-
Redeemed Bodies: The Functions of Divine Healing in Incipient
Pentecostalism
JONATHAN R. BAER
Pentecostalism originated in the body as much as the spirit. The
"full gospel" it proclaimed promised renewed health along with
saved souls, and its embryonic ethos prized the human embodiment of
divine initiative. Glossolalia and other ecstatic manifestations
au-thenticated God's presence and power, reflecting the reality of
the Holy Spirit within believers. But the materiality of the
culture that gave rise to Pentecostalism received its fullest
expression in "divine healing."1 Suffering men and women yearned
for the restoration of their broken bodies, and their faith
provided it.
Historians have traced the origins of Pentecostalism to the
late-nineteenth-century radicalization of the holiness movement
that first arose within American Methodism at mid-century and later
spread to large segments of evangelical Protestantism.2 Through the
ministries
I wish to thank the former Pew Program in Religion and American
History at Yale Universitynow the Institute for the Advanced Study
of Religion at Yale, still funded by the Pew Charitable Trustsfor
invaluable fellowship support. Thanks also to the following for
helpful critical readings of earlier drafts: Harry S. Stout, Jon
Butler, Grant Wacker, Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, William Inboden, John
Stauffer, Corey Beals, Chris Armstrong, D. William Faupel, William
Kostlevy, Richard Baer, Joan Baer, and two anonymous readers.
1. Participants in the holiness and Pentecostal movements
generally used the term "divine healing/' while other
contemporaries also used "faith healing" and "faith cure." I use
the term here and throughout without any intent to convey an
evaluative judgment. Likewise, I employ throughout the term
"healers" without evaluative intent to describe those who taught
and practiced divine healing, though they themselves rejected it
because they believed healing power came solely from God. Finally,
I refer to healings from the perspective of participants, removing
the awkward necessity of using qualifications like "alleged" or
"claimed."
2. Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism
(Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1987); Vinson Synan, The
Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in the
Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), 1-83;
Robert Mapes Ander-son, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of
American Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1979), 28-61;
D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance of
Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought (Sheffield,
England: Sheffield Academic, 1996), 44-186; Edith Lydia Waldvogel,
"The 'Overcoming Life': A Study in the Reformed Evangelical Origins
of Pentecostalism" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University, 1977).
Jonathan R. Baer is a doctoral candidate in American religious
history in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale
University.
2001, The American Society of Church History Church History 70:4
(December 2001)
735
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736 CHURCH HISTORY
of figures like Charles Cullis, A. B. Simpson, and Martin Wells
Knapp, divine healing became a common feature of the radical wing
of the holiness movement by century's end.3 Yet historians of early
Pente-costalism have given only limited attention to divine
healing, gener-ally placing it in the larger context of the revival
of signs and wonders that accompanied radical holiness and early
Pentecostal restora-tionism and premillennialism. Instead, they
have examined more fully the emergence of the distinctive
Pentecostal teaching, the bap-tism of the Holy Spirit evidenced by
speaking in tongues. As one recent scholar has remarked, this shows
a degree of historical amne-sia, for healing was at least as
prominent a part of early Pentecostal-ism as glossolalia.4 By
overlooking the multiple roles of healing in the ministries of
those who bridged the two movements, historians ob-scure one of the
central lines of continuity between radical holiness expressions
and arly Pentecostalism.
This essay examines three divine healers critical to the
emergence of Pentecostalism in the United States: Maria B.
