A Social Anthropologist’s Analysis of Contemporary Healing, Part 2

 

How do doctors respond to claims of healing? Are there any lasting social effects when people experience divine healing?

 

Physical and Spiritual Phenomena

Since John White is contributing a chapter to this book concerning the physical manifestations which sometimes seem to accompany the working of the Holy Spirit, here I shall confine myself to a few brief remarks arising out of my own investigations.³²

When some people at a Baptist church in Leeds began to display behaviour such as shaking, weeping or falling over (Jer. 23:9; Dan. 10:10; Neh. 8:6, 9; Jn. 18:6; Rev. 1:10, 17-18)³³ during a healing service led by some of Wimber’s team, a critic later described the events as a case of mass hysteria. This opinion was expressed by a theologian with no training in psychology or psychiatry. However, it led me to include in my follow-up interviews a simple psychological test which gives a preliminary indication of the plausibility of this explanation.

A retrospective study of a case of mass hysteria among some English schoolgirls confirmed the hypothesis of Professor Eysenck that more hysterical individuals tend to rank high on scales of both extroversion and neuroticism.³⁴ However, only twelve out of the one hundred people in my random sample ranked high on both these scales, and all but two of them were only just over the border into the ‘high’ category on only one of the two scales. Nevertheless, virtually all of these 100 people had themselves experienced at least some of the physical phenomena. I found that reports of these experiences were spread across all the different psychological categories of people and were by no means confined to any one psychological ‘type’. This argues against any theory that these physical phenomena can be explained away by a theory of mass hysteria.

Another theory is that these phenomena can be explained away as a form of learned behaviour. A number of experts agree that some form of auto-suggestion can influence such behaviour in at least certain cases. In my questionnaire at John Wimber’s Harrogate conference I asked people to indicate whether or not they had experienced such phenomena in the past or for the first time at Harrogate. The question then arose how to interpret the statistics. For instance, among those who had fallen over in the past, 69% (499 out of 725) did not repeat the behaviour again at the Harrogate conference. It might therefore be argued that this was not ‘learned behaviour’. On the other hand, the fact that 31% did fall over again might be regarded either as ‘learned behaviour’ or else as further genuine ministry from God which necessitated this kind of phenomenon. However, it was clear that ‘milder’ phenomena such as the tingling or shaking of hands, weeping or changes in breathing were much more likely to be repeated or else to be manifested for the first time than were more ‘dramatic’ forms of behaviour such as falling over, screaming or shouting. These ‘milder’ phenomena are often associated with ministry to others (including weeping in the context of intercessory prayer) and are quite likely to be repeated, whereas phenomena connected with receiving ministry tend to recur less often and usually cease once the ministry is completed.

For well-known phenomena like falling over it was more difficult to test for the influence of suggestion because many of those present at the Harrogate conference had attended other Wimber conferences or heard about them. This was particularly the case for a dozen commonly occurring phenomena publicly mentioned on the third day of the 1985 Sheffield conference during a workshop on physical healing—by which time the participants had already witnessed most of these forms of behaviour.

However, when I later tried to classify all the different kinds of phenomena actually reported on their questionnaires by participants at the Harrogate conference, I found that I needed over two hundred different categories. Most of these were very difficult or else impossible to explain away as due to ‘suggestion’. They included sensations of something like “electricity” or a “force field … like something out of Star Wars.”³⁵ A few people spoke not of heat (which could be due to suggestion) but of “cold sensations” or “severe chilling.”³⁶ Several people mentioned experiences of a heavy weight or pressure upon parts of their bodies, particularly the head or chest.³⁷ Others felt what they variously described as like a “mantle,” a “blanket” or a “heavy sheepskin coat” over them. A few found themselves unexpectedly outside their physical bodies, in one case looking down on her own body receiving ministry while “resting in the Spirit” on the floor.³⁸ Two people mentioned smelling fragrances of flowers. One of them afterwards asked the young German man next to her if he had smelt them too. At first he replied “No,” but then he “reluctantly” told her that during that session he had “walked in the garden with the Lord.”³⁹

It is difficult, and in several cases probably impossible, to explain away these and other kinds of experiences as due merely to ‘suggestion’. There are also many other accounts of individuals with no prior exposure to this kind of ministry, or teaching about it, who have nevertheless experienced some of these phenomena. A clear example occurred in 1992 at my own church in England. In my message on being “open to God” I had not mentioned these kinds of phenomena at all, but when the Holy Spirit was invited to minister to people the first person to display any kind of “unusual” behaviour—and the only one to “rest in the Spirit”—was a Ukrainian girl who was visiting us at the time. I knew that she had definitely not come across such phenomena previously in her limited contacts with Orthodox or Catholic churches in the Ukraine.

