The Christian life

Divine healing

What the Church prays for the sick, what she has never promised, and how to answer both the sceptic and the faith healer.

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Christ healed. A large proportion of the gospel narratives are healings, and He sent the apostles to do the same. The Church has prayed for the sick from the beginning, and James gives explicit instructions: call the elders, let them pray and anoint with oil, and the prayer of faith shall save the sick.

All four traditions believe God heals, and none of them teaches that miraculous healing has ceased.

But all four also teach three things that cut against the healing ministries most people have encountered.

Healing is not guaranteed. Paul asked three times for his thorn to be removed and was refused, with the explanation my grace is sufficient for thee. He left Trophimus sick at Miletus. He told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach - practical advice, not a rebuke for insufficient faith.

Illness is not evidence of sin or of weak faith. Christ says so directly of the man born blind: neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents. The book of Job exists to demolish the argument that suffering indicates guilt, and God rebukes Job's friends by name for making it.

Medicine is God's gift. The traditions have never set prayer against treatment. Luke was a physician. Monasteries built the first hospitals. Praying for healing and seeking the best available medical care are the same act of seeking God's help, and nobody should be discouraged from treatment on religious grounds.

The Church's ministry to the sick is prayer, anointing, the sacraments, and presence - and her ultimate promise is not that you will not die but that you will rise.

What the New Testament shows

The healings in the Gospels are not chiefly demonstrations of power. They are signs of the kingdom: pictures of what God's reign looks like when it arrives, which is why they cluster around the marginal - lepers, the blind, a haemorrhaging woman, a demoniac, a foreigner's servant.

Several patterns are worth noticing, because they cut against the way healing is usually preached.

Christ does not heal everyone. At the pool of Bethesda a multitude of sick people lie waiting, and He heals one man and leaves. He passes through Galilee constantly, and the region does not become disease-free.

Faith appears in different places. Sometimes the sick person's - thy faith hath made thee whole. Sometimes someone else's, as with the paralytic lowered through the roof, where the text says Jesus saw their faith. And sometimes nobody's: the widow's son at Nain is dead and nobody asked.

The apostles continue the ministry and do not always succeed. Paul heals dramatically in Acts, and in his letters mentions Epaphroditus nearly dying, Trophimus left behind sick, and Timothy's chronic stomach trouble.

Pause and thinkPause: Paul asked three times for his thorn in the flesh to be removed. What was he told, and what does the answer establish?

Prayer and medicine are not rivals

This needs saying plainly, because the idea that faith and medicine compete has done real harm.

The Christian tradition has always regarded medicine as a gift of God and its practice as a vocation. Sirach, read as Scripture in Catholic and Orthodox usage and as useful reading by Anglicans and Lutherans, says: honour a physician with the honour due unto him... for the Lord hath created him. The Lord hath created medicines out of the earth; and he that is wise will not abhor them.

Luke, the author of a Gospel and Acts, is called the beloved physician. Christ's own image of Himself is medical - they that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick. The first hospitals in the Western world were built by the Church: Basil the Great's foundation at Caesarea in the fourth century included a hospital, a hospice and accommodation for those caring for patients. The monastic infirmary is the ancestor of the modern hospital, and the nursing orders of the nineteenth century shaped the profession.

So when a Christian is ill, the tradition's counsel is straightforward: pray, ask the Church to pray and to anoint, receive the sacraments - and go to the doctor, take the treatment, and follow the advice. These are not alternatives, and no one should ever be told that seeking medical care shows a lack of faith.

Why healing is not always given

The traditions do not pretend this is comfortable, and none of them claims a complete answer. What they offer is several partial ones, held together.

The kingdom has come and has not yet come fully. Christ's healings are a foretaste, not the finished thing. In the resurrection there will be no illness; now there is some healing, as a sign of what is coming. A theology that expects the final state now has collapsed the timeline.

God has purposes we cannot see. This is the answer given to Job, and it is worth noticing what kind of answer it is. God does not explain; He asks questions for four chapters and Job stops speaking. The tradition has generally been honest that this is not an explanation but a reordering of who is in a position to demand one.

Suffering can be joined to Christ's. Paul speaks of filling up what is behind of the afflictions of Christ, and of the fellowship of His sufferings. This is not a recommendation of suffering, which the traditions relieve wherever they can. It is a claim that suffering need not be waste.

Everyone dies. Lazarus was raised and later died. Every person Christ healed is now dead. The Christian hope was never the indefinite postponement of death but the resurrection of the body - which is why the Church can pray honestly for healing without needing it in order to keep her promise.

