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From Plato to Pentecostalism: Sickness and Deliverance in the Theology of Derek Prince
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 08 June 2022
Abstract
This article analyses the intellectual sources and global influence of the demonology of Derek Prince (1915–2003), a former philosophy fellow of King's College, Cambridge, who, after his move to the United States in 1963, became a globally influential Pentecostal teacher and author. It argues that his academic expertise in the philosophy of Plato shaped his understanding of the invisible realm of spiritual powers and its impact on the health and material well-being of Christians. Prince's teaching on ancestral curses and the vulnerability of Christians to demonization has been widely received in Africa and other parts of the non-Western world, appearing to provide answers to endemic problems of chronic sickness and impoverishment.
- Type
- Research Article
- Information
- Studies in Church History , Volume 58: THE CHURCH IN SICKNESS AND IN HEALTH , June 2022 , pp. 394 - 414
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Ecclesiastical History Society
References
1 This article represents an expansion and development of material first published in my Christianity in the Twentieth Century: A World History (Princeton, NJ, 2018), 296–304. I am grateful to the provost and fellows of King's College, Cambridge, for granting me access to the minute books of the Cambridge Apostles and to the fellowship dissertation of Derek Prince, and to Peter Monteith, former assistant archivist of King's College, for his assistance. I also express my gratitude to Allan Anderson, Paul Grant and the anonymous peer reviewers for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.
2 Kalusa, Walima T., ‘Language, Medical Auxiliaries, and the Re-interpretation of Missionary Medicine in Colonial Mwinilunga, Zambia, 1922–51’, Journal of Eastern African Studies 1 (2007), 57–78CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
3 Ibid. 74.
4 Terence Ranger, ‘Medical Science and Pentecost: The Dilemma of Anglicanism in Africa’, in W. J. Sheils, ed., The Church and Healing, SCH 19 (Oxford, 1982), 333–65, at 336, 337. For a more recent exposition of the balance between continuity and discontinuity in the relationship between African indigenous cosmologies and Pentecostal Christianity, see Anderson, Allan Heaton, Spirit-Filled World: Religious Dis/Continuity in African Pentecostalism (Cham, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 On the long process of separation, Thomas, Keith, Religion and the Decline of Magic (London, 1971)Google Scholar, remains unsurpassed.
6 Ranger, ‘Medical Science and Pentecost’, 339.
7 For example, Mark 5: 34; Luke 8: 48; 17: 19; 18: 42; see Paul Germond and Sepetla Molapo, ‘In Search of Bophelo in a Time of AIDS: Seeking a Coherence of Economies of Health and Economies of Salvation’, Journal of Theology for Southern Africa 126 (2006), 27–47, at 42–3.
8 Joel Cabrita, The People's Zion: Southern Africa, the United States, and a Transatlantic Faith-Healing Movement (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 4–5.
9 Paul Gifford, African Christianity: Its Public Role (London, 1998), 44–7, 308–25; idem, Ghana's New Christianity: Pentecostalism in a Globalising African Economy (London, 2004), 197–8.
10 For example, Ogbu Kalu, African Pentecostalism: An Introduction (Oxford, 2008).
11 For example, Claudia Währisch-Oblau, ‘Material Salvation: Healing, Deliverance, and “Breakthrough”, in African Migrant Churches in Germany’, in Candy Gunther Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing (Oxford, 2011), 61–80, at 66.
12 Stephen Mansfield, Derek Prince: A Biography (Baldock, 2005), 203–4. Although a popular biography rather than an academic one, it is a very perceptive study.
13 J. E. Raven, Plato's Thought in the Making: A Study of the Development of His Metaphysics (Cambridge, 1965).
14 Mansfield, Derek Prince, 60. On Raven's enthusiasm for the Spirit, see Ian M. Randall, ‘Evangelical Spirituality, Science and Mission: A Study of Charles Raven (1885–1964), Regius Professor of Divinity, Cambridge University’, Anglican and Episcopal History 84 (2015), 20–48.
15 Cambridge, King's College Archives, Minute Books of the Cambridge Apostles, volume 17, 1928–47, minutes for 16 October, 23 October and 13 November 1938.
16 Mansfield, Derek Prince, 77.
17 Ibid. 83–94.
18 David Edwin Harrell Jr, All Things Are Possible: The Healing and Charismatic Revivals in Modern America (Bloomington, IN, 1975), 237, cf. 245.
