Divine Healing: The Formative Years: 1830–1890: Theological Roots in the Transatlantic World

By James Robinson and William K. Kay

Divine healing is commonly practiced today throughout Christendom and plays a significant part in the advance of Christianity in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. Such wide acceptance of the doctrine within Protestantism did not come without hesitation or controversy. The prevailing view saw suffering as a divine chastening designed for growth in personal holiness, and something to be faced with submission and endurance. It was not until the nineteenth century that this understanding began to be seriously questioned. This book details those individuals and movements that proved radical enough in their theology and practice to play a part in overturning mainstream opinion on suffering.

James Robinson opens up a treasury of largely unknown or forgotten material that extends our understanding of Victorian Christianity and the precursors to the Pentecostal revival that helped shape Christianity in the twentieth century.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Apr 13, 2011
• ISBN: 9781621895862

James Robinson

James Robinson was awarded his doctorate from Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of Pentecostal Origins: Early Pentecostalism in Ireland in the Context of the British Isles (2005) and Divine Healing: The Formative Years, 1830-1890 (2011).

Book preview

DIVINE HEALING: THE FORMATIVE YEARS, 1830–1890

Theological Roots in the Transatlantic World

James Robinson

With a Foreword by William K. Kay

2008.Pickwick_logo.pdf

DIVINE HEALING: THE FORMATIVE YEARS, 1830–1890

Theological Roots in the Transatlantic World

Copyright © 2011 James Robinson. All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in critical publications or reviews, no part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher. Write: Permissions, Wipf and Stock Publishers, 199 W. 8th Ave., Suite 3, Eugene, OR 97401.

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isbn 13: 978-1-61097-105-8

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Cataloguing-in-Publication data:

Robinson, James.

Divine healing: the formative years, 1830–1890 : theological roots in the transatlantic world / James Robinson ; with a foreword by William K. Kay.

xvi + 312 pp. ; 23 cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn 13: 978-1-61097-105-8

1. Healing—Religious aspects—Christianity. 2. Protestantism—19th century. I. Kay, William K., 1945–. II. Title.

bt732.5 r63 2011

Manufactured in the U.S.A.

All images can be found at the Faith Cure web site:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/worldrevivalnetwork/sets/72157607049928521/

To the memory of Pastor James Robinson (1898–1985)

and

Kathleen Stewart Robinson (1908–1978)

who nurtured me in the faith that

was once for all delivered to the saints. (Jude 3)

Divine healing "is a pretty doctrine, and not unchristian or fanciful,

in spite of what dogmatists may say."

—Leaves of Healing (7 December, 1894) 195.

Foreword

The account of the early church given in the New Testament is packed with miracles. There is plenty of historical evidence that such miracles continued at least 200 years after the beginning of Christianity but, as the years passed, they became less common and the theology which supported them drifted away from its biblical moorings. In the centuries leading up to the Reformation miracles were associated with pilgrimages and shrines disconnected from the ordinary life of parish congregations. During the Reformation the Protestant reformers almost to a man rejected the miraculous. They did so on a variety of theological grounds but also because they wished to distance themselves from Catholicism. If Roman Catholics could verify their faith by an appeal to the miraculous, Protestants wanted to stand on quite different ground; they would verify their faith by an appeal to reason and Scripture.

During the eighteenth century the Methodist revival preached a clear evangelical gospel that expected God to work in the hearts and lives of converts and, in this way, it could not but make room for the miraculous. Even so Protestantism as a whole was not friendly to ideas about miraculous events, and this was especially so once Newton’s mathematical account of the universe was more widely understood. How could the laws of nature, which science had discovered, make room for the irregular interruptions of a personal God? The nineteenth century saw many of these intellectual and theological ideas collide and fructify. Jim Robinson has traced this story in great detail and with extensive attention to original sources. By doing so he has put his readers in his debt. He opens up an enormous treasury of largely unknown or forgotten material that will extend ideas on Victorian Christianity and, beyond this, on the Pentecostal revival that helped shape Christianity in the twentieth century. In other words, this book will contribute to a re-evaluation of the direction taken by Christianity over the last two centuries.

In the late 1980s the pioneering work of Donald Dayton argued that Pentecostalism has roots going back to Methodism, to the eschatological writings of J. N. Darby, and to the gradual rediscovery of the doctrine and practice of healing by faith. What Robinson does is to demonstrate how important this movement was in Britain as well as in North America, and his book builds up to the climax of the international healing conference held in London in 1885. By it the message of healing was disseminated beyond the restricted circles in which it had started to thrive. There were, for example, over 100 healing centres in Britain and some of those who later became leading protagonists of Pentecostalism either learnt from the centres or participated in them. Consequently our understanding of the past is reconstructed and enriched to the extent that it will be impossible for future historians of Christianity in general, and of Pentecostalism in particular, to ignore the material presented in these pages.

Perhaps most sobering for any historian of religion is the gradual rise and rapid fall of the healing movement. By the end of the nineteenth century, its most famous and influential preachers and writers had become old or died. Soon afterwards the movement ran into an army of difficulties. Many of its claims had been examined and suitably moderated, some of its supporters had wandered into esoteric practices and many of its energies had been transposed into missionary work with the result that a significant number of young missionaries who had left the western world to preach a doctrine of divine healing had died of tropical diseases. All this, of course, called into question the whole healing movement and challenged those who held the radical doctrine to revise their thinking so as to be more open to conventional medicine. Nevertheless it is perfectly reasonable to argue, as no doubt the second volume of this project will do, that the lessons of the healing movement were eventually incorporated into Pentecostalism and thus enabled it to reach out across the globe in a fuller and more balanced way than would otherwise have been possible. In this sense the strenuous efforts of Irving, Boardman Baxter, Mahan, Morris, Murray, Fishbourne, Butler and others—brought to life here—were not in vain.

