Rolling Away the Stone: Mary Baker Eddy's Challenge to Materialism - Christian Science Book on Spiritual Healing & North American Religion | Perfect for Theology Students & Spiritual Seekers

*Rolling Away the Stone* was not an easy read for me, but it was a valuable one. Amazon tells me that I bought this book back in 2007. It took me six years to be in the right place, mentally, to start reading it - and it took me another three or four weeks to finish it once I'd begun. It is not a quick read. I found myself constantly stopping to digest and ponder what Gottschalk has to say about the last 20 years of Mary Baker Eddy's life, and to think about the direction her movement has taken since her death.A theme that kept repeating itself throughout the book was the subject of "revival" and "renewal" for Eddy's movement. Gottschalk reports that, after an appearance at the Mother Church, Eddy wrote: "I find the general atmosphere of my church as cold and still as the marble floors..." and "I did feel a coldness a lack of inspiration all through the dear hearts... it was a stillness a lack of spiritual energy and zeal that I felt."Later Gottschalk writes: "As with other movements after the death of their founder, Christian Science became to a significant degree routinized, in the process losing much of the spiritual animus that accounted for its early growth. The pattern is observable, whether we are speaking of the early Christian church after Jesus, the Islamic movement in the decades after the death of Mohammad, or the Franciscan order after the death of St. Francis. Eddy appears to have anticipated with great apprehension that the Christian Science church, too, would settle down into a kind of bland predictability, when she was no longer on the scene. To her, being a Christian Scientist in any meaningful sense involved not only a strong commitment, but, in a sense, a spirit of adventure."As presented by Gottschalk in *Rolling Away the Stone*, I think "a spirit of adventure" is an apt description of Mary Baker Eddy's approach to life. Spontaneity, intuition, the courage to change course - these were all a part of who she was, how she lived her life, and how she led her movement. According to Gottschalk, formal, ecclesiastical, rigid doctrines and dogma were never what she intended for her movement. Gottschalk writes: "What apparently concerned her the most was the prospect that the church would devolve into yet another ecclesiastic organization, `barren,' to use her words in Science and Health, `of the vitality of spiritual power, by which material sense is made the servant of Science and religion becomes Christlike.'... This materialism could, she believed, take on ecclesiastical form. It did so when Christian Scientists, conditioned by their earlier adherence to orthodoxy, failed to break with outworn tradition, ritual, and other merely exterior forms of worship. `Long prayers, ecclesiasticism, and creeds,' she (Eddy) stated, `have clipped the divine pinions of Love, and clad religion in human robes. They materialize worship, hinder the Spirit, and keep man from demonstrating his power over error.'"Yeah. Thought-provoking.I'm really glad Stephen Gottschalk wrote this book, and I'm really glad I read it.Karen Molenaar Terrell, author of *Blessings: Adventures of a Madcap Christian Scientist*