Monday, March 05, 2007
What's in Your Head?
There are several different models of healing. It should also be recognized that each model has its own presuppositions about the nature of God and reality. This is why divine healing has been such a touchy subject within the church. When you ask someone to change their view on healing (through a conversation or presentation), you’re essentially asking him/her to change worldviews. It should be noted that worldviews encompass the whole person and people develop strong emotional ties to the worldview they hold. In a very real sense, then, one’s worldview is one’s heart. Therefore, any discussion about healing that leaves out the nature of God and the nature of reality will ultimately feel hollow and insubstantial.
Everyone’s worldview is to some degree formed by a tradition. Our tradition helps us articulate our worldview and our worldview helps us explain our experience. The different models of healing arise out of different traditions that are all under the common tradition known as Christianity.
Within Christianity, there are many smaller traditions. Each of these traditions typically regard their worldview as being doctrinally correct, apostolic, reasonable, historical, experiential, and biblical. In short, we’re right, you’re wrong. Otherwise all Baptists would become Anglicans and all Anglican Catholics. This is why the language of “model” is helpful.
A model is simply a way of doing and/or understanding something with recognized limitations. No one would seriously mistake a model airplane for the real thing or a map for the world. Yet, a model is helpful in understanding what it represents. To some degree, interacting with the model is similar to interacting with what it is modeling, e.g. a map. Therefore, all the models discussed here have recognized limitations and come out of a certain tradition and worldview.
1) The Augustinian-Calvinist/Reformed tradition (which informs most Catholic and Protestant thinking about healing)
This tradition has heavily influenced modern evangelicalism and its later offshoots, Pentecostalism and Charismaticism. The most succinct summation of this tradition’s worldview is found in Gregory Boyd’s book, Satan and the Problem of Evil. He writes,
Blueprint worldview/model of divine providence: The view of the world rooted in the assumption that behind every specific event there is a specific divine reason as to why it was ordained or at least allowed to take place. This view contrasts with the trinitarian warfare worldview, which argues that although there is a general reason as to why God made free agents (love), the ultimate reason for why they engage in the particular acts they engage in is generally found in them, not God. Because freedom must be to some extent irrevocable, God cannot always prevent events he would like to prevent. Hence, in the trinitarian warfare worldview there is no justification for wondering about a specific reason as to why God ordained or allowed a given evil event to take place. (418)
Thus, this tradition could also be labeled as “the Blueprint.” One can easily recognize this tradition through its language concerning suffering (including disease). “God has his reasons.” “There’s a higher purpose for everything.” “God causes all things to work together for good (read: God actually causes all things not God redeems all things),” and so forth. Most adherents within this tradition use the model of healing that includes the petition, “if it be your will God please heal this person, but if it’s not, help him/her accept this as part of your plan, etc.” Such a worldview, in my personal opinion, is not conducive for breakthroughs in the healing ministry.
In a nutshell: God is good, whatever that means. The devil is his tool to use for His own mysterious purposes.
Motivational level for praying for healing: very low.
Typical eschatology: Rapture of the remaining, desperate remnant sometime.
Examples: too numerous to mention
2) Quasi-Blueprint tradition: This tradition has moved away somewhat from the Blueprint’s shadow because of a recovery of the charismata in the life of the church. As the name suggests, this is a middle-ground and it is hard to provide definite criteria for who should belong here. I suggest that many emergent evangelical groups that incorporate the charismata into their worship fall into this category. This group of people has had enough experience in healing to know that there’s something more to it than if God wills and they’re willing to find out what that something is.
In a nutshell: God is good, I think I know what that means. The devil is evil, but not sure what that means and not sure who is responsible for what.
Motivational level for praying for healing: relatively high
Typical eschatology: some Remnant Rapturists, some Glorious Bride Rapturists who believe we’re in the last days before a major revival.
Examples: IHOP, Pentecostal groups, Calvary Chapel, etc.
3) Non-Augustinian, non-Blueprint tradition: Admittedly, there aren’t many in this tradition due to the heavy influence of the Blueprint tradition in the West. One could argue many in the Eastern Orthodox branch of the church have been untainted by Augustine and/or Calvin. Moreover, in as much as the apostolic tradition and early church fathers’ influence remains in the Orthodox faith, there is much to learn from them in so far as building a better worldview than one informed by Augustinianism/Calvinism. One could also argue that Eastern Church’s roots in Judaism and its mystical theology lay a sacramental and philosophical underpinning for much of the current practice within the Renewal, though this endeavor would take several books.
