Agnes Sanford: Apostle of Healing and First Theologian of the Charismatic Renewal, Part 1, by William L. De Arteaga

Pneuma Review Spring 2006
Part 1 of 2

Introduction

In 1985 Dave Hunt, a lay cult watcher, published one of the most influential books of the 1980s, The Seduction of Christianity.¹ In that work he lambasted much of the leadership of the charismatic renewal for “seducing” the American Christianity with ideas and practices derived from occult sources. He attacked Mrs. Agnes Sanford and her writing with particular severity. Hunt claimed that her syncretistic theology was little more that witchcraft and shamanism, and should be totally rejected by the Christian community. Hunt was convinced that the ministry she pioneered, inner healing, was especially occultic and dangerous to Christians.²

In my work, Quenching the Spirit, I argued that such characterizations are destructive and untrue. Critics such as Hunt do not take into account the tragic situation within Nineteenth Century “orthodox” Christianity which labeled any form of healing prayer as cultic and heretical. The consensus orthodoxy of the era stressed the doctrine of cessationism, which also declared the gifts of the Spirit as unavailable in the current age. This theology combined with an unrecognized dependence on philosophical realism that came into both Catholicism and Protestantism from the late Middle Ages. The result was that the consensus orthodoxy of the era left no room for the role of the believer’s faith to move in healing prayer or in the gifts of the Spirit.³

An overview of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries shows a pattern in which the Holy Spirit moved the Church away from its cessationism-realism based theology. The Spirit simultaneously inspired different groups and individuals towards theologies that reincorporated the gifts of the Spirit. This allowed for a more active understanding of the role of mind, acting through faith in Christ, to activate the miraculous powers of the Kingdom of God. This was a move toward theologies based on moderate idealism, that is, that mind, with faith, can influence matter, as in healing and the miraculous, and away from theological systems based on radical realism where the Christian merely petitions that God act.⁴ A characteristic of faith-idealism is that physical evidence is of less immediate concern than the witness of the Word of God.

The shift from cessationist realism to faith idealism was a process that began in the middle of the Nineteenth Century and has yet to be completed. The first example of faith idealism as a conscious theology was in the writings and ministry of Phoebe Palmer, the famous Holiness evangelist who developed her “altar” theology which spread the gospel of Wesleyan total sanctification. For Mrs. Palmer the evidence of the believer’s sanctification was in the Word of God, not in a person’s physical actions.⁵ Later, the Faith-Cure Movement of the 1880s developed a similar doctrine in which healing was affirmed in spite of any immediate change in the health of the petitioner.⁶

Perhaps the single most important, and controversial, theologian of faith-idealism was the evangelist E.W. Kenyon. His work greatly influenced the theology and writings of Kenneth Hagin, and through him the entire charismatic movement. Dan McConnell’s work, A Different Gospel, strongly critiqued Kenyon’s (and thus Hagin’s) theology as syncretistic and occultic.⁷ McConnell attempted to show that Kenyon was mostly dependent on New Thought writers, and thus his theology was non-Christian and dangerous to the Church. However, in Quenching the Spirit I argued to the contrary and showed that influence by heretical movements has often forced Christians into a deeper encounter with truth. This is a process common to the formation of orthodox Christian theology throughout Church history.⁸

In the case of healing prayer in particular, the heretical Idealist Cults of the 19th Century, the Mind Cure movement and especially Christian Science, forced many in the Church to reevaluate and ultimately reject cessationism. Mrs. Agnes Sanford was among those who faced the challenge of the Idealist Cults head on and helped to transform healing prayer from a cultic activity to a normative Christian practice. She played a particularly significant role in moving many Christians within the mainline churches away from cessationism and into the pastoral practice of healing prayer, and introduced many to the gifts of the Spirit. Agnes Sanford (and her friend and colleague, Prof. Glenn Clark) influenced mainline Protestants towards moderate idealism in much the same way that the ministry of Kenyon (and later Kenneth Hagin) influenced Pentecostal circles.⁹

