Spiritual Healing

Science, Meaning, and Discernment

Sarah Coakley

• Publisher: Eerdmans
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9780802870933
• eBook ISBN: 9781467459433
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Medical Theory, Practice & Reference

Spiritual healing has been a cornerstone of Christian belief from its beginnings, although there are various interpretations of what exactly it  is and how it happens. To address these questions, the contributors to this volume come together to examine spiritual healing from a number of disciplinary perspectives. How can such healing be explained through a scientific or medical lens? What do biblical and historical instantiations of it tell us today? And how are we to think of it as anthropologists, philosophers, or theologians? Finally, what does all this mean for those seeking spiritual healing for themselves, or pastors walking alongside the afflicted? 

Deftly edited by theologian Sarah Coakley,  Spiritual Healing offers a composite narrative that investigates the many intermingled factors at work in this intriguing phenomenon. The result is a human story as much as it is a theological one, satisfying discerning believers and skeptics alike in its rigorous pursuit of truth and meaning.

Part One

Biblical and Historical Perspectives

1

Healing, Meaning, and Discernment in the Biblical Text

Beverly Roberts Gaventa

What is the meaning of healing in the Bible? This question turns out to disclose some more profound and subtle issues than might be presumed. Contemporary readers of the Bible often find themselves both drawn to and mystified by accounts of spiritual healings and see them as miracles in which God or some agent of God performs a special act that cures an afflicted individual of some disease or debilitating condition. But this way of reading the biblical accounts severely distorts their depiction of spiritual healing, which is but one strand intricately woven into the vast biblical story of God’s creation and redemption of humanity. Spiritual healing in the Bible extends well beyond the correction of an individual’s problem and is deeply embedded in human communities that are themselves restored and empowered by healing. Further, spiritual healing is the subject of a process of discernment about the source and meaning of the healing itself.

Biblical Stories of Healing: A Textured Phenomenon

Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told [Jesus] about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. (Mark 1:30–31)¹

This simple, direct account takes place in the opening chapter of the Gospel of Mark, widely regarded as the earliest of the Gospels. Many biblical accounts of spiritual healing give the impression, at least at first glance, of being similarly straightforward. Jesus encounters a leper who asks for healing and receives it (Mark 1:40–44; cf. Matt. 8:1–4; Luke 5:12–16). A woman who has suffered from a crippling condition for eighteen years is restored to health when Jesus pronounces her healed and lays hands on her (Luke 13:10–17). With the words, “Lazarus, come out,” Jesus restores life to a man who has been dead for four days (John 11:1–44).

Such simple presentations of spiritual healing are both alien from and appealing to contemporary readers, perhaps especially those in the West. The hemorrhaging woman whom Jesus heals (Mark 5:24b–34) does not need to consider whether to pursue biomedical treatment or alternative therapies, does not question whether the treatment will be appropriate and effective, and does not find herself rambling in a maze of telephone calls and paperwork. She merely finds herself in the presence of the Healer and goes away restored. Small wonder that the church’s preachers and teachers so often hear the question, “Why isn’t that sort of healing taking place now, for me, for my loved one, for my friend?”

Before dismissing these scriptural healing accounts as hopelessly irrelevant to the matters addressed by other essays in this volume, it is important to understand that biblical perspectives on healing are far more complex than is apparent in the account of any single incident. In biblical literature, spiritual healing is a richly textured phenomenon. A first indication of the complexity of spiritual healing in biblical perspective is the sheer range of events involved. As noted above, what comes to mind initially are occasions when people are healed of physical ailments. The Gospels relate many situations in which Jesus performs healings, including the healing of paralysis, leprosy, hemorrhage, blindness, and even death itself. Indeed, one dominant thread in the Gospels’ presentation of Jesus is that of healer.²

Yet spiritual healings are not performed by Jesus alone. Prominent among Old Testament healings are the stories of Elijah’s healing of Naaman’s leprosy and his restoration of life to the son of the widow of Zarephath (1 Kings 17:17–24; a similar healing is attributed to Elisha in 2 Kings 4:18–37). In addition, the Acts of the Apostles recounts healings brought about through the agency of the apostles. Peter and John heal a man who has been crippled from his birth (Acts 3:1–10), and Peter heals a man suffering from paralysis and restores life to the dead disciple Tabitha (9:32–43). Paul also heals a man crippled from birth (Acts 13:8–18); later Luke reports that handkerchiefs that had touched Paul’s skin had healing properties (Acts 19:12; and see 28:7–10).