William K Kay

Professor of Theology, Glyndwr University, Wales

Preface

The seed for this book was sown while working on my doctoral thesis that studied the first twenty years of the history of Pentecostalism in Ireland.¹ It soon became clear that the movement did not emerge on the historical stage in the first decade of the twentieth century, Melchizedek-like, without genealogy. Its immediate ancestry sprang from the Holiness movement as it developed in the second half of the nineteenth century. The Holiness movement had its roots in Wesleyan perfectionism especially as it came to be formulated in the 1830s. The advancement of Holiness teaching in Britain became closely identified with Keswick teaching, a Reformed variant of Wesleyan perfectionism. Some within the movement from the 1870s widened its remit to include the healing of the body and not confine it to the sanctification of the Pauline inner man. William. E. Boardman and Mrs Elizabeth Baxter were the two advocates of Holiness teaching to pioneer the healing movement in Britain. Both were closely associated with Bethshan, the healing home in Highbury, north London. The home was opened in 1882, with the declared intention, for those have been led to God to seek the Lord as their Healer in spirit, soul and body, that they, remaining for a short time, may attend the meetings of Holiness and Healing.² Mrs Baxter (1838–1923) whose husband, Michael, was the owner of the Christian Herald was no less prominent in her role as editor of the bi-monthly magazine Thy Healer. The International Convention on Holiness and Divine Healing held in London in 1885 that drew up to 2000 people marked the arrival of a distinctive doctrine that was beginning to attract widespread attention, most of it highly critical.

It was from the Holiness/Healing constituency that many within the early leadership of the Pentecostal movement were drawn. My doctoral research picked out two visitors to Ulster, Edward Irving (1792–1834) and John Alexander Dowie (1847–1907), both of whom identified with a ministry of healing. The former has been described as the first Reformed Pentecostal theologian and the forerunner of the charismatic movement.³ The latter, founder of the International Divine Healing Association in 1882, visited Ulster in 1901 and in his robust style preached in the Guildhall, Londonderry a sermon on the topic of divine healing. Such gleanings whetted an appetite to explore the progress of the divine healing message in the nineteenth century and into the early decades of the next. The dating of the study 1830–1930 encompasses the short-lived phenomenon of Irvingism and takes as its terminal point a date by which the Pentecostal movement had become firmly established on the global religious scene.

As the research proceeded a growing awareness developed that the subject was as vast as it was absorbing. The first draft drew closer to half a million words, much too large for publication. The decision was made to slim down on the wordage and divide the text into two books with the dividing line chosen as 1890 to flag the end of the 1880s, the decade that marked the high point in the early history, or first phase, of the radical healing movement. Another conclusion reached was that most recent published works and academic theses on the subject emanated from North America with limited coverage of Britain and continental Europe. While North America holds a significant place in the history of the subject it does not monopolize it. The dramatic events surrounding the Presbyterian Edward Irving, the Lutheran pastor Johann Christoph Blumhardt, and the Pietist Dorothea Trudel preceded developments in America, while the latter two inspired developments there. In the latter third of the nineteenth century the healing movement had become transatlantic in its range. Britain, by its geographical position between Europe and North America and its durable evangelical tradition, was well placed to play a significant part in the story of the radical healing movement as evidenced by the choice of London for the location for the International Conference in 1885. The transatlantic dimension of the story of the healing movement is covered, with chapter 2 devoted to Europe, chapters 3 through 6 largely to America, and chapters 1 and 7–8 to Britain.

Much of the primary resource material for the British chapters was obtained from the British Library with its unique collection of contemporary periodicals, especially the Morning Watch and Christian Observer for chapter 1 and Thy Healer and its successor Jungle Needs for chapter 7. The British Library Newspaper Library in north London made access possible to periodicals such as The Christian and Word and Work. Other primary sources of entire sets of relevant magazines have come more effortlessly than trips to London. Three fully searchable CD-ROMs have proved invaluable: Triumphs of Faith (1881–1912) edited by Carrie Judd Montgomery, Leaves of Healing (1894–1906) edited by J. A. Dowie, and Confidence (1908–1926) edited by Alexander A. Boddy. Important archival material such as Word Work World edited by A. B. Simpson became available online. Equally the facility to purchase and download American doctoral theses made available key texts such as Jonathan Baer’s Yale thesis Perfectly Empowered Bodies: Divine Healing in Modernising America. Another boon was the number of long out-of-print books that are found only in the largest academic and national libraries, and have now become available online. Robert Isaac Wilberforce’s The Doctrine of the Incarnation, first published in 1848 is one such. Some enterprising publishers now print to order otherwise unobtainable texts. Two such that were most relevant to this study have recently reappeared after more than a century-long lapse, viz., Record of the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness (1885), edited by W. E. Boardman. The biography entitled Life and Labors of the Rev. W. E. Boardman: Preacher of the Higher Christian Life written by his wife Mary was reissued in 2009. The historian Keith Thomas well observed the sad truth is that much of what it has taken me a lifetime to build up by painful accumulation can now be achieved by a moderately diligent student in the course of a morning.

