Healing Marks. Bruce G Epperly
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was the key to healing, even when a physical cure is unlikely.
The point of this preamble is both confessional and affirmative. As an adult I reclaimed the healing stories of the Bible. Like the words of the Corn Flakes commercial, I wrestled with these stories “again – for the first time.” This time, however, my perspective was far more global than my Baptist upbringing. Although that evangelical child still lives within me, shaping my relationship with Jesus as companion and friend, I reclaimed the healings of Jesus through my encounters with Christian mysticism, complementary and technological medicine, process theology, quantum physics, Biblical scholarship, and reiki healing touch, a form of hands on healing that promotes well-being by balancing and intensifying the healing energy of the universe.[1] I found that Jesus’ healings are part of much larger movement toward healing, reflecting God’s quest for abundant life for people of every continent, faith, and ethnicity. My experiences have shaped my vision of first and twenty-first century healing. I also rediscovered Jesus the healer – and still am journeying on this healing frontier – in the midst of my own need for healing and transformation, chronic and life-threatening illnesses of friends and family, my son’s diagnosis and recovery from cancer, and my responsibilities as a pastor and spiritual leader, called to pray with people in crisis, vulnerability, infirmity, grief, and despair.
I’ve experienced Jesus’ healing touch in hospital rooms, healing services, energy work, spiritual conversations, and simple heart-felt prayer. Healing will always remain essential to my faith, but the quest for healing will always be challenging to me, personally, theologically, and spiritually. I suspect that healing is mysterious and challenging to you as well even if you consider yourself a person of faith who believes in the power of prayer to change bodies, minds, spirits, and relationships.
Rediscovering Jesus the Healer in the Modern and Postmodern Worlds. Interest in healing has peaked in recent years. Until the last few decades of the nineteenth century, Jesus’ healing ministry was consigned to fringes of Christianity. As Morton Kelsey insightfully recounts in Healing and Christianity, the healings of Jesus were marginalized within a few centuries after Jesus’ ministry as the church, facing the realities of persecution and plague, focused peoples’ attention on the afterlife.[2] This world was viewed as the testing ground in the grand conflict between God and Satan for eternal possession of the souls of humankind. What did a few healthy years matter when your life is suspended by a thread above the flames of hell? Further, the unambiguous message of God’s love proclaimed by Jesus was eclipsed by church teachings that identified sickness with divine punishment, correction, and decision-making. The great Christian teachers – Augustine, Aquinas, Luther, Calvin, and Zwingli– saw Jesus’ healings as peripheral to the message of God’s graceful forgiveness of sinners that opened the floodgates of salvation to undeserving humanity. Radically different in tone and overall message from the Reformation gospel, the proponents of philosophical deism, the belief that the divine clockmaker created the world and then let it move forward on its own accord without intervening, continued the marginalization of Jesus’ healing ministry and the healing ministry of the church. Deism attracted many intellectuals and influenced how orthodox Christians viewed God’s relationship to the world. Deism consigned divine activity to the margins of human life, leaving the important temporal decisions to us. Any intervention by God would have to be from the outside rather than from within the predictable world of cause and effect. Among believers of all theological persuasions, the image of a deistic God encouraged the belief that God acted supernaturally from the outside, answering prayers or intervening to prevent tragedies or harm our enemies without consideration to the regular patterns of cause and effect that govern our lives. Despite the contrast between the Living God of scripture and the Spectator God of deism, popular Christianity began to see God as a “personal being,” or “individual” standing beyond the world of change who could only come into our lives from the outside supernaturally in law-defying ways. This led to a further separation of mind and body and faith and medicine in responding to issues of health and well-being.
It is just a small step from deism to the belief, widely held among more liberal theologians and clergy for last two centuries, that the healings of Jesus were entirely metaphorical or moral in nature. The healing stories were intended to be invitations to spiritual transformation and acts of hospitality, changing people’s status from unclean and unwanted to clean and accepted in the social order. In either case, God’s business was primarily with spiritual lives and ethical conduct of persons and not the physical world of sickness and health. Whereas liberals exorcised the healings of Jesus from their understandings of faith, believing that issues of health and illness should be left to medicine and not the church, many fundamentalist Christians saw healing as essential to the spread of the first century gospel but no longer relevant to the church’s mission of saving souls. They believed that God’s focus in this historical dispensation, or period of history, is soul winning, not physical or political transformation.
Still, Christ can never be pinned down by our worldviews or theologies. People in need seek wholeness and in the process discover surprising healing energies that can’t be explained by theologies that restrict God’s actions solely to bygone eras, spiritual well-being, and occasional supernatural events. Interest in Christian healing reemerged in the late nineteenth century, first, among followers of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science movement and the “mind cure” philosophies that influenced her understanding that health and illness are direct reflections of our spiritual condition without any relationship to our illusory bodies.[3] Eddy believed that God has given us a “science” to promote healing. Correct thinking and optimism lead to good health; negative thinking is manifest in illness. Cures can only occur at the spiritual level, since ultimately our perception and affirmation of the reality of the physical world is the result of turning from divine perfection. If you focus on the eternal truths of Divine Mind, immersing yourself in the propositions of Eddy’s Science and Health and the guidance of a Christian Science practitioner, the illusory ills of embodiment will fade away. Today, many contemporary new age approaches to healing, such as those found in the writings of Louise Hay, A Course in Miracles, and the best-selling Secret, reflect Eddy’s belief that health and prosperity are entirely a matter of our mental and spiritual state.[4] Spiritual truth alone is necessary for well-being: change your thoughts and your body and financial situation immediately will change for the better. Conversely, all illness is self-caused, a result of fear, alienation, and negativity.
Shorty after Eddy’s discovery of Christian Science, revival fires broke out on Azuza Street in Los Angeles, California, and then across the North America and the world as groups of Christians affirmed that the church was on the verge of a second Pentecost, characterized by the Holy Spirit’s movements through speaking in tongues, healing, paranormal experiences, and miraculous acts of power and prophesy. Rather than focusing on the mind as the source of healing and spiritual transformation, Pentecostals affirmed the lively presence of God’s miracle-working Spirit coursing through all things, and providing spiritual, financial, and physical deliverance for people in need. Faith no larger than a mustard seed could open the pathways of divine healing that Jesus’ first followers experienced. Experiential in nature, the Pentecostal movement justified its affirmation of Jesus’ healing ministry by pointing to peoples’ life-changing encounters with the Holy Spirit. The healing ministries of Oral Roberts, Kathryn Kuhlman, and later Benny Hinn as well as the prosperity gospel and “name and claim it” movements carried the Pentecostal message of miracle and healing to the wider world of television, radio, and “big tent” and auditorium ministries.[5] While different in philosophy from Christian Science, the new age movement, and Science of Mind, many Pentecostal healers also connected spiritual states, often in a direct and unilateral way, with issues of health and sickness, and prosperity and poverty. In extreme forms, “faith healing” placed the burden of health entirely on vulnerable people many of whom could not, even by force of will, conjure up the mustard seed faith prerequisite to God’s supernatural interventions.
Healing