PROBING THE DEMISE AND RECOVERY

OF HEALING IN CHRISTIANITY

by J. Steven O'Malley

Part One: The Demise of Healing in Christianity

As we examine historical sources, we find that Christians have not

been the only ones concerned with the healing of the sick over the years.
In fact, we know that there is practically no civilization that has not had
some religious concern for higher Being and for the achievement of
wholeness in human life. Another approach to healing is that which
emerges from the pages of classical Greek antiquity. Note the difference
between the perspective of healing in the context of the kingdom which
Jesus announced, and the understanding of healing which stems from
classical humanism. The latter view remains a viable option in our day.
The first hospitals, so far as we know, are to be found among the
ancient Greeks. There was a god of medicine that the Greeks called
Asklepios, who probably was a deified version of an ancient physician by
that same name who healed people in ancient Greece. His daughter was

J. Steven O'Malley (Ph.D., Drew University), serves as Associate Professor of Church

History, School of Theology. Oral Roberts University, Tulsa Oklahoma. He is a prolific
writer and a popular conference speaker on the topic of spiritual renewal.

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called Hygiea, from which we get the word "hygiene."I There was an
elaborate ritual connected with this particular tradition in these
hospitals. They were really centers of cultic, priestly life, as well as
centers of physical healing. The sick incubated in temples under the care
of priests/physicians. The problem was that only the elite could afford
the care provided by this pagan form of humanistic religion. Only those
who had sufficient means were treated. Those who came with incurable
diseases had the means for care.
The symbol of this tradition was the snake, as reflected today in the
insignia of the snake upon the lapels of medical personnel. They were
harmless yellow snakes that slithered about the hospital grounds in
these ancient cultic centers, moving over people who were in a state of
insomnia, thinking that there was some kind of therapeutic benefit
stemming from this procedure. The ancients believed the snake
incarnated the god in some mysterious fashion.
Those with incurable diseases were brought to these centers. After
persons were treated in this fashion, they offered animal sacrifices to
Asklepios in a cultic ritual. Archaeologists have discovered long lists of
what are called votive tablets, or records of persons who had gone to
these centers and had left their contributions following their sacrifices.
Thus, in the ancient world, and outside our Judeo-Christian heritage,
there was a concern for healing that was connected with religion, whose
gods were apotheosized human figures. The mere wedding of religion and
medical science does not make for Christian healing. This contrasts very
clearly with Jesus' enunciation of the kingdom, and especially those
signs of its appearing, which are the healings.
In the ancient Greek tradition, the healer was deified. Healing was
not linked to obedience to the God of creation and redemption. Healing
was not linked to life in the kingdom of God. It was also for those who
were affluent. It was not for the afflicted, the masses for whom Jesus
came.
With this background in mind, let us look briefly at some of the
attitudes toward healing and medicine in the early church. As the early
church began to proclaim her message in the first century, she was
bringing the gospel into a culture surrounded by Hellenistic society. It
was a world in which medical physicians were scarce. It was a world in
which Hellenistic centers of learning scorned the Christian mission

See Leslie Weatherhead. Psychology.Religionand Healing (New York, Abingdon,

1952). pp. 20. 39, and 77.

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the sick. This is evident in the record of Justin, the great martyr of the
second century, in his Apology.1 He tries to refute as many of the false
charges that were laid against the Christians as he could. One of them
was that they were "proletarian." They were concerned with the riff-raff.
They embraced the down-and-outers, and they included the afflicted
and the sick among their numbers. This was quite a different spirit from
the shrines of Asklepios, that were so elitist and concerned with human
self-improvement. The Christian mission was one which sought out the
sick. Justin did not try to deny that charge at all. There were other
charges that he did refute, such as the alleged immorality of Christians.
He knew that our Lord came for those who had need of a physician.
As late as the early second century, in the time of Justin, the witness
of the church was clearly on the side of a God of healing. However, the
situation began to change. As Agness Sanford in her book, The Healing
Light, has told us, the further the church moved from Pentecost, that
light that shone so brightly began to dim. That vision of a kingdom of
God on earth that would come with those who had been touched by the
life of our Lord began to grow dim. The light grew weaker. The healing
power began to move out of the church and into other centers, and
sometimes it was not to be found at all. The further from Pentecost, the
less powerful the energy that is at work. There is a lateral movement
here, a weakening of that intense communication between God and man
which makes possible life in the presence of God. After the second and
third centuries we see that healing began to be relegated to monasteries.
At first, healing had also been vitally associated with the sacraments,
but this, too, began to change, and the sacraments no longer bore the life
of healing. What was first Holy Unction becomes extreme unction. It
became a last rite to prepare one for a good death, instead of an occasion
for the healing power of God to come to His people. This also helped to
give rise to what we call dispensationalism, which is usually associated
with Darby and Scofield, but can be traced at least as early as St.
Cyprian in the third century. He writes that God has now withdrawn the
gift given to the apostles.2 He is referring to the gift of healing, of which

