The Life of the Founder
(1869–1941)
Eschatology did not begin as a religion, and its founder insisted to the end that it never was one. It began instead as one man's stubborn attempt to explain why he had survived tuberculosis, and it grew, book by self-published book, into an entire private system of "mental science" taught out of his own home. That man was William Wilfred Walter, and the story of Eschatology is really the story of how far one healer was willing to break from the church that first saved him.
A boyhood without a fixed church
Walter was born on July 13 in the small town of Sublette, Illinois, into a Catholic household. As a teenager he began wandering into services at other denominations, and at seventeen he left home altogether for Aurora, Illinois, before eventually returning to buy and run a barber shop.
Marriage, a sick son, and a diagnosis of his own
Walter married Barbara Stenger at twenty-one, and the couple had a son who grew up with a disabling illness. By the time the boy was fourteen, Walter had turned to Christian Science in search of an answer. Not long after, while working as a department-store buyer, Walter himself contracted tuberculosis. He later wrote that it took him seven years of practicing Christian Science's healing methods on himself before he considered the illness overcome — and that experience turned him into a practitioner who tried to heal others the same way.
A first book, published under someone else's name
After years spent writing mental-healing novels for his clients, Walter released a book called The Christ Way under a pseudonym. It laid out Christian Science ideas without ever naming the church or its founder, Mary Baker Eddy. Rank-and-file Christian Scientists responded in a cold manner, but readers outside the church responded well enough that Walter reissued it under his real name.
The first class, taught at home
By now writing steadily and publishing his "Plain Talk" booklets, Walter opened his home to a small circle of dedicated students and began a structured course he called the Walter Method of Christ Science. Within a few years his own students were teaching newer students in turn — though always under a permit Walter renewed, or refused to renew, himself.
A science named after last things
Walter settled on a new name for his teaching: the Science of Eschatology, borrowing the theological word for the study of final or ultimate matters. Like Eddy before him, he claimed the science traced back to Jesus himself. But where Eddy had built a church, Walter refused to. He kept his teaching a private course conducted from his own house, calling it simply the "Science of Life."
The Sharp Sickle
Eschatology's official textbook appeared under this title, a sequel to an earlier volume called The Sickle. In its closing pages Walter suggested that the Book of Revelation had, in effect, foretold his own two-volume unveiling of hidden truth — though characteristically, he stopped short of claiming any divine appointment for himself.
Death in St. Petersburg
Walter passed suddenly at age seventy-two at his home in St. Petersburg, Florida, survived by his wife and his son Arthur. His works and his spirit live forever, as timeless edification.
What Eschatologists Believe
Because Walter came up through Christian Science, Eschatology kept some of that church's fingerprints even as it drifted away from it. Both groups read the Bible as carrying symbolic meaning beyond its literal text, both deny that hell is a place of eternal punishment, and both regard Mary Baker Eddy as someone who rediscovered — rather than invented — a "Science of Life" that Jesus himself had supposedly practiced and that early Christianity later lost.
Where Walter broke from Eddy
Walter came to reject the idea of a personal God almost entirely, a shift he described as a genuine "mental warfare" within himself as he wrote his way out of theism. That single break pulled Eschatology closer to New Thought and New Age thinking than to Christian Science or Christianity proper, placing it alongside kindred groups like the Church of Integration, the Infinite Way, and the Church of the Higher Life.
Mind before matter
Walter taught that suffering and disease begin as a kind of mistaken belief — what he called "wrong thinking" — well before any symptom shows up in the body. He also held that psychic abilities resembling what is usually called telekinesis could, in principle, be developed far enough to hold off aging and even death itself.
Guarding the advanced texts
Walter deliberately kept his three most advanced books — The Sickle, The Primary Notes, and The Sharp Sickle — out of general sale, releasing them only on a teacher's recommendation. In a 1936 letter to his teachers, he warned that handing these texts to students who'd skipped the earlier coursework would leave them with only "the letter and not the deep meaning" of what he'd written. Notably, he drew this line around specific advanced texts and formal teaching authority — not around informal discussion of his more widely available work.
After the Founder
Walter's sudden death left the movement without a plan, but it did not end it. Genevieve L. Rader, who had studied under Walter since 1921, gradually took the work forward and eventually moved the organization's base from Aurora, Illinois to Pacific Palisades, California in the early 1960s. She wrote study guides for Walter's four-stage curriculum and led its annual teacher training course. Leadership has passed down a quiet, deliberate line ever since:
Meanwhile the teaching found a second life outside the United States. From the 1970s onward it took particular hold in Mexico, where Juan del Río founded a Mexico City school built on Eschatology's ideas and wrote his own book on self-healing. He died of cancer in May 2001 after a four-year illness — a detail some critics note sits uneasily beside the movement's claims about mind conquering disease.
Sources for This Page
Wikipedia's "Eschatology (religious movement)" article draws its biographical detail chiefly from a sketch published by the Eschatology Foundation, along with William Walter's own book The Sharp Sickle (1928) and his 1941 obituary in the Aurora Beacon News. The Foundation's own site carries a longer account under "Who Was William W. Walter." The 1936 letter on restricted texts is quoted from the Foundation's FAQ page.