Spiritual Healing in Britain

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The position on healing in England in the 16th century was ambivalent. Healing was easily equated with witchcraft because of its mystery and invisible processes, but protection was offered to herbalists and other folk medicine practices.

In the England of the 16th and 17th century, the customary reaction to illness was to probe one's individual soul for moral misdemeanours. Physical sickness was a theological issue, and this is clear in the Elizabethan Prayer Book's command to clergymen visiting the sick to remind their patients that the illness that had befallen them was of God's decree.

The ancient link between the Christian view of illness as a curse from God exists in the names of certain illnesses-St Vitus dance and St Anthony's fire (Sydenham's chorea and ergotism respectively) are two examples. In the England of the 18th century, healing was losing ground rapidly.

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), the author of Leviathan, argued that the miracles enumerated in the Old Testament could not be given credence because if they had actually happened they would have automatically brought about a worldwide wholesale belief in the Christian religion.

The Age of Enlightenment brought about perhaps the severest critic of healing, David Hume. In his 1748 essay on miracles he argues that they are a 'violation of the laws of nature'. These laws were fixed and inviolable, and he would not tolerate the suggestion that they could be transcended.

In recent history a growing awareness of literary forms in the Bible by scripture scholars and theologians has led to some quarters questioning whether or not we should take the miracles of Christ in a literal way. Today people are more interested in the historical truth of the miracles, so that the miracle stories are interpreted as having a symbolic meaning rather than a literal one.

There was admittedly an inclination to embellish healing stories and inflate the numbers involved. For instance, Mark (10:46) has one blind man whereas Matthew has two (20:30). It has also been observed that some miracles resemble Rabbinic stories and older legends. Furthermore, there is a description of Vespasian healing a blind man using saliva, and a myth in the cult of Dionysus describing water being turned into wine. The healing miracles in the Bible also follow the template of other miracle stories in the Gentile miracle story tradition.

Christian existentialists such as Husserl and Kierkegaard denied the supernatural as a reality. The German Lutheran theologian Rudolf Bultmann was also to deny the objective reality of Jesus's healings.

The only form of healing accepted by many churches is so-called 'spiritual' healing. If genuine physical healing takes place, it is regarded as a problem; the Catholic church tends to distance itself from healers who claim divine inspiration in case these healers should turn out to be charlatans. While this approach is no doubt politic, it tends to undermine the place of healing in religious life.

As well as this, many Christians believe that the 'well of healing' dried up with the early church and limit the healing ministry of Christ to three short years of his life.

While it may be fashionable to query the literal truth of the healings of Jesus, whether we accept the healing miracles or not, we have to see the healing ministry of Christ as central to the life of Jesus Christ and his message. Healing was Christ's symbolic way of saying to his people that he understood their problems, and was not unaware of them.

Christ's whole existence was full of suffering, his death on the cross being only the culmination of his sufferings. The Hebrews whom Jesus dwelt amongst, and indeed ministered to, saw people in a holistic sense-that is, as a person with a body, a soul, feelings and a personal history.

All these things had to be integrated into a harmonious unity of absolute concord in the healing process. Illness is not just a meaningless event but to a large extent the child of a person's fears, aspirations and actions. This is a central tenet of the philosophy of holism. Holism is a philosophy that may appear new but clearly is linked to the older tradition of Plato, the Hebrews and the Chinese, along with the Yogis.