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Conclusion
Jennie Smith died in 1924. For forty-six years following her healing, Smith had crisscrossed the nation as a “railroad evangelist,” seeking to bring salvation and sobriety to those “phases of humanity” who had been “neglected spiritually.” In the final installment of her autobiography, published four years before her death, Smith recounted the “incidents and experiences” that had marked her ministry after her cure in 1878. Although she briefly alluded to her remarkable recovery in the preface to this memoir, nearly all of the episodes she described in the text focused on the spiritual conversion of hardened sinners rather than the physical restoration of afflicted sufferers. Whenever invalids or sick persons appear in the narrative, they usually remain confined to their beds. Some, such as Smith’s infant niece and her co-worker of more than fourteen years, died from their diseases. Smith herself struggled with attacks of rheumatism and bouts of illness on several occasions and often admitted to needing rest from her labors.1
Smith’s relative silence on the subject of faith cure following her initial healing set her apart from her friend Carrie Judd Montgomery, who continued to advocate divine healing until her own death in 1946. Although Smith maintained cordial relations with leaders of the divine healing movement like Judd Montgomery, A. B. Simpson, and R. K. Carter and sometimes even spoke at their conventions, faith cure never became a central focus of her own ministry. While she sometimes prayed for healing when she fell sick and testified that the “the Holy Spirit” made her well so that she could accomplish the work God had given her to do, her efforts on behalf of others were primarily evangelistic. Her own cure in 1878, she explained at a New York Gospel Tabernacle gathering eight years later, prompted “a special baptism of the Holy Ghost for service, for my life work… . Since then I keep hearing the Macedonian cry. There is so much to do and we are doing so little.” Although she never disavowed divine healing, Smith implied that the work of preaching the good news of salvation to lost souls took precedence over propagating the doctrines of faith cure.2
While Smith’s tendency to elevate the gospel of spiritual redemption over the hope of bodily restoration distinguished her from many of her peers in the divine healing movement, she was not the only recipient of faith cure to adopt this position. Lucy Drake Osborn, whose experience of divine healing was perhaps even more celebrated than Smith’s, devoted herself primarily to urban relief work and foreign missions after her recovery. Like Smith, Osborn maintained contact with advocates of faith cure such as her mentor Charles Cullis and later worked alongside Carrie Judd to promote the cause of missions, but she never embarked on a healing ministry of her own or directly endorsed the efforts of these colleagues to foster the spread of faith healing.3
By the mid-1880s, even some of faith cure’s most vocal champions had begun to moderate their emphasis on the ministry of healing as they shifted their attention toward social reform, evangelism, and foreign missions. An article published in the October 1885 issue of Simpson’s Word, Work and World indicated that “other departments” of the New York Gospel Tabernacle were of “greater importance” than the Berachah healing home. “The work of the Tabernacle,” the author declared, “embraces a large amount of evangelistic and missionary work, and the work is thus kept from getting into a single groove, in the line of faith healing alone. Indeed, this is recognized as but a subordinate part of a much greater whole.” The founding of the Christian Alliance in 1887 confirmed the status of divine healing as one of the “four great essential truths of the Gospel of Christ,” but placed the doctrine third in the list, behind the more vital tenets of salvation and complete sanctification. “More than ever is it necessary to hold Divine healing in its true place in inseparable connection with personal union with our Lord Jesus, and personal faith and holiness,” wrote a correspondent for Word, Work and World in a report of the events surrounding the Alliance’s establishment. As the Alliance matured, leaders placed even greater stress on faith healing’s tertiary standing. In 1896, Simpson himself stated that “the place of divine healing in the whole system of spiritual truth … is a very important place, but it is also a very subordinate place. It is not the prime truth of the gospel, nor is it even the first truth that we have to testify to in these days of witnessing. It is a supplementary truth.”4
The experiences of the Alliance’s early missionaries on the foreign field accounted in part for the growing tendency of leaders like Simpson to insist that divine healing take a “supplemental” and “subordinate” position in the preaching and practice of Christianity. Although R. K. Carter asserted that Simpson had always held that “spiritual matters” were more important than divine healing and argued that he “never allowed the subject to claim more than a fraction of time or attention,” Carter also admitted that “the failure of the holiest missionaries to withstand the African fever purely by faith” had prompted Simpson to play down the importance of divine healing even more adamantly. Many of the Alliance’s first missionaries, Carter noted, “passed away, one after another” because they refused to take medicine when they contracted malaria, believing that “the Lord would keep them.” Eventually, the Alliance moderated its policy on remedies and began screening candidates to make sure that missionaries met “some sort of physical qualifications for the work.” By the late 1890s, Carter reported, most missionaries “used quinine and other remedies freely.” Although Simpson continued to advocate divine healing in this period, his “utterances and considerations of the subject,” Carter contended, had “moderated greatly from his earlier deliverances.”5
No case of a missionary’s death after rejecting “means” and medical assistance provoked more outrage among faith cure’s critics or more consternation among the movement’s exponents than the demise of twenty-one-year-old Charlie Miller on May 7, 1885. Only several months after arriving in Africa to serve alongside prominent Holiness leader and Methodist Bishop William Taylor in his missionary effort, Miller contracted malaria. For three weeks, Miller fought the fever, “refusing aid of any kind, testifying freely and continually that his trust was only in God, asserting that ‘a steady faith wins,’ and declaring that he did not have the fever.” Despite the mission doctor’s insistence that his body temperature had reached 105 and the urgings of his comrades, including Bishop Taylor himself, Miller refused to allow the physician to prescribe remedies. When “typhoid set in,” he finally took medicine, but by then it was too late. After a week of delirium, Miller died.6
