Conversatio Divina

Part 1 of 16

Healing Body and Soul

Gary W. Moon
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Table of Contents

  1. 01.  Introduction
  2. 02.  For Example

01.  Introduction

Do you believe that a minister can cure disease by praying and putting a hand on someone’s head? Careful before you answer, a very similar question is on a test used by mental health professionals to diagnose psychopathology, and to affirm that particular item will increase your score on a scale that will make you appear, to state it succinctly, crazy. 

My uncle Otis would have answered, “Yes.” He was my favorite uncle, who just happened to be a semi-famous faith-healing evangelist. I sometimes say that he was Charismatic before it was cool—but only my classical Pentecostal friends get that reference. 

Otis believed miraculous healing to be a commonplace thing for Christians and that demons were real, present, and easy to send packing. 

Otis was a bigger than life extrovert who never met a stranger. He was loud, constantly smiling, and rarely seen without a cassette tape recorder in tow, having discovered that, for him, listening to other evangelists tell stories from the trenches of spiritual warfare was a much better way to prepare sermons than digging through dusty commentaries. 

Uncle Otis did have a few misfires along the way. Once he was praying for a man to be exorcised of a demon and demanded of the spirit-being, “What is your name?” 

When an unusually raspy voice was heard to say, “My name is Lying,” Uncle Otis quickly demanded, “Are you telling me the truth, lying demon?” 

As Otis tells the story, that particular demon was left confused and speechless. 

There was another time my uncle was praying for a very shy man to be healed of his infirmity. He was praying into a live microphone with a thousand people listening in. When the man reluctantly whispered his very personal problem into my uncle’s ear, Otis bellowed while placing a very large hand on the man’s head, “Be healed of your constipation, instantly!” I’m not sure if the man experienced relief, but if so, God provided the miracle with much more discretion than Uncle Otis. 

Uncle Otis has been on my mind quite a bit the past few months as we’ve worked on this issue of Conversations, built around the theme of Healing. I think it’s because Otis would have been very much at home in the church of the first four centuries. He would not have seemed odd in an environment where Christians seemed to emerge from baptismal waters and stepped into another dimension, a realm where miraculous healing and encounters with demons were common place. 

Francis MacNutt, in his book, The Nearly Perfect Crime: How the Church almost Murdered the Ministry of Healing, says it this way: 

 

“When you think about it, this near destruction of divine healing is an extraordinary mystery, because miraculous healing—with its twin the casting out of evil spirits—lay at the very heart of Jesus Christ’s mission. For the first four hundred years of Church history, Christians expected healing to take place when they prayed! How is it possible that something so central to the Gospel almost died out?” 

 

MacNutt underscores his claim of a murder mystery by quoting from 2 Timothy 3:5 (NJBScripture quotations marked (NJB) are from The Jerusalem Bible, Copyright 1966, 1967, 1968, 1998 by Darton, Longman & Todd Ltd. and Doubleday & Company, Inc. Used by permission.), “They will keep up the outward appearance of religion but will have rejected the inner power of it.” Otis would have liked Francis quite a bit. 

But there is another aspect of early Christianity, I believe, that has been all but lost to many Christians today. I recently heard a podcast featuring Eugene Peterson. The discussion was centering around “salvation.” I was listening intently—after all, Eugene Peterson had written the Bible—when I heard him say, “You know, if there were one other word that could have been used for most translations of ‘salvation,’ it would have been ‘healing.’ ” 

After hearing this, I went to the New Testament and conducted an interesting exercise. Whenever the Greek verb sozo occurred I would insert the word “healing” or “made well.” 

