Religious healing is a hot topic in contemporary public and academic discourse. Over the past several decades, medical researchers, religious believers, and scholars from a variety of disciplines have been exploring and debating the relationship between faith and health. Studies aiming to assess the value of contemplative practices for coping with physical pain and the efficacy of petitionary prayer for curing bodily illness have stimulated controversy among scientists and seized the attention of popular news media. Publications such as Newsweek and Time have frequently reported on growing grass-roots interest in intersections among religious belief, spiritual practice, and physical well-being. At the same time, medical anthropologists, sociologists and scholars of religion have documented the myriad ways in which a wide variety of faith communities seek to integrate the insights of biomedicine with the resources of their religious traditions.

Amanda Porterfield's sweeping study, Healing in the History of Christianity, reminds us that interest in religious healing is nothing new. In fact, Porterfield asserts, the practice of healing has been a part of "many, if not all" faith traditions around the world and throughout history. Christians, she contends, have made healing a "defining element" of their religious experience from the time of Jesus through the present and have proved themselves especially adept at promoting their faith as a means of attaining personal, social, and eternal health. The "distinctive" emphasis Christians have placed upon healing, Porterfield argues, helps to explain Christianity's "endurance, expansion, and success" as a world religion. Since its inception, Christianity has appealed to people in a variety of different cultural and historical contexts because of its ability to serve as an "antidote" for suffering of all kinds; a means of coping with the diseases, stresses, fears, and alienations caused by social dislocation, political oppression, economic upheavals, and cataclysmic cultural change.

Porterfield supports her thesis with a remarkable range of data. Spanning the first to the 21st centuries, Porterfield's story encompasses the entire sweep of Christian history. The book's geographical scope is equally vast. Not only does Porterfield attend to the place of healing in both Eastern and Western European forms of Christianity, she also examines how healing figured in Christianity's global expansion throughout Africa, India, Asia, and the Americas. Focusing on healing as a central feature of Christian faith and practice also enables Porterfield to incorporate an extraordinarily diverse cast of characters, many of whom have been overlooked in standard historical treatments. Alongside the usual suspects—the apostle Paul, the Virgin Mary, Augustine, Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, to name a few of the most prominent—less familiar personages appear as key participants in the chronicle of Christian history. Women such as the medieval abbess and herbalist Hildegaard of Bingen; the health reformer and Seventh-day Adventist leader Ellen G. White; Mary Baker Eddy, founder of Christian Science; and Bernadette Soubrious, the visionary of Lourdes, come into view, as do Native American leaders and prophets such Kateri Tekawitha, Handsome Lake, Wovoka, and Black Elk. Revolutionaries who have conceived of Christian healing in social and political terms also emerge as important characters in the story. Participants in China's Taiping Rebellion, Latin American liberation movements, and anti-apartheid efforts in South Africa play important roles in the ongoing drama of Christianity's development.

By examining the history of Christianity through the lens of healing, Porterfield also sheds new light on more familiar figures. From her vantage point, Albert Schweitzer's commitment to the relief of human suffering through medical missions is as significant as his influence as a New Testament scholar and author of The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Similarly, the contributions of Nobel Peace Prize-winners Mvumbi Lutuli, Nelson Mandela, and Desmond Tutu to discussions about the meaning of Christian healing are just as noteworthy as their achievements within the political realm.

Using healing as the consistent thread that runs throughout the history of Christianity, Porterfield weaves her narrative with skill and dexterity. In contrast to the many scholars who insist that the concept of "Christianity" is a patchwork made up of incongruent components, Porterfield insists that healing provides a unifying strand for the story. Seemingly disparate elements become integral parts of the pattern, and subjects that are rarely treated together (Spiritualism and Pentecostalism, for example) are placed side by side. The result is a complicated, sometimes chaotic, but consistently captivating configuration of Christian history—a vibrant and compelling picture that offers a distinctive perspective on how and why Christianity has flourished in diverse cultural, social and historical settings.

