Divine Healing: The Years of Expansion, 1906–1930

Theological Variation in the Transatlantic World

Robinson

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781630873318
• Topic: Théologie et religion
• Subtopic: Religion

In the present volume James Robinson completes his trilogy, which deals with the history of divine healing in the period 1906-1930. The first volume is a study of the years 1830-1890, and was hailed as a standard reference for years to come. The second book covers the years 1890-1906, and was acclaimed as a monumental achievement that combines careful historical scholarship and a high degree of accessibility. This volume completes the study up to the early 1930s and, like the other two works, has a transatlantic frame of reference. Though the book gives prominence to the theology and practice of divine healing in early Pentecostalism, it also discusses two other models of healing, the therapeutic and sacramental, promoted within sections of British and American Anglicanism. Some otherwise rigorous Fundamentalists were also prepared to practice divine healing. The text contributes more widely to medical and sociocultural histories, exemplified in the rise of psychotherapy and the cultural shift referred to as the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The book concludes by discussing the major role that divine healing plays in the present rapid growth of global Christianity.

1

Healing in the Early American Pentecostal Movement

Two doctrines distinguished the early Pentecostals from the majority of other Christians, viz., speaking in tongues taken as the initial evidence of Spirit-baptism, and the prominent place given to divine healing. This contrast is less sharp today, an adjustment made explicable in part by the arrival of the Charismatic movement in the late 1950s. In the Pew survey Spirit and POWER: A 10-Country Survey of Pentecostals (2006) divine healing stood higher in a number of ways than tongues.2 The data collected from the USA and the nine other countries selected from South America, Africa, and Asia revealed that in the USA 49 percent of Pentecostals claimed never to have spoken in tongues, while 62 percent claimed to have witnessed or experienced divine healing, as against 28 percent of other Christians. The same pattern was found in all ten countries. Other polls indicate that 70–80 percent of all Americans believe in divine healing. As shown throughout this study, divine healing has been practiced considerably longer than speaking in tongues in its distinctive Pentecostal understanding. The reason for this is obvious. Human suffering is endemic within the fallen creation, the source of an existential angst that searches unremittingly for a universal panacea. That search is of greater magnitude and intensity than tongue-speaking could summon. Both practices owed much to Holiness theology, with its stress on purity and power, in both its Wesleyan and Reformed Higher Life guises. The foundational leaders of the new Pentecostal movement in America almost invariably had a background in the Holiness movement, though considerable numbers of the latter were opposed to the upstart it had nourished in its womb. How the message and practice of divine healing was continued and shaped in its new Pentecostal setting is the challenge of this chapter.

Towards Azusa Street Revival: Parham, Seymour, and Healing

Kansas at the end of the nineteenth century provided the background that was typical of the historical and socio-religious milieu in which the Holiness movement thrived. Such an environment, representative of much of the American Midwest, had as distinctive a part to play in the birth of Pentecostalism as that frequently given to California.3 The Middle West states had become from the middle of the century the bread basket of the transatlantic world. In good years farm incomes soared, while in the depression years of the 1890s the situation became grim. In response to their despair farmers formed local Farmers’ Alliances that were more than sales cooperatives. Masonic-like, their lodges were hugely popular, especially their mass picnics that “drew hundreds of families into something like revivalist meetings.”4 Despairing of the two great national political parties, they went political in creating the People’s Party, a radical alliance commonly known as the Populists. One of its leading figures advised a meeting, “What you farmers need to do is raise less corn and more Hell.”5 Root, in his thesis, has shown that Parham’s sympathies were with the radicals, for example, in writing a glowing obituary for the prominent editor of Appeal to Reason, a socialist newspaper printed in Girand, Kansas.6 It became clear that his sympathies lay with the anti-capitalist views and class antagonism of the Populists and Socialists.

Kansas was not only a farming state but for a short period became a leading centre for the mining of metals. The mining town of Galena, Kansas, was typical of the many settlements founded at the time. It was established in 1877 with the discovery of lead and zinc ores. For a few years it became one of the largest producers of these minerals in the world. Between 1890 and 1900 the population jumped from 2,496 to 10,514, a more than fourfold increase within a decade. In the early years the business was largely in the hands of small operators who had little or no capital. The mineral deposits were scattered and shallow in depth, thus providing conditions that “make a favourable locality for poor men to operate in [and] made rich by the stroke of a pick.”7 This period of the small, localized lease-system could not last in face of the incursion of national and foreign capital invested in purchasing large tracts of land and establishing a pyramiding of land leases and royalties that penalized the miner in the bottom layer of royalty payments. This was not the least of their problems. They had to face the hazards of collapsing roofs in the shallow tunnels, explosive hazards and, most seriously, disease in the form of lead poisoning silicosis that made them also susceptible to tuberculosis. Contagious diseases such as tuberculosis were transmitted rapidly throughout the poorly-housed camps scattered throughout the area. A recent convert, Howard A. Goss, recounted that in the center of his hometown Galena nearly every other building housed a saloon or brothel. Frequently on his way to work, he observed at least one dead man lying between the tent shacks where he had been thrown during the night.

The Ozark area attracted sizeable numbers of Scotch-Irish in the mid-nineteenth century. The American geographer Carl Sauer described them as “a restless frontier type [who] . . . in the main formed the advance guard of civilization on the outer margin of he frontier.”8 In 1903, Mary Arthur, an American citizen of Scotch-Irish descent, was a forty-one-year-old resident of Galena. Her husband was a prominent local businessman. She was an active member of Galena’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Dark shadows were cast over her family by Mary’s numerous and diffuse ailments. Her greatest distress lay with her eyes. Her right eye had been virtually blind from birth and the other eye was subject to spasms of sudden blindness. It was in August 1903 in Eldorado Springs, Missouri that she first encountered Charles Parham, then an itinerant Kansas preacher who described his message as “the apostolic faith” that claimed to rest on the contemporary restoration of New Testament Christianity. After prayer for her healing her health improved dramatically, whereupon she returned immediately to Galena, totally committed to Parham’s message and ministry. Emboldened by her healing, she invited him to hold services in her home. The home, though large and commodious, soon proved to be too small for the numbers who attended. Eventually, a group of businessmen, not all of whom were Christian, approached her husband and told him “to get that man here, we need this very thing and we must have it. If you can’t get him, we will go there.”9

Why such insistence from the business class? Root identified a number of factors that helped to make the time ripe for his arrival in the town in October 1903. The town was going through a difficult time with the decline in production of lead and zinc, both faced by competition from more productive mines elsewhere in the region. By 1904 the population of the town had virtually halved. As the price of the ores dropped the mine operators agreed to shut down production to force the price up. As the closure strengthened, many miners became destitute. The one positive note struck was the message delivered by Parham of personal salvation, divine healing, and Spirit-baptism. Parham was in an advantageous position to strike the right note with his listeners in their alienation. The county in which the town was sited in almost all the elections in the 1890s voted for Populist candidates. As late as 1912, 25 percent of the county voted for the Socialist Party. Parham’s anti-establishment and anti-elitist inclination served him well in catching the ear of his audiences. He was convinced t...