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Reviewed by:
  • Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900
  • Paul Harvey
Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900. By Heather D. Curtis. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. 2007.

“How believers should comprehend and cope with pain is a perpetual question in the history of Christianity” (3), Heather Curtis writes in her thoughtfully rendered study of Christianity and divine (or faith) healing through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. She argues that divine healers led a substantial body of American Christians away from an older ideal of “sanctified suffering” to a newer notion of “victory over affliction,” by which believers were prepared for “active service” in the world. In this way, “advocates of faith healing endeavored to articulate and embody an alternative devotional ethic that uncoupled the longstanding link between corporeal suffering and spiritual holiness” (5). Rather than endure Job-like suffering, they sought to remake the “meaning and practice of pain” (52). For believers in divine healing, “passivity and physical frailty were symptoms of a disease that needed to be cured, . . . not characteristics of Christian holiness that ought to be cultivated” (16). The obvious gendered conceptions of overcoming “passivity and physical frailty” meant that women were especially prominent in the divine healing movement.

Evangelical divine healers are the focus here, but they obviously joined an entire coterie of contemporary movements—Spiritualists, Christian Scientists, homoeopathists, and others—all of whom “suggested that these experiences of bodily transformation represented signs of a return to a purer form of religion unmarred by the accretions of dogma and creed or the corruptions of institutional politics and cultural conformity” (75). Divine healing became devotional practice. Sufferers were instructed to “act faith” as part of making healing part of a bodily expressed Christian ethic.

Besides facing the problem of empirically documenting their success (or whether it would breach faith to do so), divine healers also encountered and grappled with the showmen and stuntpeople who seemed to draw the most attention with flamboyant exercises of healing that ignored the deeper theological truths that many healers sought to inculcate. Healers established faith houses where, surrounded by fellow believers in quiet and serene settings, supplicants could abandon modes of thinking that kept them bedridden, embrace biblical healing, and “embody a manner of living that linked holiness with the energetic pursuit of purity and service” (166). Their ideal was that overcoming suffering through faith would then strengthen the Christian for active engagement and service in the world. However, the faith healing community ultimately split over whether sickness and illness [End Page 159] could be overcome fully, the kinds of “theological tensions that ultimately destabilized the movement’s cohesion” (196).

Healers of her era would look at ours and rejoice in continuance of their movement but “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” (196). However unwittingly, divine healers of this era did prepare the way for the contemporary “Word of Faith” movement, the latest iteration of the irrepressible “health and wealth” theology that seems a constant of American evangelical history. Ultimately, showmanship trumped suffering, but also has overshadowed the more serious theology of the healing advocates whom Curtis so usefully documents.

Paul Harvey
University of Colorado at Colorado Springs
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