For detractors of divine healing such as James Buckley, Miller’s death proved that faith cure was a dangerous form of fanaticism. Characterizing Miller as “a martyr to superstition which he mistook for faith,” Buckley blamed proponents of divine healing for “the suicide of this young man.” Skeptics like Buckley were not the only ones who attributed Miller’s death to misguided belief. Even staunch supporters of faith cure found Miller’s uncompromising adherence to a particular formulation of divine healing deeply troubling. In a letter describing Miller’s illness, decline, and death, Bishop Taylor lamented the loss of such a promising worker and expressed his conviction that Miller was the “innocent victim of an insidious error.” Having embraced “extreme views of certain good men who claim to be expositors of faith healing,” Taylor wrote, Miller ignored the medical care that might have preserved his life. Although Taylor confirmed his own belief “in the direct healing of the body by faith,” he rejected the notion that “we are justified in refusing to trust God in the use of well-tested remedies by means of medical skill.” Taylor also took aim at “extremists” who based their refusal of medicine on a conviction that Christ’s atoning work on the cross provided for “a present ‘full salvation’ for the body as well as the soul.” While he too believed that Christ’s atonement included a provision for bodily as well as spiritual restoration, Taylor insisted that the work of physical redemption would not be completed until the resurrection. By arguing that the “perfect healing of the body” and the “perfect healing of the soul” were inseparably connected and available to all in this life, Taylor charged, certain proponents of divine healing made miraculous cures dependent on an individual’s ability to exercise faith in the promises of God rather than on God’s providential decision to heal according to “the Divine will.”7
Taylor’s disagreement with Charlie Miller and those he labeled “extremists” became increasingly common among proponents of faith cure who took issue with the idea that spiritual holiness and bodily wholeness were inseparable parts of the gospel message, universally applicable to all persons in every situation. The most forceful apologies for the controversial “healing in the atonement” theology, Robert L. Stanton’s Gospel Parallelisms: Illustrated in the Healing of Body and Soul and R. K. Carter’s The Atonement for Sin and Sickness; or, A Full Salvation for Soul and Body, both appeared in 1884, just prior to Miller’s departure for Africa. Yet in the same year, William McDonald, a longtime supporter of Cullis who succeeded In-skip as the second president of the National Holiness Association, began to publish editorials in the Methodist paper The Christian Witness and Advocate of Bible Holiness, warning his constituency against putting “modern miracles” such as the “healing of the sick in answer to prayer … in the foreground.” Not only was salvation from sin “a thousand times more important than the healing of the body,” McDonald argued, but the notion that “bodily healing by faith sustains the same relation to the atonement that sin does” represented an “extravagant” and “illogical” error. It was precisely this kind of “unscriptural” reasoning, McDonald charged, that misled Charlie Miller and cost him his life. Echoing Bishop Taylor, McDonald affirmed his belief in divine healing but insisted that the blessing of health was a special privilege extended to human beings “under certain conditions,” according to God’s sovereign will rather than a general promise for all Christians.8
While the tragedy of Miller’s death prompted leaders like McDonald and Taylor to rein in their theologies of divine healing, some had offered qualified positions prior to this heartrending event. In 1879 Daniel Steele wrote to Jennie Smith, who at that point was still confined to her invalid cot, “that the gift of healing has been in the Church for all ages”; nevertheless, he rejected the conclusion that lack of faith was the only adequate explanation for a failure to be healed through prayer. Warning Smith of the “danger of fanaticism” associated with divine healing, Steele suggested that restoring the sick to health was not always God’s will. Distinguishing between “the grace of faith” for salvation, which was “required of every soul,” and the “gift of faith” that accompanied healing, Steele asserted that the latter was not “a general promise of the Bible” available to all but an “occasional” gift that God “sovereignly bestowed” by the Holy Spirit “to every one severally as he will.” For this reason, Steele insisted, Smith need not worry that she remained bedridden because of unbelief. Several years later, in an address to the Boston Methodist Preachers’ Meeting, Steele clarified his position, stating that healing was “not the result of ordinary faith in God, but rather of an extraordinary faith inwrought by the Holy Spirit for this specific purpose.”9
Although leading proponents of divine healing like Steele had articulated a more moderate position regarding the extent to which Christians ought to expect God to cure them in answer to prayer as early as 1879, theirs remained the minority viewpoint. Throughout the 1880s, more vocal advocates such as A. B. Simpson, Carrie Judd, and R. K. Carter vigorously promoted the idea that healing was available to everyone who asked for it, since God always willed the health of believers. That these two competing theologies remained in play during this decade reveals the multiformity of the divine healing movement and suggests that the lack of any kind of official governing body or formal authority structure to adjudicate core issues made the development of a coherent and consistent theological framework difficult to achieve. Like the larger Holiness and Higher Life movements out of which it emerged, divine healing attracted a broad range of followers from a wide variety of denominational and regional backgrounds. While this diversity generated productive ecumenical energy that helped to inspire unique avenues of ministry as well as new cooperative efforts in the areas of evangelism, missions, and relief work, it also spawned institutional strife within existing denominational bodies and produced theological tensions that ultimately destabilized the movement’s cohesion.10
