Agnes Sanford: Apostle of Healing and First Theologian of the Charismatic Renewal, Part 1, by William L. De Arteaga
This sounds very simple, but it did not prove to be so. First of all, I found that what He said went directly contrary to many of the explanations concerning religion that I had been taught since my youth. For instance, I had been told that the age of miracles was past – yet I had seen a miracle…I also knew that there was no use in trying to understand what I had not experienced. Therefore I set myself to find an experience of God’s power.
In order to do this, I laid aside temporarily all that I had been taught concerning Christianity. I did not disbelieve it, I merely laid it on the table to be considered later. And that is what all of us must do if we are to learn.19
She began with reading Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health With Key to the Scriptures, but felt bewildered by the vocabulary and philosophical underpinnings of Christian Science (radical idealism), and laid it aside. Much more useful was the Christian New Thought writer Emmet Fox. In his classic work, Sermon On The Mount, Agnes spirit found profound resonance.20 Here was a person who believed in the power of God and of scripture for the here and now – a common assumption of New Thought writers. Ironically, this non-cessationist view placed Fox closer to the plain and literal understanding of scripture than the more orthodox and conservative Christians of the era. Agnes’s firm devotion to Jesus and her determination to use the gospels as her discernment anchor saved her from adopting Fox’s Arian Christology – something that in any case is not manifest in the Sermon On The Mount. She continued to look into the available literature of healing including the literature of the Unity School of Christianity. It seems that she did not encounter at this time the literature of the Evangelical healing revival of the 1880s. She also made contact with a small church in Philadelphia run by an ex-Baptist who had been expelled from her congregation for practicing Christian healing.21
Category: Church History, Pneuma Review, Spring 2006
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