Testing Prayer: Science and Healing by Candy Gunther Brown (review)

As a professor who has, in the last five years, managed (in some broad sense) some thirty-four doctoral dissertations, almost all of them researching Christian healing, I can unhesitatingly express my admiration for Candy Gunther Brown’s magnificent work, Testing Prayer. Since 2012, this work has become a required text for my program. It serves as a judicious model for framing research methodology in examining Christian healing in its philosophical, historical, religious, and sociological contexts.

Brown is no ivory tower academic, though her BA, MA, and PhD all were awarded from Harvard, and she attained the rank of full Professor in an exceptionally short time at the University of Indiana. She has traveled the globe to examine the phenomenon of healing with exceptional diligence. Her seminal article in the Southern Journal of Medicine (2010) fuelled further widespread debate over how, or even if spiritual healing warranted scientific study. She argues that “researchers can and should use empirical methods” in the study of prayer for healing. Accordingly, Brown spells out a fairly conventional and appropriate “four-pronged model” of scientific investigation on the effects of healing prayer: 1) the analysis of pre- and post-prayer medical records for claims of healings that appear to have no other obvious explanation. 2) Research should examine the subjective experiences within the plausibility structure of those claiming healing. 3) “Prospective clinical trials” can establish controlled conditions in which to study any perceived changes due to “prayer practices.” 4) Research of this kind should also include long-term follow-up investigations to gauge the lasting effects of the healing encounters (10).

Brown notes that just as in all science, the effects of healing prayer cannot be “proven” in any absolute sense. The hypothesis that, under the right conditions, prayer for healing results in improvement in undesirable medical states, can only be sustained or contradicted, with confidence growing in one’s opinion—either way—only after repeated experiments and only asymptotically reaching “certainty.” We can speak of a “miracle” as a “violation of the laws of nature,” but this whole construct breaks down when we understand that what we describe as a “law of nature” is not a fiat prescription of what must be in every case, but rather an incomplete human description of observed phenomena. Hence, so-called “scientific” observation is really no different than “religious” observation: both are products of a habit as well as intellectual and spiritual bias in describing one’s engagement with our environment. Indeed, judging from their emotional (and sometimes economic!) commitments, one could argue that “scientists” express as much “faith” in their constructs of “reality” as religious practitioners. Brown does not shrink from exposing fraudulent claims among healing advocates—claims which tend to diminish the reputation of studies on healing, though not descending to the dismal credibility level of the “scientific research” by the cigarette, pharmaceutical and GMO industries.

Brown provides the historical setting for this controversy in Chapter 1, surveying a modern, and the largest (now close to 700 million worldwide) network of healing practitioners in contemporary Christianity: Pentecostals and charismatics—those who believe and apply the New Testament descriptions and instructions for healing and other “gifts of the Spirit.” This meticulous and original survey of this movement from the mid-1990s to the present proved particularly valuable to our Doctor of Ministry cohorts, whose focus it is to understand, articulate, and practice the values of this movement.

The second chapter, “Why Are Biomedical Tests of Prayer Controversial?” shows (rightly) that skepticism over healing miracles, always latent in Church history, but co-existing with the supernatural hagiographies of the saints, assumed a new intensity and theological weight in the polemics of the Protestant Reformation. Healing miracles, long divorced from their original New Testament function as divine acts of compassion, expressing “salvation” from the Kingdom of darkness into the Kingdom of God, had historically morphed into dazzling divine events, designed to cow an...