By the 1890s, the uneasy synthesis among disparate factions within the divine healing movement had begun to unravel. The deaths of Charles Cullis on June 18, 1892, and A. J. Gordon on February 2, 1895, both of whom had served as mediating figures in the debate between those who advocated the notion that healing was a provision of Christ’s atonement and those who urged a more restrained view, eroded the tenuous middle ground that these two elder statesmen had helped to maintain. While both Cullis and Gordon had cautiously embraced the idea that healing was a universally and presently accessible benefit of Christ’s salvific work on the cross, they tempered their endorsements with repeated affirmations of God’s sovereignty and insisted on preserving a place for the inscrutability of the divine will as a strategy for coping with the dilemma of unanswered prayer.11
The passing of these two influential leaders coincided with the emergence of more “radical” and “aggressive” exponents of “the Atonement theory” of healing—none of them more controversial or divisive than John Alexander Dowie. After emigrating from Australia to California in 1888, Dowie spent two years promoting divine healing along the western seaboard. Wherever he went, he established branches of the International Divine Healing Association, an organization he had founded several years prior to his arrival in the United States. In marked contrast to Cullis’s Faith Work, the Christian Alliance, and even periodicals such as Judd’s Triumphs of Faith, all of which aimed to promote both healing and holiness as well as rescue work, evangelistic outreach, and foreign missions, Dowie intentionally and emphatically limited the focus of his association to the advancement of divine healing. Although he eventually established a new denomination (the Christian Catholic Church) and a utopian community (Zion City, Illinois), both of which endorsed a broader range of theological propositions and reformist objectives in the late 1890s, Dowie concentrated almost exclusively on divine healing during his first eight years in the United States, even going so far as to criticize organizations like the Christian Alliance for diluting the importance of healing by incorporating it under the umbrella of the fourfold gospel. Comparing Dowie’s ministry with that of most American teachers of faith healing, R. K. Carter noted that Dowie’s presentation of the subject was “quite radical,” and observed that “he gave the whole of his time, or most of it, to this one theme.”12
While several leaders of the divine healing movement, including Carrie Judd Montgomery and her husband, George, embraced Dowie, some found his radicalism disconcerting. Even Carter, one of the most forceful apologists for the idea that healing was an integral part of the gospel message, eventually concluded that Dowie’s explication of this doctrine and his emphasis on healing in general went too far. After a bout with malarial fever in 1888 left him with “a certain mysterious underlying weakness and inability to endure exertion,” Carter sought prayer from Cullis, Simpson, and several others, but “the full healing did not come.” In crisis, Carter turned to Dowie in 1890. Although Dowie was confident that he “felt the power of God” while laying hands upon Carter and expressed his certainty that his prayer would be effective, Carter did not receive the restoration he sought. This experience pushed Carter into a terrible state of “mental depression of nervous prostration” that endured for six months, until at last a physician friend convinced him to try a medicinal remedy. “Purely as an experiment,” Carter recounted, “the medicine was taken and forgotten until a week or two later, when the writer waked up to the fact that the awful depression had gone, and a renewed sense of life and vigor that was simply delightful had taken its place.” He then entered a season of “work and usefulness … which surpassed any similar time in his experience.”13
As a result of this transformation, Carter began to reconsider his former views on divine healing. Turning to the scriptures, he began to reread the passages that he had used to bolster his teaching in The Atonement for Sin and Sickness; or, A Full Salvation for Soul and Body. Concluding that he had misinterpreted the Bible, Carter issued a retraction of his early work in which he declared that his defense of the atonement theory of healing had been a mistake. Published in 1897, Carter’s “Faith Healing” Reviewed After Twenty Years included a point-by-point rebuttal of his prior position. Without disclaiming God’s ability to work miracles of cure in the modern period, Carter agreed with McDonald and Steele that God granted healing as a “special favor” rather than as a “general provision in the Atonement for all believers.” God might choose to heal “directly as a miraculous or unusual putting forth of His power,” but very often God did not work in this way. Healing was thus a “subordinate matter” to salvation, an “incidental” rather than an “integral” part of the gospel.14
Carter’s reexamination of scripture also led him to repudiate his original conviction that healing was a matter of “exercising faith” without regard for circumstances, feelings, or symptoms. All of the miraculous cures recorded in the New Testament, he argued in his later work, “were cases of full and complete healing.” Those who approached Jesus or the apostles seeking physical restoration “were made perfectly whole” instantaneously, not instructed to act as if they were well while still suffering from the effects of their diseases. This scriptural study, combined with his own “downright inability” to claim healing and act faith in spite of ongoing pain, prompted Carter to declare that this “plan of action” was “all a mistake.” “It is purely will power to attempt to act faith and make believe we are healed,” he argued. Not only was this course of behavior misguided, it was often injurious and sometimes even fatal. Citing Charlie Miller’s “heroic” efforts to “act faith,” Carter asserted that his death offered “a solemn object lesson” to all who held the atonement theory of healing and consequently encouraged individuals “to say I believe, and not I feel.”15