Mrs. Sanford’s Heritage

Agnes Sanford’s father, the Rev. Hugh W. White, was one of the most distinguished American missionaries to China in an era filled with dedicated and self-sacrificing missionaries. Hugh White intended to be a pastor, like his father, but he felt a calling as a missionary to China and went there immediately after seminary. Except for home leaves, he stayed there until his death in 1940. During his long service the Rev. White was forced to confront the inadequacies of cessationist theology in two major crises.¹⁰

One of his trusted Chinese elders baptized an entire family that had recently been converted. In this family, the husband had two wives, as was the custom among the merchant class in China. For the elder, there was no problem in this. The elder recognized that 1 Timothy 3 takes into account this situation. Further, to force the husband to renounce one of his wives would have condemned the rejected wife to a life of prostitution. Unfortunately, as clear as this issue was biblically, mission doctrine and policy forbade such baptisms. The Rev. White backed his elder. As a result, he was forced to leave his comfortable post and establish a new mission.

The second crisis began when another of the Rev. White’s trusted evangelical aides reported that on a round of the villages he had baptized two persons, received three new inquirers and “cast a demon out of old Mrs. Tsu.”¹¹ White was astonished by the reported exorcism – cessationist theology, the consensus orthodoxy of the times, claimed that demonic possession ended after Apostolic times. He accompanied his aid on his next rounds, and sure enough, the faith-filled layman ministered another exorcism in Rev. White’s presence. From that time on Rev. White began collecting evidence on possessions and exorcisms, eventually ministering many exorcisms himself.

He presented his finding in a book called Demonism Verified and Analyzed, which was published in 1922.¹² White believed that possession was a form of violent disassociation. The possessing force was not a spiritually independent entity; it was more like a psychic force or idea. Yet the exorcism itself was “real” in the sense that it was a form of rapid psychotherapy. This theory may not be entirely satisfactory, but it was a pioneer attempt to integrate biblical revelation with modern psychology, and his book deserved more attention than it received.¹³

Rev. Hugh White’s ministry taught his daughter Agnes, in her years of special impressionability, that certain elements of normative, “consensus orthodox” could be stubbornly unscriptural. It also showed her that perfectly sincere Christians, such as the fellow missionaries who opposed her father, were all too ready to confuse consensus doctrines with biblical revelation.

Birth, Education and Marriage

Agnes White was born in the Chinese city of Hsuchoufu on August 15, 1896, the eldest child of six. She received “home schooling” from her mother that stressed the conventional topics of Bible stories, verse memorization and reading. Mrs. White obviously did a good job, as she was able to encourage Agnes’s talent for writing to the point that at age ten she sold her first piece of writing to the Shanghai Mercury.

At age nine, during one of her father’s periodic home leaves, Agnes attended a revival in rural Virginia and made a “born again” commitment to Jesus Christ. By age eleven she was entirely dissatisfied with the conventional arguments that miracles were for the Apostolic Age alone. Later, as a teen-ager she became deeply depressed and bewildered over the denominational disputes over doctrines that split the American missionary effort in China, yet her commitments to Jesus and the Bible were unshaken. In 1914, age seventeen, Agnes returned to the United States to finish her education. She received a teaching certificate from North Carolina and subsequently attended Agnes Scott College for a year as an auditing student.

Agnes returned to China where she found a teaching position in Shanghai at a secondary school for missionary children.¹⁴ In that city she met and fell in love with Edgar (Ted) Sanford who was an Episcopal priest and principal of another Christian school. They were married in April of 1923 and the first of three children arrived the next year. Soon Ted moved his family to a post in the interior of China. That station proved to be a harrowing experience as the young missionary family was caught in battles between warlords.¹⁵ After this the Sanfords decided to take a temporary leave from China so that Ted could get an advanced degree. The year was 1925, and while in graduate school Ted felt a calling to go into the pastorate in America. He accepted a call as rector to a small church in Moorestown, New Jersey, Trinity Episcopal Church.