Woodworth-Etter, John Alexander Dowie, and Charles F. Parham. After
surveying their re-spective careers, it analyzes the functions of
divine healing in their ministries over the two decades following
the mid-1880s. It employs the term "incipient Pentecostalism7' as
shorthand for the general religious milieu of the radical holiness
movement and early Pentecos-talism. Like almost all incipient
Pentecostals, Woodworth-Etter, Dowie, and Parham adopted the more
absolute articulations of the teaching. They insisted that Christ
secured full bodily healing through his atoning sacrifice on the
cross and that embracing this form of healing entailed rejecting
doctors and medicine. These claims rested upon holiness
understandings of sanctification as either the immedi-ate removal
or the suppression of personal sin through a second crisis
3. Paul G. Chappell, "The Divine Healing Movement in America"
(Ph.D. diss., Drew University, 1983); Dayton, Theological Roots,
115-41; Raymond J. Cunningham, "From Holiness to Healing: The Faith
Cure in America, 1872-1892," Church History 43 (Dec. 1974):
499-513; Grant Wacker, "The Pentecostal Tradition," in Caring and
Curing: Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions,
eds. Ronald L. Numbers and Darrel W. Amundsen (Baltimore: Johns
Hopkins University Press, 1986), 516-20; Gary B. Ferngren, "The
Evangelical-Fundamentalist Tradition," in Caring and Curing,
490-95; and Harold Y. Vanderpool, "The Wesleyan-Methodist
Tradition," in Caring and Curing, 336-39.
4. See Wacker, "Pentecostal Tradition," 520-21, for the "loss of
historical memory" involved in downplaying healing. Wacker's essay
is the most thorough treatment of early Pentecostal healing. Others
include: Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The Assemblies of
God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 1993), 19-24; Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early
Pentecostals and American Culture (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 2001), 26-28, 65-67; Anderson, Vision, 93-97; Faupel,
Everlasting Gospel, 130-33; and Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal
Tradition, 192-93.
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DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 737
experience following conversion, caused by the direct action of
the Holy Spirit. Divine healing represented an extension of this
holiness perfectionism from the spirit to the body. Just as faith
alone could produce sanctification, so too only faith could lead to
the renewal of the body.5
Divine healing in incipient Pentecostalism was one of many
Chris-tian healing practices that flourished around the turn of the
century. Catholic healing shrines at Lourdes in France, St. Anne de
Beaupr in Quebec, and Knock Chapel in Ireland drew millions of
pilgrims in search of cures and much American publicity. Mary Baker
Eddy's Christian Science and the various groups in the New Thought
move-ment taught healing through mental therapeutics and
metaphysical monism. Across the Protestant spectrum, the
Reformation doctrine of the post-apostolic cessation of miracles
weakened perceptibly, as theologians and healers discovered more
permeability in the barrier between nature and supernature. In the
first decade of the twentieth century, the Emmanuel movement arose
within Episcopalianism and spread to other mainline Protestant
churches, combining theological modernism and psychotherapy to
promote healing. Amid the disori-enting social and cultural changes
wrought by advanced industrial-ization, urbanization, waves of
immigration, and scientific develop-ments, many Christians searched
for therapeutic resources within their faith communities or
developed innovative spiritual healing programs to address their
ailments.6
5. On holiness perfectionism, see Melvin Easterday Dieter, The
Holiness Revival of the Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (Lanham, Md.:
Scarecrow, 1996); and Charles Edwin Jones, Perfectionist
Persuasion: The holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867-1936
(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1974). Cunningham, "From Holiness to
Healing," stresses the connections between holiness sanctification
and divine healing. Wesleyan holiness advocates of the nineteenth
century taught that "entire sanctification" immediately removed
inbred sin and perfected the believer's motives and volitional
acts. The Higher Life or Keswick form of holiness that spread among
traditionally Reformed and non-Wesleyan denominations after 1875
moderated this perfectionism by regarding sanctification as a
distinct crisis experience that began a process involving the
sup-pression or counteraction of personal sin rather than its
eradication. While this theo-logical distinction is important, the
practical expectation for believers on both sides was a dramatic
cleansing experience that produced "heart purity" and empowerment.
On the Higher Life movement, see Waldvogel, "The Overcoming Life'";
and David Bundy, "Keswick and the Experience of Evangelical Piety,"
in Modern Christian Reviv-als, eds. Edith L. Blumhofer and Randall
Balmer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 118-44.
6. Several of the essays in Caring and Curing provide
information on turn-of-the-century Christian healing practices. For
newspaper reports on Catholic healings from the early 1880s, for
example, see the following articles in the New York Times: "The
Knock Mortar Miracle," 20 July 1880, 2; "The Lourdes Miracles
Again," 13 Jan. 1881, 4; and "Visited by the Virgin Mary," 1 Aug.