 

Whom Does God Heal?

We do not know why God seems to heal some people but not others. Why did Jesus heal one man at the pool of Bethesda and apparently leave other invalids alone? Wimber suggests that a clue is given in John 5:19, when Jesus says that the Son can do nothing by himself but only what he sees the Father doing, but this still leaves unanswered the question of why some are healed when others are not.

The fact that some 57% of my sample reported a sustained and noticeable physical improvement following prayer has been regarded by some as a surprisingly high percentage. Others, however, ask why the remaining 43% did not receive such healing.

John Wimber himself only prayed with a small number of these people because the primary focus of the conference was on training other Christians how to pray for healing. The ones who prayed were usually members of Wimber’s team, often in conjunction with ordinary delegates to the conference who later began to assume more leading roles in praying for others. Since the intention was to provide opportunities for “learning by doing,” many of those praying for others were relatively inexperienced in this kind of ministry. I have heard of one instance in which a woman who did not receive healing at a Wimber conference in Brighton was subsequently healed through the ministry of Andy Arbuthnot of the London Healing Mission.⁴⁰ Arbuthnot comments that in this case what God wanted to do first was to deal with the effects of certain emotional traumas in the woman’s past which were affecting her physical health. Presumably these other kinds of needs were not discerned by those ministering to her at Brighton. Another comment on my statistic of 57% receiving noticeable and sustained physical healing comes from the director of Ellel Grange, a healing centre in the north of England, who assumed that some of those ministering had not discerned the need for rebuking evil spirits associated with certain illnesses. He presumed that the rate of healing would have been higher if more of those praying for others had discerned the need for a ministry of deliverance from demons.⁴¹

Such ideas may account for some but by no means all cases in which no healing was received. A good example is that of Jennifer Rees-Larcombe, who between 1982 and 1987 had five serious and life-threatening attacks of encephalitis, an inflammation of the brain and meninges, further complicated by inflamed nerves. Between these acute episodes of illness, the inflammation of the brain, meninges, nerves and muscles seemed to remain in a chronic form and was labeled by the neurologists as Myalgic Encephalomyelitis. Her continuous pain, loss of balance, muscular weakness and fatigue meant that she had to use a wheelchair when she needed to go more than a few yards. Doctors had recognized their inability to provide a cure, only alleviate some of the symptoms. Jennifer was receiving the highest level of State disability allowance and was told that her condition had deteriorated to the point where regular assessments would no longer be necessary—that is, they did not expect her to recover. She had also been to many Christian healing meetings but had not been healed. In fact, she even wrote a book entitled Beyond Healing, and the Lord gave her a ministry of encouraging those who were suffering. However, when the Lord eventually did heal her, he chose to use not a well-known person such as John Wimber but a recently converted young colored woman who, on account of her own past sins, had felt she was “not good enough” to pray for Jennifer. When she did pray, it was a simple and sincere prayer of faith through which God healed Jennifer.⁴²

Jennifer’s healing was publicized on the front page of the local free newspaper in her home town of Tunbridge Wells, and became a well-known sign of God’s power. In John’s gospel Christ’s miracles are often called signs, and helped people to come to faith—but also provoked opposition from the religious establishment. Anecdotal evidence from those I interviewed who had prayed for God to heal non-Christians indicates that often there were noticeable signs of God’s power at work. It was not always the case, however, but even those who did not receive healing appreciated the concern shown by those who were willing to pray for them.

God’s ways are above our ways, and his thoughts above our thoughts (Isa. 55:8-9). Nevertheless I did find some further interesting clues as to why certain categories of people appear to be healed more often than others. What was particularly interesting to me was to note the patterns which emerged from analyzing my results according to sociological variables like age and social class, which might give some clues towards understanding why God seems to heal some people but not others.

I found that younger people reported significantly greater degrees of healing than older people.⁴³ It should be stressed that this is a statistical finding and not an absolute rule: there are always exceptions. For example, a retired missionary told me how before the conference she had been unable to hear her watch tick with her right ear, but since then had been able to do so, and had ceased using a hearing aid.