Continuing Education in Moorestown

After the Sanfords settled in Moorestown they had their third and last child, John—later to become the distinguished psychologist and writer. When John was a year and a half old he developed a severe ear infection. After several weeks of illness it seemed like John might die. The rector of a near-by Episcopal Church, Rev. Hollis Colwell dropped by the Sanford residence to see Ted on church business, and learned of John’s situation. Fr. Colwell had read New Thought literature on healing, and by the time of his visit to the Sanford’s he had developed into a practiced and faith-filled healer. He laid his hands on John’s ear, after which the toddler promptly went into a deep sleep and awoke completely well. In the days before antibiotics this was indeed a miraculous recovery.¹⁶

Fr. Colwell encouraged Mrs. Sanford to pray for the healing of others. At first Agnes was reluctant to do so. However, with Fr. Colwell help, she began to investigate the topic. He believed that a necessary ingredient of the healing ministry is an adherence to a strict health-food regime. Apparently Fr. Colwell had read the works of the Episcopal healing and health food pioneer, the Rev. Robert B. H. Bell, and had taken Bell’s dietary insights to an extreme position.¹⁷ Agnes looked into this and read some of the health-food literature available at the time (1931). In fact, for the rest of her life she adopted what would now be recognized as a moderate health food diet for herself and her family, avoiding processed foods and stressing fresh fruits and vegetables. However, she also discerned that although eating health foods was good, that could not be the foundation of either Fr. Colwell’s or anybody else’s healing power.

Agnes then set out to find out as much about healing as she could, and at this stage made a critical decision. She determined to compare whatever she read or heard by the standard set up by Jesus in the four gospels.¹⁸

This sounds very simple, but it did not prove to be so. First of all, I found that what He said went directly contrary to many of the explanations concerning religion that I had been taught since my youth. For instance, I had been told that the age of miracles was past – yet I had seen a miracle…I also knew that there was no use in trying to understand what I had not experienced. Therefore I set myself to find an experience of God’s power.

In order to do this, I laid aside temporarily all that I had been taught concerning Christianity. I did not disbelieve it, I merely laid it on the table to be considered later. And that is what all of us must do if we are to learn.¹⁹

She began with reading Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures, but felt bewildered by the vocabulary and philosophical underpinnings of Christian Science (radical idealism), and laid it aside. Much more useful was the Christian New Thought writer Emmet Fox. In his classic work, Sermon On The Mount, Agnes spirit found profound resonance.²⁰ Here was a person who believed in the power of God and of scripture for the here and now – a common assumption of New Thought writers. Ironically, this non-cessationist view placed Fox closer to the plain and literal understanding of scripture than the more orthodox and conservative Christians of the era. Agnes’s firm devotion to Jesus and her determination to use the gospels as her discernment anchor saved her from adopting Fox’s Arian Christology – something that in any case is not manifest in the Sermon On The Mount. She continued to look into the available literature of healing including the literature of the Unity School of Christianity. It seems that she did not encounter at this time the literature of the Evangelical healing revival of the 1880s. She also made contact with a small church in Philadelphia run by an ex-Baptist who had been expelled from her congregation for practicing Christian healing.²¹

Fr. Colwell continued to urge Agnes to move out in faith and pray for the healing of others. Her first attempt was a failure; she had prayed for a young man who had gone insane. Years later she recognized that type of illness is among the most difficult to heal, involving much prayer, deliverance and intercession.²² Her second attempt was totally successful. This case was one of a young child dying of a severe infection that stirred in her a special compassion, for it was infection that almost killed her youngest child. Agnes described that case in Sealed Orders:

But the time came when I felt strongly urged to march myself to a hospital and offer to pray for a child desperately ill with a streptococcus infection. This was in the days before the miracle drugs, and the child had the infection in the heart, the kidneys, and the blood stream…

