Notes on the book by Amanda Porterfield “Healing in the History of Christianity”

In this book Amanda Porterfield describes the course of the history of the healing traditions within Christian religion. In other words, she studies the history of Christianity through the prism of healing within it, and it works just right due to the fact that, as we find out, healing has always been central to the Christian faith. 

We are taken through the history of Christian thought and approaches starting from Jesus and ending with modern Christianity, and we see how the ideas of healing had changed within it, as, for example, the move inspired by Calvin from firm belief in the miracles of healing related to saints to the idea that healing miracles had been only the extraordinary gifts of the Spirit reflected on Christ’s earliest followers to reflect the actual miracle of Christs’s appearance on Earth, rather than ongoing practices of Cristian life. In this viewpoint miracles simply accompanied the revelations God made through Moses and Jesus, but were not the natural scheme of things. Calvin insisted that miracles were not part of the nature as most Christians had believed. Throughout the book we are shown how Christians have attempted to revive the religious healing in different ages. 

Another line of history explored in the book is the development of “western” medicine out of (and through) the Christian faith. As the author points out, the relationship between Christianity and medicine, and the boundaries between them, have always been complicated. Nonetheless, the split between medicine and religion seemed to be inevitable. By the second half of nineteenth century the growing professionalization of both medicine and ministry meant that each job was too demanding, and too specialized, to be combined with the other: 

“Either a good surgeon or a good pastor was spoiled if people expected one man to be both.” (p.143) 

The intellectual concepts of scientific medicine derived from materialistic disciplines—anatomy, physiology, chemistry, and biology denied spiritual interpretation. Even though by the end of the nineteenth century the medical establishment had succeeded, for the most part, in excluding approaches based on spiritual causation from licensed medical practice on the grounds that they violated scientific principles, these approaches never really disappeared, and in Western cultures today, they have become complementary alternative forms of medicine, such as homeopathy, yoga, and acupuncture.

Another interesting aspect of this historical research is the implication of Western (Christian) medicine in Africa and China. Here we learn about the very different ways in which these two parts of the world received this new medicine. If medical science was losing strength in Africa as Christianity flourished, the opposite occurred in China. There the promotion of scientific medicine by Western Christians proved so effective that the Chinese incorporated it into their own society while not accepting Christianity. 

Anyhow, the way Christianity and medicine provided so-called mutual support is really a valuable idea to think about. We learn that important shifts in Protestant theology coincided with medicine’s increasing authority and power. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, medicine’s usefulness as the promoter of Protestant missions developed together with optimism for the improvement of the conditions of human life around the world. This way science and Christianity sort of held each other up in the movement for bringing the world together in peace and health.

We are left with the conclusion that because the benefits of medical research and technology fail to reach vast portions of the world’s population, and global health crises challenge existing resources and lines of support, Christianity’s appeal as a source of spiritual healing predominates over medical work today as it did for centuries before the scientific discoveries of modern medicine. From this book it seems that medicine continues to play a secondary role as an expression of Christian compassion and missionary outreach to the world (p. 158). 

My personal interest with psychosomatics has often brought me to the subject of religious healing, and this book has also added to this collection of thought. I once again found the confirmation of the idea that today’s interest in scientifically validating the therapeutic effects of religious faith grows out of several centuries of effort to establish a relationship between religion and science in which religious claims about spiritual reality can be made to harmonize with scientific claims about nature. 

In search of the clue to divine healing different groups of people developed different kinds of theories and practices. For example, while radical Puritans in search of religious healing expected the same kind of miracles to work through them as the ones described in the Bible and tried to reinstate the laying of hands method of healing from the New testament, the more conservative Puritans, on the other hand, while not denying God’s power to cause miraculous cures, put more emphasis on the way God worked through nature in conformity with natural law. 

The search for spiritual healing is ever alive. This book describes just several of the “new” spiritual movements, such as mesmerism, spiritualism, Wesley’s Christian healing, Christian Science, that have stimulated new thinking within Christianity and given new hopes of spiritual healing. This search continues and is only here to prove yet again that we as a species are inseparable from the spiritual part of our lives. Of course, we most often turn to it when we encounter hardships, such as illness, but the desire for miracle is not merely a pledge for salvation. It is also a desire of the proof of the larger and deeper reason for what we are going through. 

Christianity had become as strong and spread out is not only the doctrines and the forgiveness of the sins, and the hope for miracles, etc. In my opinion, one of the strongest sides of Christianity is in the promotion of suffering. Acceptance, welcome, and even cultivation of suffering had always been part of Christian life. Christian heroes proved their faith through martyrdom, ascetic deprivation, and self-inflicted discomfort. These exercises were  respected as a path of sanctity. In the late medieval period, mystics developed this tradition of Christian suffering further by adding fasting and other forms of pain and deprivation. Simply because we all suffer in one way or another and suffering is an inevitable part of human life, making suffering part of the religions rightness has automatically confirmed the religiousness of those who suffer and offered them a relief by assigning a meaning to what they are going through. 

I can’t help but wonder whether this sort of praise to suffering, apart from giving psychological relief to those suffering, could also become an obstacle to healing. If one is convinced that his suffering is “divine” and is needed for whatever reason, he will resist internally to healing. There is a lot of literature that explores how our sets of beliefs influences our wellbeing as, for example, The Biology of Belief  by Bruce H. Lipton. The numerous studies described in his and other books explores the power of belief over the physiological processes in our bodies. Thus, by holding a strong belief about the rightness of suffering one may prevent himself from healing without even knowing it.