A Social Anthropologist’s Analysis of Contemporary Healing, Part 2

Another working-class person in my random sample told me how all her life she had suffered from hyper-sensitive teeth. Since childhood she had been unable to bite on ice cream, and in winter she had to keep her mouth closed or covered over while outside or else her teeth would throb. Even if she had kept her mouth shut, she could not have a warm drink for half an hour after coming indoors. I have been advised by a dentist that a healing of this degree of hyper-sensitivity is not the kind which could be attributed to a “normal” reduction of sensitivity over time.

However, after prayer at the Harrogate conference this woman received complete healing. There was a slight recurrence later that evening, but the following day she was able to walk around outside in the cold and then immediately drink a cup of tea without any sensation at all. Since then she had gone through a whole winter without any pain and without having to take any extra precautions while outside. Her dentist was aware of her hyper-sensitivity and sent me details from her record card which confirmed the presence of persistent sensitivity over the previous four years and ten months while she had been receiving treatment from him. At her next routine check-up after the Harrogate conference, he wrote, “patient no longer complains of sensitive teeth.”⁴⁸

These examples of healings among “working class” people in Britain may not seem so dramatic when compared with the miraculous filling of dental cavities among very poor people, or cases of raising the dead in parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America.⁴⁹ On a worldwide scale, we in the affluent West all belong to the richer social classes. Might it be for this reason that apparently more dramatic cases of healing seem to occur more often among Christians in Africa, Latin America and Asia? Or is it that we tend to rely on divinely ordained medicines and drugs, whereas God specially heals those deprived of access to such treatments?

 

Divine Healing: Fiction or Fact?

It is hard to escape the conclusion that many people have received through Christian prayer remarkable healings which bring glory to Christ and which are difficult or impossible to explain away in conventional medical terms. The available medical evidence and case histories indicate that the healings themselves have to be regarded as facts. Although some people might attempt to interpret those facts in a variety of ways, there is mounting evidence to indicate that prayer in Christ’s name seems to be an important factor in many medically inexplicable recoveries.

Tags: analysis, anthropologists, contemporary, healing, part, social

Category: In Depth, Winter 2009