I was terrified. I would as soon have walked up to the mouth of a cannon, or so I thought. But the urge of compassion was strong, for I knew the child would die unless something intervened… Strange to say, as soon as I sat down beside the bed and began to talk to the child, I had no fear at all! The venture seemed as simple and as natural as if I had been doing it all my life… I laid hands on the region of the heart and simply asked Jesus to make him well, and then thanked Jesus because I knew he was doing it. The next day the child’s blood stream and heart were free of infection. The kidneys took one more day.²³

We should notice that already she was praying in the “moderate idealist’ style, thanking God for the healing even though no evidence was manifest. This case greatly encouraged her, and she began praying for others. Soon she formed a lady’s Bible study and prayer group, which met in the parish chapel once a week. This group developed great power in intercessory prayer and soon Mrs. Sanford was building up case upon case in effective healing prayer. She also began acquiring a reputation as an expert in healing and began receiving invitations to speak publicly on the topic. At first she would be invited by women’s groups, as ministers would be deathly afraid of anything to do with healing, especially from a woman, but gradually she began to receive a few direct invitations to speak in the churches.

Ministry at Tilton Army Hospital

By the outset of World War II she was well read, well practiced in healing and strong in discernment. Mrs. Sanford volunteered for service as a Gray Lady at Tilton Army Hospital at Ft. Dix. Every week she would spend a full day there. Her assigned duties were to pass around a cart of comic books, magazines, candies and flowers for the wounded men in the hospital. It was strictly and absolutely forbidden to pray for the men. Soon however her compassion overcame her respect for the lawfulness of authority (Acts 4:18-22). Often she would place her hands underneath a copy of Life magazine (the largest magazine available) so that the authorities would not see what she was doing.

Agnes later came to see this period in her life as the most fruitful one in her healing ministry. God’s healing power flowed through her to an unusual degree, partly because there was no publicity and partly because war wounds were not associated with personal sin of the soldiers. Thus the healing power of God could flow without impediment from unresolved sin or unforgiveness. As she gained more confidence in this secret ministry, she began to teach the soldiers how to pray for themselves and one another. She had particular success in the “wet ward” where soldiers with infected wounds were often relegated to die slow deaths. Not long after she finished teaching the men to pray for one another, that ward was closed down with the soldiers discharged and healed.²⁵

Just after the war ended Agnes was caught in the very act of praying for a soldier! She was brought to her supervisor, a dedicated, orthodox Christian woman, who tongue lashed her as a dangerous heretic and witch, and dismissed her. Agnes was shaken and hurt by this, but understood that she needed to forgive the nurse or her healing ministry would be weakened. The Lord turned evil into good. Agnes then had time to return to her writing, and she wrote a best-selling novel about her experiences at Tilton Army Hospital, Oh, Watchman!²⁶ She also continued a busy schedule of appearances at church healing missions and lectures.

Part 2 continues in the next issue.

Notes

¹ Dave Hunt and T.A. McMahon, The Seduction of Christianity (Eugene: Harvest House Publishers, 1985).

² Ibid., see especially chapter 9 “Shamanism Revived.” In this paper I will not cover Mrs. Sanford’s development of the ministry of inner healing. I hope to present that controversial topic at next year’s SPS conference.

³ William De Arteaga, Quenching the Spirit (Lake Mary: Creation House, 1996).

⁴ William De Arteaga, “Confusing the Roots With the Fruits,” Ministries Today 9 (July/August 1991), 56-62, and Quenching the Spirit, passim.

⁵ Charles Edward White, “Phoebe Palmer and the Development of Pentecostal Pneumatology.” Wesleyan Theological Journal 23 (spring/fall, 1983): 198-212.

⁶ The classic work of the Faith Cure Movement is: Carrie F. Judd’s, The Prayer of Faith (Buffalo, N.Y.: H. Otis, 1882).