The earliest of the more recent books to fire my awareness was Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (1996) by Robert Bruce Mullin that demonstrated the resurgence of the concept of miracles not only at the popular level but also in more cultivated circles from around 1860 into the twentieth century. Three other volumes were of considerable help. Two of them originated as doctoral theses that were regarded highly enough to be published. Heather D. Curtis’ Harvard thesis presented in 2004 was in substance published as Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture 1860–1900. It proved a real eye-opener. One reviewer opined that the writer had done the historical guild and the church a great favour in that it had remapped our imagination and transformed our understanding of suffering.⁴ James W. Opp’s thesis presented in 2000 to Carleton University, Ottawa, was published in 2005 under the title The Lord for the Body: Religion, Medicine and Protestant Faith Healing in Canada 1880–1930. The book is a scholarly study of faith healing that studies the interpenetration between divine healing and society within an advanced society. Nancy Hardesty’s Faith Cure: Divine Healing in the Holiness and Pentecostal Traditions takes a thematic approach. Published in 2003, it was the first of the three books to hand, thus opening an area of study that was beginning to attract serious academic interest. In that all three works are of North American provenance, one aim of his study seeks to redress the balance by giving greater attention to religio-cultural contexts and events on the other side of the Atlantic.

All these books deepened my awareness of the complexity of the subject that were relevant to the disciplines theology, sociology, culture, and medicine. This work seeks to differ from these informative texts referred to above in four main ways. First, it places more emphasis on the theology and biblical foundation of divine healing. Second, it covers a wider historical time span, and, being largely chronologically ordered, seeks to capture the historical flow of events that help to explain the making and advance of a new movement. Third, more biographical background on the leading figures in the movement is presented than is customary, an approach based on the observation that for many leaders much of their theology of healing was shaped by their personal experience of it. Finally, a strong motivation behind much of the book was the quest to uncover links between early Pentecostalism and the Holiness/Healing movement, with particular attention to Britain. 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. Such a ministry needs, above all, sensitivity to the pitfalls that lurk on the pathway of those who answer the call to step that way.

My grateful thanks is extended to those people who helped me in the reading and proofing that must be undertaken to prepare a typescript for publication. For their encouragement and helpful suggestions, I wish to thank the Rev. John Duncan, Fiona Forbes, David Hewitt, Rev. Noble McNeely, Michael Perrott, and Mark Shields. My wife Mary was a good sounding-board for my moments of elation as well as those inevitable times of frustration that threaten to derail any ambitious project. I always learned something new from Desmond Cartwright in our lengthy telephone conversations. Robin Parry opened doors and kept me right in matters relating to publication.

1. It was subsequently published as Robinson, Pentecostal Origins.

2. Wiseman, Elizabeth Baxter, 87.

3. Strachan, Pentecostal Theology of Edward Irving, 13.

4. Books & Culture, May/June 2008, 33.

Abbreviations

ASSU American Sunday School Union

BDEB Blackwell Dictionary of Evangelical Biography

BMJ British Medical Journal

CAC Catholic Apostolic Church

CMA Christian and Missionary Alliance

CO Christian Observer

CWJW Collected Writings of John Wesley

LRE Latter Rain Evangel

M W Morning Watch

ODNB Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

RICDH A Record of the International Conference on Divine Healing

and True Holiness

TH Thy Healer

WWW The Work Word World

Introduction

Radical Healing: Positioning the Debate

In July 1872 an article under the title The Prayer for the Sick: Hints towards a Serious Attempt to Estimate its Value jolted religious circles in London.¹ The article, carrying an introduction by John Tyndall, triggered off what came to be known as The Prayer Gauge Debate.² The article carried the proposal that a test to assess the efficacy of prayer for healing should be arranged. Healing was considered particularly suitable because few more interesting subjects of inquiry can exist for the honest believer than the extent of man’s influence with Heaven at the most momentous crisis in his personal history.³ Tyndall suggested that a ward or hospital be selected where, in conditions as standardised as possible, prayer for one set of patients be made the object of special prayer by the whole body of the faithful while the other would be treated as the control group.⁴ The mortality rate for both sets would then be compared after three years at least had passed.

The ensuing debate was described as the sensation of the season to an extent that the major newspapers of London were filled with editorials on the controversy. Why such a stir was raised at the time can be attributed to the circumstances surrounding the illness from typhoid of the Prince of Wales. Special prayers for the restoration of his health were read in all parishes on Sunday, 10 December 1871. The Prince’s health improved dramatically during the following week, leading one clergyman to remark that the recovery will surely impress many hitherto doubtful minds with the efficacy of prayer.⁵ For scientists like Tyndall, T. H. Huxley (Darwin’s bulldog) and Francis Galton (Darwin’s cousin), such a conclusion was highly suspect. Similarly, reaction to Tyndall’s proposal was swift and robust. An editorial in The Spectator described the article as an unworthy piece of literary irony and deemed it to be an attempt to poke fun at [believers] in the shape of thinly-veiled scoffs; it smacked more of a covert sneer than the frank challenge of a cultivated enquirer.⁶ On a visit to America following the article, Tyndall’s lecture tour was stalked by controversy. Prayer meetings for his conversion were held in Boston and Philadelphia and the Episcopal Bishop of New York refused to attend a banquet in his honour.⁷ More measured reactions were soon activated on both sides of the Atlantic. Those from America included such luminaries as James McCosh and Mark Hopkins, presidents of Princeton and Williams College respectively. In Britain, the Duke of Argyll and Canon H. P. Liddon were among those who entered the fray against Tyndall.

