Healing by Faith

Faith healing, the idea that faith in God is the operative agent in miraculous healings of the body, is in large part a misnomer. Most Christian ministers and evangelists who practice healing understand clearly that God, through the power of the Holy Spirit, is the operative force in healing. In Christian theology, faith is the name given to the trusting relationship the Christian hopefully has with God. Given the omnipotence of God, faith is often seen as the element that allows the believer to receive God's healing power.

The practice of healing in evangelical churches has often received bad press. It has been attacked by those who believe it is an exercise in ignorance. The image of healing ministers has not been helped by those few who have advocated a complete break with doctors, an attitude carried over from the days prior to the scientific medicine of this century. Given the successes of medicine, the miracles reported have not dealt with the question of those who failed to receive any healing. A few have cited lack of faith as a reason why some people are not healed.

Divine healing, the more proper designation of what is popularly called faith healing, emerged in force in the 1870s, contemporaneously with Christian Science and New Thought. Physicians were scarce and their cures still haphazard at best. The leader of the new healing movement was an Episcopal physician, Charles Cullis, who held healing meetings each summer beginning in the 1880s. Among those who were healed at his hand was Rev. Albert Benjamin Simpson, a Presbyterian minister who had responded to the new Holiness movement that had emerged among the Methodists. Members of the Holiness movement saw themselves living in the last days, when God would pour his spirit out anew on his people (Acts 2). They thought they lived in a time of miracles.

Simpson joined hands with G. O. Barnes, also a former Presbyterian minister, who had worked with evangelist Dwight L. Moody and also had been affected by Holiness preachers. In 1876, Barnes traveled through Kentucky, saving souls and healing the sick by laying on hands in the name of the Lord. By 1882, Barnes and A. B. Simpson were working together. Simpson began a magazine, the first step toward founding the Christian and Missionary Alliance, the first modern denomination to advocate healing as a central tenet. Simpson developed an understanding of Christ's fourfold ministry as Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer, and Coming King.

Another influential evangelist healer was John Alexander Dowie, an Australian Congregationist minister who came to the United States from Australia in 1888 as head of the international Divine Healing Asssociation. He eventually settled in Zion, Illinois, north of Chicago, and founded the independent Christian Catholic Church. Dowie was a controversial figure, constantly in conflict with authorities, and lost control of his own movement following an illness in 1906. His community was a frequent stop on the tours of initerant healing evangelists and several of the residents emerged to became evangelists of note.

Healing in the Holiness movement was passed along to the Pentecostal movement. That movement began with Holiness evangelist Charles Fox Parham. Parham opened the Bethel Healing Home and Bible School in Topeka, Kansas, and it was here in 1901 that people began "speaking in tongues," the definitive experience of Pentecostalism. In his revival campaigns, Parham practiced healing through the laying on of hands, and hundreds of cures were claimed. Among Parham's Bible school students was African American Holiness preacher William J. Seymour, who became pastor of a small holiness congregation located on Azusa Street in Los Angeles.

The healing emphasis in Pentecostalism set the stage for the emergence of Aimee Semple McPhearson, one of the most colorful healing evangelists of the 1920s. Unable to find a home in the older denominations, she founded the independent Church of the Foursquare Gospel, drawing her doctrinal perspective from A. B. Simpson. Although MacPherson's following was initially small, a revival campaign in San Diego became immensely successful through claims of miraculous healing under her ministry, and her followers eventually provided funds for a huge Angelus Temple in Los Angeles. A charismatic figure, McPherson had a flair for publicity, and was one of the early evangelists to take advantage of the new communication possibilities provided by radio. She purchased a radio station in Los Angeles, and her services were broadcast to thousands of followers across the United States. In 1926, she was supposed to have been kidnaped for a month, but critics have stated that this story covered a "love-nest" scandal.

During the Great Depression, healing evangelism suffered something of a decline, although there were still many missions and itinerant preachers. There was a great upsurge in evangelism after World War II with the ministry of William Marrion Branham, an independent Baptist preacher who attracted huge crowds with his healing during the 1940s. There were rumors that he had even raised a man from the dead. Amongst those influenced by Branham's gospel campaigns were Oral Roberts, O. L. Jaggers, Gayle Jackson, T. L. Osborn, and Gordon Lindsay, all of whom developed their own ministries. In spite of a great expansion of such evangelism during the 1950s, there was again some decline through the 1960s, largely attributed to the development of air conditioning, which virtually killed independent itinerant evangelism of all kinds until the emergence of large air conditioned facilities in the 1980s.