1 See The First Apology of Justin, The Martyr, tr. by E.R. Hardy, Early Christian
Fathers (\'01. I in "The Library of Christian Classics," Philadelphia: The Westminister
Press. 1953). pp. 242-76.
2St. Cyprian, cited by Weatherhead, op. cit., p. 78.

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he writes as a Bishop in the West in the third century. He also wrote,
"The sins of Christians have weakened the power of the church." It is a
self-inflicted condition developed in the church, according to Cyprian.
As a result, Christians begin to rationalize this weakened condition.
They begin to find new dispositions, such as saying God no longer
intends to heal us. The teaching emerged that Christians have to bear
the sufferings of this life patiently, just as Christ bore His cross. Here is
a subtle shift in the whole concept of cross-bearing. It is now associated
with accepting sickness. Previously, cross-bearing had to do with the
suffering associated with witnessing to the healing power of Christ. Now
this is inverted.
Another disposition developed that said illness is a punishment for
sin, and this ought not be allayed, especially through medicine. As a
result, the church defaulted in her holy commission to deliver a whole
gospel for a needy human race. She left the art of healing through
medicine to the secular world, and yet she continued to disapprove its
methods because they were done from a pagan base. She, herself,
defaulted in the acts of healing, and yet she criticized those who were
doing it.
This is illustrated in an edict of the Emperor Justinian, the Eastern
Emperor who lived in Sixth-Century Constantinople. In that century, he
permanently closed the medical centers in Alexandria and in Athens.
They were continuing the study of medical science basically from a non-
Christian baste. However, the church did not intercede to fill the gap. In
fact, by the time we get to Pope Innocent III in the 13th Century, surgery
is condemned by papal edict. He opposed the dissection of the human
body and the study of the anatomy in 1248 A.D.2
This record indicates the urgent need to join together in our day the
care for the body and for the spirit. This bifurcation was epitomized by
that change in the sacrament of Holy Unction to extreme unction in
order to assure a "good death." As a consequence, progress in medicine
became disassociated from the church. The two healing streams, both
from God, were split apart.
Not only did the church default in the whole area of medical science,
in addition to that, an entirely modern, unbiblical view of man begins to
emerge, parallel with this separation between the spheres of medicine

lIbid., p. 87.
2Ibid.

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and prayer. The human person is compartmentalized into the separate
and discreet areas of mind and body, to be understood in terms of the
canons of mathematical reasoning. No longer was mankind the
mysterious handiwork of a gracious Creator. This, too, was a slow
development and was undoubtedly related to the default of the church
in the area of healing.
When we look at the great teachers in the medieval church, like St.
Thomas Aquinas who lived in the 13th century, medical science did
have at least a formal place in the grand system of knowledge that he
devised for the medieval universities. He called theology the "queen of
the sciences," but he also spoke of the moral sciences and the natural
sciences. His concern was to relate all learning to God as final end. This
meant that there was a place for natural science and for the study of
human nature and the health sciences within that scheme, at least
formally.
However, his plan for the integration of all human knowledge did not
actually develop the kind of holistic concern for body and spirit that
might be expected. Instead, the church continued to neglect the care for
the body in favor of the soul until we come to the time of Descartes, the
father of modern rational philosophy who lived in the 17th Century.
More than any other, he split apart mind and body in his attempt to
establish that we can rationally, and that is mathematically, prove what
exists. He said that we have to begin with universal doubt instead of
faith. Therefore, I know I am a doubter, and that is all I can say about
myself. I think as a doubter, therefore, I am (cogito, ergo sum). Then he
proceeded to say that there are two realms of reality, the realm of the
body and of the mind. We know our mind because we are thinking
beings, and mind is spiritual. It is characterized by thought. The body is
known by an quantitative measurement since it is material So there are
these two totally different realities in the universe, he thought. One is
spiritual and the other is material. One is mind and the other is body.
The great problem that he left modern mankind was how should these
be brought together into a unified whole? The result is a dichotomy
between mind and body, spirit and matter, which is so prevalent in
modern secular thought.