⁸

While all these argued strongly on formal theological and philosophical lines, it was left to William Patton, American Congregationalist minister, to take up the gauntlet by facing the demand for empirical verification.⁹ In the latter chapters of his Prayer & Its Remarkable Answers he set out to provide a multitude of instances . . . in which the answer comes in a way so striking it may be . . . that one cannot fail to recognize the divine intervention.¹⁰ While biblical miracles featured in the book, most of the book was taken up with contemporary healings. To collect the evidence he sent a circular to respondents throughout the country asking them to provide cases of answered prayer. Testimonies were printed that informed readers of healing from chronic rheumatism, a young girl’s serious spinal condition and an English gentleman who had been an invalid for a long time.

Ostrader saw Patton’s book as representing a transition between the world of learned Protestant theologians and popular, revivalistic Protestantism.¹¹ The world of learned Protestant theologians in the main has throw up formidable barriers to the acceptance of ideas of explicit, supernatural intervention that feature distinctly in revivalist and Pentecostal/Charismatic Christianity. Reformation thought portrayed God as one who does not irrupt into either the natural or human realm as directly as the Catholicism it rejected. In contrast to Protestantism, the Catholic world was permeated by supernatural manifestations: miracles, saintly intercessors, even the sacraments themselves. Direct interventions by the heavenly realm were normal, expected (even irrevocable) features of reality in Catholic eyes. Protestantism denied most of them. The God it portrayed would not grant such ‘popish’ boons to mankind as utterly, and frightfully, fallen as Luther and Calvin believed. In the final analysis, only one undeniably supernatural event was allotted Protestant man: the devolution of God’s sovereign grace.¹² The Protestant Reformation undoubtedly transformed the traditional understandings of miracles. Rather than reflecting the sanctity of particular individuals or, in Cardinal Newman’s phrase, the supernatural ordinance intrinsic to the nature of the church, the Reformers saw miracles as attestations of the person and authority of Christ and the delegated authority of the prophets and apostles. Having accomplished that task as evidenced by the expansion of the church, miracles were no longer necessary since revelation was complete. Newman was critical of Protestants because they believed that Christianity is little more than a creed or doctrine, introduced into the world once for all, and then left to itself . . . containing certain general promises of aid for this life, but unattended by any special Divine Presence or any immediately supernatural gift¹³ Cessationism all but precluded any return of miracles.

For his part, Calvin maintained that the reason why Protestants were to expect no new miracles was because they presented no new gospel. In his magnum opus he opined that the miraculous powers which the Lord was pleased to give for a time [disappeared] that [they] might render the new preaching of the gospel for ever wonderful. That the manifest power of healing was discontinued is because that gift was temporary, and owing, in some measure, to the ingratitude of men, immediately ceased.¹⁴ For the magisterial Reformers in their battle with Rome any claim to post-biblical miracles was nothing less than surrender to lying wonders, activated by ignorance or diabolical intrusion. In effect, they postulated that the world had returned to the ceaseless course of cause and effect with the passing of the apostolic age. Expressed thus, this view had to face the question as to the place of prayer. The answer was couched in the language of providence as distinct from that of miracles. The latter were thought of as acts that overrode the natural order; the former were actions of God acting through nature. General providence was understood as God’s outworking of his purpose within the created order, essentially natural law. In addition, for believers there were special providences which God worked through secondary causes, shaping a particular end within the orderly course of nature. Thus Thomas Arnold, educationalist and scholar, sought to explain the miraculous feeding of five thousand in postulating that it may well have had its rise in the suspension of hunger and thirst during hours of rapt interest and intense mental excitement. In such hours a trifling sustenance, which would commonly serve for but a few, will suffice for many. Rumour and imagination make and add details, and swell the thing into a miracle.¹⁵ By such reasoning, all miracles almost had to be explained away. Special providences by their very nature are discernable solely to the eyes of faith while, to the non-believer, they are regarded as the outcome of intelligible circumstance and/or arbitrary coincidence.

¹⁶

For most Christian believers prayer for healing had the same rationale as for any other petition. Any positive outcome was seen as an act of special providence, though one would be hard put to discern the difference between miracle and special providence. As against the concept of patient endurance in the face of suffering, there arose in the nineteenth century a number of Christian leaders who challenged such a view. They argued for a biblically-warranted conviction that healing was a promise of God to be claimed. F. F. Bosworth, the American healing evangelist expressed it starkly: Some people have been taught that you can glorify God more by being sick than by being well, but I can find no Scripture for that. If that were true then Paul robbed the Father of glory by healing the sick on the Island of Melita. The thing that glorifies God is to prove His Word and give Him an opportunity to do that which He has promised.¹⁷ Many such radicals believed that the atonement was cornerstone for the healing ministry, carrying the implication that healing for the body could be claimed on the same grounds as salvation for the soul. Their ideas took root within minor outposts of continental Pietism, expanded in the American Holiness/Higher Life movement and were boosted in the twentieth-century by the Pentecostal and Charismatic movements. Those who operated on this understanding are referred to as radical healers in this study that examines how this change unfolded in the nineteenth century up to the end of the 1880s. A subsequent work is planned to carry the story forward from the 1890s to c.1930 by which time the Pentecostal movement had become established, though rarely welcomed.