⁷ D. R. McConnell, A Different Gospel: A Historical and Biblical Analysis of the Modern Faith Movement (Peabody: Hendrickson, 1988). Subsequent intensive research by Dale H. Simmons, published in his book, E. W. Kenyon and Postbellum Pursuit of Peace, Power, and Plenty (Lanham, MD: Scare Crow Press, 1977) and Geir Lie in his article “The Theology of E. W. Kenyon: Plain Heresy or Within the Boundaries of Pentecostal-Charismatic “Orthodoxy”?” PNEUMA 22 (spring, 2000) 85-114, have shown that Kenyon was influenced mostly by Holiness theology, not New Though.

⁸ De Arteaga, Quenching the Spirit, chapter 13. My position is based largely on Harold O. J. Brown’s Heresies: The Image of Christ in the Mirror of Heresy and Orthodoxy From the Apostles to the Present (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1984) and Leonard Verduin’s, The Reformers and their Stepchildren (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 1964).

⁹ The role that Glenn Clark and his CFO played in challenging cessationism and preparing the way for the charismatic renewal is described in my article “Glenn Clark’s Camps Furthest Out: The Schoolhouse of the Charismatic Renewal” PNEUMA: The Journal of the Society for Pentecostal Studies 25:2 (2003) 265-288.

¹⁰ The Rev White’s trials with cessationist orthodoxy in China are mentioned in Mrs. Sanford’s Sealed Orders, (Plainfield: Logos International, 1971), and extensively described in her autobiographical novel, The Second Mrs. Wu (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1965), which gives a detailed description of her years at the mission station in Hsuchoufu.

¹¹ A description of this incident is found in The Second Mrs. Wu, 209. See also: Agnes Sanford, “Prayer of Healing,” Tape #140-A, Ft. Myers: Lord’s Own Tape Ministry, n.d.

¹² Hugh W. White, Demonism Verified and Analyzed, (Shanghai: Presbyterian Mission Press, 1922).

¹³ It is informative to see the similarities between Rev. White’s view of possession and exorcism and the view of M. Scott Peck, whose books on evil have become best-sellers. See especially Peck’s chapter 5, “Of Possession and Exorcism” in his People of the Lie, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1983).

¹⁴ Agnes Sanford’s novel, The Rising River, (New York: J.B. Lippincott, 1968), contains autobiographical details of this period of her life.

¹⁵ For a glimpse of this high-adventure, see: Edgar L. Sanford, God’s Healing Power (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice-Hall, 1959), 155-159.

¹⁶ Sealed Orders, 96-98.

¹⁷ Fr. Bell’s major work was: The Life Abundant: a manual for living, (Milwaukee: Moorehouse Publishing Co., 1927).

¹⁸ Sealed Orders, 102-103.

¹⁹ Agnes Sanford, Behold Your God (St. Paul: Macalester Park, 1958), 2.

²⁰ Emmet Fox, The Sermon on the Mount: a general introduction to scientific Christianity in the form of a spiritual key to Matthew V, VI and VII (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1932).

²¹ See: Sealed Orders, 103 ff. for a description of the works she read in her first years of her healing ministry.

²² Agnes Sanford, The Healing Power of the Bible, (New York: Pillar Books, 1976), 54.

²³ Sealed Orders, 110-111

²⁴ Ibid., 141.

²⁵ Ibid., 178-188.

²⁶ Agnes Sanford, Oh, Watchman! (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1951).

Editor’s Note:

At the time of printing, an excerpt from Agnes Sanford’s book Healing Light was available online at this location: http://agnessanford.wwwhubs.com/sanford2.htm

This article is an unpublished paper “Agnes Sanford: Ecumenical Teacher, Apostle of Healing Prayer and  First Theologian of the Charismatic Renewal” originally presented on March 15, 2002 at the 2002 Society for Pentecostal Studies Conference convened at Southeastern College in Lakeland, Florida. Used by permission of the author.