'See Rene Descartes, Discourse on Method (1637), discussed by Justo Gonzalez,

A History of Christian Thought, ill (Nashville: Abingdon, 1975), pp. 293-303.

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 Part Two: The Recovery of Healing in Christianity

It is quite important for us, to consider on what terms, on what

foundations, do we build? The tradition of Asklepios bears witness to
that. There were many models for religious healing in the ancient world,
in addition to that of the early church. How can we properly discern, at
this point in time, between how we are called into healing that is fully
Christian and that which is not?
Healing which is Christian, I would suggest, must always be Chris-
tological. That is, it must be related to our Lord Jesus Christ, to His
incarnation, to His cross, to His resurrection, and to the kingdom life
related to Him. Part of Jesus' proclamation of this kingdom was also
the unique understanding of human nature that accompanies the
Hebrew mind of which Jesus shares, which is so different from that of
the classical pagan view of man that surrounded the early Christian
church. To the early church, man is created as a being who is in the
image of God. A being who, in every dimension that we can think of man,
is related by having a life with God, in God, and through God. By
comparison and by contrast, we see that in the classical pagan world,
man is not so much an animated being in covenant with God, as he is a
soul, incarnated in a body for a brief duration of time. Classical writers
also taught that after His incarnation in one body, this would be
replaced by incarnation in another body. The emphasis lay upon the
immortal soul, encased for a brief time in a mortal, corruptible body.
As the church gradually moved from Pentecost, the vision of a com-
munity that would be whole in every respect began to recede from sight.
Healing gradually begins to be seen as no longer part of God's will.
Illness is theologized as divine punishment. In part at least, the
sacramental structure of the ancient church and the medieval church is
built around that assumption. She began to alter her priorities in
significant ways. She now was concerned less with this healing mission,
of which the gospel is directed originally, and was more preoccupied
with questions of institutional maintenance. Particularly after Con-
stantine, we see where the church became involved in questions of
politics and alignments with the state and imperial policies. With all
this, the vision of being a healing community began to recede from our
views. Along with this is the change in the view of human nature. As the
church herself begins to trade her Hebraic understanding of a person in
a holistic sense with the Hellenistic view that we have described, the
soul is valued above the body.
Against this background, various attempts have been made in the
history of Christianity to seek to recover the healing dimension of

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kingdom living, with varying degrees of success. Three types of healing
communities which have been established will be noted. Each has a
unique and particular insight from which we can draw, and yet, each is
also flawed in some particular respects as well.
First, there are those attempts toward Christian healing in the
context of the medieval Catholic Church. We must remember the great
hold that the Mass had upon the medieval populace. Contemporary
records indicate that the adoration aspect given to the elements them-
selves was unduly magnified. There are even reports of people
burroughing holes in the sides of cathedrals to get into the Mass right at
the moment of the consecration of the elements.1 It was believed that
there would be something immediately saving and healing in the very
sight of the consecrated host. People were so enamored at the moment
when the elements were consecrated and uplifted, that they would enter
the church at that moment, having been signalled by the ring of a bell,
and would exit after the consecration, in the belief that was where the
real saving benefit was for them. Services of worship were even
scheduled in staggered fashion throughout cities in the Middle Ages so
that you could attend several at the time of the consecration. Sometimes
there were processions of the host down the streets from church to
church.2
In addition to this priestly, sacerdotal system, there was another
model for healing that emerged in the Middle Ages, as exemplified by
traveling or mendicant friars, notably St. Francis of Assissi. These friars
did not stay within the confined walls of a monastery, but went out to the
people, taking their gospel witness with them; they itinerated among the
pcor, fulfilling the words of the Psalmist, "Blessed is he who visits the
land with healing." St. Francis, above all, was a person who met people
on their own terms, in a day when that was rare. Not only did he meet
them with his witness of the living Lord, he met them with the touch of
healing. Tradition reports that he even received the stigmata, the very
wounds of our Lord, as the church has reported, in the last years of his
life as a result of his utter identification with the suffering and passion of
Christ in his own ministry.

lThomas M. Gannon, S.J., and George W. Traub, S.J., The Desert and the City
(London: M8ICwillan,1969), pp. 108f.
2 ibis.