Admitting his own sense of responsibility for having “helped Miller to take the position he did,” Carter urged other leaders of the divine healing movement to learn from his past errors and to revise their teaching on this point. By adopting a more moderate stance, he argued, proponents of faith cure would help prevent needless deaths like Miller’s while also freeing suffering individuals from the uncertainty, confusion, and doubt they felt when the prayer of faith failed to bring relief. Although he rejoiced that some did experience physical restoration “by the direct power of God,” Carter contended that “the very great majority” of those who sought healing by faith did not “receive the literal answer.” After twenty years of participating in meetings for healing the sick and observing the “after results in cases of claimed healing,” Carter conceded that “only a small per cent of the seekers after heath are really and positively cured.” To blame these apparent failures on the seekers themselves—most of whom were sincere Christians who endeavored to “take hold by faith” with their full strength—was “worse than foolish.” Although Carter singled out Dowie as the most obvious offender in this regard, he also challenged Carrie Judd Montgomery and A. B. Simpson to admit that the atonement theory of healing led to the “irresistible” conclusion that unanswered prayers resulted “from some deficiency on the part of the subject” rather from the mystery of divine sovereignty.16
Finally, Carter asserted that advocates of the “extreme theory” of healing undermined the devotional ethic of active service to God that they sought to promote. Carter’s own experience had convinced him that in many cases the practice of acting faith depleted a person’s strength and hindered her ability to carry out the work that God had called her to undertake. For years, Carter recalled, he had “sought healing through faith, and used only the ‘scriptural means’ of prayer and anointing with oil, and had ‘acted his faith’ so desperately as many times to calmly take the platform and preach when sound medical opinion regarded it as very doubtful whether he would live through the effort.” When he finally compromised and tried medicine, he was “speedily lifted” out of his enervated condition “and at once began to preach and work, accomplishing more in six months than he had been able to do in three years.”17
While Carter claimed that “most of the leading teachers” of divine healing were “gradually coming to see that God does as He pleases, and what He pleases, and acts when He pleases, and that it is best for us not to be too dogmatic, or attempt to limit Him within our narrow lines,” Dowie remained recalcitrant. In the same year that Carter issued his retraction, Dowie publicly condemned pharmacists and physicians as “poisoners and murders.” On October 18, 1899, he preached his notorious sermon “Doctors, Drugs and Devils,” inciting over two thousand physicians and medical students from the University of Chicago to riot in protest. The publicity that these events generated, on top of the negative press Dowie had received in 1895, when both he and his wife had been arrested on charges of practicing medicine without a license at the Zion Divine Healing Home they had established in 1894, further exacerbated the friction between Dowie and the faith-healing move-ment’s more moderate proponents. Within this highly charged context, maintaining a mediating position on divine healing became increasingly difficult.18
The establishment of independent Holiness groups such as the Church of God (Anderson) in the early 1880s and the Fire-Baptized Holiness Association and the Church of God (Holiness) in the late 1890s, many of which vigorously promoted the notion that divine healing was a universally available benefit of Christ’s atonement and encouraged followers to eschew all forms of medical treatment, also contributed to declining support for faith cure among more mainstream advocates of Holiness. “For Methodist evangelicals who sought to remain within the fold,” historian Jonathan Baer has written, “qualified support for divine healing had become untenable” in light of the “fractiousness” and “radicalism” of the “come-outer” organizations. Paving the way for Pentecostalism, leaders of these separatist groups stressed Satan’s agency in sickness to a greater degree than earlier apologists for divine healing had, interpreting miraculous cures as victories in a larger eschatological battle that was reaching its climax as the second coming of Christ drew near. Because bodily healings served as visible signs of Christ’s power and authority over the devil’s minions, they were accompanied by vivid and instantaneous physical manifestations.19
With the emergence and growth of Pentecostalism in the early twentieth century, this conception of faith cure became increasingly widespread, prompting some long-standing supporters of divine healing to become all the more circumspect about the place and practice of healing through faith in their own ministries. While a number of faith cure’s earliest exponents, including Carrie and George Montgomery and Elizabeth Sisson, eventually embraced Pentecostalism, others—notably A. B. Simpson, George Pardington, and Mary Mossman—maintained their distance from the new movement and strove to distinguish their understanding of divine healing from the theology and practices being promoted by Pentecostals. Several weeks after Pentecostal revival broke out at Azusa Street in Los Angeles, for example, Alliance leaders complained in their annual report that the “many forms of fanaticism and extravagance that the year has brought to light” had thrown “discredit” on “the work of Divine Healing.” Although they vowed to “be more true than ever to the sane and Scriptural doctrine of Divine Healing” in light of Pentecostal extremism, subsequent publications suggest that fulfilling their pledge became increasingly challenging. In the 1909 report, leaders described divine healing as a “distinguishing feature” of the Alliance but insisted that “the work is less sensational and spectacular and more a matter of habitual experience and normal Christian living.” Several years later, in his 1914 history of the Alliance’s first twenty-five years, longtime member George Pardington asserted that “while the truth of Divine Healing is made of great importance, it is held in strict subordination to the pre-eminent truths of salvation and holiness.” After Simpson’s death in 1919, his successor, Paul Rader, reaffirmed the Alliance’s commitment to the four fold gospel but stressed the primacy of missions and evangelism. By 1920, the Alliance had closed all of its houses of healing, many of which had previously been converted to missionary retreats or rest homes for Christian workers. Although some healing evangelists ministered under the auspices of the Alliance in the ensuing decade, most leaders continued to downplay the doctrine.20
