Christian healing is a messy mystery. All who have practised it and thought seriously about what they were doing will have found that it raises agonising questions to which there are no final answers and yields results that are very hard to categorise or explain.
The longer we go on with it, the more the mystery deepens and the more superficial all attempts to turn prayer into technique, sacramental obedience into manipulative process are bound to appear. All the charismatic panaceas for healing, wholeness and holiness that used to come across from America every two years or so, proved by their sheer multiplicity that they could not deliver on what they were offering. They helped some, but they did not help all and in the gap between the some and the all the old unsolved mystery remained.
The Mystery of God's Love - Faithful and Free
The mystery of healing is a subset of the mystery of all prayer and the mystery of prayer is inherent in the mystery of the God who, even as he reliably and definitively reveals himself as Father, Son and Holy Spirit, at the same time asserts his freedom to be faithful to his self-revelation in ways of his own deciding and not according of patterns of our prescribing.
As Karl Barth puts it, God is love in freedom; his love is faithful and reliable and that is what nourishes and sustains our faith, but how and when and to whom he manifests that love belongs to his freedom. The way he exercises that freedom seems sometimes to throw doubt on that love and even to contradict it, and it is in this tension that his people have to live, not least in relationship to the ministry of healing. The Father who has sent his Son and his Spirit to bring us into the wholeness of his salvation still exercises his freedom as to whom and when and how he will heal, and does so often in ways that refuse to conform to the expectations and hopes that his own gospel have aroused in us.
All this is a way of saying that, because this is a mystery of God's freedom, we cannot solve it. What we can do, however, is to set the mystery in the context of the revealed gospel in which we are better able to understand and cope with it, and come to see that, because God's love is free and we cannot prescribe or even comprehend the way he deals with us, nevertheless God's freedom is the freedom of his love. Even in our incomprehension of the way his love works, we have good grounds for trusting that it is the love of God that is at work among us and that through all the strange turnings and contradictions of his ways with us, that love will keep its promises and deliver its salvation.
Freedom and Covenant
We can put this more concretely in terms of the basic biblical concept of covenant, which from start to finish is an expression of both God's love and his freedom. At its heart God's commitment of love to his people is summed up in the phrase 'I will be your God and you will be my people'. It is that promise and commitment that holds Israel together through all the twisting and turnings of its history. It holds together God's promise to Abraham, his liberating faithfulness to Moses, his commitment to David and the return from exile. It remembers that he has been their God in the past and finds in that hope not only that he will be their God in the future but that in a renewed covenant they will be delivered from their rebellion to be his people in the future.
But the administration of that covenant remains mysterious from beginning to end. This is the God who in his freedom chooses one people to reach all people, and does not say why, within that people, he chooses to work with Jacob rather than Esau, with David rather than Saul. This is the God who sometimes forgives and sometimes leaves people to the punitive consequences of their disobedience.
This is the God who in Christian belief fulfils his covenant by the unheard of miracle of incarnation, by the scandal of crucifixion, by the reversal of resurrection and by the pouring out of new life at Pentecost, whose work in Christ opens his covenant to all people and yet sees it rejected by his own chosen Israel. Here is both the utterly committed love and the utterly unfathomable mystery of the God of the covenant in his dealings with his world, and it is that context that the mysteries of the Christian ministry of healing arise and are best explored.
Pentecostal Compartmentalism
The ministry of healing has often suffered from what I might call Pentecostal compartmentalism. This ministry is based on a few biblical verses often treated in isolation and out of the canonical contest of the whole gospel revelation of which they are part. They then become pretexts for the construction of precisely these manipulative techniques that sees healing as something that can be achieved on the fulfilment of certain conditions by the healer and the healed, usually to do with faith, rather than as a gratuitous gift of grace to be sought of God and to be granted as and when he chooses in the freedom of his love.
When our concern for healing is thus seen as a thing in itself and is isolated from our commitment to the gospel and to the God of the gospel, the way lies open to a dangerous reversal in which first of all Christ is valued as the means to physical healing and then, quite consistently rejected when that physical healing is not given, so that it may then be sought from some other source in some other way.