Some radical healers were not slow to shed inhibitions about putting prayer for healing to the test. Few were to prove more audacious or, in the eyes of their opponents, more brazen than Scot-bred John Alexander Dowie, and the no less intrepid Yorkshire evangelist Smith Wigglesworth.¹⁸ Dowie was quite prepared to rise to the challenge implied in the assertion of the atheist lawyer, Robert Ingersoll, that any doctrine that will not bear investigation is not a fit tenant for the mind of an honest man. In the course of one of his sermons Dowie pointed to the numerous crutches and casts discarded by those who had been healed, adding, These things are not faith. Crutches, braces, boots, a cancer in a bottle, the cots upon which the dying were brought to this city, and from which they were removed and healed. These things are only the outward and visible signs of an inward and invisible faith.¹⁹ Ingersoll went further in asserting that, God is of no use. He has never answered a prayer.²⁰ Never slow to face down opposition, Dowie invited Ingersoll to attend one of his services to hear the testimony of hundreds who had been miraculously healed the week before. If Ingersoll had chosen to turn up, one of the more grisly pieces of evidence to confront him would have been a bottle that contained a cancer, a fully formed cancer, which fell out of the body of Mrs Arbeiter when she was in the auditorium. In his characteristically robust style, Dowie put Ingersoll’s non-appearance down to cowardice that had penetrated to his very backbone and spinal marrow, and made him afraid to put it to the test [what] he is himself is calling out for.

²¹

Wigglesworth was equally unflinching, enough to alarm his associates. On occasion, he would issue the challenge, The first person in this audience who stands up, whatever his or her sickness, I’ll pray for that one and God will heal him or her.²² His son-in-law commented, How often our hearts have quaked as we have heard him make that bold announcement. Secretly we had hoped that one of the simple cases would stand and not one of the far-gone cancer cases or deformed cripples. Like Dowie, Wigglesworth faced some high profile controversies. Both men aroused medical and church establishments to bring actions against them. In 1894 the State Board of Health in Chicago was called upon to investigate Dowie on the grounds that he was practising medicine without a licence in his healing homes in the city.²³ Ultimately the case against him was dropped and, with notable healings such as that of Amanda Hicks, cousin to Abraham Lincoln, little stomach was left to pursue him on that line. Wigglesworth met similar high-level opposition in Stockholm in 1921. His prayers for the sick brought protestations from both the established Lutheran church and members of the Swedish medical profession. Representatives from both bodies together with the police in an audience with the King pressed for his expulsion from the country. However, a nurse in the royal household who had received healing at one of his meetings brought this healing to royal attention. Deportation was cushioned by the arrangement that the evangelist would accept a voluntary escort from the country, but not before he was granted permission to hold a meeting in a Stockholm park that attracted 20,000 people.

²⁴

The Contentious Theology

of the Radical Healing Movement

At the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness held in London during the first week in June 1885, a speaker in a reference to the Prayer Gauge Debate asserted, The Christian church was then afraid to face the challenge, but I doubt whether Tyndall would make it today. I think it would be answered by the testimonies in this place sufficient to prove that Christ is a Saviour of the body as well as the soul.²⁵ Over the thirteen years between Tyndall’s challenge and the Conference this assertion pointed to a notable shift in attitudes towards healing in some circles. That it was as yet a minority stance was implied by the speaker’s admission, Too many of our brethren utterly reject it . . . good men, high in the office of the church who characterise it as a delusion, a work of Satan.²⁶ What the good men were condemning was not divine inability or unwillingness to heal for, as Warfield stated, no one who is a Christian in any clear sense doubts that God hears and answers prayer for the healing of the sick.²⁷ With this acceptable measure of agreement, the question arises as to what then did set the radicals apart from their opponents. Three distinctive features can be identified: (i) the role of healing in the atonement, (ii) the function of faith, (iii) uneasiness with medical intervention. While a broad consensus existed on the three strands within radical circles, unanimity was neither expected nor enforced on all three:

(i) In the radical healing apologetic, redemption carried a wider connotation than in accepted evangelical understanding. It held that since the defilement of sin extends to both the spiritual and physical sides of human kind, the redemptive work of Christ applied to both. Kelso Carter maintained, The Atonement has provided for the body all that has been provided for the soul.²⁸ Sin and physical suffering were both dealt with on the cross. Therefore, healing became less a matter of divine sovereignty and more a gracious provision, a gift to be explicitly claimed rather than an inscrutable bestowal. A new note of authority in overcoming disease, claimed by its advocates as a veritable restoration of primitive Christianity, was beginning to be recognised within Protestantism, a worm that would start to lay waste to some of its intestinal verities. One observer of the healing evangelist Charles S. Price alluded to his tremendous authority over sickness and demons: He did not suggest or plead. He commanded and it was done. Miracles happened before our eyes. ²⁹ A. B. Simpson was quite clear that our healing becomes a great redemption right that we simply claim as our purchased inheritance through the blood of Christ.³⁰ Rarely, even never, in post-apostolic church history had the doctrine of radical healing been stated so explicitly nor become accepted so widely within Protestantism, and in such terms wider even than its practice in Catholicism. Such a contention, carrying the hint to the believer of an unbounded right, paved the way for the global healing evangelism that erupted in the second half of the twentieth century and continues to woo the millions in the rapid growth of Christianity in the developing world.