Marjoe Gortner, a healing evangelist as a teenage preacher, left the field and appeared in a documentary film (Marjoe, 1972) in which he exposed the tricks used by some evangelists to support their highly competitive work. His exposure of the underbelly of healing ministries, and the disgusting practices of some ministers, disillusioned thousands of would-be followers and threw doubt on other evangelists.

By 1970, the end of the traveling tents was in sight, as increasingly sophisticated audiences expected comfortable seats and air conditioning. However, a recovery was seen as revival services were shifted to hotel auditoriums and the new civic centers built to house seasonal sports events. Experienced evangelists such as Oral Roberts, W. V. Grant, and Rex Humbard found a new life.

New life for the healing evangelists also came from the emergence of the charismatic movement, a new spread of Pentecostalism within the older mainline denominations. As Baptists, Methodists, and Presbyterians found the baptism of the Holy Spirit and spoke in tongues, they became open to the Pentecostal message of healing. A new generation of healers emerged, including Don Stewart, Kathryn Kuhlman, Roxanne Brandt, and many others. Included among them was Ruth Carter Stapleton, sister of former president Jimmy Carter. One notable evangelist healer is Willard Fuller, who specializes in dental healing. An eyewitness reported: "He prays for people and God fills their teeth. I have actually seen fillings appear in teeth that had cavities; some gold, some silver, some white enamel-like substances, and some are completely restored to their original condition."

Is Faith Healing Genuine?

Healing as practiced by the Pentecostal and Charismatic evangelists raises all of the questions that any form of nonconventional or psychic healing does. Do healings occur? If paranormal healings occur, do they happen because of some psychokinetic force? By definition, consideration of God and the Holy Spirit stands outside of any scientific discourse, but might it be that the results of any divine intervention in the life of an individual have measurable consequences that could be documented? Could it be that subtle psychokinetic forces are active but misunderstood as miraculous or divine?

Given current knowledge of the mundane healing forces, quite apart from drugs, available to the average individual, from placebos to the body's own healing capacity, those skeptical of divine healing have made a strong case that all religious healing can be ascribed to natural forces—the placebo effect (operative in most cases of fraud), delayed action by medications, temporary or spontaneous remission, or, as often as not, misdiagnosis of the person's condition. On such grounds, for example, physician William Nolan attacked the ministry of Kathryn Kuhlman.

The most recent attack upon the legitimacy of healing ministries followed the discovery and exposure in the mid-1980s of several healers, most notably Peter Popoff and W. V. Grant, Jr., who were using fraudulent techniques derived from Spiritualism to bolster their appearance as people possessed of unusual powers. Magician James Randi surveyed the activities of numerous evangelists. He found most of them to be naive people of integrity, but discovered several engaged in fraud.

Defenders have countered with reports, complete with medical records, of people who have been healed in their meetings. These are, however, relatively few in number given the amount of effort required to properly document a case. Also, in most cases today, the proper records do not exist, the condition is largely stress related (psychosomatic), or the causes operative in the healings are not clear.

Many who defend healing in the religious context no longer argue that such healing is miraculous. Rather they cite the value of a life in which community, intimacy, fellowship, forgiveness, order, and compassion operate to destroy the guilt, alienation, and chaos that contributes to diseased conditions.

Sources:

Allen, A. A. Bound to Lose, Bound to Win. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1970.

Berger, Arthur S., and Joyce Berger. The Encyclopedia of Parapsychology and Psychical Research. New York: Paragon House, 1991.

Harrell, David Edwin, Jr. All Things Are Possible With God. Bloomington, Ind.: Indiana University Press, 1975.

Hart, Ralph. Doctors Pronounced Me Dead in Dallas. Detroit: The Author, n.d.

Lindsay, Gordon. William Branham, A Man Sent From God. Dallas: Voice of Healing Publishing, 1950.

Melton, J. Gordon. A Reader's Guide to the Church's Ministry of Healing. Independence, Mo.: Academy of Religion and Psychical Research, 1977.

Randi, James. The Faith Healers. Buffalo, N.Y.: Prometheus Books, 1987.

Roberts, Oral. My Story. Tulsa, Okla.: Oral Roberts Evangelistic Association, 1961.

Rose, Louis. Faith Healing. London: Victor Gollancz, 1968.

Simpson, Eve. The Faith Healer: Deliverance Evangelism in North America. St. Louis, Mo.: Concordia, 1977. Reprint, New York: Pyramid, 1977.

Spraggett, Allen. Kathryn Kuhlman: The Woman Who Believes in Miracles. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970. Reprint, New York: New American Library, 1971.

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