In my Fountain Trust days I was once phoned up by a URC minister who wanted me to rebuke some charismatics in his congregation who were objecting to his commendation of and dependence upon a psychic and mediumistic healer who made no profession of faith in Christ. When I demurred and said that far from rebuking them, I was inclined to agree with them, he told me that he himself had been healed psychically and delivered from the Christian narrowness and exclusiveness that I and the charismatics were objecting to and had come to see that God all religions were the same.
That to me was proof that you come into the power of whatever name you are healed in, so to be healed outside Christ puts you in danger of being more and more divorced from your commitment to Christ. The interview ended when I brought the underlying issues into focus by saying, 'As far as I am concerned better to lie sick in the arms of Jesus than to be healed in any other name' - whereupon he hung up on me and went his way.
Christ the Healer
Most certainly that christocentric focus is at the heart of what I want to put before you in these articles. The healing that I am interested in is that brought to us by the incarnate Son in the name of the heavenly Father and in the power of the Holy Spirit in the context of the gospel of the new covenant in which God restores wholeness to us by being our God all the way to the cradle and the cross, and shaping us into his people in the image of his Son and by the power of his Spirit. That is where the mystery of healing can be coped with because that is where it belongs.
Healing - Controlled Process or Expectant Prayer
This christocentric focus has important practical implications for what we say to those people who come to us for healing. The expectations that we arouse in them have to take account both of God's faithfulness to his promises and of his freedom in the way that he keeps them. To tell somebody that if they believe enough the healing that they seek is guaranteed is to court disappointment if it does not happen, but even worse it is to misrepresent healing as a cause and effect process rather than a personal transaction, a prayer in which we let what concerns us pass from our hands into his and wait for an answer that we cannot control but that we have good reason to believe will always be gracious even when it is not the one we were looking for.
On the other hand blessed are they who expect nothing because they will not be disappointed because nothing will happen! We have to steer a careful and delicate course between not encroaching on God's freedom and at the same time firmly trusting in God's promises. That is what we do in healing because that is what we do in all prayer. We shall not go far wrong when we remember that a ministry of healing is always a ministry of prayer, and intercessory prayer is the surrender of control from us to God.
I do not rule out the possibility that in the exercise of this ministry there will from time to time come to us insights and perceptions about what God is going to do or not do in a particular situation - what charismatic jargon calls words of knowledge. When these happens we have to exercise a process of discernment to see whether the source of our claimed insight is indeed God's Spirit or just our loving wish for the person's recovery. Then we have to decide when it is appropriate to share such insights with the sick to build up their faith and when it is better to keep them to ourselves to build up our own.
All this, viewed theologically, raises questions of eschatology that will pursue us at every turn and that we shall address more specifically in our last article. What is the relationship between what God will to do to fulfil his promises to faith penultimately here and now, and that final fulfilment in the new heavens and the new earth that are the object of our hope in the parousia of Christ and the overcoming of all evil in his kingly rule? This is the question we must prepare for.
So far I have concentrated on the theological connectedness of the ministry of healing to the covenant of God with his people that is the context of the whole story of his dealings with Old Testament Israel and with the New Testament people of Christ.
Healing and the Local Church
That theological integration of the ministry of healing with the whole gospel has its pastoral reflection in what one of the key New Testament passages says about how and by whom that ministry should be exercised in the Church. James 5:14 begins, 'Are any among you sick? They should call for the elders of the church and have them pray over them, anointing them with oil in the name of the Lord.' We shall be referring to that whole passage more than once before we are done, but for now I want to draw your attention to the not so often noticed point that here the appropriate ministers of healing prayer and anointing are identified as the elders of the Church.
Those to whom we are advised to turn when we are ill and seek spiritual healing are not detached charismatic experts for whom this has become a specialty, but rather those who have overall and continuing responsibility for the ministry of the gospel in a local church.
It may be that within that local eldership there will be those who to a pre-eminent degree have those gifts of healings that Paul mentions in 1 Corinthians 12 just as there will be others who have special gifts of preaching and teaching, pastoral or administrative skills, but in principle the location of the ministry of healing is the local church and the appropriate exercisers of that ministry are the presbyteral leaders of that church.
What I am interested in here is not to claim a monopoly for the ordained - I doubt if James knew or cared very much about ordination - but rather to insist in this pastoral context that the ministry of healing is itself most healthy when those who are responsible for it are the same people as those who are responsible for the ministry of word and sacrament and for the whole integrated life of the body of Christ in a particular location.
