What about Divine Healing?: A Book Survey

Nothing concerns people more than their health or that of those close to them. In the past five years a whole library of books has appeared on the subject of healing and the problem of pain, which is the reverse of the health coin. The following discussion samples what is currently available. The books reflect different perspectives and traditions. Many of them are written by charismatics, where the renewed interest in healing began, though such mainline denominations as the Reformed and Methodist churches are also represented.

Sooner or later suffering finds us all. Whether we respond with prayers for healing or prayers for acceptance, we can find comfort and guidance in the experiences of Christians who have grappled with these issues. Most of these books have helped me. I include some books that aren’t useful to show the differences in quality of books on healing. And I look at three books that raise the obvious question, What if you aren’t healed? I want to show the reader how to evaluate books on healing so they can find the best books available. The place to begin is with Morton Kelsey’s study Healing and Christianity: In Ancient Thought and Modern Times (Harper & Row). Kelsey to date has written the most complete work, theologically and historically, on healing. Kelsey says that “this is not a book on the method of practice of religious healing. Instead it is an attempt to provide a theological foundation, based on historical and scientific understanding, for a serious ministry of healing today.”

Kelsey’s book, based on charismatic theology, represents a radical departure from the mainstream of modern theological thought on the matter of divine healing. It is a comprehensive history of sacramental healing in the Christian church from biblical times to the present. A theme that runs through charismatic literature on the subject of healing is the belief that it is God’s ordinary will to heal, and that such healing comes primarily through supernatural intervention.

The best writers on the subject argue that healing was a primary ministry of Jesus and his church, but that it fell into disrepute sometime during the Middle Ages, when the sacrament of anointing the sick became relegated to a rite for the dying. Kelsey makes a strong case for returning a concern for healing to the ordinary life of a congregation and demystifying the experience of being healed by God of one’s infirmities, be they emotional or physical, congenital or accidental. Kelsey, an Episcopal rector, researched his study for fifteen years and has had far more than an academic relationship to the subject of healing. As he puts it, “I have seen the things of which I write.” I believe him.

For a person who wants a more pragmatic book on healing, Francis MacNutt has written one. Father MacNutt, like Kelsey, is a theologian in the charismatic renewal movement who has been involved in a healing ministry for about ten years. Healing (Ave Maria) is an excellent book. It contains detailed information on the charismatic healing style, which has spread across the world in the years since Vatican II. MacNutt describes how he was drawn into a healing ministry and responds directly to questions concerning why some people are not healed. MacNutt’s maturation is reflected in the contrast between his first and second books. The Power to Heal (Ave Maria) enjoys more subtlety and open admission of the mystery of God’s ways regarding why some persons’ prayers for healing are answered affirmatively and some negatively.

I do not find in MacNutt, however, a satisfactory treatment of the theology of suffering or of the cross, which is the critical question to be resolved in the matter of divine healing. Why does God apparently heal some people and not others? Can suffering be redemptive? But in The Power to Heal, MacNutt is far more direct than in Healing, his earlier work. He admits that he doesn’t know the answers. Readers searching for books on healing written with balance and maturity can anticipate being challenged by MacNutt’s clear and forthright message: healing power is available to everyone—healing is the birthright of the Christian church. But MacNutt does not hit you over the head; he invites you to test it for yourself.

Being the sister of the current president makes it difficult for her work to be accepted in its own right, but Ruth Carter Stapleton’s message is worth hearing. In her two books, The Gift of Inner Healing and The Experience of Inner Healing (Word), she shares simply and directly her insight on the nature of emotional healing. Like MacNutt, she shows decided growth between books.

If it’s a question of reading only one, make it the second in which she shares her own experience of inner healing. She conveys a spirit of warmth and hope throughout the book that will thaw the most cynical reader.

Stapleton has a gift to share with us: the repression and denial of one’s true feelings is the antithesis of Christianity and can only lead to spiritual, often physical, death. If this sounds like pop psychology a la the Sensitivity Group Movement’s cheap grace variety, it is not. She demonstrates repeatedly in both books what Paul Tournier expressed in Guilt and Grace: The painful path of sin and humiliation precedes the royal road of grace and forgiveness. Inner healing is not a cheap idea. It means tough repentance and restitution.

The refreshing thing about Stapleton is that she is convinced that Christ loves and forgives the feelings of the inner child each of us has, and that through prayer and “faith imagination” the painful memories that still dominate our present thoughts, activities, and relationships can be healed by him. Along with Kelsey and MacNutt, Stapleton respects the insights of modern psychology and acknowledges their usefulness. A mark of maturity in charismatic literature on healing is its respect of medical science.

The most significant theological aspect of charismatic literature on healing is the conviction that sickness is evil and inconsistent with the intention of God toward the creation. Sickness is the direct result of the Fall; salvation brings wholeness and health if we but ask through prayer. The healing miracles of Jesus and the disciples is a sign of the Kingdom of God.