³¹

(ii) As salvation was through faith, so was healing. The early nomenclature of prayer cure, faith-cure, and faith healing came increasingly to be dropped in favour of divine healing to differentiate between the source and the recipient of healing. When Carrie Judd (m. Montgomery) titled her first book The Prayer of Faith and her new periodical Triumphs of Faith she was deliberately signalling the role of faith in healing. For her, Faith is not meritorious, but it is essential.³² Having herself experienced a dramatic healing, she could insist, I have never failed to receive according to my faith.³³ Man can only receive divine grace according to his faith, wrote Andrew Murray, and this applies as much to divine healing as to any other grace of God . . . The part of faith is always to lay hold on just what appears impossible to human eyes.³⁴ Charles Price, noted American healing evangelist, was described as one who spoke of faith as though it were a commodity that God imparted into a believer’s life.³⁵ For radicals, the boundaries of the faith claim were delimited by the words and works of Christ and the promises of Scripture: God has promised, maintained Bosworth, to respond only to the faith that is produced and rests in his Word, or promise.³⁶ In his aptly titled Ever Increasing Faith, Wigglesworth—who earned the tag the Apostle of Faith—wrote, As we read the Word and believe the promises . . . we are made partakers of God’s very essence and life.³⁷ The centrality of faith was to come to its most controversial and highly publicised form in the Prosperity Gospel during the latter half of the twentieth century through such of its exponents as Kenneth Hagin and Kenneth Copeland.

³⁸

(iii) The question of means was probably the most vexed of the three positions taken on healing. For some radical healers, medical treatment and faith were incompatible. I have known cases, said one speaker, where people have made up their minds that they would never, under any circumstances, take medicine in any form . . . Many have found it an unspeakable privilege to have to do only with God in sickness, to be occupied with Him and not distracted with attentions to the body.³⁹ The issue of means was tied closely to that of faith. Bosworth contended, It honours God to believe Him even when every sense contradicts Him! And He promises to honour those who honour Him.⁴⁰ On this understanding, medical intervention signalled a deficient faith that only resulted in less glory to God.⁴¹ A. B. Simpson was the leading advocate of faith-alone healing and it was the early position taken by his Christian and Missionary Alliance (CMA). For him, All the provisions of grace are by faith, not by works or ‘means.’⁴² One of his supporters held that, taking medicine was contrary to the fundamental principle of the Alliance, which [takes] Christ as its great healer and all-in-all.

Simpson and Dowie were among the more contentious proponents of the radical form of divine healing, both its teaching and practice, bringing to it an unfamiliar emphasis and perspective. While the understanding and practice of divine healing was to take diverse forms during the nineteenth century, this study will pay particular attention to this particular wing of the healing movement by setting it within the context of nineteenth century socio-cultural and theological change. What distinguished radical healing from other healing movements was to provide it with an innovative biblical hermeneutic that widened its appeal by greatly intensifying the expectation of healing to the sick.

Synopsis of the Study

How such views came to be held is the objective of this study. Chapter 1 looks at the prefiguration of the later radical healing movement that took place in the period 1830–35. This short episode, largely focussed on the Scottish Presbyterian divine, Edward Irving, is regarded as the high point of Irvingism proper. It examines the reasons for the short-lived nature of the charismaticism that Irving fostered, or more precisely the failure of Irvingism to lay the foundations of a global Pentecostal movement. Chapter 2 examines the life and influence of the Lutheran pastor, Johann Christoph Blumhardt. Blumhardt labored in a village in present day south-west Germany. There, he was precipitated into a case of demonic possession that tested him almost to breaking point. The exorcism was followed by a revival (the Awakening) in the surrounding district. The critical view taken by the regional church consistory of his healing ministry led to his decision to establish a healing home at Bad Boll, near Stuttgart. It became the prototype of subsequent healing homes, a trend that reached a peak in the 1880s. Karl Barth acknowledged the influence of Blumhardt in labelling him the theologian of hope. The chapter concludes with the healing homes established by Dorothea Trudel in the village of Mannedorf situated on the north shore of Lake Zurich, Switzerland. Though born into an impoverished family and suffering permanent curvature of the spine, she eventually established four separate homes in the village that attracted visitors seeking healing and rest from both sides of the Atlantic. Both Blumhardt and Trudel provided the inspiration for similar ministries in Europe and North America.

Chapter 3 is an intermission before proceeding with an examination of other feeder streams that contributed to the theology and practice of divine healing. It considers the conflicting current ideological/theological perceptions of suffering with particular attention given to the widely received Christian view of bodily affliction. The almost universally held view was summarised in 1844 by the English writer, Harriet Martineau that pain is the chastisement of a Father; or, at least, that it is, in some way or other, ordained for, or instrumental to good.⁴³ The part played by the radical healing movement in challenging that view, will be touched upon throughout the book. The therapeutic treatments available to counter bodily affliction are explored, whether those employed by doctors who increasingly sought for and ultimately attained professional status during the nineteenth century or by those who specialized in the wide range of alternative/complementary therapies that blossomed at the same time. Some therapies presented a direct challenge to the ministry of divine healing, while the medical profession remained decidedly cool.

Chapter 4 examines the role of early Methodism in both Britain and America in its contribution to divine healing. The chapter is devoted largely to the period between the early Methodism of eighteenth century Britain and that of America up to the 1860s. It was during that period that the seeds of the later Wesleyan Holiness movement were sown, notably through the influence of Phoebe Palmer and her Tuesday meeting. In formulating an innovative understanding of Christian perfection, she made the experience of entire sanctification one of anticipation and immediacy that was to render it congruous with the experience of healing within the radical movement. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the contribution to the healing message of those whose religious background was more in the Reformed tradition. In chapter 5 the writings of those associated with Oberlin Perfectionism are examined together with those of William E. Boardman and Horace Bushnell. The former through his book The Higher Christian Life (1858) introduced perfectionist beliefs to non-Wesleyans as well as popularising the term Higher Life that was used generally to designate the Reformed version of the holiness message. Bushnell’s liberal views threatened to bring him to trial for heresy before his Congregational Association. Even so, he noted with a sense of loss the absence of the charismatic gifts that featured prominently in the primitive church. He presented a case for their recurrence that would not shame a Pentecostal apologist. The Higher Life contribution is the theme of chapter 6. In Britain it came to be identified with the Keswick Convention in England. The contribution of the Higher Life movement to healing theology reached its apogee in the 1880s. The seminal figures were the German-born theologian, Otto Stockmayer, and in America,

A. B. Simpson and A. J. Gordon. All three wrote works of substance that provided theological leverage for the radical take on healing. Stockmayer and Simpson joined the Boston homeopath, Charles Cullis, in establishing healing homes, a development made familiar through the ministry of Blumhardt and Trudel.

