Divine healing

Divine healing is the belief and practice, prominent in Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, that God heals sickness in answer to prayer, often through the laying on of hands, anointing with oil, or the exercise of a spiritual gift of healing. It rests on the New Testament record of Jesus healing the sick as a central part of his ministry, on his commissioning of his followers to heal in his name, and on the instruction in the letter of James that the elders of the church should pray over the sick and anoint them with oil. Practitioners hold that the same power is available to the church today, and that physical healing is part of the salvation Christ won, to be sought in faith.

The practice ranges from the quiet prayer of a congregation over a sick member to the dramatic public healing services of revivalists and healing evangelists, a tradition that grew in the twentieth century alongside the rise of Pentecostalism. It has also been a source of controversy and, at its edges, of harm: the claims of some prominent healers have been challenged as exaggerated or fraudulent, and the teaching, in its stronger forms, that sufficient faith guarantees healing, so that continued illness reflects a failure of faith, has caused real anguish and, where it has led people to forgo medical treatment, real danger. Most churches that practise divine healing hold it alongside rather than against the use of medicine, understanding both as means through which God may heal, while the relationship between prayer, faith and cure remains contested both theologically and in its encounter with medical evidence.

Divine healing sits differently within different churches, and the difference has occasionally reached a courtroom. The great majority of bodies that pray for healing, Catholic, Orthodox and mainstream Pentecostal alike, teach explicitly that prayer accompanies medical treatment rather than replacing it, and hospital chaplaincy is itself built on that assumption. A small number of groups have taught otherwise.

Faith Assembly congregations in the American Midwest and similar small denominations have at times taught that seeking medical care shows a lack of faith, and prosecutors have brought manslaughter and neglect charges against parents in cases where a child died of a treatable condition after medicine was withheld in favour of prayer alone, cases that recur periodically in American courts and that child-welfare researchers have tracked as a distinct pattern rather than isolated tragedy. Faith-healing exemptions written into some state child-welfare statutes, which excuse parents who rely on prayer from a legal duty to seek medical care, have themselves been challenged and narrowed in several states following such deaths. Large public healing meetings associated with figures such as Oral Roberts and later Benny Hinn drew both enormous crowds and sustained scrutiny, including investigative reporting that could not verify claimed cures and questioned the selection and framing of testimonies given on stage. None of this touches the quieter and far more common form of the practice, a hospital visit, an anointing with oil and a prayer offered alongside, rather than instead of, whatever medicine is already doing.