Healing Life’s Hurts: Healing Memories Through the Five Stages of Forgiveness (Paulist) written by two brothers, both Catholic priests, is a major addition to the work done by Stapleton on healing the emotions. The Linn brothers have used the Kübler-Ross stages of death and dying to express the process for healing memories and emotions. As they put it, healing a memory is like dying. Therefore, they take us through the five stages of forgiveness: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance, and illustrate through personal experience and examples how to uncover and forgive the hurts that have occurred over the course of a lifetime. Healing Life’s Hurts combines theory with practice, and includes several exercises on how a person may guide him or herself through the process of forgiveness, which is necessary to healing. This is an important companion to Stapleton’s work because it is designed for use by small groups to help build the church’s life.

The Linn brothers, with the help of Barbara Shlemon, a registered nurse with whom they have shared a healing ministry, have written another book on healing. To Heal as Jesus Healed (Ave Maria) explores in the light of their own experiences in a ministry of healing the rite of anointing the sick. The authors provide numerous examples of healings and demonstrate that the new Roman Catholic Rite of Anointing is in keeping with the original place of healing in the ministry of Jesus and the life of the early church. This book offers limited usefulness, because of its focus on the Roman tradition, rather than on the scriptural basis for healing.

Althouse, in his Rediscovering the Gift of Healing (Abingdon), is involved in a ministry of healing primarily in the United Methodist Church. He relies heavily on MacNutt and Kelsey to build his historical and theological basis for healing as an ordinary mission in the church’s life. The brief study includes suggestions on how to begin a healing ministry in one’s local church.

In contrast, George Bennet, former hospital chaplain, working in the church healing ministry trust of the Church of England, has written a refreshing and brief account of his experiences with and belief in healing as an ordinary part of the church’s life in In His Healing Steps (Judson). Anglican and Roman Catholic charismatics who come from traditions steeped in the sacraments seem to maintain a more balanced and mature relationship to the gifts of the Holy Spirit and decisions about their place in the life of the larger church. Bennet is a clear example of this pastoral maturity. He does not see healing in black-and-white simplicity, and is not afraid to discuss why some are not healed after fervent prayer. Nor does he explain this by telling us that they did not have enough faith.

Bennet maintains that the very name of Jesus implies healing: It means God saves or God heals, that it is the nature of Jesus to heal, that where the presence of Christ is there is healing. He speaks about the power of the principalities that lie beneath all our disease, and that in most sickness there is some malignancy that is buried even from conscious awareness that needs attending. His book is not history or theology but a testimony of the power of a healed and reconciled relationship with God.

George Martin’s Healing: Reflections on the Gospel (Servant) attempts a short interpretation of some of the biblical material concerning healing. It is too brief to be definitive and although it is well written, it lacks depth. One would do better to read Kelsey and MacNutt for a more integrated analysis of the relationship of the biblical case for healing to the present implications for a healing ministry in the church’s life.

Two books that I would not recommend are both from the Gospel Publishing House of the Assemblies of God. The Case for Divine Healing by Bill Popejoy and By His Stripes: A Biblical Study on Divine Healing by Hugh Jeter are characteristic of the oversimplification of which charismatics are often accused. They are glib and preachy. Although I do not doubt the sincerity of either individual regarding their convictions about divine healing and its usefulness to the church, the tone of these books makes true dialogue impossible. They are monologues, love affairs with their own convictions. Kelsey, MacNutt, Stapleton, and Bennet do not try to convert the reader. They believe the healing power of Christ will persuade and speak for itself. Popejoy builds his case for healing in an authoritarian, catechetical style, which is lifeless and unconvincing. He is out to prove it to us through the authority vested in Scripture, but it comes out like a clanging symbol.

By His Stripes, too, tries to build an airtight biblical case to sanction the practice of supernatural healing in the life of the Church. But the approach is brittle: isolated proof-texting of quotations from Scripture and the discouragement of honest doubt. If Christ included Thomas in his inner circle, so should Jeter in a matter as complex as the question of God’s will in regard to sickness and suffering.

Healing is not a new thing for Roman Catholics and Anglicans; you sense immediately a maturity and an enthusiasm tempered by experience in the books they write. Reginald East, an Anglican priest, has written a short study Heal the Sick (Dimension). His aim is to encourage Christians to accept a healing ministry as ordinary rather than pointing to it as something extraordinary. East wants to demonstrate that any Christian can enter into a healing ministry through prayer and openness to God’s spirit. He offers clear and simple instruction to readers who are interested in learning to pray with others for healing. East shares his own initial reluctance to enter this kind of ministry; yet he felt directed to it by God’s spirit. He discusses both physical and emotional healing and offers practical instruction for each type of prayer. This book will be of particular use to readers who are already convinced of the need for healing prayer and are seeking guidelines as they begin to practice it.