Groups currently identifying themselves with the Renewal (post-Toronto/Toronto-birthed) also lean heavily in this direction as well, i.e., away from the Blueprint. In short, the Renewal has learned that it’s difficult to contend for healing and prophesy if you’re view of God is that He has already set everything in stone and is responsible for everything as well. In this case, their practice and/or experience has helped shaped, in my opinion, a more biblical theology.
In a nutshell: God is good all the time and that means better than I know. The Devil is bad all the time and is responsible for his own evil—which includes sickness.
Motivational level for praying for healing: very high
Typical eschatology: We’re living in the eschaton now and we better be bringing Heaven down now.
Examples: Bethel, many Vineyard churches, Woodland Hills, etc.
Classic Quotations on Healing
McNutt, Francis. Healing, 1974. “The healing acts of Jesus were themselves the message that he had come to set men free; they were not just to prove that his message was true” (McNutt 53).
“. . .[E]very time Jesus met with evil, spiritual or physical, he treated it as an enemy. Every time a sick person came to him in faith, Jesus healed that person” (62).
“He [Jesus] came to save persons not just souls”(63).
“. . .God’s view of man: holiness is wholeness. . . Even God can’t play on a broken violin”(74).
The cross Jesus carried was the cross of persecution, the kind of suffering that comes from outside a man because of the wickedness of other men who are evil”(78).
“Every time you meet Jesus in the Gospels, he is either actually healing someone, or has just come from healing someone, or is on his way to do it” (80).
By New Testament standards, it should be normative for the Christian to pray for the removal of sickness rather than its acceptance. Redemptive sickness is the exception, not the rule” (86).
“But I believe the principal reason for this shift [acceptance of sickness rather than warring against it] has been that we have tended to emphasize doctrine rather than experience, as if right knowledge coupled with willpower were enough to produce Christians” (89-90).
“To deny or minimize the healing ministry is to take away much of the power of the gospel and to leave in its stead a body of truths devoid of life” (94).
Reasons for lack of healing:
1) Lack of faith
2) Redemptive suffering
3) A false view attached to suffering
4) Sin
5) Not praying specifically
6) Faulty diagnosis
7) Refusal to see medicine as a way God heals
8) Not using the natural means to preserve health
9) Now is not the time
10) A different person is to be the instrument of healing
11) The social environment prevents healing from taking place (248-261, paraphrased)
Virkler, Mark and Patti. How to Hear God’s Voice, Destiny Image: Shippensburg, PA, 2005.
I am absolutely, 100 percent convinced that it is God’s will to heal everyone who comes to Him Everything I read in the Bible and everything I have learned about my Father through our personal relationship demands that this be so. Jesus healed all who asked, and He said that He was doing exactly what He saw the Father doing. I believe that complete healing is always the will of God. I believe that if I ask the Lord if it His will to heal someone, the answer will always be “yes.” However, I also know that not everyone is healed. As I reminded you earlier, God’s perfect will is not always accomplished on the earth. There are factors in healing that I simply have not comprehended so far in my life, search and meditate and pray and experiment and ask as I might. So what do I do when someone I love is diagnosed with cancer? I believe that God will heal him. I believe that it is absolutely God’s will that this child of His walk in health and serve Him his allotted threescore and ten years (at least). I pray with total confidence for the healing touch of God. . . And if he is not healed? I still believe it is absolutely God’s will that His children walk in health. I still believe it is always God’s will to heal. I do not understand why His will was hampered in this life, and I grieve the loss of the one I loved. But I do not allow any circumstance, no matter how tragic, to undermine my faith in my God. My understanding of the Lord and His will is not based on physical conditions but on the unchanging Word and character of God. (Virkler 189-190)
Boyd, Greg. Satan and the Problem of Evil, IVP: Downers Grove, IL, 2001.
