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Textual Healing: Mainstream Protestants and the Therapeutic Text, 1900–19251

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Pamela E. Klassen
Pamela E. Klassen
Affiliation:
Associate professor in the Department and Centre for the Study of Religion at the University of Toronto.
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Extract

Healing—whether via medical or miraculous means—has increasingly caught the attention of scholars of North American Protestantism within the past decade. Recent studies have convincingly argued that healing was at the heart of Protestant identity, especially in turn-of-the-twentieth-century United States and Canada. Loosely defined as the restoring of physical or emotional well-being with recourse to medical, symbolic, or religious means, healing is often distinguished from curing as a therapeutic approach with more “ho-listic” goals than the cessation of particular physical ailments. Nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century groups known for their commitment to divine healing and their antipathy to biomedicine, such as Christian Scientists and Pentecostals, are readily fit within this paradigm of healing, but so too are groups often thought to have disparaged faith healing in their embrace of biomedicine, such as mainstream Anglo-Protestants. Through foreign and domestic medical missions, establishing hospitals and medical schools, and initiating deaconess orders, mainstream Protestant groups, including Anglicans and Methodists, made healing central to their public identity and daily practice. In the process, they faced the tricky negotiation of embracing epistemologies of scientific medicine without surrendering their own theologies of God's omnipotent love, all the while living in an increasingly “therapeutic culture.” Complicating their task was their persistent encounter with different, often competing versions of religious healing, whether in the encounter with natives in colonial missions or in the challenge of rival therapeutic theologies such as those of Christian Science. Making their way through this era of increasing medicalization (and increasing contestation of medicalization), mainstream Protestants developed a strain of Christian healing that was unabashedly medicalized and modern, and they testified to its power in print and in practice.

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Church History , Volume 75 , Issue 4 , December 2006 , pp. 809 - 848
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Copyright © American Society of Church History 2006

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References

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34. Between the years 1908–25, the Christian Guardian had a consistent subscription rate that ranged from 20,000 to 23,000, with a jump in 1920 to 32,126: “Methodist Book and Publishing House Financial Statements,” 1915, 1919, 1920, 1924, 1925, file 21, box 30, fonds 513/2, 83.061C, Financial operations: Methodist/Ryerson, United Church of Canada Board of Publication Collection fonds (hereafter UCC Board fonds), United Church of Canada/Victoria University Archives, Toronto, Canada. Ministers were the main agents for the paper, but it was also peddled door to door: “The Christian Guardian,” n.d., 7, file 2, box 12, fonds 513/2/3, 83.061C, Ryerson History, UCC Board fonds. Archival records and subscription rates for the Canadian Churchman from 1900–1925 are seemingly non-existent. In the 1950s, a low point, its subscribers numbered approximately 5000: “Anglican Journal/Journal Anglican: A Brief History,” Anglican Journal—Historical Information, G596–07, Anglican General Synod Archives, Toronto, Canada. On editorial histories, see Miliman, T. R., “Canadian Anglican Journalism in the Nineteenth Century,” Canadian Church Historical Society, 3:5 (1959): 9Google Scholar; Katerberg, William H., “Redefining Evangelicalism in the Canadian Anglican Church: Wycliffe College and the Evangelical Party, 1867–1995,” in Aspects of the Canadian Evangelical Experience, ed. George, Rawlyk (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1997), 176Google Scholar; Hayes, , Anglicans in Canada, 125Google Scholar; Airhart, Phyllis, Serving the Present Age: Revivalism, Progressivism, and the Methodist Tradition in Canada (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1992), 78Google Scholar; Christie, Nancy and Gauvreau, Michael, A FullOrbed Christianity: The Protestant Churches and Social Welfare in Canada, 1900–1940 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1996), 25Google Scholar. On Creighton's love of books, see Creighton, Donald, “My Father and the United Church,” in The Passionate Observer: Selected Writings (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1980), 95–96.Google Scholar

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48. Ibid., 27 January 1915.

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96. Ibid., 1 March 1900.

97. See Twain, Mark, Christian Science (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996)Google Scholar; Gill, Gillian, Mary Baker Eddy (Reading, Mass: Perseus, 1998)Google Scholar; Cunningham, Raymond J., “The Impact of Christian Science on the American Churches, 1880–1910,” American Historical Review 72 (04 1967): 885–905CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Gottschalk, Stephen, The Emergence of Christian Science in American Religious Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).Google Scholar

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99. Christian Guardian, 18 September 1901.

100. Ibid., 3 January 1900.

101. The inscriptions, still extant in the Christian Science Mother Church in Boston, are the following. On the left front wall: “He shall give you another comforter, that he may abide with you for ever; Even the spirit of truth whom the world cannot receive, because it seeth him not. But ye know him for he dwelleth in you. Christ Jesus.” This is a slight alteration of John 14:16–17 AV. On the right front wall: “If sin makes sinners Truth and Love can unmake them. If a sense of disease produces suffering and a sense of ease antidotes it, disease is mental. Hence the fact of Christian Science that the human mind alone suffers and the divine mind alone heals it. Mary Baker Eddy.” This is an earlier version of the passage in the current edition of Science and Health 270:22. Also on the right front wall: “Preach the word; be instant in season, out of season; reprove, rebuke, exhort with all wrong suffering and doctrine. Paul”: 2 Timothy 4:2 AV.