Most of these healings are concerned with conditions or ailments that are readily understandable to modern readers, but several variations in biblical healings press the boundaries of what is normally regarded as matters of illness. Prominent among Jesus’s healings is the act of exorcism, a condition that involves neither disease nor birth defect, but conflict with the demonic.³ A typical story of exorcism is the following:

Just then there was in the synagogue a man with an unclean spirit, and he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth? Have you come to destroy us? I know who you are, the Holy One of God.” But Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Be silent, and come out of him!” And the unclean spirit, convulsing him and crying with a loud voice, came out of him. They were all amazed, and they kept on asking one another, “What is this? A new teaching—with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.” At once his fame began to spread throughout the surrounding region of Galilee. (Mark 1:23–28)

By contrast with the first group of healings, in which the healer addresses the afflicted individual directly, in this instance, the healer addresses the unclean spirit. And the spirit resists, unwilling to give up its power over the man. Although biblical narratives elsewhere present illness as part of the natural course of things, as in the woman with a fever or the woman with a hemorrhage, here the stories are of conflict between divine power and the powers that resist God. Acts 16 provides an elegant twist to this motif: Paul exorcises from an unnamed slave woman a demon that led her to tell fortunes and thereby to enrich her owners, and the exorcism places Paul in conflict not only with the demon but with the enraged owners who have now lost a source of income.⁴

The element of conflict is particularly vivid in Mark 5, which opens with an extensive description of the powerlessness of the afflicted man. He is no longer part of the human community, having been so dominated by the demon that he cannot be subdued, and is reduced to living alongside the dead, howling aloud and even inflicting pain on himself. As in the instance mentioned above in Mark 1, Jesus confronts the demon directly and gains access to its name, “Legion.” At the demon’s request, Jesus sends it into a herd of swine, which Legion then so completely controls that they are plunged down a bank and into the sea. Other exorcisms likewise underscore this element of conflict between Jesus and demonic powers (for example, Mark 9:14–29).

Numerous biblical stories of miraculous births may also be regarded as spiritual healings, although they are not customarily treated as such.⁵ Several important points in Israel’s history are marked by accounts of births to women who have long been unable to conceive. The best-known and most influential of these stories is that of Sarah, who, according to the biblical narrative, gives birth to her son Isaac only after her ninetieth birthday (Gen. 17:17). Other barren women who give birth include the women of Abimelech’s household (Gen. 20:17–18), Rebekah (Gen. 25:21), Rachel (Gen. 30:22–24), the unnamed wife of Manoah, mother of Samson (Judg. 13:2–3), and Hannah, mother of Samuel (1 Sam. 1:1–20). Luke’s Gospel closely follows these accounts of barrenness and birth in the story of the birth of John the Baptist to Elizabeth and Zechariah (Luke 1:8–25). These traditional accounts of healing barren women are replayed with a dramatic twist in the story of Mary’s conception, in which the young and unmarried Mary conceives without a human partner (Luke 1:26–38).

To be sure, these events are rarely labeled as healings, although Genesis 20:17–18 explicitly states that “God healed Abimelech, and also healed his wife and female slaves so that they bore children.” The role of God in such stories is expressed in various ways, as in Genesis 21:1, where the text asserts that “The Lord dealt with Sarah as he had said, and the Lord did for Sarah as he had promised.” Rebekah’s conception occurs because the Lord grants the prayer of Isaac (Gen. 25:21), Rachel’s because “God remembered” and “heeded her and opened her womb” (Gen. 30:22), and an angel of the Lord foretells Samson’s birth (Judg. 13:2–24). The role of God in these conceptions is celebrated in Psalm 113:9: “He gives the barren woman a home, / making her the joyous mother of children.” Such exultation rings particularly true in a culture that attached overwhelming significance to childbearing and regarded the childless woman with disdain. It is easy to understand why Rachel responds to her conception, “God has taken away my reproach” (Gen. 30:24), and why Elizabeth says that God “took away the disgrace I have endured among my people” (Luke 1:25). In this society, reproductive health and social standing were thoroughly intertwined.