I do not deny that in the contest of this war zone God sometimes may allow, or even ordain, suffering for a particular higher purpose. Scripture teaches this much. I can therefore affirm much in those traditional theodicies that explain suffering as, for example, God’s way of punishing sin, or building our character, or of contributing to some other “greater good.” However, I deny that Scripture, reason, or experience requires the belief that suffering must always serve a divine purpose. (Boyd 19)
“. . . in contrast with any view that would suggest that disease and demonization somehow serve a divine purpose., Jesus never treated such phenomenon as anything other than the work of the enemy. . . Furthermore, rather than accepting their circumstances as mysteriously fitting into God’s sovereign plan, Jesus revolted against them as something that God did not will and something that ought to be vanquished by God’s power” (36).
“All sickness and disease was considered a form of satanic oppression, and so in freeing people from it Jesus demonstrated the presence of the kingdom of God” (37).
The world looks like a war zone because it is a war zone. . . [I]t is clear. . . that God’s good will is not being uniformly carried out in history. Atheists argue on this basis that there is no Creator. Early church fathers rather argued on this bases, and from God’s word, that there is a Creator God but that he must battle a formidable opponent who has of his own volition made himself evil. If this opponent was indeed then one originally entrusted with matter itself, and if the powers and demons who follow him were originally assigned other areas of creation to guard, then it is not surprising that creation is corrupt to the core. When morally responsible free agents choose to oppose God’s will, all that they are responsible for suffers accordingly. (48)
I do not believe that Scripture teaches us to find consolation in trusting that everything that ever occurs has a divine reason behind it. This belief not only goes beyond the teaching of Scripture; it fosters a mentality that is at odds with Scripture. If one holds that there is a divine reason behind all suffering, one is more likely to resign oneself to things that Scripture encourages us to revolt against. Jesus and the New Testament authors instruct us to revolt against evil as coming from the enemies of God rather than trying to find security and consolation in the hope that God is somehow secretly behind it. Jesus never encouraged people to accept their sickness, disease or demonization as somehow fitting into his Father’s plan. Rather, he revealed that God’s plan was to overthrow these things, and he taught his disciples (and us) to adopt the same attitude. We are not to trust that God meticulously controls these things. We are rather to trust that God is against them, that he ahs empowered us to work with him in battling such evils and that God will ultimately overthrow all his foes and rid his creation of all forms of evil. If we adopt a warfare worldview rather than a blueprint worldview, we are encouraged to trust God for everything God himself tells us to trust him for and to fight against everything God himself fights against. (162-3)
Everyone’s worldview is to some degree formed by a tradition. Our tradition helps us articulate our worldview and our worldview helps us explain our experience. The different models of healing arise out of different traditions that are all under the common tradition known as Christianity.
Within Christianity, there are many smaller traditions. Each of these traditions typically regard their worldview as being doctrinally correct, apostolic, reasonable, historical, experiential, and biblical. In short, we’re right, you’re wrong. Otherwise all Baptists would become Anglicans and all Anglican Catholics. This is why the language of “model” is helpful.
A model is simply a way of doing and/or understanding something with recognized limitations. No one would seriously mistake a model airplane for the real thing or a map for the world. Yet, a model is helpful in understanding what it represents. To some degree, interacting with the model is similar to interacting with what it is modeling, e.g. a map. Therefore, all the models discussed here have recognized limitations and come out of a certain tradition and worldview.
1) The Augustinian-Calvinist/Reformed tradition (which informs most Catholic and Protestant thinking about healing)
This tradition has heavily influenced modern evangelicalism and its later offshoots, Pentecostalism and Charismaticism. The most succinct summation of this tradition’s worldview is found in Gregory Boyd’s book, Satan and the Problem of Evil. He writes,
Blueprint worldview/model of divine providence: The view of the world rooted in the assumption that behind every specific event there is a specific divine reason as to why it was ordained or at least allowed to take place. This view contrasts with the trinitarian warfare worldview, which argues that although there is a general reason as to why God made free agents (love), the ultimate reason for why they engage in the particular acts they engage in is generally found in them, not God. Because freedom must be to some extent irrevocable, God cannot always prevent events he would like to prevent. Hence, in the trinitarian warfare worldview there is no justification for wondering about a specific reason as to why God ordained or allowed a given evil event to take place. (418)
Thus, this tradition could also be labeled as “the Blueprint.” One can easily recognize this tradition through its language concerning suffering (including disease). “God has his reasons.” “There’s a higher purpose for everything.” “God causes all things to work together for good (read: God actually causes all things not God redeems all things),” and so forth. Most adherents within this tradition use the model of healing that includes the petition, “if it be your will God please heal this person, but if it’s not, help him/her accept this as part of your plan, etc.” Such a worldview, in my personal opinion, is not conducive for breakthroughs in the healing ministry.
