Dr. William L. De Arteaga wrote Agnes Sanford and Her Companions: The Assault on Cessationism and the Coming of the Charismatic Renewal to describe the history of Cessationism within the Christian Church. He splits the book into five parts, each describing a different aspect of the topic. The first three sections focus primarily on how Cessationism arose in response to the heresy of Marcion, how it was challenged by movements that developed in reaction to attempts to quench revival, and how its rejection eventually brought forth both the Pentecost and Charismatic Movements. The last two sections are centered on Agnes Sanford, first and foremost describing her ministry and writings and then discussing how her contributions affected later movements and ministries. De Arteaga presents an insightful and scholarly book reflecting both research and insight into historical persons and movements. His evaluation of Cessationism, not only as a movement but also as an impetus for change, is invaluable for anyone interested in understanding renewal and revival. Although his opinion of Sanford is clearly favorable, he provides sufficient support to allay any suspicions of interpretive bias. I highly recommend Agnes Sanford and Her Companions for anyone who is interested in Agnes Sanford as well as the theological issues related to the rise and fall of Cessationsim in Christian history.

Reviewed by Martin L. Dignard

William De Arteaga has created a ground-breaking, major contribution that is foundational to the evolving understanding of the Pentecostal/charismatic movement projected to reach 811 million in only four more years.

The author offers a surprisingly sympathetic narrative of one whom he regards as the foremost, and ultimately, most influential theologian of the charismatic renewal, a woman nonetheless maligned as a “new age” heretic, Agnes Sanford.

De Arteaga’s work employs two metaphors to express its thesis that Sanford’s ministry overcame cessationism (the “Galatian bewitchment” 3:1-3, replacing the miracle power of God with human effort), by a series of “Marcion shoves” (a reference to a heretic pushing a truth into error in order to bring that truth to the attention of the mainstream). In Sanford’s case, hers was a trial-and-error sampling of various contemporary positions on healing, being dialectally “shoved” into a thoroughly biblical understanding.

In the early 1930s, the loudest voice against healing, however, was the heretical consensus doctrine of Protestantism of that time: cessationism, that is, miracles of healing simply do not happen today. Sanford began her God-given quest by having to reject the “Galatian bewitchment” of her cradle faith, Protestantism. In this De Arteaga showed how Sanford, in the total vacuum of Christian biblical scholarship on healing, was compelled to search a variety of fringe groups for any possible insight into the truth about the healings she had received from God. Through all this, Sanford held to the centrality of Jesus and his scriptures, but only gradually, with no help from the church, discovering how central was healing to the biblical mission and message of Jesus and the New Testament.

Agnes was the daughter of Presbyterian missionaries in China, educated in the US, who as an adult continued their ministry back in China briefly until she met and married an Anglican missionary, Ted Sanford. Against the growing destabilization of China by competing warlords in the 1920s and by the insurgent communists, the new family moved to the USA to minister in Anglican churches near Philadelphia. Upon the healing of her baby son of a severe ear infection and of her own deep depression by a fellow Anglican clergyman, Agnes Sanford’s life course was set. It was discerned that her depression derived from “violating her God-given nature” by trying to be an excellent housewife instead of the writer and minister of healing that God had called her to be.

At this point, since the Christian tradition at that time was unanimously cessationist (the “Galatian bewitchment”) Sanford decided to test (ever alert to the “Marcion shove”) the variety of competing ideologies on healing, Christian Science, occult “science,” spiritism, “New Thought,” New Age, etc. against the “standard” of Jesus described in the four Gospels.

Since she had personally experienced such miracles, Sanford’s curiosity was drawn to the only voices of the time, who seemed to affirm what she had seen so clearly. She skimmed Mary Baker Eddy’s Science and Health but found “it did not make sense.” She twice attended a “Christian” spiritist séance, “carefully keeping an open mind,” but discovered the leader himself was plagued by spirit-induced headaches. When Sanford prayed for the spiritist’s sick mother, she found herself in “deep depression” and “could taste in [her] own mouth” the foul odor on the breath of the spiritist. On top of that the spiritist’s mother immediately died. Sanford promised the Lord that she would “never go near a séance again.” Unwittingly, she came to understand that her prayer was mixing the “energy” of the demonic with that of the Holy Spirit. Thereafter, she would screen out for special attention and prayer anyone who admitted to involvement in spiritism. Despite her strict and clear repudiation of her experiment with “Christian” spiritism, critics pounced on her account as evidence of her “demonic” ministry, instead of it serving as a “Marcion shove” toward biblical truth. Sanford’s “scientific” and biblical process of “Do not quench the Spirit . . . test all things, hold fast to that which is good” (1Th 5:19-20) proved inflammatory for her critics.