Porterfield's emphasis on coherence and continuity in the history of Christian healing also enables her to highlight the centrality of related motifs, such as the crucial role that Christians in various times and places have played in resisting philosophical dualism. The question of how the mind and body, the spirit and the flesh are related, Porterfield demonstrates, has been a recurring and critical issue for Christian believers across the centuries. Porterfield's insights suggest that the doctrine of the incarnation has inspired innumerable conflicts—as well as incredible creativity—among Christians, and helps us understand why subjects such as healing (not to mention abortion, euthanasia, and sexuality) continue to generate such intense debate. Also helpful in this regard is Porterfield's treatment of the interplay between "religious" healing and "scientific" or "secular" medicine. Although she might have done more to historicize these concepts, Porterfield does show that the relationship between Christianity and medicine has always been far more complex than many standard accounts of the subject suggest. Confluence and cooperation have been just as prominent as conflict and contestation. Symbiosis, in her reading, is a more persuasive model than secularization.

Given the abundant resources that Porterfield's expansive analysis yields, it seems uncharitable to complain about the costs of comprehensiveness. Yet Porterfield does pay a price for synthesizing such a wealth of material. In her effort to highlight commonalities among the many episodes in the history of healing that she incorporates within her narrative, Porterfield tends to gloss over important particularities and obscure critical differences. Porterfield's analysis of healing in the modern era—ironically, the historical time frame with which she is most familiar—focuses excessively on the influence of electricity as a means of conceiving divine power, for example, and in so doing ignores other crucial factors that shaped the ways in which Christians understood and experienced healing in this period. Although her emphasis on electricity does allow her to bring together figures as diverse as John Wesley and Mary Baker Eddy, Porterfield's coupling of these characters comes at the expense of appreciating the theological distinctions—sometimes subtle but frequently stark—between these proponents of healing. To claim that Eddy was "heir to Wesley's understanding of Christian healing" seems, at best, a stretch.

At the same time, Porterfield pays scant attention to the many holiness and Higher Life evangelicals who drew directly upon their Wesleyan heritage as they worked to revitalize Christian healing in the late 19th century, often in direct opposition to Eddy's Christian Science. As historians such as R. Bruce Mullin and Ann Taves have recently demonstrated, the "divine healing" or "faith cure" movement that arose and flourished among evangelicals throughout Continental Europe, Great Britain, and North America during the latter decades of the 19th century influenced a broad and diverse segment of the Protestant population, including the early Pentecostals that Porterfield does discuss. Evangelicals of various sorts continued to participate in and promote faith healing throughout the 20th and into the 21st century. Although Porterfield briefly attends to Aimee Semple McPherson, she never mentions the many other healing evangelists—Oral Roberts, Kathryn Kuhlman, and Francis MacNutt, for example—who have contributed to an ongoing and increasingly global evangelical faith-healing movement.

While Porterfield's lack of attention to evangelicals is curious, given their levels of involvement in and influence on healing, her silence on the subject is not unique. Evangelicals are also noticeably absent in the 2004 volume Religion and Healing in America, edited by Linda Barnes and Susan Sered. Not one of the 31 essays in this collection deals with evangelical faith healing (although one does focus on healing among Latino Pentecostals and another discusses sexual healing in the ex-gay movement). Why this reticence?

Perhaps for scholars like Porterfield, Barnes, and Sered, who interpret religious healing as a primarily positive and frequently empowering phenomenon, evangelical faith healers and their followers seem to represent a countervailing and possibly threatening force. Although Porterfield demonstrates remarkable sympathy toward her subjects, the one or two references to "conservative Protestants" she does make suggest that she might be apt to associate some expressions of evangelicalism with political oppression and social exploitation. Rather than dealing directly with forms of Christian healing she might construe as potentially harmful, destructive, or even pathological, Porterfield may have chosen to omit such unsettling subjects from her survey. Whatever her reasons for leaving evangelicals out of the story, doing so impoverishes this otherwise rich analysis. Not only would including evangelicals provide a more complete and accurate picture of Christian healing in the modern and postmodern periods, but attending to the ways in which faith healing may have contributed to, rather than alleviated, various forms of social stress would have helped to nuance Porterfield's characterization of Christian healing in important ways. To see religious healing (or indeed religion itself) as capable of both liberation and coercion, as a means of both empowerment and repression, would be to capture more fully both the promises and the perils involved in the ongoing enterprise of linking the pursuit of holiness with the quest for health.

Heather D. Curtis is assistant professor of religion at Tufts University. She is the author of Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860-1900, recently published by Johns Hopkins University Press.

Copyright © 2008 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
Click here for reprint information on Books & Culture.