Process Theology and Healing

By Bruce G. Epperly

Religious and spiritual healing practices are often seen as a show in which a healer claims to physically cure someone through actions or words. These healings mostly fail.

In this booklet, the third of three that integrate process theology with contemporary spiritual life and activity, Bruce Epperly presents a very different view of healing. He calls for a healing ministry, but one that finds God in all things and uses scientific medicine, healing ritual practices, and prayer in concert, sometimes for spiritual healing but also for a way to live out the challenge of illness, to face death with dignity, and yes, sometimes for a cure that appears miraculous. He applies these healing practices not just to human beings, but to all life and to the planet we live on. Healing is not the province of a few, calling on supernatural forces. Rather, it is a cooperation with the energies God has placed in the universe. Rather than supernatural it is more natural than anything.

Epperly is a specialist in bringing difficult concepts to life for everyone. He combines that skill with the short format of the Topical Line Drives series to present a call for all of us to be healed and to become healers as part of God’s call to life and light.

This book may well be the call you need to hear to find wholeness, Shalom, in your life and your relationships to others and this world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Energion Publications
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781631998904

Book preview

Table of Contents

1 A World Of Wonders 1

2 Process Theology as Holistic Theology 10

3 Jesus The Healer: A Process Perspective 18

4 Process Theology and Complementary Medicine 23

5 Healing The Dying 28

6 Healing The Person, Healing The Planet 34

Reading for Healing 39

Chapter One

A World Of Wonders

The power by which God sustains the world is the power of himself as the ideal…the world lives by its incarnation of God in itself.¹

What does it mean to be healed? Can you be healed of illness without being cured? Where is God in the healing process? Do our prayers and spiritual practices make any difference in promoting healing? Can we join global and holistic spiritual practices with Western medicine? Can we claim miracles without supernaturalism? Questions like these can inspire hope and transform lives. They can also challenge our religious beliefs and images of God.

I’ve always been interested in the healing process, and the relationship between faith, sickness, and health. I grew up watching faith healers Oral Roberts and Kathryn Kuhlman on Sunday afternoons with my mother Loretta. In need of emotional healing, my mother took solace in Roberts’ bombastic Be healed and Kuhlman’s whispered I believe in miracles. These pioneering televangelists believed that God would respond supernaturally to diseases of mind, body, spirit, and finances if we only had the faith of a mustard seed.

The son of a small-town Baptist pastor, I often companioned my father Everett Epperly on pastoral calls. I waited in the lobby while he visited congregants in the hospital, and I joined in prayers for healing at home visits. I overheard conversations about the power of prayer and also observed situations in which, despite desperate intercessions, a congregant died.

My mother had a kitchen magnet affixed to the refrigerator that promised, prayer changes things. She believed that without divine intervention, she would have been the victim of the depression, low self-esteem, and obsessional thinking that plagued her throughout her life. My mother was a prayer warrior, who depended on God to make a way through the wilderness of mental health issues.

As I child, I believed that God could intervene in our lives to heal body, mind, and spirit. Yet, I wondered why some were healed and others continued to deal with chronic illness or succumbed to death, despite our prayers.

Although I no longer believe that God acts supernaturally, from outside the world to overturn the laws of nature, I am deeply interested in the healing process, whether it involves answers to prayer, divine activity, antibiotics and vaccines, surgery, chemotherapy, energy work, or the importance of self-care. At some point in our lives, we all need healing, and the impact of a power, energy, and wisdom greater than our own to restore us to wholeness. Now an adult theologian, I recognize that healing refers to the whole person, while curing relates to a particular disease or malady. I now see healing as a relational as well as personal issue. I want to be on the side of healing, the wholeness of persons and institutions, and believe that God is present in our prayers as well in the lives of healthcare professionals developing pharmaceuticals that saved millions of lives during the COVID epidemic and whose dedication led to curing once incurable diseases such as certain forms of cancers, polio, and HIV. I meditate, and also medicate for hypertension, and get flu, shingles, pneumonia, and COVID vaccines, grateful for God’s Creativity inspiring human creativity.

As a pastor and friend, I have sought to be a healing companion, incarnating in my relationships and ministry God’s aim at wholeness and Shalom. I have been a companion in the healing of friends, family, and congregants. I have sat at the bedsides of dying congregants and friends, who no longer prayed