As a result of this increasing reticence among Alliance leaders as well as among those evangelicals who remained within “mainstream” denominations, divine healing became primarily associated with independent Holiness and Pentecostal churches during the early decades of the twentieth century. The rapid spread of these groups reshaped the divine healing movement in significant ways. Whereas late-nineteenth-century faith healing was an international and interdenominational phenomenon that flourished in large cities along the Atlantic seaboard, Pentecostalism prospered primarily in Midwestern and southern states, transferring the locus of divine healing away from urban centers like Boston, London, New York, and Philadelphia, to rural areas and smaller cities. Although Pentecostals continued to promote healing practices such as united prayer, laying on of hands, and anointing, they also ardently adopted ecstatic forms of worship such as trances, falling down in the spirit, and especially speaking in tongues, which earlier advocates of divine healing had rejected. Similarly, Pentecostals accorded a more prominent place to “healers” in the curative process than their predecessors in the faith cure movement had allowed. While evangelists like Maria Woodworth-Etter, who embraced Pentecostalism in 1912, always gave credit to God for the miraculous cures that took place during their revivals, they believed that particular people possessed the spiritual “gift” of healing and were therefore especially equipped to act as conduits of God’s healing power. Finally, because Pentecostals placed such heavy stress on the cosmic significance of miraculous physical restorations in answer to prayer, the idiom of “power for service” that permeated the rhetoric of divine healing in the late nineteenth century was a far less prominent theme in Pentecostal discourse. Although Pentecostals frequently prayed for an “enduement of power,” embraced the cause of world-wide evangelism with zealous energy, and sometimes engaged in efforts to alleviate the sufferings of the poor, their emphasis on the eschatological import of divine healing overshadowed the associations between miraculous cures and ministries of service that proponents such as Cullis, Simpson, and Judd Montgomery had so assiduously maintained. While bodies restored from crippling illnesses or brought back from the brink of death might engage in more active forms of godly work, their primary meaning, within the highly charged context of early Pentecostalism, was to display God’s triumph over Satan. Fully inverting the conception of sanctified suffering that shaped Mary Rankin’s experience of physical pain, Pentecostals suggested that somatic affliction was a sign of unvanquished evil or lurking sin, rather than a marker of spiritual holiness. Whereas Rankin’s suffering flesh offered evidence of afflictive providence, symbolizing the presence and prerogative of the Almighty, Pentecostal theology implied that only perfectly healthy bodies could incarnate God’s purity and power.21
The teaching and practice of divine healing among early-twentieth-century Pentecostals provoked the indignation of a diverse assortment of critics. Members of the medical community, secular reporters, and spokespersons for liberal Protestantism all derided Pentecostalism in general, saving some of their harshest denunciations for the ways leaders and participants imagined the meanings of sickness, health, and healing. Many of the most ardent opponents of Pentecostal healing, however, came from the ranks of the emerging fundamentalist movement. While some fundamentalists, notably figures like Rueben Torrey who had their roots in the late-nineteenth-century Higher Life movement, continued to champion divine healing during the early decades of the twentieth century, others rejected healing wholesale. Although usually at odds with Protestant modernists, theologians such as Princeton Seminary’s Benjamin Warfield found common cause with customary adversaries on the issue of modern miracles of healing. Like his liberal counterparts, Warfield argued that the psychological theory of suggestion explained the vast majority of seemingly supernatural cures. Reasserting the classic Reformed belief that biblical miracles ceased with the apostolic age, Warfield insisted that God worked healing through natural means, not through miraculous intervention. Although his primary targets were Pentecostals, Warfield also criticized advocates of divine healing like Dowie, and even A. J. Gordon, all of whom, in his view, promoted a flawed understanding of God’s providence that threatened both the physical and spiritual health of those who embraced it. Going beyond moderate proponents of faith cure such as Carter, McDonald, and Steele, who maintained that God’s will regarding sickness and healing remained a mystery but continued to resist the notion that God was the author of suffering, Warfield reaffirmed the doctrine of afflictive providence in unmitigated terms. “Sickness is often the proof of special favor from God,” he wrote in his text, Counterfeit Miracles, “and it always comes to His children from His Fatherly hand, and always in His loving pleasure works together with all other things which befall God’s children, for good.”22
While Warfield championed the ideal of sanctified suffering with a zeal befitting a front-man for fundamentalism, his arguments against divine healing echoed the complaints of a steady stream of detractors who, throughout the movement’s history, insisted that the doctrines and practices of faith cure imperiled the bodies, minds, and souls of its devotees. By uncoupling physical affliction from spiritual sanctification, critics such as Methodist minister George Milton Hammell charged, advocates of divine healing promoted false hopes “among innumerable invalids who lie in the weakness of chronic disease,” and thereby endorsed a form of Christianity that “mocks suffering, patience and faith.” Theologian George H. Hepworth asserted that faith cure relied on a “magical theory of religion,” and complained that the movement’s proponents played “on the imagination of the pious in a very dangerous fashion.” By attempting to circumvent God’s sovereignty in a presumptuous fashion, he claimed, faith cure fostered “incredible fanaticism” over against “a pure and undefiled religion.” Even physicians complained about the theological and pastoral implications of rejecting the doctrine of afflictive providence and the devotional ethic of passive resignation to physical suffering. “To promise present cure, and brand the failure to obtain it as unbelief, is a shocking cruelty, which cannot be too strongly opposed; and the recoil of the shattered faith in which it often results is painful to contemplate,” wrote British physician Alfred Schofield in the early 1890s. “It is good to feel our limitations, and patiently to bear our infirmities, to feel the advance of age and the approach of death; and better to cultivate a spirit of filial submission than to talk of claiming and demanding immediate cures.”23