1881, 5. For Christian Science and New Thought, see Gillian Gill,
Mary Baker Eddy (Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1998); Beryl Satter, Each
Mind a
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738 CHURCH HISTORY
All this occurred in the context of a crowded and complex
medical marketplace. While orthodox or "regular" doctors sought to
profes-sionalize under the banner of science and delegitimize their
compet-itors, panaceas of all kinds clamored for the attention of
patients. Not surprisingly, medical advances like germ theory
fueled claims and expectations that often exceeded the capacities
of regular physicians. Doctors remained ill-equipped to address
many frightening and fatal diseases like tuberculosis, as well as
chronic illnesses that involved psychosomatic elements.
"Neurasthenia" or "nervous prostration," which doctors suggested
resulted from lack of nerve force, became a common
turn-of-the-century diagnosis for harried urbanits ex-hausted by
the pace and demands of modern life.7 "Alternative" therapies like
homeopathy, chiropractic medicine, the water cure, and dozens more
found adherents among those disillusioned by regular medicine or
critical of its solidifying scientific paradigm. A burgeon-ing
market for patent medicines and nostrumscompletely unregu-lated
until the Food and Drug Act of 1906produced thousands of tonics,
pills, and medical devices backed by fantastical claims and glowing
testimonials. The proprietor of "Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegeta-ble
Compound" was perhaps the most recognizable woman in Amer-ica in
the last quarter of the nineteenth century, owing to the
popu-larity of her product and the dominance of nostrum
manufacturers in advertising. Pinkham's alcohol-based tonic
promised to cure all man-ner of infirmities, especially for women,
and her motherly visage adorned her advertisements and labels.
Suggesting that male doctors were insensitive to women's health,
she invited customer inquiries about delicate female maladies,
promising confidentiality and indi-
Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought
Movement, 1875-1920 (Berkeley: University of California Press,
1999); and Eugene Taylor, Shadow Culture: Psychology and
Spirituality in America (Washington, D. C: Counterpoint, 1999),
137-55. On debates over cessationism, see Robert Bruce Mullin,
Miracles and the Modern Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1996). For the Emmanuel Movement, see Allison
Stokes, Ministry after Freud (New York: Pilgrim, 1985), 17-36; and
Sanford Gif ford, The Emmanuel Movement (Boston, 1904-1929): The
Origins of Group Therapy and the Assault on Lay Psychotherapy
(Boston: Francis Countway Library of Medicine, 1996).
7. For the professionalization of medicine and its limitations,
see Paul Starr, The Social Transformation of American Medicine (New
York: Basic, 1982), 79-144,180-97; and John Duffy, From Humors to
Medical Science: A History of American Medicine, 2d ed. (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), 167-228. Concerning
neurasthenia, see Edward Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A
History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Era (New York: Free
Press, 1992), 201-32; Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An
Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991);
and Cynthia Russett, Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of
Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989),
104-29. The neurologist George M. Beard coined the term
"neurasthenia" in 1869; see his American Nervousness: Its Causes
and Consequences (New York: Putnam, 1881).
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DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 739
vidual responses. Some two decades after her tombstone settled,
Lydia Pinkham's personal signature graced thousands of letters each
year offering health tipsmainly increased consumption of her
Veg-etable Compoundto suffering women around the country.8
In this religious and medical environment, incipient
Pentecostals formed part of a radical evangelical culture featuring
divine healing as a central element of a larger program that
usually included ecstatic religiosity, strong millennial
expectations of Christ's return, a primi-tivist desire to replicate
the early church, perfectionist spirituality, and behavioral
asceticism. Within this fabric of beliefs and practices, what were
the functions of divine healing in incipient Pentecostalism, in
addition to relieving sickness? The teachings of incipient
Pentecostals on the restoration of the apostolic church and the
imminent second coming of Christ helped foster an environment in
which healing thrived, but they offer limited insight into the
nature and multiple purposes of divine healing. Interpretations
based on them treat a profoundly experiential reality too fully in
terms of its supporting theological framework. At its most basic
level, divine healing pro-vided believers with tangible assurance
of the present power and love of God and the human capacity for
wholeness in the face of pain, illness, and death. The healed
bodies of former sufferers symbolized both their fresh
understanding of God's relationship to sickness and the new life
world they had entered. For the healers themselves, healing
legitimated and demarcated their larger ministries and en-hanced
their personal power.