102. Christian Guardian, 27 June 1906.

103. Ibid., 7 August 1901.

104. Ibid.

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109. Johns, , “The Physiology of Reading.”Google Scholar See also the discussion of writing as “recordation,” in Bhabha, , The Location of Culture, 94–96Google Scholar; and deCerteau's, Michel discussion of writing, citing, and belief; The Practice of Everyday Life, 188–89Google Scholar. Also see Harrison, Peter, The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Jardine, Lisa, Ingenious Pursuits: Building the Scientific Revolution (London: Little, Brown, 1999).Google Scholar

110. Gauvreau, , Evangelical CenturyGoogle Scholar: and Van Die, Marguerite, An Evangelical Mind: Nathaniel Burwash and the Methodist Tradition in Canada, 1839–1918 (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1989), 98.Google Scholar

111. For example, “The Christian Science Case,” Christian Guardian, 31 May 1905; “Table Talk,” Christian Guardian, 1 November 1905; Waggett, J. M., “An Editor and Christian Science,” Christian Guardian, 18 07 1917Google Scholar; “Superstition and Spiritualism,” Canadian Churchman, 24 May 1900; Rev. Forster, A. Haire, “Christian Science,” Canadian Churchman, 26 06 1919.Google Scholar

112. Christian Guardian, 31 January 1900.

113. Even Christian Scientists and evangelical proponents of faith healing were caught up in the language of truth and empirical verifiability with their stress on public witnessing and testimonies of healings. See Wacker, , Heaven BelowGoogle Scholar; Schoepflin, , Christian Science on Trial.Google Scholar

114. Canadian Churchman, 7 April 1904.

115. Mullin, , Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination, 46, 97.Google Scholar

116. Christian Guardian, 19 May 1909.

117. Moorshead, , The Way of the Doctor, 60–61.Google Scholar

118. Gray, Donald, Percy Dearmer: A Parson's Pilgrimage (Norwich, U.K.: Canterbury, 2000).Google Scholar

119. Dearmer, , Body and Soul, 120–21.Google Scholar

120. Dearmer, Percy, Everyman's History of the Prayer Book (London: Mowbray, 1912).Google Scholar

121. In Acts 19:19 NRSV, Paul's preaching and acts of healing in Ephesus are so convincing to the Ephesians that “a number of those who practiced magic collected their books and burned them publicly.”

122. Dearmer, Percy, ed., The Fellowship of the Picture: An Automatic Script Taken Down by Nancy Dearmer (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1920)Google Scholar. On automatic writing and its relationship to the uses of texts as scientific evidence, see Gitelman, , Scripts, Grooves, and Writing MachinesGoogle Scholar. Mullin classifies Dearmer as a sacramentalist for his championing of anointing the sick—given his spiritualist interests, I would argue that he was equally “thaumaturgical,” though not in a Pentecostal sense. See Mullin, , Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination, 199–202.Google Scholar

123. See Root, John D., “Science, Religion, and Psychical Research: The Monistic Thought of Sir Oliver Lodge,” Harvard Theological Review 71 (07–10 1978): 245–63.Google Scholar

124. Christian Guardian, 26 January 1910.

125. Ibid., 9 February 1910, 2 March 1910.

126. Bedson, C. L., “We Have Not Turned Spiritualist,” Christian Guardian, 26 01 1910.Google Scholar

127. Bainborough, George A., “Sir Oliver Lodge's Creed,” Christian Guardian, 16 02 1910.Google Scholar

128. Naylor, C. E., “Sir Oliver Lodge and Psychic Research,” Christian Guardian, 2 03 1910Google Scholar. In another exchange of letters in January–February 1915, one pro-Lodge writer took care to mention that he “receives communications in writing from many of his old friends who have passed away”: Murphy, John, Christian Guardian, 3 February 1915.Google Scholar

129. Christian Guardian, 2 March 1910. For an Anglican clergyman parallel to Lodge, see Rev. DuVernet's, F. H. discussions of his experiments with “radio mind”: “Telepathic Testimonies,” Canadian Churchman, 1 November 1923.Google Scholar

130. See Schmidt, Leigh, Hearing Things.Google Scholar

131. Opp, , The Lord for the BodyGoogle Scholar; and Burkinshaw, , Pilgrims in Lotus Land.Google Scholar

132. “The Special Committee's Report on the Dr. C. S. Price Healing Campaign,” Christian Guardian, 16 January 1924; and “The Price Campaign: The Minority Point of View,” Christian Guardian, 19 March 1924. The Canadian Churchman printed brief articles about Price but did not print the report.

133. For example, Routley, T. C., “Canadian Health Service: Article 1, The Waste of Ill Health,” Christian Guardian, 3 12 1924.Google Scholar

134. Christie, and Gauveau, , A Full-Orbed Christianity, 129.Google Scholar

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136. “Good Reading Popular,” Christian Guardian, 5 October 1910.

137. Harrison, , The Bible, Protestantism, and the Rise of Natural Science.Google Scholar

138. See Opp, , The Lord for the Body.Google Scholar

139. Wacker, , Heaven Below, 31.Google Scholar