To some extent, this tendency for higher rates of physical healing to be concentrated among younger people is linked with the fact that more specific words of knowledge tend to pick out younger people. At the Harrogate conference, those aged under forty constituted 85% of those responding to highly specific public words of knowledge. The percentage of those under forty years old dropped to 60% for those responding to revelations of “medium” specificity and 46% for those responding to very general “words of knowledge.” This correlation was a surprise to John Wimber when I told him about it. It is also statistically significant.⁴⁴

My statistical findings nevertheless raise questions about God’s priorities. We do not know the ages of most of the people whom Jesus healed, but we do know that five of the seven biblical accounts of a dead person being raised to life in response to specific prayer involve younger people. Though raising the dead may seem highly unusual to us today, the same correlation with younger people is found in most reports in our own century of raising the dead.⁴⁵ Certainly raising the dead is one instance in which a “psychosomatic” component to the healing can be ruled out.

One suggestion which tries to account for my statistical findings regarding physical healing is the idea that younger people have more “vitality” and heal quicker than older people, whose illnesses are often of a degenerative kind. However, the consistency between my statistical findings and the biblical accounts of raising the dead seems to indicate a wider theological explanation. I suggest that these statistical links with the age of the person healed relate to the fact that all healing is, in one sense, “temporary,” in so far as we are healed into bodies which eventually die. Presumably there is a purpose if God does grant physical healing in this life. Might it be in order that the person healed might fulfill a particular role on this earth, for which the healing is necessary?

By contrast, I found no statistical links with age for what is variously known as “inner healing,” “emotional healing” or “healing of the memories”. Often this involves repentance from particular sins or the forgiveness of people against whom one has harbored resentments. Older people are as likely as younger people to report high degrees of inner healing. The result is often a purer lifestyle—which one might see as a preparation also for heaven. God desires this of all Christians, no matter how old they are.

Another finding of mine was that those from the highest social class, who are also better educated, report significantly lesser degrees of physical healing.⁴⁶ This again ties in with what we read in the ministry of Jesus, that he came to bring good news to the poor (Lk. 4:18). Two of those from the higher social classes whom he did heal—Jairus’ daughter and the nobleman’s son—were actually younger people. Today, it might be that somehow the higher education of some people is itself a barrier to their receiving divine healing with a childlike faith.

A disproportionately high proportion of those attending Wimber’s Harrogate conference were professional and better-educated people such as doctors and clergy. Among those in my random sample who received physical healing, some of the more “dramatic” cases were reported by those from the “working class.” For instance, one man had almost died after falling fifty feet from a crane. One of the bones in his leg had not grown back straight but “came out sideways as a spur” but the subsequent operation left his leg 1 1/2 inches shorter than the other. At Harrogate “we prayed for my leg: I watched the leg come level with my right leg and even heard it grow—like breaking wood. I could not walk right for twenty years but now I can go walking with our vicar. I didn’t wear a built-up shoe, just limped. I’d learnt to walk with my hip displaced but … my stature had got a wobble on.… For the first time in twenty-one years I can walk without discomfort or pain, it seems level to me. People used to ask what was wrong with my leg but now they don’t mention it.”⁴⁷

Another working-class person in my random sample told me how all her life she had suffered from hyper-sensitive teeth. Since childhood she had been unable to bite on ice cream, and in winter she had to keep her mouth closed or covered over while outside or else her teeth would throb. Even if she had kept her mouth shut, she could not have a warm drink for half an hour after coming indoors. I have been advised by a dentist that a healing of this degree of hyper-sensitivity is not the kind which could be attributed to a “normal” reduction of sensitivity over time.

However, after prayer at the Harrogate conference this woman received complete healing. There was a slight recurrence later that evening, but the following day she was able to walk around outside in the cold and then immediately drink a cup of tea without any sensation at all. Since then she had gone through a whole winter without any pain and without having to take any extra precautions while outside. Her dentist was aware of her hyper-sensitivity and sent me details from her record card which confirmed the presence of persistent sensitivity over the previous four years and ten months while she had been receiving treatment from him. At her next routine check-up after the Harrogate conference, he wrote, “patient no longer complains of sensitive teeth.”⁴⁸

These examples of healings among “working class” people in Britain may not seem so dramatic when compared with the miraculous filling of dental cavities among very poor people, or cases of raising the dead in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.⁴⁹ On a worldwide scale, we in the affluent West all belong to the richer social classes. Might it be for this reason that apparently more dramatic cases of healing seem to occur more often among Christians in Africa, Latin America and Asia? Or is it that we tend to rely on divinely ordained medicines and drugs, whereas God specially heals those deprived of access to such treatments?