John Sanford, Episcopal priest and Jungian analyst, has written what is to me the most provocative study on healing of the books surveyed here. Healing and Wholeness (Paulist) relies on the work of psychologist Carl Jung for its arguments. Evangelicals who will note his somewhat unorthodox use of Scripture and the use he makes of wisdom from other religious traditions may distrust the book. Nonetheless, this refreshing and stimulating study suggests that the cultural definition of health as adjustment and adaptation is a false one, which needs revision. To illustrate his point he reminds the reader that in Nazi Germany the whole society was sick and that those who could not adjust or adapt to Hitler’s views were not sick but profoundly well. Thus we need to reexamine our notion of wholeness.

Sanford suggests that one of the goals of life is a journey toward wholeness or individuation in Jungian terms. Sanford believes that the journey toward healing and wholeness cannot be equated with peace of mind. And that is encouraging. For Sanford, suffering is a real part of becoming whole. This is a book for the serious reader on the subject of healing. It emphasizes the philosophical and theological rather than the practical ways to find healing. Ironically, it may offer us more than many “how to” books because of the thinking it provokes.

The reader always returns to the question of suffering—whether in the celebrated account of Paul’s thorn in the flesh, the story of Job, or the countless other examples in Scripture that imply that illness and suffering are sent from God, the author of all life. You cannot ignore the possibility that illness and suffering may serve a purpose in the lives of individuals. God’s thoughts and ways are not ours. It is to this side of the question of healing that we must turn sooner or later, for it is painfully obvious to even the most zealous advocate of spiritual healing that everyone who prays is not healed.

Burton Seavey’s Why Doesn’t God Heal Me? (Creation) is a negative example; it represents many books that take the approach that the reason God doesn’t heal us is that we don’t have enough faith and are not obeying God’s set of conditions for healing. This simplistic reduction of the mystery surrounding suffering will be of little use to the person who has prayed fervently and who has not received the healing he desires. What it will do is create guilt and feelings of failure. Seavey declares that “it is God’s will to heal every born-again believer, when the conditions are met.” Others who address the problem of pain concur that this thinking is not only bad theology but harms individuals who are looking for answers as to why they are not healed.

Here are two fine books that deal more adequately with the magnitude of suffering. Philip Yancey, former editor of Campus Life, says that pain has the potential for blessing in Where Is God When It Hurts? (Zondervan). He does this in fresh ways. He visits a leprosarium in Louisiana and discovers that those afflicted with leprosy do not have the built-in warning system in their nerve endings to warn them of danger. They lack the ability to feel pain. Pain, he says, is God’s blessing that nobody wants. He raises the question of why there is such a thing as pain and of how people respond to pain. He suggests ways to cope with pain. He interviews Brian Sternberg and Joni Eareckson, two Christians whose lives were changed in split seconds to life-long quadraplegics. Brian and his family believe and hope for a complete healing miracle. Joni seeks to find meaning in the acceptance of her situation. Although prayer for healing is an option for Yancey, it fails to erase the problem of pain, since each of us must face death. Yancey wants to help those people trapped in pain to find meaning in and acceptance of their situation.

Robert Wise embraces the possibility of spiritual, even miraculous, healing, but he also grapples with the fact that all people who pray for healing are not healed. When There Is No Miracle (Regal) does this well. Wise writes as one who has believed in and experienced miracles.

“You ought to believe and anticipate the extraordinary intervening power of God, but God does not move at the snap of anyone’s fingers, nor by the quoting of Scripture verses out of context. It is possible that you are missing the greatest miracle: that His sovereign hand is moving through every single event of your life whether the moment is exalted and exhilarating or tempestuous and traumatic.”

Wise challenges us to anticipate God’s work in our lives even when we see no concrete evidence of this, and when we experience only pain and frustration. He points out that the question, “Why did this happen to me?” needs to be transformed into “what is the intended meaning of this event?”

A member of the Reformed Church in America, Wise accepts a theology of providence based on the assumption that nothing is lost to God. No person or no moment of our existence is without meaning, though there will be many times when the present meaning will not be accessible to our understanding. Each chapter of When There Is No Miracle begins with an imaginary dialogue between the author and Jesus discussing a different aspect of pain and suffering. And each chapter closes with questions for discussing the convictions Wise expresses.

Ultimately, there should be no conflict in accepting the paradox that suffering exists side by side with supernatural healing; that the faith and hope to pray for healing is not fundamentally opposed to that faith and hope which accepts what is given, while looking to the transforming power of God’s love.

Books on healing and suffering bring us to the basic question of human existence, the question of God’s will. Although that will may remain ultimately a mystery, there are some aspects that are clear: God’s will is dynamic, not static, and it always calls the Christian to greater faith and hope. Regardless of the outcome of individual suffering, our primary call is to be drawn deeper into relationship to him.

D. Bruce Lockerbie is chairman of the Fine Arts department at The Stony Brook School, Stony Brook, New York. This article is taken from his 1976 lectures on Christian Life and Thought, delivered at Conservative Baptist Theological Seminary in Denver, Colorado.

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