I. THE ECSTATIC HEALING REVIVALISM OF MARIA WOODWORTH-ETTER
Woodworth-Etter (1844-1924), Dowie (1847-1907), and Parham
(1873-1929) knew the pain and grief of protracted illnesses and the
loss of family members and friends. As they each endured many such
situations, they faced the necessity of making sense out of their
experiences in light of their Christian beliefs. All of them
adopted divine healing amidst deep personal suffering, as they
struggled to
8. For nineteenth-century alternative medicine, see Robert C.
Fuller, Alternative Medicine and American Religious Life (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989). On nostrums and patent medicines,
see James Harvey Young, American Health Quackery: Collected Essays
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 23-31,59-62,89-102;
Sarah Stage, Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of
Women's Medicine (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979); and Stewart H.
Holbrook, The Golden Age of Quackery (New York: Macmillan, 1959),
58-66. Edward Bok, muckraking editor of the Ladies' Home Journal,
exposed the Pinkham scandal by publishing a photograph of her
tombstone, showing that she died in 1883. "Pictures that Tell Their
Own Stories," Ladies' Home Journal Sept. 1905, 15.
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740 CHURCH HISTORY
understand how God could will the death of a child or a
disabling disease. Like the patients they healed in their
ministries, they also knew firsthand the limitations of medicine;
each one had seen doctors repeatedly fail to bring about healing.
Throughout their respective ministries, they referred frequently to
their own healing experiences, which served as archetypes for their
followers.
Suffering and death marked the life of Maria Woodworth-Etter
prior to her turn to public ministry in the early 1880s. Born in
New Lisbon, Ohio, in July 1844, Maria Beulah Underwood was almost
twelve years old when her father, "addicted to the accursed cup,"
died suddenly of sunstroke in 1856, leaving her mother to care for
eight children with no source of income. Along with her older
sisters, Maria had to leave school and work as a domestic away from
home. Despite limited religious influence from her parents, Maria
converted at the age of thirteen through a Disciples of Christ
meeting. She soon sensed a call to evangelism, but since "the
Disciples did not believe that women had any right to work for
Jesus," she resolved to marry an earnest Christian with whom she
could engage in missionary labors. Several years later she entered
an unhappy marriage with P. H. Woodworth, a Civil War veteran who
had sustained a head injury during military service that limited
his capacities. Together they scratched out a living farming near
New Lisbon, while Maria's health deteriorated. Over the next
fifteen years or so she bore six children, only to see death claim
five of them in infancy or early youth. Throughout these ordeals
her "nervous system became prostrated," and several times she
seemed close to death.9
Whereas many other bereaved mothers of her era turned to
spiritualism to salve their heartbreak, Woodworth-Etter found-
solace
9. Maria Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders God Wrought in the
Ministry for Forty Years (1916; reprint, Bartlesville, Okla.: Oak
Tree Publications, n.d.), 20, 21, 20-27; Maria B. Woodworth, Life
and Experiences of Maria B. /oodzvorth (Dayton, Ohio: United
Brethren Publishing House, 1885), 28. Signs and Wonders, 19, states
she was born in July 1844 and her father died in July 1855, while
Life and Experiences, 15, indicates she was born in July 1845 and
her father died in 1856. Wayne E. Warner, The Woman Evangelist: The
Life and Times of Charismatic Evangelist Maria B. Woodworth-Etter
(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1986), 3, suggests July 1844 and July
1856, which I have followed. For the sake of simplicity, I will
refer to Woodworth-Etter as such hereafter. In 1891, she and P. H.
Woodworth divorced, and she remarried in 1902 to Samuel Etter.
Secondary literature on Woodworth-Etter is limited. Along with
Warner's biography, see Wayne E. Warner, "Maria Beulah
Woodworth-Etter/' Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic
Movements, eds. Stanley M. Burgess and Gary B. McGee (Grand Rapids:
Zondervan, 1988), 900-901; Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions:
Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to
James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 241-47;
Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 273-79; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith,
24; Anderson, Vision, 34-35, 36; and Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal
Tradition, 191.1 am grateful to Wayne Warner for making available
to me his personal files on Woodworth-Etter.
