The Healing Myth

A Critique of the Modern Healing Movement

Howard

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781621898504
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Religion

What is the role of the church in ministering to the sick? This book argues that it is not what is now called the healing ministry, with its frequent claims of remarkable cures from physical illness. Little critical attention seems to have been paid to the validity of these claims, which, if genuine, would be producing clearly observable effects on the levels of morbidity and mortality in society. Similarly, the important ethical and moral questions the movement raises have also been very largely ignored. A huge edifice of muddled theology, together with highly questionable practice, has been built upon very shaky foundations. It is the purpose of this book to examine seriously the dubious claims and teaching of the modern healing movement, as well to expose its very real dangers, in order to encourage Christian people, both ordained and lay, to exercise a more critical approach to the healing movement. The book concludes by outlining a framework for a return to a more biblical emphasis on proper pastoral care in the church's ministry to the sick.

1

The Healing Phenomenon

The growth of interest in, and practice of, what is referred to as “healing” in Christian circles in recent years has been remarkable. Venturing into this subject, however, is to wade into troubled and controversial waters, and there is no doubt that much of what follows will be controversial, and possibly even offensive to some. To start with, my use of the term “myth,” to characterize the modern Christian healing movement, will no doubt cause a good many eyebrows to rise. Those sympathetic to the movement’s aims and activities will no doubt consider the use of such a word both unnecessarily harsh and judgmental. It is, after all, a word that inevitably conjures up negative attitudes with regard to the matter under consideration.

The Shorter Oxford English Dictionary defines “myth” as, “a purely fictitious narrative usually involving supernatural persons, actions, or events, and embodying some popular idea concerning natural or historical phenomena.” That will serve as a working definition, and it will be one of the aims of the present study to demonstrate that the great majority of the claims made by the advocates of religious healing may reasonably be characterized in this way. That some will be offended, and others angered, by such a judgment is a foregone conclusion; but at the same time it is hoped that there will also be those who will be prepared to give more careful and critical consideration to the issues that will be discussed in this study of what will be called religious healing, as a general term to cover the various forms of healing practice in Christian circles.

The starting point for this discussion is the widespread, and increasing public interest in, and acceptance and use of, the many varieties of alternative medicine to be found in the marketplace. The range is enormous from herbs to homeopathy, and among these forms of alternative medicine has to be placed the activities of those involved with religious healing in its various manifestations. Religious healing, by whatever name it may be presented, has taken a highly prominent position in today’s Christian ministries, although, at the same time, it needs to be recognized that the movement as a whole is by no means homogenous, and a great many beliefs and practices, not all Christian by any means, hide under the umbrella of what is variously called “spiritual healing,” “faith healing,” “healing ministry,” and what I have simply termed “religious healing.” Such a wide variety of practices and beliefs would require a much larger and more detailed study than the one planned here were it to do justice to what is a very complex subject. Consequently, this short study is limited quite specifically to the role of the Christian church in the “healing” of disease and sickness, and particularly to an examination of the practices of those who advocate what has come to be called the “church’s healing ministry.” The brevity with which this complex matter is to be discussed may lead some to consider that I have not done adequate justice to either the beliefs or practices of the advocates of these forms of ministry. However, the primary concern will be to examine the evidence for and against the effectiveness of these various healing ministries. Can such ministrations be shown to have any curative effect on the pathological processes that cause disease and sickness, rather than providing no more than spiritual comfort and psychological support? Much has been claimed in support of healing ministries; the question that requires an answer is whether these claims are genuine or false.

It is unlikely that anyone would call it an exaggeration to state that, over the past forty or so years, the conviction that the Christian church should have a healing ministry has become virtually an article of faith across the great majority of communions. At the same time, it would also be true to observe that there has been remarkably little in the way of genuine critical examination and discussion within the Christian community as a whole, either of the claims made by the proponents of these healing ministries, or indeed of what exactly is meant by “healing.” The term, indeed, is so slippery that it is almost impossible to establish a uniform and exact definition. The advocates of religious healing, whether clergy or lay, have, in fact, been highly articulate and very successful propagandists for their views and practices, with the result that “healing” (as noted above, a term almost always used without definition) has come to be accepted as a necessary ministry, virtually without question.

The Report of the Review Group set up by the bishops of the Church of England, published at the turn of this century, well sets out what has very largely become current thinking in most denominations of the Christian church. That document expresses the hope that, “this report will encourage all Anglicans to embrace what is sometimes called ‘the full gospel’—that is the gospel preached with the hope of healing—so that it may become central to our mission.”1 In a similar vein, Roy Lawrence, an Anglican active in the healing movement, has written, “Christian Healing is a ministry for all who believe and profess themselves Christian and therefore for every local church . . . we must know beyond a doubt that a church which is not a healing church is hardly a church at all. So, every church a centre of healing? It is a necessity.”2

Clearly the healing movement has arrived in a big way and is into a major “hard sell” advertising campaign. Doubts remain, however, both about the validity of its claims in general and, more especially, about its effectiveness with regard to the cure of genuine physical illness. In addition, the biblical foundation of much of its teaching requires serious scrutiny. These are matters that are open to serious question, but there seems to have been remarkably little in the way of critical examination from church leaders. As stated earlier, it is the purpose of this study to raise some of these critical questions and to encourage a greater level of critical thought among both ordained ministers and laypeople in the churches. Particular attention will be devoted to the claims of the healing movement to see whether they stand up to careful scrutiny, for at the end of the day the important question is simply, “Does it work?”