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 A modern interpreter of St. Francis, G.K. Chesterton, once made a
rather incisive comment about this man's achievement.l It needs to be
understood, he said, against the context of the mystery religions of the
ancient world. In the ancient world, mankind had filled nature with
pagan legends. There were the fertility cults. One could not look at
nature, neither the stars nor the flowers nor the birds without .
associating nature with these pagan practices of nature religion, the
fertility cults in particular. As the Christian Gospel came upon the
scene, Chesterton surmises, it was necessary, finally, for the greatest
leaders of the church to turn away from nature before they could turn
back to it. They had to go into the desert for at least four centuries. And
there, in the Middle Ages, the greatest Christian minds were to be
found, not among nature, but in the desert where flowers do not bloom
and in caves where the stars could not be seen. There they communed in
inward silence with their God. It was also during this period that
medicine was shunned by the church, and medical schools were
prescribed and the dissection of the body was outlawed. Nature, you '
see, had been so infested with the pagan mystery religions, the religions
of nature, that nature was simply not capable of being used by the
Church for healing. But finally this changed. This period of purgation
only lasted so long. The significance of St. Francis is that he represents
the end of that long period of purgation. As he steps out in 1200 A.D.
upon the scene of Europe to go forth with the healing message of the
gospel, a new day had dawned. A new day had come in which nature
could once more be embraced. He calls the sun brother. He calls the
flower sister. He calls the star brother.2 Once again, we see nature as
part of God's good earth. And so we can turn to the elements of nature
for healing. He used those elements in his own healing ministry. He
began to call upon them. Before, not a flower, not a star was present that
had not been stained. Devoted Christians had been compelled to go into
the desert, but now they could come forth into a word that had been
cleansed and expurgated of these memories. Nature was new. The
flowers and trees were innocent again. They could be given new names.
It was literally a time of a new heaven and a new earth. And so St.

1 G.K.Chesterton. St. Francis of Assissi (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1957).

2 SeeSt. Francis of Assissi, "The Canticle of Brother Sun" in The Legendsand Land.,
ed. by Otto Karrer, Sheed and Ward, London, 1947, pp. 261f.

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 Francis saw needy and bruised humans and beasts at the point of their
need. And with compassion he touched them with the healing power of
the GospeL
What lesson do we learn? If the ancient Christians, the desert
fathers, teach us and warn us against the dangers of unholy alliances
with non-Christian religious systems, St. Francis underscored our need
for compassionate involvement in God's world. We are to be the vessels
who honor God. If we are to be bold in our healing mission, we do not
" wait for the established institutions to do it for us.
St. Francis represents a rather solitary individual voice in a long
period of Roman Catholic history. As we approach the period of the
Protestant Reformation of the 16th century, we come, second, to other
models for Christian healing. The reformer who may have been most
intently involved in a ministry of healing was among the least known,
Paracelsus (b. 1493).l He took his name from the ancient classical
physician, Celsus, saying, "I am the preeminent one over Celsus, so I am
Paracelsus." Significantly, this man was a physician and also held a
clerical office. He surrendered a lucrative medical practice and began to
be a roving itinerant minister of healing. Traveling all the way from
Lapland to the Near East, he brought the message of healing to people
in need. He did not charge the poor and the indigent. A rather solitary
and isolated voice, he moved against the established practices of
medicine and clerical systems as they existed in his day.
There is one point of difference between St. Francis and this later-
day itinerant healing minister. St. Francis had taken the vow of poverty
and chastity and obedience to the church. He remained accountable to
the church, particularly the papacy of the Roman church. However,
Paracelsus cut himself off from the institutional church. He gave up the
possibility of the church ever accomplishing her mission. He repudiated
her sacramental system all together, and ministers in place of the
church. He isolated himself from being accountable to the Christian
community. He looked for God to raise up a new "spiritual" church,
where there would be no outward preaching and sacraments, and where
everyone would have the Spirit simply within himself, perhaps much like
Montanus in the early church. This vision did not come to pass in his
day, and so he remains an isolated figure in the story of Christian
healing. However dissatisfied we may personally become with the
institutional church, we need her correction and collective wisdom to
keep us from falling into error.