In a nutshell: God is good, whatever that means. The devil is his tool to use for His own mysterious purposes.
Motivational level for praying for healing: very low.
Typical eschatology: Rapture of the remaining, desperate remnant sometime.
Examples: too numerous to mention
2) Quasi-Blueprint tradition: This tradition has moved away somewhat from the Blueprint’s shadow because of a recovery of the charismata in the life of the church. As the name suggests, this is a middle-ground and it is hard to provide definite criteria for who should belong here. I suggest that many emergent evangelical groups that incorporate the charismata into their worship fall into this category. This group of people has had enough experience in healing to know that there’s something more to it than if God wills and they’re willing to find out what that something is.
In a nutshell: God is good, I think I know what that means. The devil is evil, but not sure what that means and not sure who is responsible for what.
Motivational level for praying for healing: relatively high
Typical eschatology: some Remnant Rapturists, some Glorious Bride Rapturists who believe we’re in the last days before a major revival.
Examples: IHOP, Pentecostal groups, Calvary Chapel, etc.
3) Non-Augustinian, non-Blueprint tradition: Admittedly, there aren’t many in this tradition due to the heavy influence of the Blueprint tradition in the West. One could argue many in the Eastern Orthodox branch of the church have been untainted by Augustine and/or Calvin. Moreover, in as much as the apostolic tradition and early church fathers’ influence remains in the Orthodox faith, there is much to learn from them in so far as building a better worldview than one informed by Augustinianism/Calvinism. One could also argue that Eastern Church’s roots in Judaism and its mystical theology lay a sacramental and philosophical underpinning for much of the current practice within the Renewal, though this endeavor would take several books.
Groups currently identifying themselves with the Renewal (post-Toronto/Toronto-birthed) also lean heavily in this direction as well, i.e., away from the Blueprint. In short, the Renewal has learned that it’s difficult to contend for healing and prophesy if you’re view of God is that He has already set everything in stone and is responsible for everything as well. In this case, their practice and/or experience has helped shaped, in my opinion, a more biblical theology.
In a nutshell: God is good all the time and that means better than I know. The Devil is bad all the time and is responsible for his own evil—which includes sickness.
Motivational level for praying for healing: very high
Typical eschatology: We’re living in the eschaton now and we better be bringing Heaven down now.
Examples: Bethel, many Vineyard churches, Woodland Hills, etc.
Classic Quotations on Healing
McNutt, Francis. Healing, 1974. “The healing acts of Jesus were themselves the message that he had come to set men free; they were not just to prove that his message was true” (McNutt 53).
“. . .[E]very time Jesus met with evil, spiritual or physical, he treated it as an enemy. Every time a sick person came to him in faith, Jesus healed that person” (62).
“He [Jesus] came to save persons not just souls”(63).
“. . .God’s view of man: holiness is wholeness. . . Even God can’t play on a broken violin”(74).
The cross Jesus carried was the cross of persecution, the kind of suffering that comes from outside a man because of the wickedness of other men who are evil”(78).
“Every time you meet Jesus in the Gospels, he is either actually healing someone, or has just come from healing someone, or is on his way to do it” (80).
By New Testament standards, it should be normative for the Christian to pray for the removal of sickness rather than its acceptance. Redemptive sickness is the exception, not the rule” (86).
“But I believe the principal reason for this shift [acceptance of sickness rather than warring against it] has been that we have tended to emphasize doctrine rather than experience, as if right knowledge coupled with willpower were enough to produce Christians” (89-90).
“To deny or minimize the healing ministry is to take away much of the power of the gospel and to leave in its stead a body of truths devoid of life” (94).