02.  For Example

  • “She shall give birth to a son, and you are to give him the name Jesus, because he will [sozo—heal/ make well] his people from their sins.” (Matthew 1:21, NIVScripture quotations marked (NIV) are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®, NIV®. Copyright ©1973, 1978, 1984, 2011 by Biblica, Inc.™ Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved worldwide. www.zondervan.com The “NIV” and “New International Version” are trademarks registered in the United States Patent and Trademark Office by Biblica, Inc.™) 
  • “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but to [sozo—heal/make well] the world through him.” (John 3:17, NIV) 
  • “Salvation is found in no one else, for there is no other name under heaven given to mankind by which we must be [sozo—healed/made well].” (Acts 4:12, NIV) 
  • “That if you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is Lord,’ and believe in your heart that God raised

Him from the dead you shall be [sozo—healed/made well].” (Romans 10:9, NIV) 

  • For it is by grace you have been [sozo—healed/made well], through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God. (Ephesians 2:8, NIV) 

 

As I have done this exercise with a word that can be translated “saved,” “healed,” “made well,” “delivered,” I’ve come to realize that while I grew up in part of the church that was open to the real possibility of miraculous physical and emotional healing, the notion of salvation as “healing” had been all but lost to my faith community. Most of my salvation metaphors were played out in a courtroom and not a hospital. While I had prayed for forgiveness of sins to avoid painful punishment, salvation, for the most part, was a mechanistic contractual process worked out on my behalf by Jesus. And God was a hostile judge. 

While I do not dismiss the forensic elements of salvation, I have found it very helpful to place on that foundation, what seems to me, an additional, and more complete view that involves a great healing—the restoration of relationship with the Trinity and the process of becoming whole and complete. Plugged back in to the life that is God (See John 17:3). I know that I have a need to be both “saved” from my sins and “healed” from them as well—healed from my desire to continue living life separate and apart from God. 

Physical healing was at the center of Jesus’ mission. The only way to escape that fact is to deny that the miracles really happened. In the Gospels, not only were signs and wonders at the heart of the message but almost all these miraculous events were acts of healing or exorcism. 

  1. T. Wright puts it this way:

 

“Jesus did things and then commented on them, explained them, challenged people to figure out what they meant. He acted practically and symbolically not least through his remarkable works of healing.”N. T. Wright, The Challenge of Jesus (Downers Grove, Ill: InterVarsity Press, 1999), 39.

 

So what did all those “healing” acts mean? Well certainly Jesus’ miraculous works gave proof that when he claimed to have special knowledge about how to live life in the Kingdom of God, he was to be taken seriously. He had authority from out of this world. He knew what he was talking about. But I also think his demonstrations of sozo (healing and deliverance) symbolized something else very important. His primary message, the present availability of the Kingdom of God, meant that humanity’s biggest spiritual disease—estrangement from God—could also be healed by Jesus. The ultimate healing is a return to fellowship with God, who is capable of bringing the miraculous into the finite. 

We hope you’ll enjoy this issue of Conversations that is built around the theme of healing. You will read articles about the healing of both body and soul, beginning with listening in on a conversation with Francis MacNutt—who with his wife Judith founded Christian Healing Ministries—and Harold Koenig, Director of the Center for Spirituality, Theology and Health at Duke University. 

You’ll also read a tribute to Bill Vaswig, a friend and mentor to Richard J. Foster, who lived a very special life as a joy-filled friend of God. He also was founder and first president of Preaching and Prayer Ministries. This tribute is written by James Catford, President of the British Bible Society, as well as other friends of Bill Vaswig. You’ll also find a deeper look into the idea of salvation as healing in an excellent article by Henry Cloud, “Getting Saved.” 

And you will find many other articles by individuals who have found healing or who provide healing through: community (Mark Scandrette), spiritual direction (Susan Phillips), prayer ministry (Jacci Turner), inner healing prayer (Mary Yerkes), sound teaching (Jeff Berkebile) and in intimate family relationships (Ben Patterson). I think you will also continue to enjoy the excellent contributions of our feature writers for this issue on Healing—which marks the completion of the first ten years of Conversations. So, pull up a chair; there’s always a place for you at the table. 

Footnotes

Gary W. Moon, executive director of the Dallas Willard Center for Christian Spiritual Formation at Westmont College, founded (with David G. Benner and Larry Crabb) Conversations Journal, directs the Renovaré Institute for Christian Spiritual Formation and has authored several books. He still teaches at Richmont Graduate University when they let him.

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