Keeping the Faith, Discerning the Divine: Terms and Conditions in New Research on Christianity and Healing in North America Faith in the Great Physician: Suffering and Divine Healing in American Culture, 1860–1900

摘要

Approaching the subject of Christianity and healing in North America is anfraught task for the scholar of religion. In a historical context so profoundlynshaped by biomedical models of human physiology, on what grounds, besidesnmaterialist reduction, can scholars account for the claims of those who arguenthat God heals? One measure of this quandary is the shifting terminologynused to describe the phenomenon itself—from faith cure, to faith healing, tondivine healing. Giving different emphasis to the “faith” of the distressed ornthe interventions of the “divine,” faith healing and divine healing arencategories that, when employed by scholars, themselves indicate a host ofnimplied methodological and theoretical concerns. Keeping in mind that thisnis not terminology of fixed precision, one could hazard the claim thatn“faith healing” is a largely etic category used by outsiders to imbue spiritualnhealing with a hint of quackery. By contrast, “divine healing” is an emicncategory preferred by practitioners, and scholars, who want to take claims ofnhealing by spiritual means seriously. (In some uses, the divine healingnmovement can also delineate a particular late nineteenth-century precursornto pentecostalism.) Whether in the specter of charlatanism or of thenHoly Ghost, the terminology of modern Christian healing is haunted bynconvictions about the limits of what is possible when repairing the body in anbiomedical age.