Where the four traditions stand

Catholic

The Church has a formal sacrament for the sick: the Anointing of the Sick, based directly on James 5:14-15, conferred by a priest with oil blessed by the bishop. Its effects are given as the union of the sick person with Christ's passion, strength, peace and courage; the forgiveness of sins if the person was unable to confess; the restoration of health if it is conducive to the salvation of the soul; and preparation for the passage to eternal life. The qualification is important and is characteristic of the Church's whole approach: healing is asked for, and God's judgement of what is good for this person is accepted. The Second Vatican Council recovered the wider use of the sacrament, which had contracted into extreme unction given only at the point of death; it may now be received by the seriously ill at any stage and repeated. The Church investigates claimed miracles rigorously - the medical bureau at Lourdes has examined many thousands of claims and confirmed around seventy - and that rigour is itself a statement about how such claims should be treated. Charismatic renewal within Catholicism has its own healing ministries, under episcopal oversight.

Orthodox

Orthodoxy has the Mystery of Holy Unction, celebrated with seven Gospel readings, seven epistles and seven prayers, ideally with seven priests, and anointing with blessed oil. It is not reserved for the dying; in Greek practice the whole congregation is anointed on Holy Wednesday, and it may be received by anyone who is ill in body or soul. The Eastern framing of salvation as healing means that the distinction between physical and spiritual healing is deliberately soft: Christ is the Physician, sin is disease, and the same word does duty throughout. Orthodoxy venerates the Unmercenary Physicians - saints such as Cosmas and Damian, and Panteleimon, who were doctors and treated the poor without charge - which is a direct endorsement of medicine as a holy calling. Healing is also sought through holy relics, miraculous icons, and holy water, and the Church keeps records of such healings while treating claims soberly and warning against the pursuit of the miraculous, which falls under prelest, spiritual delusion.

Lutheran

Lutherans pray for the sick in every service and provide orders for the visitation of the sick, including confession, absolution and communion. Anointing was not retained as a sacrament - the Apology classes extreme unction among the rites received from the Fathers which lack a divine command - though many Lutheran service books have restored anointing as a rite, and it is increasingly used. Lutheran theology's characteristic contribution here is the theology of the cross: God is found not in power, success and visible triumph but hidden in suffering and weakness. This is a direct answer to the healing evangelist's premise. A Christian in a hospital bed is not a Christian whose faith has failed; he may be precisely where God has chosen to be found. Lutheran teaching emphasises the means of grace for the sick - the word spoken, absolution, the sacrament brought to the bedside - and sees medicine as belonging to God's rule of the world through reason and vocation, so that the doctor is a mask of God as surely as the pastor.

Anglican

The Prayer Book's Visitation of the Sick is one of its most pastorally serious offices: it provides for exhortation, examination of the sick person's faith, confession and absolution where the conscience is troubled, prayers, and communion of the sick. Anointing appeared in the 1549 book, was removed in 1552, and has been widely restored in modern Anglican liturgies; most provinces now provide a rite of anointing and laying on of hands. The Order of St Luke and similar bodies have promoted healing ministry within Anglicanism since the early twentieth century, and healing services with laying on of hands are common across churchmanships. Anglicanism's characteristic instinct here is sobriety: pray for healing genuinely, without extravagant claims; encourage medical treatment without reservation; and be honest when healing does not come. The Anglican chaplaincy tradition in hospitals is long-established and has shaped modern palliative care - Cicely Saunders, who founded the modern hospice movement, worked explicitly from Christian conviction.

Where modern denominations differ

Who differs: Pentecostal and charismatic churches teach divine healing as a central element of the gospel, and in some strands as something the atonement guarantees - by his stripes ye are healed read as a promise of physical health in this life. At the extreme, the Word of Faith movement teaches that healing is always God's will and that failure to receive it indicates insufficient faith or a negative confession. In the opposite direction, cessationist Reformed and Baptist churches hold that miraculous healing ceased with the apostolic age.

How to answer the Word of Faith position: this is the one that needs answering most urgently, because it does measurable harm - people have died after being told to stop treatment, and bereaved families have been told their faith was at fault.

Start with Paul. He asked three times and was refused, and the answer was not believe harder but my grace is sufficient. He left Trophimus sick. He advised Timothy to take wine for a recurring stomach complaint rather than rebuking his faith. Epaphroditus was sick nigh unto death, and Paul attributes his recovery to God's mercy rather than to anyone's technique.