Reasons for lack of healing:
1) Lack of faith
2) Redemptive suffering
3) A false view attached to suffering
4) Sin
5) Not praying specifically
6) Faulty diagnosis
7) Refusal to see medicine as a way God heals
8) Not using the natural means to preserve health
9) Now is not the time
10) A different person is to be the instrument of healing
11) The social environment prevents healing from taking place (248-261, paraphrased)
Virkler, Mark and Patti. How to Hear God’s Voice, Destiny Image: Shippensburg, PA, 2005.
I am absolutely, 100 percent convinced that it is God’s will to heal everyone who comes to Him Everything I read in the Bible and everything I have learned about my Father through our personal relationship demands that this be so. Jesus healed all who asked, and He said that He was doing exactly what He saw the Father doing. I believe that complete healing is always the will of God. I believe that if I ask the Lord if it His will to heal someone, the answer will always be “yes.” However, I also know that not everyone is healed. As I reminded you earlier, God’s perfect will is not always accomplished on the earth. There are factors in healing that I simply have not comprehended so far in my life, search and meditate and pray and experiment and ask as I might. So what do I do when someone I love is diagnosed with cancer? I believe that God will heal him. I believe that it is absolutely God’s will that this child of His walk in health and serve Him his allotted threescore and ten years (at least). I pray with total confidence for the healing touch of God. . . And if he is not healed? I still believe it is absolutely God’s will that His children walk in health. I still believe it is always God’s will to heal. I do not understand why His will was hampered in this life, and I grieve the loss of the one I loved. But I do not allow any circumstance, no matter how tragic, to undermine my faith in my God. My understanding of the Lord and His will is not based on physical conditions but on the unchanging Word and character of God. (Virkler 189-190)
Boyd, Greg. Satan and the Problem of Evil, IVP: Downers Grove, IL, 2001.
I do not deny that in the contest of this war zone God sometimes may allow, or even ordain, suffering for a particular higher purpose. Scripture teaches this much. I can therefore affirm much in those traditional theodicies that explain suffering as, for example, God’s way of punishing sin, or building our character, or of contributing to some other “greater good.” However, I deny that Scripture, reason, or experience requires the belief that suffering must always serve a divine purpose. (Boyd 19)
“. . . in contrast with any view that would suggest that disease and demonization somehow serve a divine purpose., Jesus never treated such phenomenon as anything other than the work of the enemy. . . Furthermore, rather than accepting their circumstances as mysteriously fitting into God’s sovereign plan, Jesus revolted against them as something that God did not will and something that ought to be vanquished by God’s power” (36).
“All sickness and disease was considered a form of satanic oppression, and so in freeing people from it Jesus demonstrated the presence of the kingdom of God” (37).
The world looks like a war zone because it is a war zone. . . [I]t is clear. . . that God’s good will is not being uniformly carried out in history. Atheists argue on this basis that there is no Creator. Early church fathers rather argued on this bases, and from God’s word, that there is a Creator God but that he must battle a formidable opponent who has of his own volition made himself evil. If this opponent was indeed then one originally entrusted with matter itself, and if the powers and demons who follow him were originally assigned other areas of creation to guard, then it is not surprising that creation is corrupt to the core. When morally responsible free agents choose to oppose God’s will, all that they are responsible for suffers accordingly. (48)
I do not believe that Scripture teaches us to find consolation in trusting that everything that ever occurs has a divine reason behind it. This belief not only goes beyond the teaching of Scripture; it fosters a mentality that is at odds with Scripture. If one holds that there is a divine reason behind all suffering, one is more likely to resign oneself to things that Scripture encourages us to revolt against. Jesus and the New Testament authors instruct us to revolt against evil as coming from the enemies of God rather than trying to find security and consolation in the hope that God is somehow secretly behind it. Jesus never encouraged people to accept their sickness, disease or demonization as somehow fitting into his Father’s plan. Rather, he revealed that God’s plan was to overthrow these things, and he taught his disciples (and us) to adopt the same attitude. We are not to trust that God meticulously controls these things. We are rather to trust that God is against them, that he ahs empowered us to work with him in battling such evils and that God will ultimately overthrow all his foes and rid his creation of all forms of evil. If we adopt a warfare worldview rather than a blueprint worldview, we are encouraged to trust God for everything God himself tells us to trust him for and to fight against everything God himself fights against. (162-3)