19 Mansfield, Derek Prince, 110, 125–41.
20 Ibid. 273.
21 Ibid. 174.
22 Ibid. 191.
23 See T. F. C. Bewes, Kikuyu Conflict: Mau Mau and Christian Witness (London, 1953), 8–9, 43, 52, 54; John Casson, ‘Missionaries, Mau Mau and the Christian Frontier’, in Pieter N. Holtrop and Hugh McLeod, eds, Missions and Missionaries, SCH Subsidia 13 (Woodbridge, 2000), 200–15, at 203.
24 Mansfield, Derek Prince, 209.
25 Gordon Lindsay, The Life of John Alexander Dowie whose Trials, Tragedies, and Triumphs are the Most Fascinating Object Lesson of Christian History (n.pl., 1951), 22–5; Philip L. Cook, Zion City, Illinois: Twentieth-Century Utopia (Syracuse, NY, 1996), 8.
26 L. G. McClung Jr, ‘Exorcism’, in Stanley M. Burgess and Eduard M. van der Maas, eds, The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Grand Rapids, MI, 2002), 624–8, at 626. For accounts of early American Pentecostals being tormented by demons, see Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge, MA, 2001), 91–2. See also James Robinson, Divine Healing: The Years of Expansion, 1906–1930 (Eugene, OR, 2014), 146.
27 I have argued this case in Christianity in the Twentieth Century, 297–8.
28 Harrell, All Things are Possible, 185.
29 The ‘Fort Lauderdale Five’ comprised Prince, Don Basham, Bob Mumford, Charles Simpson and Ern Baxter. The group gave particular emphasis to structures of ‘shepherding’ believers, which aroused controversy on account of their authoritarian tendencies.
30 Harrell, All Things Are Possible, 182, 184–5.
31 Derek Prince, Life's Bitter Pool (Harpenden, 1984), 43; ‘About Derek Prince’, online at: <https://www.derekprince.org/Groups/1000103610/DPM_USA/About/About_Derek_Prince/About_Derek_Prince.aspx>, accessed 18 January 2021.
32 Prince's obituary in King's College Cambridge Annual Report (Cambridge, 2004), 50, notes the particular significance of audio cassettes for the dissemination of his teaching.
33 Gifford, African Christianity, 100, 346–7.
34 Opoku Onyinah, Pentecostal Exorcism: Witchcraft and Demonology in Ghana (Blandford Forum, 2012), 172.
35 Gifford, Ghana's New Christianity, 89; see also Emmanuel Kingsley Larbi, Pentecostalism: The Eddies of Ghanaian Christianity (Accra, 2001), 393.
36 Thomas J. Csordas, The Sacred Self: A Cultural Phenomenology of Charismatic Healing (Berkeley, CA, 1994), 41, notes that Prince was one of those primarily responsible for introducing deliverance ministry to American Catholics.
37 The Tablet, 20 April 1996, 525, cited in Gifford, African Christianity, 330; see also ibid. 227.
38 Paul Gifford, Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa (London, 2015), 118–19.
39 James M. Collins, Exorcism and Deliverance Ministry in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis of the Practice and Theology of Exorcism in Modern Western Christianity (Milton Keynes, 2009), 57, 61, 63.
40 Léon-Joseph Suenens, Memories and Hopes (Dublin, 1992), 313–15. The Protestant charismatics appear to have asked Suenens for permission to join his pilgrimage, and he agreed. See also Mansfield, Derek Prince, 238.
41 Léon-Joseph Suenens, Renewal and the Powers of Darkness (London, 1983), 62.
42 Collins, Exorcism and Deliverance Ministry, 64–5, 87–90; Frank Hammond and Ida Mae Hammond, Pigs in the Parlor: A Practical Guide to Deliverance (Kirkwood, MO, 1973).
43 Hammond, Pigs in the Parlor, 154–5. Csordas, The Sacred Self, 181–4, reproduces in full the Hammonds' table of types of demonic infestation from Pigs in the Parlor, which he terms ‘the most comprehensive demonology formulated by practitioners of deliverance’ (ibid. 181), but does not trace the classification to its source in Prince.
44 Ibid. 222. For an account of the use of Pigs in the Parlor as a deliverance manual in an African American storefront church in Durham, NC, with the use of purging by vomiting, see Catherine Bowler, ‘Blessed Bodies: Healing within the African American Faith Movement’, in Brown, ed., Global Pentecostal and Charismatic Healing, 81–105, at 90. For vomiting as a sign of dispossession in early modern exorcisms, see Philip C. Almond, Demonic Possession and Exorcism in Early Modern England: Contemporary Texts and their Cultural Contexts (Cambridge, 2004), 151, 268; Jane P. Davidson, Early Modern Supernatural: The Dark Side of European Culture, 1400–1700 (Santa Barbara, CA, 2012), 112.