One of the most trenchant critiques of faith cure’s attitude toward pain, illness, and healing came, not from a minister or a physician, but from a lay woman who had once wholeheartedly embraced Jesus as the Great Physician and encouraged others to claim the promises contained in James 5 rather than resorting to medical remedies. During the early years of Charles Cullis’s ministry in Boston, Elizabeth Annabelle Needham had worked alongside her husband, Irish-born evangelist George C. Needham, who served as the first editor of Cullis’s journal, Times of Refreshing. In 1881 Elizabeth indicated her own support for the teaching and practice of divine healing in an article entitled “Jehovah Rophi—The Lord Our Healer,” which was published in A. J. Gordon’s periodical, The Watchword. After several years of observing the progress of faith cure in Boston, however, Needham withdrew her endorsement of the movement. In 1891, she published Mrs. Whilling’s Faith Cure, a parody of divine healing based on her own interactions with leaders like Cullis and Gordon as well as with sick persons who had prayed for healing, given up medicines, and endeavored to act faith, but who remained plagued by disease and discomfort. As a result of encounters such as these, Needham concluded that faith cure, rather than bringing bodily health and spiritual wholeness to those who sought these blessings, “twisted the heads and disturbed the hearts of hundreds of Christians; and robbed more invalids of the glory and peace of acquiescence in God’s sovereign will than any deceit the Devil has ever perpetrated.” Renouncing “the theory that ‘continual health of the body is the highest state of religious life,’” Needham insisted that “God’s purposes in sickness are various and majestic” and lambasted the “faith-healers” who “degrade and despise and depreciate and dishonor this awful and effectual instrument in the hand of the Almighty God.” Although she never discouraged ailing sufferers from praying for healing, Needham insisted that resigned endurance represented the proper Christian response to affliction. Pain, in her view, was an integral part of the spiritual life. “The Christian is encouraged to beat his [body] black and blue,” she declared. “The Christian is encouraged to take pleasure in tribulations, in persecutions, in necessities, in distresses… . The Christian is glorified when he is made a spectacle to the world, to men, and to angels.”24
Needham’s robust reclamation of the significance of somatic suffering in the Christian life suggests that the question of how believers ought to interpret and cope with illness, infirmity, and pain remained an unsettled issue among Protestants in the late nineteenth century. Although many participants in the evangelical faith cure movement embraced and embodied a model of spiritual experience that valorized active service to God rather than passive acceptance of affliction, others found this approach to the dilemma of corporeal disease and distress deeply disturbing. Rather than resolving the tensions that arose over the meaning and practice of suffering in this period, the divine healing movement sparked a vigorous and ongoing debate about the relationship between physical illness and spiritual health that continued well into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
During the 1910s and 20s, Pentecostal evangelists such as Maria WoodworthEtter, John G. Lake, Smith Wigglesworth, Fred F. Bosworth, and Aimee Semple McPherson proclaimed the promise of divine healing to thousands across the United States and beyond through their large-scale revival campaigns. Millions more heard about God’s wonder-working healing power over the airwaves as pioneers like Bosworth and McPherson took advantage of radio technologies to broadcast their gospel message. Although Pentecostals suffered some setbacks during the Great Depression of the 1930s, they again rose to prominence after World War II, when the revival crusades of evangelists William T. Branham and Oral Roberts thrust Pentecostal divine healing back into the national spotlight. In 1955, Roberts began televising his healing services, endeavoring to introduce the Great Physician to audiences outside Pentecostal circles. According to historian Paul Chappell, Roberts’ weekly broadcast was “the number one syndicated religious program on television for almost thirty years” and helped give birth to the charismatic revival that swept through many “mainline” Protestant and Roman Catholic churches in the 1960s. Through the ministries of individuals such as evangelist Kathryn Kuhlman and author-teacher Francis MacNutt, both influential figures in the ecumenical charismatic movement, the message of miraculous healing became widely accepted among believers from a broad range of denominational backgrounds. Since the mid-1970s, the growth of independent charismatic churches like those associated with the Vineyard Fellowship has prompted many “mainstream” evangelicals to embrace the notion that the supernatural gifts of the New Testament—including glossolalia and healing—remain available for contemporary believers who desire and are willing to claim them. During this same period, televangelists such as Benny Hinn and advocates of the “Word of Faith,” or “Positive Confession” movement have persuaded large numbers of American Christians to lay hold of “all the rights and privileges” that are theirs as “children of God”—including prosperity, health, and healing.25
Practitioners of nineteenth-century faith cure lived in a vastly different social, cultural, and theological world than contemporary Pentecostal and charismatic proponents of faith healing, yet it is possible to discern some common themes across the historical divide. Like their predecessors, current champions of divine healing aim to provide Christians with a means for comprehending and contending with physical affliction. The dilemmas they face also echo those that troubled their forbears: how to explain various forms of “failure” such as recalcitrant invalidism, recurring illnesses, and repeated relapse; what to recommend in the way of medical treatment; how to define and defend what counts as “true” Christian healing amidst an array of doctrinal possibilities and devotional permutations. Finally, recent attempts to promote faith in the Great Physician, like those that flourished in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, have provoked an assortment of reactions, ranging from enthusiastic appreciation, to cautious curiosity, to utter hostility.