 

Divine Healing: Fiction or Fact?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that many people have received through Christian prayer remarkable healings which bring glory to Christ and which are difficult or impossible to explain away in conventional medical terms. The available medical evidence and case histories indicate that the healings themselves have to be regarded as facts. Although some people might attempt to interpret those facts in a variety of ways, there is mounting evidence to indicate that prayer in Christ’s name seems to be an important factor in many medically inexplicable recoveries.

Moreover, the more specific public “words of knowledge” cannot be explained away as due to “coincidence” or human manipulation, but seem to indicate a source of knowledge beyond that of the person receiving the revelation. In the examples discussed in this chapter, the words of knowledge are associated with healings, but in other cases they can be of a moral nature, intended to lead a person to repentance.⁵⁰ This seems to indicate that the source of the revelations possesses consciousness and not only cares about healing and wholeness but is also morally concerned to move a person toward godly, biblical norms.

Similar kinds of difficulties arise in trying to explain away associated physical phenomena by reference to known psychological processes. In each case, known medical, psychological or sociological explanations might account for a limited part of the available facts, but are unable to account for all of them.

A more fruitful approach seems to be a statistical one, which assesses the probability of specific outcomes occurring by “chance.” Where these turn out to be highly unlikely, we have to ask if another factor needs to be taken into account. In the case under discussion, the participants attribute these “unexpected” outcomes to the power of God.

What is particularly interesting and unexpected is that the healings and words of knowledge discussed above indicate a significant “bias” in favor of the young and those from the lower social classes. This pattern is even clearer if we consider miraculous healings in a global perspective. The same pattern can also be discerned in the earthly ministry of Jesus. Therefore the underlying values behind the manner in which God grants physical healing to certain people continue to be the same today as they were in the earthly ministry of the Lord Jesus Christ.

 

PR 

 

Notes

³²This section summarizes some of the material in chapter four (pp.162-202) of my book Healing: Fiction, Fantasy or Fact?, op.cit., to which the reader should refer for further supporting evidence and documentation.

³³See appendix 6 in this book: “Models of Prayer for Healing and Related Phenomena.”

³⁴Peter D. Moss and Colin P. McEvedy, “An Epidemic of Overbreathing Among Schoolgirls,” British Medical Journal, November 1966, pp.1295-1300.

³⁵See appendix 6 in this book: “Models of Prayer for Healing and Related Phenomena”; Dr. Cyril H. Powell, the British New Testament scholar, points to occasions when Jesus said He felt “power had gone out from him” to heal people (Mk. 5:30; Lk. 5:17; 6:19; 8:46). Some scholars, points out Dr. Powell, have viewed “the dunamis [power] mentioned here as something automatic and quasi-physical, like a fluid or operating like an electric current” (C. H. Powell, The Biblical Concept of Power [London: Epworth Press, 1963], p. 109); cf. the descriptions of others regarding the power of God in these passages—”material substance (stoffliche Substanz),” F. Fenner, Die Krankheit im Neuen Testament (Leipzig, 1930), p. 83); “a power-substance (eine Kraftsubstanz),” W. Grundmann, Der Begriff der Kraft in der neutestamentlichen Gedankenwelt (Stuttgart, 1932), pp. 62ff.

³⁶The possibility that these cold sensations are sometimes indicative of demonic activity is suggested by a different report of cold sensations which were felt in the context of ministry, at a church in Sheffield, to a non-Christian Japanese man belonging to a Shinto-derived religion named Tenriky.

³⁷In a footnote to my report on the Sheffield conference (Wimber and Springer, Power Healing, p.286) I mentioned that the Hebrew word for ‘glory’ (kābōd)is derived from a root with a primary meaning of ‘weight’ or ‘substance’ (BDB, pp. 457ff.) and might be related to experiences of the ‘falling phenomenon’. There might be a hint of this in 2 Chronicles 5:13-14 (and I Kgs. 8:10-11), when the priests ‘could not stand to minister because of the cloud; for the glory of the Lord filled the house of God’ (RSV). Compare also Ezek. 3:14-15, 22-23; Isa. 8:11; Ps. 32:4.

