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Textual Healing: Mainstream Protestants and the Therapeutic Text, 1900–19251
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 28 July 2009
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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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References
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103. Ibid., 7 August 1901.
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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
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118. Gray, Donald, Percy Dearmer: A Parson's Pilgrimage (Norwich, U.K.: Canterbury, 2000).Google Scholar
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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
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125. Ibid., 9 February 1910, 2 March 1910.
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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
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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
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