Were late-nineteenth-century advocates of divine healing able to assess their own legacy, it is likely that they would rejoice in the fact that faith in the Great Physician remains so strong in the postmodern world, yet bewail the flamboyant performances of some popular evangelists and wince at the tendency of certain prominent figures to link the “promises” of physical rejuvenation and financial success. Despite its prominence throughout most of the twentieth century, the “health and wealth” gospel was never a part of nineteenth-century faith cure. With the exception of Carrie Judd Montgomery, who married a moneyed man after her miraculous recovery, most leaders of divine healing ended up worse off financially as a result of their involvement with the movement. Although Baptist pastor Russell Conwell preached his famous sermon “Acres of Diamonds” numerous times in the 1880s and 1890s, it was not until well into the twentieth century that some proponents of faith healing began to proclaim that Christ’s atoning work on the cross guaranteed eternal salvation, freedom from bodily pain, and abundant financial gain.26
But if individuals like Sarah Mix, Charles Cullis, and A. B. Simpson would, in all probability, reject the notion that believers have a right to expect material riches as part of their Christian inheritance, they would be hard-pressed to deny some resemblance between their own understanding of divine healing and the view advanced by champions of the prosperity gospel. By maintaining that physical health was a universal blessing accessible to all who offered the “prayer of faith” and acted according to their conviction, these late-nineteenth-century teachers unwittingly paved the way for the emergence of the more instrumental concept of prayer and healing associated with numerous figures over the course of the twentieth century, most recently with “faith movement” spokespersons such as Kenneth Hagin, Kenneth Copeland, and Frederick K. C. Price, all of whom insist that perfect health is available to anyone who will “name it and claim it.”27
The remarkable popularity of these “Word of Faith” preachers suggests that their version of the gospel message resonates with many people who are longing to obtain the “promised” blessings of bodily healing and wholeness. As countless contemporary commentators have observed, modern individuals (and modern Americans in particular) have become increasingly preoccupied with physical fitness over the course of the twentieth century. For some, “fitness” connotes freedom from disabling forms of illness or infirmity. For others, it involves the pursuit of corporeal perfection through participation in diet and exercise regimens, experimentation with ever more innovative therapies and surgical techniques, partaking of pharmaceutical treatments that promise to augment athletic prowess or sexual performance, and the embrace of a constantly expanding array of products designed to improve personal hygiene or enhance physical attractiveness. At another level, the quest for healthier, even superior bodies has fueled the advancement of medical research aimed not only at eradicating crippling diseases and genetic conditions but also at developing technologies that would, among other things, allow for human cloning and the production of “designer children.”
Clearly, many factors have contributed to this pervasive and multifaceted obsession with bodily fitness, corporeal health, and the prospect of genomic perfection: extraordinary scientific discoveries, faith in the ideal of progress, and the forces of consumer capitalism not least among them. But as Marie Griffith has so aptly argued in her own study of twentieth-century “body fixations” among American Christians, Protestant beliefs and practices—particularly those with roots in nineteenth-century health reform and healing movements—have played an “indispensable role” in shaping and continuously reshaping the “widespread cultural obsession with human health, longevity, and what has blandly been termed wellness.” While Griffith focuses primarily on the ways in which New Thought teachings and devotional regimens contributed to the rise of modern evangelical diet and fitness culture and shows how these contemporary religious weight-loss programs are implicated in the tendency to esteem “slender, white bodies over other kinds,” I would like to suggest that the faith cure movement of the late nineteenth century also bears some responsibility for promoting an ideal of physical fitness that has profoundly influenced American attitudes toward and experiences of corporeal infirmity and suffering. By espousing a devotional ethic that associated sanctity with able-bodied service rather than resigned endurance of affliction, proponents of divine healing inadvertently fueled the conviction that “God favors fitness over sickliness, healthy Christians over their ill or flaccid brethren.”28
Examining the unintended consequences of late-nineteenth-century faith cure reminds us that coping with corporeal affliction is always a highly charged and inescapably complex enterprise. By exposing the connections between the devotional ethics of divine healing and subsequent valuations of sickness and health, I do not mean to cast the faith cure movement or its legacy in an entirely, or even primarily, negative light. Instead, I have endeavored to show that making sense of suffering involves a host of complicated negotiations that rarely, if ever, resolve the cultural, social, and theological tensions that arise whenever people confront the predicaments of illness, pain, and death. Certainly, the ideal of sanctified suffering that proponents of divine healing worked so hard to modify had its downsides too—especially for women such as Carrie Judd who found the prescription of patient submission physically excruciating, professionally stifling, and spiritually oppressive. As this study has demonstrated, participating in faith cure helped individuals like Judd and many others to overcome unbearable illnesses and to engage in admirable efforts to reform the meaning and experience of affliction in the lives of others. In so doing, they made possible new modes of being and acting that carried with them both beneficial advantages and troubling costs.