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DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 741
through her evangelistic and healing ministry. She later
interpreted her hardships as trials God used to deepen her faith
and prepare her for ministry. During this time of preparation she
experienced several dramatic visions that improved her health and
impelled her to evan-gelistic labors, but timidity and the
opposition of her husband and daughter caused her to hesitate.
Eventually she prevailed and began preaching locally around 1880,
shortly after losing her last remaining child to death.
By 1883 Woodworth-Etter had convinced her husband to accom-pany
her as she itinerated; while she preached, he sold books and
pamphlets, food, and pictures of her to help support the work.11 As
thousands flocked to her revivals in the upper Midwest, national
press coverage followed by early 1885. Woodworth-Etter began her
healing ministry that spring after receiving the gifts of healing
(de-scribed in 1 Cor. 12:9) during a revival in Columbia City,
Indiana. In her typical fashion, she gave no indication of human
influences, saying simply, "The Lord showed me . . . that I had the
gift of healing, and of laying on of hands for the recovery of the
sick/' Thereafter, her fame rested on her capacity to induce both
healings and trances in revival participants, with healing becoming
increasingly central to her ministry.12 Though Woodworth-Etter
ministered under the auspices of the United Brethren Church
(18807-84), the Church of God (Wine-brennerian) (1884-1904), and
the Pentecostal movement (19127-24), she operated as an independent
evangelist. In 1918 she settled in
10. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights
in Nineteenth-Century America (Boston: Beacon, 1989). For
Woodworth-Etter's visions and interpretation of her hardships, see
Signs and Wonders, 26-30.
11. Woodworth, Life and Experiences, 31-33; Woodworth-Etter,
Signs and Wonders, 26-34; Warner, Woman Evangelist, 15-18.
observers, including some supporters of Woodworth-Etter's ministry,
criticized "her avaricious husband and his money making adjuncts/'
"Woodworth Meeting," Kokomo Gazette Tribune (Indiana), 18 May 1886,
5.
12. For examples of press coverage, see "Religious Craze in
Indiana," New York Times, 30 Jan. 1885,1; "Trance Evangelism,"
Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 Jan. 1885; "Rigid Religion," Fort Wayne
Sentinel, 31 Jan. 1885, 1; "A Farcical Religion," Indianapolis
Times, 11 May 1885,1. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 70-71;
70; M. B. Woodworth, Trials and Triumphs of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth
(Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House, 1886), 192;
Warner, Woman Evangelist, 68 n. 6; Taves, Fits, Trances, &
Visions, 241-47. During the 1880s and early 1890s,
Woodworth-Etter's ability to induce trances in revival-goers caused
great wonder and agitation. Entranced participants would lay cold
and rigid, with significantly reduced pulses, for hours on end;
upon coming to, they often would describe glorious visions of
heaven and reassuring contact with departed loved ones.
Woodworth-Etter herself frequently went into trances. See, for
instance, Trials and Triumphs, 187. For an example of the
controversy caused by trances, see "Ring the Riot Alarm!" and
"Flora Briggs' Story," San Francisco Examiner, 9 Jan. 1890,1.
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742 CHURCH HISTORY
Indianapolis, building an eponymous tabernacle, which she ran
until her death in 1924.13
By all accounts, Woodworth-Etter's revivals were unmatched
spec-tacles that anticipated the drama and flavor of early
Pentecostalism. Throughout her ministry, she stressed the immanence
of God through the power of the Holy Spirit, and various ecstatic
behaviors accom-panied the conversions, sanctifications, and
healings at her revivals. Carrie Judd Montgomery, a holiness divine
healer in Buffalo and then Oakland, said of Woodworth-Etter's
1889-90 Oakland revival: "It was a revelation to me to see the
immense crowds that poured into these meetings. I have never before
or since attended any gatherings where there was such conviction
upon the people The noise of penitential prayer went forth like the
sound of a wailing sea . . . . Mrs. Woodworth was wonderfully
anointed when she preached. The power of God rested upon many of
the people in a remarkable way and there were unusual
manifestations of the Lord's presence in the midst/' News-papers
called her the "voodoo priestess," the "trance evangelist," and the
"priestess of the doctrine of 'divine healing.'"14 A strong
majority of reporters and editors were skeptical or antagonistic,
some charging her with propagating "bare-faced lies," but others
considered her revivals beneficial to the religious life of their
communities.15
Most of Woodworth-Etter's healings occurred in revival settings,
generally outdoors under large tents or in open fields or parks,
with
13. Woodworth-Etter remained silent as to the reasons for two
long periods of diminished public activitybetween about 1894 and
1902, and between 1904 and 1912that interrupted her ministry. Like
many itinerant eyangelists, she suffered from the grueling demands
of her work, often preaching three times daily for weeks on end.
