The teachings of Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science, present a metaphysical worldview that stands in sharp opposition to the plain and historical reading of Genesis 2:18. At the heart of Eddy’s system is the denial of the material world as real or meaningful. She wrote in Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, “Matter is neither intelligent nor creative” (2023, p. 89) and, “All is infinite Mind and its infinite manifestation, for God is All-in-all” (2023, p. 468). According to her interpretation, creation—including male and female, the body, and even the concept of relational companionship—is not literal but illusory, the projection of spiritual ideas within the “divine Mind.”
This radically redefines the categories used in Genesis 2:18. When the Lord God says, “It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him an help meet for him,” the Christian Science view treats both “man” and “woman” not as historical, embodied persons, but as abstract spiritual principles. As a result, the creation of Eve is not seen as the divine solution to Adam’s real solitude, but as symbolic of an inner metaphysical harmony between masculine and feminine ideas within the divine consciousness. The text becomes allegory divorced from historical or ontological substance.
Such a reading empties Genesis 2:18 of its core theological meaning. In the biblical account, the man’s aloneness is not a spiritual metaphor but a real, creational deficiency in an otherwise good world. The woman is not an abstraction but a concrete, embodied person formed by God from Adam’s side (Genesis 2:22). Her role as “help meet” (ezer kenegdo) is rooted in relational, covenantal, and physical realities that make human community possible. In denying the physical creation, Christian Science eliminates the very context in which God’s gift of companionship has meaning.
Furthermore, the implications of this denial reach far beyond Genesis. If man and woman are not real, embodied persons, then the doctrine of the Incarnation collapses. Scripture teaches that “the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us” (John 1:14), and that Jesus partook of flesh and blood so that He might redeem human beings in their full, embodied state (Hebrews 2:14–17). But if the body is an illusion, then Christ did not truly take on humanity, and the atonement becomes a metaphor rather than a historical, redemptive act. Thus, to spiritualize Genesis 2:18 is to begin dismantling the very structure of biblical theology, from creation to redemption.
In summary, Christian Science reinterprets Genesis 2:18 in a way that denies the goodness, reality, and purpose of embodied human existence. By reducing man and woman to mental concepts, and companionship to abstract harmony, it severs the text from its creational and relational grounding. Yet Scripture affirms that God’s answer to man’s aloneness was a real woman, crafted from his side, given as a suitable companion in the goodness of a physical world that God declared “very good” (Genesis 1:31). Any theology that denies this denies not only the meaning of Genesis 2:18 but the foundation of the gospel itself.