Acknowledging both the positive contributions and the distressing repercussions of divine healing will, I hope, alert contemporary interlocutors to the potential rewards and risks that accompany any attempt to deal with the dilemmas of sickness and suffering. As I indicated in the introduction, current debates about the role of religious belief and practice in promoting bodily health and healing reveal that the experience of physical affliction remains a challenging and perplexing issue for people of all faiths. By exploring how a specific cadre of believers in another time and place coped with the problem of pain, I have attempted to put present efforts to address the crises of illness and infirmity in broader historical context.
In recounting the stories of women and men like Jennie Smith, A. B. Simpson, and R. K. Carter, I have also aimed to encourage critical reflection on the kinds of theological, cultural, and social forces that shape the ways in which people interpret and respond to corporeal sickness and distress. Pain, according to a number of contemporary theorists, is more than a physiological phenomenon. While physical discomfort itself is rooted in biological and neurological mechanisms, the meanings that human beings assign to their pain, as well as the strategies they employ for coping with it, are influenced by the interaction of personal conviction and broader environmental factors. Suffering and healing, from this perspective, are “hermeneutical” processes, mediated through the symbols, metaphors, and categories of culture and belief. Drawing on this understanding of pain as a “culturogenic” or “psychosocial” phenomenon, some researchers have argued that human beings have the capacity to transform their experiences of bodily injury, disease, and distress. By altering their beliefs about affliction as well as their behavioral responses to it, scholars like David Morris have asserted, individuals can “completely reconstruct” the ways in which they suffer pain and experience healing. “Change the mind (powerfully enough) and it may well be that pain too changes,” Morris has written. “When we recognize that the experience of pain is not timeless but changing, we may also recognize we can act to change or influence our own futures.”29
Sarah Mix, Charles Cullis, Carrie Judd, and other advocates of faith cure would have agreed with Morris’s reflections. The claims that these nineteenth-century devotees of divine healing forwarded regarding the power of faith and devotional disciplines to transform the meaning and experience of somatic affliction bear a striking resemblance to contemporary theories that stress the “interpretive” dimensions of pain and that promote various forms of practice—meditation, ritual engagement, “narrativization”—as means for alleviating bodily distress. By championing an alternative understanding of the relationship between physical suffering and spiritual blessing, and by adopting a set of devotional exercises that helped ailing individuals translate their faith into practice, proponents of divine healing endeavored to recast the present experience and future implications of corporeal pain for themselves and for the wider community of Christian saints of which they counted themselves a part.30
Participating in faith cure thus offered individuals means for pursuing both personal transformation and broader cultural reform. In addition to enabling believers to conquer illness and counteract its effects on their own flesh, the doctrines and rites of divine healing supplied strategies for navigating, and sometimes resisting or modifying, the complicated religious, cultural, historical, economic, and social circumstances that influenced the ways in which pain and suffering, illness and healing were understood and performed. To act faith was to defy a central premise of Reformation theology and to reject the authority of medical experts; to receive the laying on of hands was to close one’s mind to rationalism and materialism while opening one’s body to the incursion of supernatural power; to abandon one’s self to God was to stretch certain normative constructions of gender without transgressing their limits.
Proponents of faith cure formulated their theology and practices within a historically and culturally contingent constellation of issues, but the solution they posed to the predicament of pain was applicable, they claimed, to a perennial problem in the history of Christianity. By declaring that healing was entirely the work of God, while at the same time instructing invalids to rise up and walk, ministers of faith cure were attempting to negotiate one of the thorniest dilemmas in Christian theology: deciphering the relationship between divine sovereignty, human volition, and spiritual practice in the processes of salvation and sanctification. For the evangelical Protestants who participated in the divine healing movement of the late nineteenth century, grace and faith; God’s power and personal agency; devotional disciplines; and the redemption of body, mind, and soul were inextricably, if inexplicably intertwined. Invoking the Great Physician ultimately involved the acceptance, rather than the resolution, of the perplexing paradoxes and inscrutable enigmas that arise whenever human beings confront the mystery of bodily suffering and embrace the hope of divine healing.
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6 The Lord for the Body, the Gospel for the Nations: Divine Healing and Social Reform