James Robinson: Divine Healing
James Robinson, Divine Healing: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition Years, 1890-1906: Theological Transposition in the Transatlantic World (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2013), 238 pages, ISBN 9781620324080.
James Robinson’s second volume in his Divine Healing series is a major contribution to the study of Pentecostal origins in the Anglo-American world. An interesting and highly researched work, Divine Healing: The Holiness-Pentecostal Transition Years, includes enough anecdotes and testimonies from primary sources to engage the lay reader and a tempered, even-handed review of the secondary literature and historical critiques others have had concerning the divine healing movement of the late 19th century and early 20th.
The author, (PhD Queen’s University, Belfast, 2001), is a relative newcomer to the field, having retired from a lifelong vocation as a grammar school teacher in Northern Ireland prior to his contributions to Pentecostal studies. His volumes include forewords by such noted Pentecostal scholars as Candy Gunther Brown (Indiana University) and William K. Kay (University of Chester). As a Presbyterian elder with Pentecostal roots, Robinson is conservative in regards to his work on divine healing: “A more subliminal, and possibly ethereal, aspiration is that some within the church of our day will find something in the book pertinent to the safeguard and furtherance of the historic ministry of healing†(Robinson 2011: Kindle Location 145). This hopeful conservatism underwrites both volumes and shines brilliantly through Robinson’s careful attention to detail and objectivity.
Transition focuses on the years between 1890-1906. His prior volume covers 1830-1890, and a planned volume will investigate 1906-1930. However, these dates are not tight restrictions, but, rather, a permeable focus on people and highlights of the proto-Pentecostal era building up to Azusa.
Transition begins with a brief overview of the preceding volume and establishes the parameters of the rest of the work. In the introduction, Robinson outlines three distinctive features of the radical healing apologetic that underwrote the flowering of the movement. These features were: 1) Redemption extended to “both the spirit and the body.†2) “As salvation is through faith, so is healing,†and 3) “Medical intervention was considered the sign of a deficient faith and brought less glory to God†(Kindle locations 214-224). These features resurface time and time again in Robinson’s narrative and analysis. The rest of the Introduction links the Holiness-Pentecostal transition to earlier historical precedents and highlights divine healing teaching and practice in a variety of contexts.
Chapter 1 looks closely at the Holiness-Pentecostal transition in America. This transition occurred in the post-Bellum era and primarily among splinter groups off of the Methodist church. These splinter groups comprised the Wesleyan Holiness counter movement from which and in which radical divine healing advocates flourished. Again, Robinson underscores the connection between Holiness teaching and divine healing rooted in the extent of redemption. Following the trajectory from Methodism, through the Wesleyan Holiness counter movement, the author finishes out the chapter with how the Holiness movement with its divine healing overtones were linked to early Pentecostal movements and leaders such as Frank Sandford, the Shiloh Movement, Daniel Warner, and Alma White. These links, as elsewhere in the volume, are developed through extensive biography and narrative along with contemporaneous accounts from those outside the movement.
Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the Reformed-Pentecostal Transition, the legacy of J. Alexander Dowie’s Zion project, and prominent women leaders’ impact on the development of the doctrine of divine healing in its contribution to nascent Pentecostalism. Meticulous and extensive research combine to give perhaps the most comprehensive overview of Dowie’s theology and legacy. Robinson’s focus on Dowie operates as a synecdoche for his thesis, i.e., radical healers and their three aforementioned emphases contributed to the development of Pentecostalism. Further, the author uses Dowie as a touchstone to contextualize radical divine healing apologetics within the Anglo-American Reformed branch of Protestantism. In doing so, the perspectives and activities of Reformed divine healing advocates like A.B. Simpson, A.T. Pierson, and R.A. Torrey, are also covered. Moreover, in tracing the legacy of Dowie and Zion, Robinson notes: “The biographies [of former Zionites] all demonstrate the nexus between nineteenth-century Holiness restorationism and twentieth-century Pentecostalism. Zionite teaching provided a structure that allowed adherents to adjust to the Pentecostal experience†(Kindle location 3535). According to the author, Zionism significantly influenced Pentecostal luminaries-many of which had significant healing ministries- such as John G. Lake, Arthur Booth-Clibborn, Smith Wigglesworth, and Gerrit Polman. Chapter 4 carries the reader further into the development of Pentecostalism with its focus on women leaders who emphasized divine healing and holiness. These female leaders included Alys Pearsall Smith and especially Maria Woodworth-Etter, who “[w]hen it came to healing, she exceeded other healing evangelists as assessed by the number who claimed healing under her ministry†(Kindle location 4735). Carrie Judd Montgomery’s donations round off the narrative. The author concludes the chapter with an excursus on the phenomenon of neurasthenia, the much misunderstood, mostly 19th century condition that primarily afflicted women. The excursus serves as a foil to the previously mentioned feminine participation in the divine healing movement making their contributions all the more remarkable within the medically-reinforced, chauvinistic Victorian milieu.
The remainder of the volume centers on the wider context of the Holiness-Pentecostal transition in Britain and divine healing’s legacy within Pentecostalism. Robinson discusses competing spiritualities such as Mesmerism, magnetism, Christian Science, and spiritualism that vied for similar functions as divine healing among 19th and early 20th century populations. He shows that critics of divine healing often associated it with these other fin-de-siècle “metaphysical alternatives.†Moreover, contemporaneous with these, the Keswick movement arose and provided a Christian solution to the experience of the transcendent. Robinson then traces the rise of the divine healing movement and Pentecostalism in Britain through Keswick-influenced Bethshan Healing Home and leaders like Elizabeth Baxter et al. The author includes another helpful excursus on Christian Science that challenged various aspects of the divine healing movement in Britain and elsewhere to the degree that “faith healing, for the general populace, came increasingly to be identified with Christian Science†(Kindle location 5673). Such confusion between mind-over-matter/placebo effects and divine healing still exists. Transition ends with a look at the demise of the radical divine healing movement and a helpful discussion about its place within proto-Pentecostalism and Pentecostalism in general.
This book is essential for anyone seeking to understand the origins of Pentecostalism and its contexts. It is also essential for any serious student of divine healing. Robinson’s extensive accounts of the radical healers, their lives, and their teachings serves as a compendium of things not to do as well as things that need recovered and emulated. Furthermore, it is encouraging and enlightening to see how these early healers handled opposition and that the opposition they faced is similar to the opposition those who practice and believe in divine healing face today. However, what impressed me the most were the lifestyles and convictions of these early leaders.
Finally, perhaps Robinson’s greatest contribution to the ministry of divine healing through his labors is to spur better, clearer, and more biblical thinking about the subject. His objective handling of the contemporaneous critiques points to a seriousness about the ministry that practitioners would do well to regard.
Reviewed by Benjamin Crace
Other Works Cited
James Robinson, Divine Healing: The Formative Years:1830-1890. Theological Roots in the Transatlantic World (Eugene, OR: Pickwick Publications, 2011), 326 pages, ISBN 978-1610971058.
Publisher’s page: wipfandstock.com/store/Divine_Healing_The_HolinessPentecostal_Transition_Years_18901906_Theological_Transpositions_in_the_Transatlantic_World
