by these stories today. During this decade, the recovery of Christian healing has accelerated to the point that it has become an undeniable part of the Christian landscape. As with most grass-roots movements, it has included differing and in some instances contradictory approaches. And both Christian Science and the form of Christian healing that has become part of mainstream church life should be clearly differentiated from the "faith healing" associated with TV evangelism, itinerant evangelists (portrayed, for example, in the recent CBS television film "Promised a Miracle") and fundamentalist groups such as Faith Assembly. A recent article in a Christian Science periodical observed, "Many Christians who have ministries of healing reject the label ‘faith healing.’ It’s becoming apparent that blind faith doesn’t stand up to the scrutiny of an increasingly sophisticated and technological society" (David B. Andrews, "The Future of Christian Healing: Fresh Convictions and Spiritual Realism," Christian Science Journal. June 1988, p. 33)

A Methodist minister actively involved in spiritual healing for many years speaks for one current of opinion when he says, "Christian Science has been a tremendous influence because it has put its finger right on what Christ says about healing the sick. Christian Scientists have demonstrated it; they have practiced it and put it at the very heart of what they’re trying to do" ("Christian Science and Spiritual Healing Today: A Conversation with the Reverend Paul Higgins," Christian Science Sentinel, October 6, 1986, p. 1860)

The most questionable aspect of Christian Science for many is its view that medical and spiritual treatment cannot be beneficially combined. For Christian Scientists, this approach follows from a belief that spiritual treatment rests on a basis wholly different from that of medicine. It does not mean that one cannot pray as any Christian would that another experience more of God’s healing love. But it is motivated by a concern that patients not rely for healing on contradictory forms of treatment -- and also by deference to the efforts of medical professionals if their care has been elected. The church strongly emphasizes that choice of treatment remains wholly individual and voluntary. However, those engaged in the ministry of Christian Science healing for the public must usually withdraw their names from listings in church periodicals for a stipulated period of time if they decide to make use of medical care for themselves.

Whatever one’s view of this approach to healing, it has resulted in a body of evidence about healings that have been effected through spiritual means alone. In light of this evidence, it is ironic that Christian Science healing should be attracting attention more by its failure than by its successes. Put in an unenviable media spotlight, Christian Scientists have objected to what they see as the inequity of the public judgment upon them. As one of them put it recently, "Many children, as well as adults, die under medical care. . . . Nobody gives a second thought to those, they just let it go . . . whereas a few cases where prayer has appeared to fail are brought out and publicized all over the country" (Lawrence Eagle Tribune, May 9)

Yet for Christian Scientists, as for those in the medical community, failures in practice often cause genuine soul-searching. A brief interview with David Twitchell on ABC’s "20/20" gave a public glimpse of a private struggle. "Maybe a doctor could have saved Robyn," he said. But then he added, "Have you ever asked a doctor for a guarantee?" -- a pointed comment, considering the consent forms typically required for those undergoing medical treatment listing multiple risks for which hospitals disclaim responsibility. Yet for Twitchell the honest regret remained: "If we were closer to God we could have stopped this from happening. In that way I blame myself."

Such aching "ifs" have also been voiced by medical professionals and those who have sought their ministrations. In medicine, as in spiritual healing, particular failures prove nothing unless related to an overall record. There may never be a "scientific" way to measure the record of Christian Scientists against that of medical treatment, other than the more or less commonsense observation that Christian Scientists are generally reasonable citizens who have not been losing children at a conspicuously rapid rate. There are currently five prosecutions in process against Christian Scientists who have lost children in this decade, during which intense media scrutiny has been given to the issue.

The death of a child under any circumstances or method of care is jarring. It is difficult to determine the number of Christian Scientists relying upon spiritual means for the healing of children, but the handful of losses among their children does not seem dramatically high for a small but widespread denomination. In Massachusetts, where Christian Science is relatively strong. Robyn Twitchell is the only child to have died under Christian Science care during this decade.

It is the successes of a healing system, not just its failures, that its opponents must reckon with. Future decades may see that reluctance to take the evidence for spiritual healing seriously as one last form of resistance to the drastic deconstruction of the mechanistic concept of reality. "Twentieth century physics," writes Peel, "suggests reality may be different from that posited by the reductionist, determinist, or ‘scientific’ materialism of the past -- and posited still by the biomedical hard-liner of today." Not that the evidence for spiritual healing is itself enough to validate a theological viewpoint. Yet the cumulative weight of testimony as to its validity is more than sufficient to disrupt the complacency of a biomedical world view that would exclude it.

In view of the indictment of the Twitchells and others. assessing this evidence is far more than an intellectual exercise. The reality of spiritual healing as Christian Scientists practice it matters profoundly to those who believe it to be dangerous. It matters to Christian Scientists who see their form of healing not only as a valid and responsible form of healthcare but as vital to the future of Christianity. One fact is certain: dealing with this question demands a rationality disciplined enough to discard dogmatisms, both religious and scientific.