Chapter 7 is devoted mainly to the healing scene in Britain in the 1880s, the decade when the radical healing movement reached a peak. The following two decades feature in chapter 8. Chapter 7 pivots on the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness held at the Agricultural Hall in north London during the first week in June, 1885. That London was the venue for the Conference was a reflection of Britain’s prominence in the internationalization of the healing movement. Participants, numbering up to 2,000, were drawn from Europe and America. The first part of the chapter looks at the inroads the Holiness message was making in Britain. Inspired by the major conferences held in Oxford and Brighton for the Promotion of Scriptural Holiness, the Rev. T. H. Battersby convened the first Keswick Convention in 1875. Among those who attended these gatherings were some associated with the healing movement, notably William and Mary Boardman and Asa Mahan from America, all three at the time domiciled in England; Andrew Murray from South Africa; Elizabeth Baxter, Lord Radstock, and Admiral E. G. Fishbourne from England. The contribution of all these leaders to the ministry of healing is outlined, together with that of the Rev. George Morris, the Anglican incumbent of a fashionable church in Belgravia, London and Josephine Butler, one of the leading social reformers of the age. All identified with Bethshan, the north London healing home founded in 1882 by Elizabeth Baxter with the encouragement of the Boardmans. Chapter 8 looks at the events and personalities following the International Conference and the spin-off in the months and years following. Attention then turns to the waning of the healing movement in Britain, coupled with the enduring imprint of Bethshan spirituality on some who later identified with the British Pentecostal movement from its initiation in the first decade of the twentieth century.

Chapter 9 considers the criticisms levelled at the radical healing movement in Britain from a variety of sources that includes opinion-forming literary journals, the evangelical press and scholarly theological opinion. Space is then given to the consideration of the book Faith Healing (1892) by Alfred T. Schofield, a Harley Street physician from a Brethren background.⁴⁴ The physician had the benefit of visiting the healing home established by Dorothea Trudel in Switzerland, but then led by her successor Samuel Zeller. The chapter concludes with an assessment of the formidable challenge that healing associated with spiritualism posed for the radical healing movement by tainting all supernormal healing in the eyes of evangelical Christians.

The Conclusion presents a cultural and religious overview that explores the shift in attitudes to suffering that took place in the nineteenth century, one from an acceptance of suffering as a means of divine testing to one that presented Christ present equally to grant physical and emotional healing as to offer pardon. The chapter concludes by summarising those developments in theological understanding that opened the way for this sea change to take place.

1. Means, ed., Prayer-Gauge Debate, 5.

2. Tyndall, a physicist by training, was appointed a professor at the Royal Institute in 1856. His presidential address to the British Association in 1874 in Belfast was fiercely denounced as an apologetic for promoting scientific materialism.

3. Means, Prayer-Gauge Debate, 14.

4. Ibid., 18.

5. Ostrader, Life of Prayer, 18.

6. Means, Prayer-Gauge Debate, 25.

7. Mullin, Miracles, 46.

8. George Douglas Campbell, the eighth Duke of Argyll was at different times Chancellor of two Scottish universities and President of the British Association for the Promotion of Science. Henry Parry Liddon, Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral at the time played a major part in advancing the High Church movement in the Church of England.

9. Patton held the position of President of Howard University, Washington, DC.

10. Patton, Prayer & its Remarkable Answers, 213–14.

11. Ostrader, Life of Prayer, 33.

12. Koss-Chioino and Hefner, Spiritual Transformation and Healings, 32.

13. Turner, John Henry Newman, 476.

14. Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, Book 4, ch. 19, paragraphs 18–20. It is important to note that the context for these remarks is a response to the sacrament of extreme unction in the Roman Church. The tone of his criticism is caught in the remark that priests, in administering the sacrament, insult the Holy Spirit by making his power consist in a filthy oil of no efficacy.

15. Schlossberg, Conflict and Crisis, 217.

16. Mullin, Science, Miracle, and the Prayer-Gauge, 203–4.

17. Barnes, Bosworth, 89.

18. Both men will be studied in a planned subsequent book.

19. Lindsay, Sermons of John Alexander Dowie.

20. Lindsay, Dowie, 93.

21. Ibid.

22. Wilson, Wigglesworth, 125.

23. Lindsay, Dowie, 106.

24. Wilson, Wigglesworth, 145–46. This was not Wigglesworth’s only indirect brush with royalty. George V was sent a handkerchief—most likely anointed and prayed over by Wigglesworth as modelled on Acts 19:11–12—by the wife of an Anglican minister. She received a letter of thanks from the King.

25. RICDH [Record of the International Conference on Divine Healing and True Holiness], 92.

26. Ibid, 93.

27. Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles, 160.

28. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism, 130.