1 See the discussion of Paracelsus in George H. Williams, The Radical Reformation

(Philadelphia: Westminster, 1962), pp. 195-200.

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 Undoubtedly the best known Protestant reformer was Martin
Luther (1483-1546). He did not give up on the institutional church,
although he was certainly tempted to do so. He remained a Catholic
priest throughout his life. We see perhaps his greatest contribution as a
reformer in his recovery in the meaning of the word of God, particularly
the word as proclaimed in the community of the faithful He once
likened that task to that of a physician who is curing the ill. He' said,
"Just as a physician will prescribe a cure, we do not see immediately the
results of that cure until a process of time has passed. But we know that
from the time that the prescription has been given and the medicine
received, that we believe healing has begun. So it is with the testament
which is the word of God." 1
The word, he says, is God's prescription for our human ills. When
that prescription is received, which he called the "testament of God," it
is like a prescription. The process has begun. By faith, we see ourselves
as whole, reconciled human beings with God and with one another, even
though that in actuality has not yet come to pass in its final sense. And
yet we believe that by receiving the prescription of God's holy word, we
are on the road toward a recovery of wholeness. That was an image he
used when he spoke of the saving effect of the word upon our life.
We know Luther was one who rediscovered the central meaning of
salvation by grace through faith alone. We know him also as one who was
very insistent upon seeing disease as the work of the enemy, not the
work of God, although he recognized that God was the power behind all
that is. Thus, in some sense, the power that Satan wields is used by him
only to the extent that God permits and allows it. Nevertheless, he would
want to attribute disease to the work of the enemy. Luther had a holy
hatred of disease. He also did not fear even the most dangerous and
communicable ones. In his letters of spiritual counsel, in which Luther
wrote on very practical matters, one of the great problems was the
bubonic plague. People were fleeing that en masse, and for a good
reason. It was wiping out villages in Germany in the 16th century. He is
asked, "Father Martin, shall we stay here with our family, or shall we
take to the hills? What should a Christian do?" And his response to this
was very clear and forthright. He says, "If the sick strike fear and terror
in your heart, be of good courage. Stay in your place. Stay in your
vocation. Your vocation is the place God has put you for service. Stay

1 MartinLuther, "Lectures on Romans," tr. by W. Pauck (Vol. XV in "The Library of

Christian Classics;" Philadelphia: Westminster Press), pp. 123-37.

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there, and have no doubt that it is the devil who is responsible for any
fear, for any worry, for any terror, for any horror. It is not God who is
responsible for that. And that he not only tries constantly to kill and
murder, but he gives vent to his scheme by making us fearful and
worried and anxious about the outcome of our ministry."1
If you are unduly upset by his infamous proddings, remember one of
the lines in his great hymn, "A Mighty Fortress," where he says,
"Though this world with devils filled, should threaten to undo us, we will
not fear, for God hath willed His truth to triumph through us. One little
word shall fell him."2
He uses that little word as he writes to a person who is having to face
the problem of the plague. He says, "Just address that infamous enemy
this way. 'Away with you and your fears, deviL Because it will vex you, I
shall defy you by going at once to my sick neighbor to help him. I shall
"
pay no attention to you, but shall attack you on two points.' First he
says, " `I know for certain that this work that I am doing is pleasing to
God and the angels, and when I do it in obedience to His will and as a
"
service of God, I will have His protection.' Addressing the devil at this
point, he exclaimed, .

You are not to have your way. If Christ has shed His blood for
me and died in my behalf, why should I not place myself in a
little danger for His sake and face the effects of a powerless
pestilence.. If you can terrify, my Christ can strengthen. If you
can slay, Christ can give life. If you have poison on your
breath, my Christ has more potent medicine. If my dear
Christ, with His command, His benefaction, and all His
comfort would not mean more to my spirit than you, cursed
devil, can do to mv frail flesh with your false terrors, God
would surely be displeased. Get thee behind me, Satan.
Christ is here. And I am His servant in this work. He shall
prevail. Amen.

lMartin Luther, "Letters of Spiritual Counsel," ed. by T.G. Tappert (Vol. XVIII in
"The Library of Christian Classics," (Philadelphia: Westminster Press) p. 238.
2Martin Luther. "A Mighty Fortress," in The MethodistHymnal (Nashville:Methodist
Publishing House, 1966), no. 20.

