Eschatology (religious movement)

Walter died in 1941, but some groups following his teaching have survived and remain active; mostly in the United States, particularly in California, and in Mexico.

[1][better source needed] At twenty-seven Walter was a buyer in a department store, a job he held the rest of his life.

In his writings he claims that after seven years of struggling using the Christian Science healing techniques he finally overcame his illness.

In 1910 Walter published The Christ Way under a pseudonym, in which he presented Christian Science concepts without mentioning the religion itself or Mary Baker Eddy, the founder of the church.

In 1916 he also published his first Plain Talk series booklets, which heavily drew upon Eddy's teaching while adding many of his own ideas.

In the final chapter of The Sharp Sickle, the official textbook of Eschatology published in 1928, Walter, who had written The Sickle a decade before, sees the biblical book of Revelation as prophesying his own work, but didn't claim any special mission from a personal God: Although Walter claimed that it is impossible "to have a leader without a follower" he remained the sole leader of Eschatology.

For instance, both groups believe in the Bible and differ from fundamentalists in that they regard the Bible as having a symbolic meaning in addition to a literal one; they reject the physical existence of hell as eternal damnation (a belief that still appears in Eschatology, a book written by Pope Benedict XVI); and they also both regard Mary Baker Eddy as the re-discoverer of the "Science of Life" which they believe was taught by Jesus but lost in early Christianity, and consider that Jesus healed by his knowledge of a Science of Life.

As a result Walter and the Eschatologists' view of God are much closer to New Thought and the New Age movements than to Christian Science and Christianity; and The Walter Method is generally grouped with other New Thought groups such as the Church of Integration, the Infinite Way, and the Church of the Higher Life.

He also believed that suffering, especially disease, occurs mentally first in belief, or fear in the reality of the problem, (what he called "wrong thinking") before being manifest on the body.

Regarding the similarities between Eschatology and other metaphysical systems, in his 1993 book, the author Martin Gardner wrote that he "was astonished by the extent to which today's New Age fantasies were so thoroughly aired a hundred years ago by New Thought leaders.

In May 2001, Juan del Río, founder of a school based on Eschatology teachings in Mexico City and author of Sánate a ti mismo (How to heal yourself) died of cancer after a four-year battle with the disease.