29. Price, The Real Faith for Healing, v.

30. Simpson, The Gospel of Healing, 300.

31. Harrell, All Things are Possible. For the present century, see Jenkins, The Next Christendom, 121–30.

32. Judd, The Prayer of Faith, 7.

33. Wacker, Heaven Below, 26.

34. Murray, Divine Healing, 24, 26.

35. Price, The Real Faith for Healing, vi.

36. Bosworth, Christ the Healer, 110.

37. Wigglesworth, Ever Increasing Faith, 13.

38. Hagin saw his vocation from God as Go teach my people faith. (Larsen, Biographical Dictionary of Evangelicals, 278.) The so-called Prosperity Gospel (variously termed name it and claim it, word of faith, faith formula, health and wealth, or positive confession) works on the assumption that words spoken in faith are regarded as objectifications of reality, establishing palpable connections between human will and the external world." (Coleman, Globalisation of Charismatic Christianity, 28.)

39. Thy Healer [hereafter TH], 1885, 51. Such an attitude was not entirely new. In one of his letters, Luther wrote that Andreas Carlstadt (d. 1541) publicly preached that the sick should not use drugs, but should only pray to God that His will be done. (Warfield, Counterfeit Miracles, 306.)

40. Bosworth, Christ the Healer, 110.

41. Opp, Lord for the Body, 78.

42. Simpson, Gospel of Healing, 318. Means as used throughout the book refers to all forms of medical intervention.

43. Bending, Representation of Bodily Pain, 5.

44. Pickering, Chief Men among the Brethren, 200–202

1

The Healing Ministry in Irvingism

Irvingite Healings¹

In the years 1830–35, the religious world of Britain was alerted to a charismatic revival that predated the Pentecostal movement by more than seventy years.² For Mrs Oliphant, the biographer of Edward Irving, the charismata witnessed then were an agitating and extraordinary chapter in the history of the modern church . . . Almost every notable Christian man of the time took the matter into devout and anxious consideration.³ She commented on one doctrinal position that came to be espoused: the idea that disease itself was sin, and that no man with faith in his Lord ought to be overpowered by it, was one of the principles which came to be adopted in the newly-separated community.⁴ The community in question was that made up of the 800 who followed Edward Irving from the National Scotch Church in Regent Street, London in 1832, to form a new congregation that was to form the nucleus of the new Catholic Apostolic Church [CAC]. The Presbytery of London had earlier repudiated the charismatic manifestations that started in 1831 in the Regent Street church as unscriptural and contrary to the subordinate standards of the Church of Scotland.

The lower Clyde region of western Scotland was the first to witness a flurry of charismatic manifestations. On 28 March 1830 a young woman, Mary Campbell, lay dying from tuberculosis and while praying with her sister she began to speak in an unknown tongue, to the great astonishment of all who heard, and to her own great edification and enjoyment in God.⁵ The following month, James Macdonald in Port Glasgow, also had an experience that he construed as the baptism in the Holy Spirit. Within minutes he went to the room of his dying sister, Margaret, and commanded her in the words of Acts 3:6, In the name of Jesus of Nazareth, rise up and walk. She arose, instantly recovered, prompting him to write to Mary Campbell, conveying to her the same command which had been so effectual in the case of his sister.⁶ Mary later recounted, I was verily made in a moment to stand upon my feet, leap and walk, sing and rejoice.⁷ A few evenings later James and his twin brother spoke in tongues for the first time, and the following evening they both spoke and interpreted tongues. Thus, in the words of Mrs Oliphant, A new miraculous dispensation was, to the belief of many, inaugurated in all the power of apostolic times by these waters of the West.⁸ When Mary Campbell moved to Helensburgh in 1830 crowds gathered round the young attractive rapt enthusiast.⁹ Numbered among them were merchants, divinity students and advocates and, much to the disquiet of the neighbouring minister at Greenock, gentlemen come from Edinburgh who . . . bow to her decisions with the utmost deference as those of one inspired by Heaven.¹⁰ But the news emanating from Scotland found its greatest impact by reaching the ears of Edward Irving in London. As the Christian Observer, the voice of moderate evangelicalism expressed it at the time, [T]he new notions which have convulsed the Church of Scotland . . . are beginning to distract the Church of England.¹¹ The periodical judged that the outburst would prove disruptive, but short-lived, in asking: Do the asserters of the new miracles believe that any man will credit the Port Glasgow prodigies ten years hence?

¹²

What explanation can be given for this sparsely populated, rural area of Scotland, becoming the focus of such dramatic scenes? Strachan has plotted the developments towards the end of the 1820s in the Gare Loch area of the lower Clyde that were to launch Edward Irving on the trajectory he came to take so enthusiastically.¹³ When John McLeod Campbell was inducted in 1825 to the parish ministry of Row (Rhu), a hamlet at the head of the Gare Loch, few could have envisaged the outcome. As in much of Scotland, the Calvinism of double predestination hung heavily on the shoulders of Campbell’s parishioners. A narrow, legalistic mindset, furthered by a lack of assurance of salvation, seemed to have sapped their religious energy. Campbell began to teach both the universality of the atonement and the assurance of personal salvation, positions that were to lead to a heresy trial in 1831 and his deposition by the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland. The outcome, in the words of one contemporary reviewer, was the beginning of no small stir round the Gare Loch and all over the land. There was an awakening of religious life there, which got its first impulse from the Row-kirk. Greenock, Glasgow, Edinburgh thrilled as with the gush of a fresh spring-tide.¹⁴ Mary Campbell and her sister Isabella, both consumptives, were among those stirred by their minister’s preaching.

Alexander John Scott was to prove another link in the chain of causation. A son of the manse, he was strongly influenced by his father, the Rev. John Scott of Greenock. Old Dr. Scott, unusually for his