Morton T. Kelsey - Healing and Christianity

Christianity has traditionally considered physical healing as somehow related to its primary concerns. This is no mere accident. Always there has been before it the figure of the Master who, as portrayed by those who knew Him best, was more often engaged in acts of healing than in almost anything else. Despite the major inroads of a Hellenistic soul-body dichotomy, and the Gnostic and Manichean down-grading of matter which so profoundly influenced early Christian thought, despite a later monastic tendency to confuse sickness with saintliness, over the centuries the healing Jesus remained a figure to be reckoned with. Although the true meaning of His Ministry may often have been obscured by attempts to reconcile it with the Churchs overt hostility toward undue concern for the body, it was impossible to deny that the body had been an important object of His concern.

The actual life of Jesus was spent in a cultural milieu which knew little of sharp Hellenistic soul-body distinctions. Surprisingly, only in recent years have Christian theologians begun to note this fundamental difference between the Hebrew (and consequently primitive Christian) conception of man, and that of the Greeks with which Christianity eventually came to terms.

The Hebrew conception of man, as the late Dr. Wheeler Robinson reminded us in a now famous sentence, is an animated body, not an incarnated soul. Or, as John A. T. Robinson has phrased it in his monograph on the body in Biblical thought: Man does not have a body, he is a body. He is flesh-animated-by-soul, the whole conceived as a psychophysical unity. On the other hand, in the dominant Greek view the soul was regarded as the essential personality, imprisoned in a body that was non-essential. Indeed, as expressed later in Gnosticism and Manicheanism, the body was positively evil and ultimately to be eliminated. This view was basically incompatible with the Hebrew conception of the resurrection of the body, an idea that dominated the New Testament. (It will be recalled that it was while discussing the resurrection that St. Paul met his rebuff at the hands of the Athenian philosophers.)

The healing ministry of Christ can be accurately understood only against this backdrop. Jesus thought not simply of saving souls, to use a familiar Christian clich. His redemptive concern necessarily encompassed the whole of man, including his body. For example, in His mind there was no sharp cleavage between sickness and sinthe former belonging to the body and the latter to the soulin the classical sense. Concerning the man sick of the palsy, He could ask, Which is easier, to say, Thy sins be forgiven thee; or to say, Arise, and walk? (Matt. 9:5). His ministry was directed to a total need.

How strangely congenial this aspect of Jesus sounds to our modern ears. Once again we are beginning to consider man not in terms of a division of soul and body or a trichotomy of soul and body and world, but as a psychosomatic or psychosoma-world unity in which whatever affects him in one area has implications for the whole of him. We have come to think of disease not only in isolated terms of organ pathology or disturbed physiological processes, but also in terms of disrupted interpersonal relations-of guilt and the need for love.

Although greatly influenced by non-Christian interpretations of mans nature, the Post-Apostolic Church often saw the healing ministry of Jesus, and that committed to the Church, as radically opposed to the methodology of pagan physicians of the period. It was miracle against scientific methodChrists healings were miraculous, not scientific! But the early Church often failed to distinguish between miracle and magic. Healing is always miracleand never more so than when at its center is the greatest of all miracleslove.

Tragically, the Church generally tended to make magic the normative element of healing; thus the later scientific investigator with his dissecting tables, his microscopes, and his pharmaceuticals was left to feel that the Great Healer, as healer, did not truly belong to him. This was to miss the central significance of Jesus. Not method but redemptive concern lay at the heart of His ministryconcern that encompassed the whole manthe making of the whole man, whole. The physician, if informed and alert to the modern implications of his vocation, cannot miss this real point of identity with Christianitys real figure. Insofar as he is aware of the total need of his patients, insofar as his ultimate concern transcends mere objective method, and insofar as he as a physician is characterized by agape, to use the New Testament word for Godly love, he walks today in the steps of the Master.

It has become traditional to identify modern doctors in spirit with a long line of historic greats reaching back to the impressive Hippocrates. This notable Greek, a veritable pinnacle in ancient medicine, often called the Father of Medicine, largely set the pattern for current professional attitudes and relationships. But sometimes it is forgotten that medicine owes its greatest debt not to Hippocrates, but to Jesus. It was the humble Galilean who more than any other figure in history bequeathed to the healing arts their essential meaning and spirit. During this Christmas season physicians would do well to remind themselves that without His spirit, medicine degenerates into depersonalized methodology, and its ethical code becomes a mere legal system. Jesus brings to methods and codes the corrective of love without which true healing is rarely actually possible. The spiritual Father of Medicine was not Hippocrates of the island of Cos, but Jesus of the town of Nazareth!

JACK W. PROVONSHA, M.D.,

Contributing Editor

Quoted in full from the Current Medical Digest, for December 1959.

Dr. Provonsha is Professor of the Philosophy of Religion and Christian Ethics, Loma Linda University, Loma Linda, California.

Some of the most careful and critical recent studies of Jesus life and teachings affirm the necessity of recognizing the reality of his healing ministry.

Gnther Bornkamm in Jesus of Nazareth (1960) points to the relation between faith and miracle. At the same time, he writes, there can be no doubt that the faith which Jesus demands, and which alone he recognizes as such, has to do with power and with miracle. And this not in the general sense, that God is all-powerful and can work miracles, but in a very concrete sense: faith as very definitely counting on and trusting in Gods power, that it is not at an end at the point where human possibilities are exhausted (p. 131).

Norman Perrin, in Rediscovering the Teaching of Jesus (1967), discusses the history of Biblical criticism and points out that modern prejudice should not blind us to the reality of the healing aspect of Jesus ministry. He then goes on to compare this ministry of Jesus to pagan parallels, suggesting that

A further problem is that many of the most characteristic sayings about faith in the gospels are associated with miracles, especially healing miracles, and critical scholarship has found this aspect of the tradition very difficult. Liberal scholars tended either to rationalize the stories, or to speak movingly of the supreme meaning of Jesus wonders: Gods will of mercy and salvation was expressing itself through him, and then move quickly to a more congenial subject! Form criticism, building on the foundations of the immense comparative studies of the religionsgeschichtliche Schule, dismissed the stories as typical products of the legend-making propensities of ancient religious movements, to be paralleled in both Jewish and Hellenistic religious literature. In either case, there was no desire to discuss the concept of faith involved in these stories as an aspect of the teaching of Jesus....