The Concise Oxford Dictionary of World Religions (545 page)

 
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Christian Science
.

The Church of Christ (Scientist) was founded by Mary Baker Eddy (1821–1910). She had been a semi-invalid who, in 1862, began to learn from Phineas Quimby the possibility of cures without medicine. In 1866 (the year in which Quimby died), she claimed a cure from a severe injury (after a fall on ice) without the intervention of medicine. She devoted herself to the recovery of the healing emphasis in early Christianity, and in 1875 she completed the 1st edn. of
Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures
. In 1879, the Church of Christ (Scientist) was incorporated with the purpose of ‘commemorating the word and works of our Master’. She became chief pastor of the Mother Church, and wrote
The Manual of the Mother Church
to govern its affairs.

 
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Christian Socialists
and
Christian Socialism.

A group led by F. D.
Maurice
, and including Charles Kingsley, which rejected
laissez-faire
economics and competition as conforming to the will of God, and envisaged instead a kind of ‘organic’ society, in which co-operative societies and education would reduce poverty and class hostility. The group published pamphlets and set up co-operatives (which failed), and it only lasted from 1848 to 1854.

 
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Christians of St John
(name given to the Mandeans)
:

see
MANDEANS
.

 
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Christmas
.

The Christian feast of Jesus' birth, celebrated on 25 Dec. Its observance is first attested in Rome in 336. Probably the date was chosen to oppose the feast of the ‘birthday of the unconquered sun’ on the winter solstice. In the E. the date 6 Jan. for the nativity generally gave way to 25 Dec. by the 5th cent., although at Jerusalem the older custom was kept until 549 and the
Armenian Church
still observes it (see also
EPIPHANY
).

 
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(Gk.,
christos
,
Christ
, +
logos
, ‘reflection’). The attempt in Christianity to account for the relation of Jesus to God, especially in his own nature and person. From the outset, New Testament writers related Jesus so closely to God that he could be seen as the initiative of God in seeking and saving that which was lost, even to the extent of being the manifestation of God so far as that can be seen or conveyed in human form. This led inevitably to questions of how the being of God is related to the humanity of Jesus in such a way that both are truly contained and present in one person.
The answers given to those questions are necessarily speculative. They range across a spectrum (in the history of the Church) from a view that he was a remarkable teacher and healer who was promoted by the faith of the early Christians into God, to the view that the pre-existent Son is God as God always is, and that the eternal and unchanging nature of God was truly present to the humanity of Jesus, both as co-agent of his activity and subject of his experience, without the humanity being obliterated or the divine nature compromised. The former are known as
Euhemeristic
or Adoptionist Christologies (see e.g.
ARIUS
). The latter culminated in the
Chalcedonian
definition, which sees the person of Jesus as (in the words of
Aquinas
)
instrumentum coniunctum divinitatis
, the conjoined instrument of the Godhead.

 
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