Then Isaiah 53:5 - with his stripes we are healed - which is the movement's central text. Read what Peter does with it: he quotes it in 1 Peter 2:24 and applies it explicitly to sin - who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that we, being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed. The apostle who was there interprets the verse for us, and he interprets it of sin.

Then ask the hard question gently: what does this teaching say to the Christian who dies? Every person Christ healed eventually died, including Lazarus. If healing is always available to sufficient faith, then every deathbed is a verdict on the person in it, and the doctrine has made a bereavement into an accusation.

How to answer cessationism: ask for the text. The usual one is 1 Corinthians 13:10 - when that which is perfect is come - read as the completed canon. But Paul's next verse explains himself: now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face. That is not a book arriving; it is the return of Christ. None of the four traditions teaches that God has withdrawn the power to heal, and each has continuing records of healings it treats seriously.

And the position to commend, which is the four traditions' common ground: pray for healing, expectantly and without embarrassment; use every means of medicine; make no promises God has not made; and never suggest to a sick or bereaved person that the outcome reflects the quality of their faith.

Work with it

Check yourself

What was Paul told when he asked three times for his thorn in the flesh to be removed?

Check yourself

How does Peter interpret Isaiah's "with his stripes we are healed"?

Check yourself

What is the Christian tradition's position on medicine?

Objection drill

If God heals, the pattern should be visible. Amputees do not regrow limbs. Healing claims always involve conditions that fluctuate anyway - pain, fatigue, tumours that sometimes regress. Every controlled study of intercessory prayer has come back null. The honest conclusion is that nothing is happening beyond hope and statistics.

Write your answer first. You will remember it far better than one you only read.

A model answer

This deserves a serious answer rather than a defensive one, and part of the answer is agreement.

On the studies. The major trials, including the STEP study in 2006, found no effect of intercessory prayer on recovery, and Christians should not pretend otherwise or go looking for methodological escapes. But it is worth asking what such a study could show. It treats prayer as a treatment with a dosage, administered by strangers to patients who are not known to them, testing whether a personal God will produce outcomes on demand under experimental conditions. Whatever the Christian tradition claims about prayer, it does not claim that. Christ refused precisely this - a sign given on request to demonstrate His credentials - and said that an evil and adulterous generation seeks after a sign. A God who performed reliably in trials would be a mechanism, and mechanisms are exactly what the tradition says He is not.

That is not a way of making the claim unfalsifiable. It is a statement about what kind of claim it is: the Church says God is a person who acts freely, not a force that acts predictably, and persons do not perform on demand.

On amputees. This is the strongest form of the objection and it should be conceded cleanly. Documented cases of limbs regrowing do not exist, and the honest position is that the healings that are reported and investigated cluster in areas where spontaneous remission is not impossible. That is a real pattern, and Christians who wave it away are not being straight.

What can be said alongside it. The Church has never claimed that God heals everything or on demand - the New Testament shows Christ leaving a crowd of sick people at Bethesda after healing one, and Paul refused his own request. So the absence of a universal pattern is not a difficulty for the doctrine; it is what the doctrine predicts. A faith that promised systematic healing would be refuted by an afternoon in any hospital, and it is the prosperity preachers, not the four traditions, who make that promise.

On the investigated cases. The rigour is worth knowing about, because it runs opposite to the usual assumption. The medical bureau at Lourdes has examined many thousands of claims over more than a century, with a panel including non-believing physicians, and has confirmed around seventy. That is a rejection rate of well over ninety-nine per cent. An institution manufacturing miracles would not run its verification that way.

And here is where the disagreement actually lies, which is worth naming rather than leaving implicit. The objection assumes that if God existed and were good, suffering would be visibly and systematically relieved. Christianity does not teach that, and never has. Its central image is God Himself on a cross, refusing to come down. Its most prominent missionary was given a chronic affliction and told the grace would be sufficient. Its promise is not that you will not suffer or die, but that you will rise.

So the question between us is not really whether healings are statistically detectable. It is whether a God who permits suffering and enters it Himself is a coherent proposition. That is a much better conversation, and it is the one Job is about.

One thing both sides should agree on. Whatever one concludes, nobody should be told that their illness persists because of their faith. That claim is not made by any of the four traditions, it is refuted by Christ's own words about the man born blind, and it has done real damage to real people.

Memory work

Turn each card over, then say honestly whether you knew it. Cards you miss come back sooner.

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