Yet another complexity in the biblical treatment of spiritual healing is that healing takes place in the context of stories of punishment and restoration. Stories of barren women who finally are able to conceive may assume that the barrenness is a sign of divine displeasure, as in Genesis 20:17–18 (cited above). When Miriam and Aaron question Moses’s leadership, God becomes angry with them and Miriam becomes leprous, only to be restored to health after the intervention of both Aaron and Moses (Num. 12:1–16). In a later episode, the grumbling of the Israelites in the desert provokes God, who sends poisonous serpents as a punishment and later (after Moses again intercedes) provides for healing (Num. 21:4–9). Similarly, King Jeroboam’s hand is withered as a punishment and restored only after prayer on his behalf (1 Kings 13:1–10). The motif of punishment and restoration may also be at work in the story of Acts 9, in which Saul’s encounter with the risen Jesus leaves him blind, to be restored to sight only after the visit of Ananias.

These varying stories come together in the identification of God as the healer of Israel. The declaration that “I am the Lord who heals you” (Exod. 15:26) is frequently reaffirmed in the Old Testament:

See now that I, even I, am he; there is no god besides me. I kill and I make alive; I wound and I heal; and no one can deliver from my hand. (Deut. 32:39)

I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will lead them and repay them with comfort, creating for their mourners the fruit of the lips. Peace, peace, to the far and the near, says the Lord; and I will heal them. (Isa. 57:18–19)

For I will restore health to you, and your wounds I will heal, says the Lord. (Jer. 30:17)

The identification of God as the healer of Israel is taken up in the New Testament in descriptions of Jesus as a healer. This is announced dramatically when John the Baptist sends his own disciples to ask whether Jesus is the awaited Messiah, and Jesus responds, “Go and tell John what you have seen and heard: the blind receive their sight, the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor have good news brought to them” (Luke 7:22). When asked to explain who he is, Jesus responds in the language of healing. The Fourth Gospel intensifies this identification by labeling Jesus’s healings (and other miracles, see John 2:1–12) as “signs” that reveal Jesus’s “glory” (for example, 4:54; 6:2; 9:16; 20:30).

Healing and Community

That God is Israel’s healer and that Jesus’s identity is to be perceived by means of his healings already suggest that spiritual healing in the Bible is not simply a matter of repairing the afflictions and diseases endured by a series of individuals. Healing is integrally involved with community—whether that community be a small local gathering or the whole of Israel. Indeed, the community’s role in the phenomenon of spiritual healing is far more extensive than might be imagined simply by noticing the presence of crowds as witnesses in the Gospel stories of Jesus’s healing. In fact, the community is itself deeply implicated in the biblical phenomenon of spiritual healing, as will be shown.

In many instances, it is the community’s initiative that sets a healing in motion: the community brings its afflicted to Jesus, confident that healing comes from him. The lively story of Jesus’s healing of a paralytic opens with the vivid depiction of a group of people digging a hole through a roof in order to place their friend in the presence of Jesus (Mark 2:1–12; cf. Matt. 9:2–8; Luke 5:17–26). On this occasion, Jesus explicitly acknowledges that those who bring the afflicted man have “faith” or “confidence” that he will be healed.⁶ In the case of a son of a Roman centurion, someone whom readers would know to be an outsider possibly resented by the local inhabitants, Luke reports that the centurion sends Jewish elders to seek Jesus’s help, which prompts Jesus to praise the faith of the centurion (Luke 7:1–10). Elsewhere that faith or confidence in Jesus is tacitly expressed in the very action of bringing a loved one to Jesus, as in Mark 7:31–37, when a man who is able neither to hear nor speak is brought to Jesus by others who “begged him to lay his hand on him” (v. 32; see also Mark 8:22). Occasionally, the Gospels simply summarize Jesus’s activity in a particular region, and typically such summaries include reports about local residents who bring their sick to Jesus, as in Mark 6:54b–55: “People at once recognized him, and rushed about that whole region and began to bring the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was” (see also Matt. 4:23–25; 8:16; 14:34–36). The anonymous “they” in these incidents does not require further identification, as the stories serve not to identify and characterize these participants but to make clear that Jesus’s power to heal is widely known in communities small and large.

Yet the community is more than a literary d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: Spiritual Healing, Science, and Meaning—Sarah Coakley
• Part One Biblical and Historical Perspectives
• Part Two What Science Shows Us
• Part Three Philosophical Insights
• Part Four Anthropological and Pastoral Perspectives
• Conclusion: Whither Spiritual Healing Now?—Sarah Coakley
• Acknowledgments
• Contributors