45 Prince's popular biographer, Stephen Mansfield, is the only commentator who has noted the marked Platonic influence on Prince's cosmology; see his Derek Prince, 272.
46 Brian McGuinness, ed., Wittgenstein in Cambridge: Letters and Documents 1911–1951 (Oxford, 2008), 294; Theodore Redpath, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Student's Memoir (London, 1990), 80, 82.
47 McGuinness, ed., Wittgenstein in Cambridge, 295; Redpath, Ludwig Wittgenstein, 82–3; Mansfield, Derek Prince, 74.
48 Mansfield, Derek Prince, 274.
49 Cambridge, King's College Archives, KCAC/4/11/1, P. D. V. Prince, ‘The Evolution of Plato's Philosophical Method’ (Fellowship dissertation, n.d. [1940]), 7, 12, 130.
50 Ibid. 60; citing A. E. Taylor, Varia Socratica, first series (Oxford, 1911), 244 (Taylor's italics).
51 Prince, ‘Evolution of Plato's Philosophical Method’, 60–1.
52 Plato, Phaedo, transl. David Gallop (Oxford, 1975), 27.
53 Derek Prince, Blessing or Curse: You can Choose, 3rd edn (Baldock, 2007), 36.
54 Derek Prince, Lucifer Exposed: The Devil's Plan to Destroy your Life, new edn (Baldock, 2007), 12.
55 For precedents in the early Hellenistic church for Prince's belief in the possibility of the demonization of Christians, see Onyinah, Pentecostal Exorcism, 248–51.
56 Prince, Blessing or Curse, 14, 41–2.
57 Birgit Meyer, Translating the Devil: Religion and Modernity among the Ewe in Ghana (Edinburgh, 1999).
58 Prince, Blessing or Curse, 19, 36.
59 Deut. 28; also Deut. 5: 9; Ex. 20: 5.
60 Derek Prince, God's Word Heals (Baldock, 2010), 177.
61 Prince, Blessing or Curse, 53–5.
62 Derek Prince, Expelling Demons, new edn (Baldock, 2015), 9.
63 Suenens, Renewal and the Powers of Darkness, 62, reproduces this list with only slight amendment.
64 Prince, Blessing or Curse, 53.
65 For biographical details of Vaughan (1866–1966), see Dix Noonan Webb, ‘A Great War C.B. Group of Eight awarded to Major-General Robert Edward Vaughan, Indian Army’, auctioneer's catalogue entry, 31 March 2010, online at: <https://www.dnw.co.uk/auction-archive/past-catalogues/lot.php?auction_id=185&lot_uid=182180>, accessed 7 December 2020.
66 Prince, Blessing or Curse, 27–9, 41.
67 Plato, Phaedrus, ed. R. Hackforth (Cambridge, 1952), 57 (244d–e); cf. Robert Parker, Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion (Oxford, 1983), 191–206.
68 Søren Skovgaard Jensen, Dualism and Demonology: The Function of Demonology in Pythagorean and Platonic Thought (Copenhagen, 1966), 60–1, 90–2.
69 Kwame Bediako, Theology and Identity: The Impact of Culture upon Christian Thought in the Second Century and Modern Africa (Oxford, 1992), 108–9, 144–5; see also Mansfield, Derek Prince, 272, on Prince's incipient dualism.
70 J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, ‘Therapeutic Strategies in African Religions: Health, Herbal Medicines and Indigenous Christian Spirituality’, Studies in World Christianity 20 (2014), 70–90, at 86–8.
71 Norberto Saracco, ‘Argentine Pentecostalism: Its History and Theology’ (Ph.D. thesis, University of Birmingham, 1989), 243–52.
72 David Maxwell, African Gifts of the Spirit: Pentecostalism and the Rise of a Zimbabwean Transnational Religious Movement (Oxford, 2006), 184–211.
73 Gifford, African Christianity, 102, 346–7; idem, Ghana's New Christianity, 89; idem, Christianity, Development and Modernity in Africa, 31, 69, 118–19; Asamoah-Gyadu, African Charismatics, 170; Naomi Richman, ‘Machine Gun Prayer: The Politics of Embodied Desire in Pentecostal Worship’, JCR 35 (2020), 469–83, at 472, 474, 480; Onyinah, Pentecostal Exorcism, 172–3, 183.
74 Haustein, Jörg, ‘Embodying the Spirit(s): Pentecostal Demonology and Deliverance Discourse in Ethiopia’, Ethnos 76 (2011), 534–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
75 Porterfield, Amanda, Healing in the History of Christianity (Oxford, 2005), 124CrossRefGoogle Scholar, citing Alves, Rubem A., A Theology of Hope (Washington, DC, 1969), 149Google Scholar.