Last Wednesday, just after I had received a copy from the publisher, I spent most of the day in prayer of thanksgiving over the completion of this work. During this last year I had encountered numerous blocks and unexpected obstacles to its completion, as in the inexplicable loss of files, and even the entire text, and lastly, the index had to be redone completely. My Facebook friends prayed me through every obstacle.

Like most authors, I asked the Lord to grant this book much success, not only in this country, but overseas. I recalled to the Lord that very dear saint, and great prayer warrior, while praying for me, spontaneously prayed for the success of this book overseas. As I prayed I kept getting the word and image of Germany. This was strange as I had not had the least thought of a German audience as I was writing this work. I merely wanted to tell the story of Mrs. Agnes Sanford, and the people around her, and how she in particular was a theological innovator (in the best sense of the word). For instance, she developed the ministry of inner healing, and went on to write the first theology of nature miracles – as in stilling storms, etc. Nature miracles have been well recorded throughout the literature of the saints and heroes of the Church, but Agnes was the first person ever to write a book on how to pray effectively for this.[1]

Back to the Germany connection. I wondered if the impression I was getting was from the Lord or from a subconscious wish. I messaged a German Facebook friend who is also a distinguished German Pentecostal pastor and scholar. He knew about the book, and messaged me back agreeing that there was indeed an anointing on the book to do a work in Germany. Hallelujah!

I then began to consider, why would this work, about the wife of an Episcopal priest and rector, who was born in China, and who spent all of her adult live in the United States, be of special interest to German Christians?

Rudolf Bultmann (1884 – 1976) was an influential liberal theologian.
Image: Wikimedia Commons.

First, it is necessary to consider that the spiritual life and vitality of the German Churches is at a very low point, as in the rest of Europe. Germany is the birthplace of the Reformation, but also the birthplace of so called higher-criticism which denied the supernatural in the Bible and made the miracles to be pious myths (Rudolf Bultmann, and his followers, etc.). That form of hermeneutical disaster and apostasy is still very influential in Europe and Germany. Not surprising, Sunday church attendance in Europe is between 15 and 5 percent of the population.

Back in 1908 the Protestant pastors in Germany met to decide what to do about the craziness coming from America and the Azusa St. revival – Pentecostalism. They decided they wanted nothing to do with it and denounced the whole movement as a delusion and heresy. As a result, any form of Pentecostal and charismatic expression has been very limited in Germany until very recent decades.[2] There is some Holy Spirit movement now, as Europeans, including Germans, are getting increasingly nervous about the Muslim penetration of Europe and are open to anything that will counter it.

With this in mind, there are certain aspects of Agnes Sanford and Her Companions that may be particularly attractive to German Christians. First, among her “companions” was Prof. Glen Clark, who founded the Camps Furthest Out (CFO). This was an anti-cessationist parachurch ministry dating from the 1930 – yes, there were such things back then.[3] Several of the major works of Prof. Clark were translated into German and widely circulated in the 1950s and 1960s. Thus, my coverage of his achievements in effective prayer and healing will resonate with some older Germans, and his translated works could be easily reprinted.

Part 2 of 2

Discover Agnes Sanford’s important influence on the charismatic movement in this article by historian William De Arteaga.

The Healing Light

It was during her ministry at Tilton Army Hospital that Mrs. Sanford wrote her first and most successful book, The Healing Light.²⁷ The book was based on the notes she prepared for an adult education class that she gave during the war. It was written in simple language. In fact, Mrs. Sanford read the text to her nine-year-old niece and was not be satisfied until the girl could understand it.²⁸ The manuscript was finished in 1945, but it was rejected by the major trade publishers. However, several chapters were serialized in Sharing magazine, the organ for the Order of St. Luke, the Episcopal healing order. Professor Glenn Clark, founder of the CFO camps, read the chapters in Sharing and recognized their superior quality. He offered to publish it through Macalester Park, his own publishing house. It initially sold slowly, partly because Macalester Park was not listed in Books in Print, and thus had difficulty in distribution, but word of mouth soon overcame that handicap.