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 In addition to facing Satan without fear, his second point is to recall
to Satan the clear promises of God with which he comforts all who
consider themselves poor and needy. Here he cites the 41st Psalm,

Blessed is he that considers the poor. The Lord will deliver

him in the time of trouble. The Lord will preserve him and
keep him alive and he shall be blessed upon the earth. And
thou will not deliver him unto the will of his enemies. The
Lord will strengthen him upon his bed of languishing.

Luther reminds us that we have a resource, above all, in God's

promises, which are greater, even, than the particular ministrations that
we perform. He says it is not our ministrations, it is the sovereign word of
God itself, which we exercise by our office and calling. Although we do
not normally think of Martin Luther as a minister of healing, maybe we
need to reconsider the issue in light of this new evidence from these
letters of spiritual counsel. He taught that the power of healing comes
for those with compassion. The condition is for our eyes and our hearts
to be focussed in compassion upon the needs of others.
In other letters Luther explains how to pray for the sick, including
how to stand at their bedside and how to touch them and to minister to
them in ways that communicates the presence of God. He speaks also
about the problem that he sees with preachers and doctors in his day. In
a comment that might be valid today, he says that preachers lack a holy
hatred of disease. Medical doctors do not entirely escape his criticism
either. He says, "They do not recognize that the cause of disease is often
at the spiritual level. The cause goes beneath the physical level."2 He
was accused of not being a very good patient by his doctor and he
responds to his doctor in one of his letters and saying, "Well, you're
right, sir." He says, "I do get impatient with you." But he says, "You
tend to make me impatient with all your doubts." He then goes on to
, deliver this word of exhortation to. all involved in the health professions
in his day.

Physicians observe only the natural cause of illness and try to

. counteract these by means of their remedies. They do well to

1 Luther, "Letters of Spiritual Counsel," op. cit., pp. 46f.

2Ibid.

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 do this, but they do not understand, Satan is sometimes the
instigator of the material cause of disease. He can alter the
health into illness. To deal with Satan, there must be a higher
medicine; namely, faith and prayer.1 .

He concludes by saying, "And since our bodies contain so many

mysterious vapors and internal and invisible organs," this was before
many of the modem discoveries in medicine, "there are also various and
unexpected dangers. Our bodies can go to pieces in an hour. Therefore,
he says, "a physician must be humble. That is he must be God-fearing.
And unless he practices with the fear of God, he is a murderer."
Here are prophetic words, for any community of learning that
includes the health professions and the theological disciplines. Finally, I
would cite that Martin Luther also gave us a vision of a new kind of
learning community. He wrote to his prince, saying.

Sir, it would be a good thing if in your grace as principality,

your grace would establish one or two centers of learning
where the Holy Scriptures would be the foundation of
learning, but not only Scriptures, but also law and all of the
sciences should be taught together. From these schools,
learned men could be got as preachers, pastors, secretaries,
counselors, and the like for the whole principality. In these
schools, we could have two theologians, we could have two
jurists, one professor of medicine, one mathematician, and
four or five men for grammar, logic, and rhetoric, and so on. If
studying is to be encouraged, we really need to have not
empty cloisters and deserted monasteries and endowed
churches, but a city in which we may come together, work
together, and incite and stimulate one another. Solitary
studies do not accomplish this, but common studies do. For
where many are together, one gives another incentive, an
example.2

Luther's vision was undoubtedly ahead of its time. In our century,

there have been attempts to recover the healing dimension of the
apostolic church, notably in the Pentecostal and charismatic move-

1 Ibid.

21bid., p. 326.

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ments. There have also been efforts to form communities where faith
and learning are integrated and where divine healing is basic to the life
of the community. How effective we will be in recovering and imple-
menting this vision also depends upon how carefully we assess the
record of the past, including the factors that contributed to the demise
of healing in Christianity as well as those attempts to recover this vital
ministry. The challenge is ours to receive. The harvest is at hand.

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