³⁸Some Christians are suspicious of ‘out-of-the-body’ experiences because in occult circles they are sometimes artificially induced. However, Dr. Richard Turner, a Christian psychiatrist, informs me that such experiences are also not uncommon ‘when an individual is experiencing a good deal of emotion’, and that in some ways ‘it can be seen as protective to the individual’. Biblical accounts of visions like those mentioned in Ezekiel 3:14-15, 2 Corinthians 12:3-4 or Revelation 1:10 are ambiguous about whether the person was within or outside his physical body, but Daniel 8:2 states that it occurred in a vision (which left him exhausted).

³⁹Fragance associated with Christ is referred to II Cor. 2:14, 16 (see G. Delling, TDNT, vol. 5, p. 495; cf. A. Stumpff, TDNT, vol. 2, p. 810) and fragance as a sign of the Spirit of God’s presence is attested in post-biblical Christian tradition (related to II Cor. 2:14, 16 by the well-known New Testament scholar, E. Nestle, “Der sÙsse Geruch als Erweis des Geistes,” ZNW 4 [1903]: 272; ZNW 7 [1906]: 95-96; see S. M. Burgess, The Holy Spirit: Eastern Christian Traditions [Peabody: Hendrickson, 1989], pp. 3-4.

⁴⁰Mentioned by Arbuthnot in part VI, on “How We Minister” in the video series Christian Prayer and Healing (Ashford, Kent: Anchor Recordings).

⁴¹Peter Horrobin, personal communication.

⁴²Jennifer Rees-Larcombe Unexpected Healing (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1991).

⁴³p=<0.001. (This means that the likelihood of this result being due to chance is less than one in a thousand. It is therefore highly significant, considering that a result with a one in twenty likelihood of being due to chance is normally regarded as statistically significant.)

⁴⁴p=<0.05 (and is virtually at the p=0.025 level).

⁴⁵See pages 64-65 of my book Healing: Fiction, Fantasy or Fact?, op.cit.; Gardner, Healing Miracles: A Doctor Investigates, pp. 84-85, 138-140; David Pytches Come, Holy Spirit: Learning to Minister in Power (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1985; published in North America as Spiritual Gifts in the Local Church, Minneapolis, MN: Bethany House, 1985), pp.232-239; C. P. Wagner, How to Have a Healing Ministry in Any Church (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1988), pp. 172-178; Mel Tari, Like a Mighty Wind (Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1971), pp. 66f.; Kurt Koch, The Revival in Indonesia (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregal, 1972), pp. 130ff.; Don Crawford, Miracles in Indonesia (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1972), p. 84.

⁴⁶p=<0.01.

⁴⁷Healing: Fiction, Fantasy or Fact?, op.cit., pp.37-38. When I interviewed this man, I also could see no noticeable limp. However, one of the frustrating sides to this kind of research was that he was afraid lest my pursuing the medical evidence might affect his legal claim to compensation from his former employers if they learned that he had been healed!

⁴⁸Healing: Fiction, Fantasy or Fact?, op.cit., pp.38-40.

⁴⁹For details, see, for instance, Gardner Healing Miracles: A Doctor Investigates, op.cit., 137-141, 175-184; Pytches Come, Holy Spirit: Learning to Minister in Power, pp.232-239; Lewis Healing: Fiction, Fantasy or Fact?, op.cit., pp.331-332; C. P. Wagner, How to Have a Healing Ministry in Any Church (Ventura, CA: Regal, 1988), pp. 172-178; Mel Tari, Like a Mighty Wind (Carol Stream, IL: Creation House, 1971), pp. 66f.; Kurt Koch, The Revival in Indonesia (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregal, 1972), pp. 130ff.; Don Crawford, Miracles in Indonesia (Wheaton, IL: Tyndale House, 1972), p. 84.

⁵⁰An example is given on page 248 of my appendix to Wimber’s Power Healing. Scripture quotations, unless otherwise indicated, are taken from the NIV®.

This chapter is from Gary S. Greig and Kevin N. Springer, eds., The Kingdom and the Power: Are Healing and the Spiritual Gifts Used by Jesus and the Early Church Meant for the Church Today? A Biblical Look at How to Bring the Gospel to the World with Power (Ventura, CA: Regal Books, 1993). Used with permission.