The Healing Light might be termed the crown work of Christian New Thought. That is, Mrs. Sanford appropriated many of the motifs, vocabulary and insights from New Thought writers, but using her biblical knowledge as filter, eliminated the unbiblical aspects of New Thought, such as its drift into radical idealism (evil is unreal, as in Christian Science) and its sub-orthodox Christology. Central to her understanding and theology was the concept that the Kingdom of God is manifest through prayer and power on earth, and is not just “other-worldly.”

Among the New Thought motifs that Mrs. Sanford appropriated was that Christian spirituality could be described as a form of scientific endeavor. This was the initial intent of Mary Baker Eddy’s Christian Science, and it permeated all New Thought writings. It was common to many movements and ideologies of the Nineteenth Century, such as Marxism and psychoanalysis. In Mrs. Baker’s writings and other New Thought systems of radical idealism, the end result of this quest was little more than a doctrinal mythology with an authoritative, convoluted syntax and pretentious vocabulary that aped the science of the times.

In comparison, Mrs. Sanford was far ahead of her New Thought contemporaries in understudying what true science was and was not. Mrs. Sanford saw that true science was not a new system of doctrines, but a methodology of knowledge that involved exploration, testing, verification (and failure) and humility of spirit with which to attack a problem. Although this is well understood today, it was not so clear when Mrs. Sanford wrote The Healing Light.²⁹ Mrs. Sanford wrote:

“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth.” The scientific attitude is the attitude of perfect meekness. It consists in an unshakable faith in the laws of nature combined with perfect humility toward those laws and a patient determination to learn them at whatever cost…Through the Same meekness those who seek God can produce results by learning to conform to his laws of faith and love.³⁰

The title of her book, The Healing Light, points to the main thesis, that the healing power of God is light energy that is accessible to all who understand its lawful application in compassion and love. Agnes speculated that the healing light was the primal light that originated at the beginning of creation, and that this light is everywhere. On the practical level, Agnes guides the reader on how to use the free gift of God’s healing light for healing. This is done by visualizing God’s light flooding the afflicted person or area of disease. To many Evangelical and cessationist-educated Christians this seemed like occult hocus-pocus. In fact, the use of light in prayer is alien to Western Christianity, but common to Eastern Orthodoxy, which has a highly evolved theology of light, especially in reference to contemplative prayer.³¹ What is innovative about Mrs. Sanford’s work it not that it urges the use of light in prayer, but its use in healing prayer.

Part 1 of 2

Introduction

In 1985 Dave Hunt, a lay cult watcher, published one of the most influential books of the 1980s, The Seduction of Christianity.¹ In that work he lambasted much of the leadership of the charismatic renewal for “seducing” the American Christianity with ideas and practices derived from occult sources. He attacked Mrs. Agnes Sanford and her writing with particular severity. Hunt claimed that her syncretistic theology was little more that witchcraft and shamanism, and should be totally rejected by the Christian community. Hunt was convinced that the ministry she pioneered, inner healing, was especially occultic and dangerous to Christians.²

In my work, Quenching the Spirit, I argued that such characterizations are destructive and untrue. Critics such as Hunt do not take into account the tragic situation within Nineteenth Century “orthodox” Christianity which labeled any form of healing prayer as cultic and heretical. The consensus orthodoxy of the era stressed the doctrine of cessationism, which also declared the gifts of the Spirit as unavailable in the current age. This theology combined with an unrecognized dependence on philosophical realism that came into both Catholicism and Protestantism from the late Middle Ages. The result was that the consensus orthodoxy of the era left no room for the role of the believer’s faith to move in healing prayer or in the gifts of the Spirit.³

An overview of the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries shows a pattern in which the Holy Spirit moved the Church away from its cessationism-realism based theology. The Spirit simultaneously inspired different groups and individuals towards theologies that reincorporated the gifts of the Spirit. This allowed for a more active understanding of the role of mind, acting through faith in Christ, to activate the miraculous powers of the Kingdom of God. This was a move toward theologies based on moderate idealism, that is, that mind, with faith, can influence matter, as in healing and the miraculous, and away from theological systems based on radical realism where the Christian merely petitions that God act.⁴ A characteristic of faith-idealism is that physical evidence is of less immediate concern than the witness of the Word of God.