The Early Church Background

I have argued elsewhere,3 and on the basis of detailed critical exegesis, that, contrary to much popular Christian opinion, and the repeated assertions of the practitioners of religious healing, the New Testament as a whole displays remarkably little interest in the healing of sickness and nowhere suggests that it was a central and essential aspect of the proclamation of the gospel. There is certainly no suggestion within the New Testament documents that remarkable cures were happening on a daily basis in the early Christian communities, as is often suggested today. In fact, there is little foundation for assuming that the early Christian congregations undertook any form of extensive healing ministry. It was the story of the Good Samaritan that furnished the early Church with its model for the care of the sick and needy. As Ferngren puts it, “it was not curing but caring which constituted the chief ministry of the early Christian community to the sick”;4 and, unlike the pagan world, or even the Jewish community, the Christians extended their concern and care to all, irrespective of race or status.

Those who advocate a central place for a healing ministry, in the sense of curing disease, frequently tend to base their arguments on Mark 16:9–17. These verses form what is called the “longer” of the two main alternative endings of the Gospel, and paint a picture of the disciples being given what can only be described as magical powers to resist the venom of snakes and perform miracles. Unfortunately for those who wish to use these verses as proof-texts, they are universally recognized as secondary and constitute a second-century scribal addition to Mark, not forming part of the original Gospel. They represent a later attempt, and one that clearly pleased at least one scribe, to provide Mark with an ending that would bring it more into line with the other Gospels, with a set of post-resurrection appearances of Christ to his followers, but underpinned with the scribe’s own or borrowed idiosyncratic theology.5

The New Testament, in fact, provides very little support for the burgeoning theologies of healing that have been developed in recent years. The emphasis of the first-century Christian communities was on caring for people in need and sickness, rather than on curing them. This is not the place to restate the arguments of my earlier studies in detail, although the main conclusions are worth setting out as a background to later considerations.

One thing should always be kept in mind when thinking about the diseases mentioned in the Bible. The understanding of the causes of different diseases and the pathological processes that gave rise to symptoms were lacking, even amongst the trained physicians of New Testament times. As a result, diseases tended to be classified simply on the basis of the symptoms or on the outward signs of the condition, as was the case, indeed, until very recent times. As would be expected, therefore, the descriptions of disease in the New Testament are almost invariably symptomatic. Thus, the people who came to Jesus in the Gospels or to the apostles in the book of Acts are variously described as being paralyzed, lame, blind, and so forth. For the people of the time, the symptoms were the disease, as the underlying pathology remained unknown to them. Consequently, the various illnesses in which convulsions were the primary feature, for example, were simply lumped together, and no distinction would have been made between a disease such as genuine epilepsy on the one hand, and “hysterical” pseudo-convulsions on the other. It is unfortunate that this symptomatic approach also tends to be that of modern “healers” who, in general, have no real knowledge of the pathology and presentations of disease processes. Such a lack of understanding has, all too often, been a recipe for disaster, a matter that will be discussed later.

It has also to be remembered that the primary aims of the evangelists were theological, and thus the Gospel traditions have undergone progressive editorial adjustments to ensure that the evangelistic and teaching needs of the young communities were being met as they began to expand into the Roman world. These considerations mean that considerable care needs to be taken in interpreting the nature of the healing stories of Jesus and the apostles. Nonetheless, there are adequate clues in the Gospel narratives to be able to draw broad conclusions about these stories. These clues come in the form of the symptoms and signs that are described, coupled with the information about the healing methods that Jesus appears to have used, and together they provide support for the conclusion that the majority of the conditions treated came within the general category of what may be termed “functional” or psychosomatic. A high proportion seem to have been cases of what are called conversion disorders or somatoform disorders, those conditions that used to be called “hysterical neuroses.” The term “conversion” in this context has nothing to do with religious conversion, but rather describes the situation when someone in a highly unpleasant and stressful situation escapes from it by converting the mental stress into physical symptoms of illness. Such conditions are common in all human societies, although cultural factors often affect the way in which they manifest themselves. An example of such a somatoform illness is seen in the case of the “possessed” man from Capernaum (Mark 1:21–28) in which psychological conflicts were transformed into bodily symptoms and complaints. In the discussion that follows, I shall use the term somatoform disorder to avoid any possibility of confusion with religious conversion.

What was true of the ministry of Jesus seems also to have been true of the illnesses treated by the apostles, although the Lukan witness of Acts probably may not be treated with the same degree of confidence as the Markan tradition of the ministry of Jesus. The pattern that emerges from a study of the diseases treated by Jesus, and probably also by the apostles, is thus one of conditions having their origin in those forms of mental disorder that closely mimic conditions that have a genuine physical pathology. Conditions of this nature tend to present as paralysis; lameness; loss of balance; dramatic convulsions; severe pain without pathology; and various sensory defects such as deafness, dumbness, and, more rarely, blindness. The physical symptoms closely mimic the features of genuine physical illness, but there is no evidence of the corresponding pathology of the physical disease itself. The condition is real, but the cause is psychosomatic rather than physical, and they form part of the spectrum of psychosocial disease and, in particular, the somatoform disorders. I have argued that there is a reasonable degree of certainty that it was diseases of this type that formed the most common, by far, of the conditions dealt with by Jesus and his apostles.

It also seems very possible that some of the examples of blindness recorded in the Gospels and Acts may have fallen into this category as well. However, in view of the way in which Jesus is recorded as healing the blind by the use of touch, it seems more likely that most, if not all, cases ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1: The Healing Phenomenon
• Chapter 2: Basic Approaches
• Chapter 3: Healing In Practice
• Chapter 4: Assessing The Evidence
• Chapter 5 :Investigating False Claims
• Chapter 6: Caring or Curing?
• Bibliography