There is of course a place for para-church organisations that exist to promote the ministry of healing, but they will operate most healthily when their chief interest is the encouragement of the ministry of healing in local churches rather than setting themselves up as alternative or even superior sources of that ministry.
To make a thing local is to make it real. It takes it away from the exotic world of Americans in lammé suits performing miracles before adoring multitudes and makes it people we know and trust praying for other people we know and love in the familiar context where we gather to hear God's word and break Christ's bread. When things happen there they get a different quality of attention and they give rise to much more rooted hopes. In the background of the encounter of the healer and the sick person there is the continuing prayer of the local community that knows and cares for them both.
In the sixties in Northern Ireland my wife and I were asked to pray with a one year old girl who had metabolic problems that were preventing her growth and, in the mercy of God, after one brief session of prayer it soon became obvious that she had started to thrive and over the months and the years she developed in a normal and healthy way. Nothing was said publicly but news of what had happened to little Rosie soon spread through that close-knit community. It was as if Jesus had stepped out of his stained glass window and started to walk through our streets and work in our homes and the Christian community began to look more like a place where the gospel was not just talked about but happened.
This kind of localised ministry is not a one-off tip and run as it is with itinerant healers. The sick person is met in the whole context of his life and there is a continuing pastoral concern for the ongoing process that ministry initiates.
In such a context realism is mandatory. Itinerant healers make claims that it is hard to verify, but within the local churches there are witnesses to what happens and what does not happen that rebukes and controls over-enthusiastic triumphalism and is forced to come to terms with all the problems, questions and doubts that arise when the prayers are not answered and the healing does not happen.
Every congregation that is open to the healing ministry sooner or later has to face the situation when one of its most beloved and respected members falls terminally ill. All the resources of prayer and faith are summoned and put into operation; prophecies or assurances of healing may be given but in spite of it all the person dies and the theological questions that we have been discussing become existential and agonising. Then the whole relationship of the community to God and his promises comes into question in a way that, in the mercy of God, will in the end be deepening rather than destructive. This will mean that the ministry of healing will be exercised not in a context of triumphalist fantasy but where people face together things as they really are, and look to whole gospel of Christ, incarnate crucified and risen, if not to answer them, at any rate to cope with them. For all these reasons, here as in many other contexts, local is best.
The Contemporary Context
Finally we must look at the historical context within which the healing ministry is exercised today.
When I was ordained fifty three years ago, the ministry of healing as part of the local church was almost unknown. It was exercised by a few pioneers who attracted a lot of interest but who were seen as extraordinary, and there was at best only a glimmer of expectation that their ministry might become part of the ministry of us all.
With the charismatic renewal of the sixties and seventies that began to change. The poor expectation that anybody might be healed by God was transformed into an abounding expectation that everybody might be healed right here and now.
Theologically that hyper-optimism was a corrective to the dispensationalist exclusion of healing ministry that had prevailed for so long, but it in turn proved to be unsustainable when all the unhealed sick and the unanswered prayers that we have been talking about began to accumulate.
In his recent book Promise and Presence, which has a whole chapter on the theology of healing, John Colwell, the Baptist theologian, suggests that much of that charismatic hyper-optimism was a sociological reflection in the Christian world of the contemporary secular culture. As cure-all wonder drugs that were going to banish sickness from the world appeared one after the other, death was no longer seen not as the passage to fulfilment to be prepared for, as in classical Christian teaching and practice, but as defeat and failure to be dreaded and avoided. When that culture took over in Christian circles the cure of souls became the cure of bodies and a theology of healing was pursued one-sidedly without a balancing theology of suffering and death.
If the dispensationalists expected too little and the charismatics expected too much, the historic context leaves us with the same set of questions as the theological and pastoral contexts that we have been exploring. How are we to understand a ministry of healing within the covenantal context of the Christian gospel in a way that is true to the realities that we encounter and that takes full account of both the faithful promises and the sovereign freedom of the living God?
In my next article I shall offer some pointers as to how that central question can be approached and addressed.
The Revd Dr Tom Smail is retired and a former lecturer in doctrine at St John's College, Nottingham and the former editor of Theological Renewal
These posts are by guest authors for Fulcrum