Hence, it is possible that health problems forced her to slow down.
A more likely explanation for the second period would be Samuel
Etter's ongoing invalidism, which was the subject of criticism from
reporters. See Warner, Woman Evangelist, 157,183 n. 3. Maria B.
Woodworth-Etter, Life and Experiences, Including Sermons and
Visions of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth-Etter (n.p., 1904), iii, indicates
that she and Etter were building a home for Christian work about
100 miles east of St. Louis, in Cisna, Illinois, at the time of
publication. Perhaps they maintained a settled ministry there for
several years, ac-counting for the second gap in the record.
14. For examples of ecstatic behaviors in Woodworth-Etter
revivals, see August Feick, comp., Life and Testimony of Mrs. M. B.
Woodworth-Etter, Evangelist: Finished Biography: Nearly Fifty Years
of Ministry (Indianapolis, Ind.: n.p., 1925), 23-24; and
Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, passim. Carrie Judd Montgomery,
"Under His Wings'': The Story of My Life (Oakland, Calif.: Office
of Triumphs of Faith, 1936), 130. "The Voodoo Priestess/' Oakland
Daily Evening Tribune, 2 Dec. 1889; "The Trance Evangelist,"
Indi-anapolis Journal, 26 Sept. 1885, 8; "The Trance Evangelist,"
San Francisco Examiner, 11 Feb. 1890; Muscatine Journal (Iowa), 7
Aug. 1894.
15. "A Case That Passes for a Faith Cure Reported from Madison
County," Indianapolis Journal, 9 Sept. 1885, 2; "A Farcical
Religion," 1; "A Cheerful Liar," The Champaign County Herald
(Illinois), 7 Sept. 1887,1; "Let There Be Faith," Daily Illinois
State Journal (Springfield), 7 July 1888.
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DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 743
anywhere from several hundred to twenty thousand or more people
in attendance. Typically she preached in or near small to mid-sized
cities, with each engagement lasting from several weeks to
months.16
She was a gripping orator whose charisma held the masses
spell-bound; her critics claimed she practiced hypnotism,
mesmerism, or catalepsy, and attributed her cures to these
devices.17 Though her style tended to appeal to the working class,
many reports indicate that all types attended her meetings. The San
Francisco Examiner described the scene at Woodworth-Etter's Oakland
revival in January 1890:
The usual motley throng of converts, idlers, church people,
roughs, children, sailors and artisans, athletes and invalids,
assembled at Mrs. Woodworth's big tent this afternoon Wan mothers,
with nursing babies in their arms, troop in by the dozens Invalids
with sunken eyes, narrow-chested consumptives and men with all
sorts of hurts and bruises are there to pass an afternoon, work
being beyond their power. Slouchy, unkempt matrons and slatternly
crea-tures of the street sit side by side with dainty damosels in
sealskins and fetching flat turbans Hoodlums are there in
bell-bottomed trousers, and solid men of business drop in on the
way from the train to their homes . . . all sorts, kinds and
conditions of people ready to shout or sing, or pray; given to
rigid conditions of the body and mental ecstasy; making strange
motions with their hands and utter-ing strange cries, all are under
the spell of the pleasant-faced woman who walks her platform
smiling and self-possessed.18
In such settings Woodworth-Etter preached the radical holiness
gospel of salvation and entire sanctification, but her healings
lifted the meetings to a fever pitch. She taught that Satan or his
demons caused all disease and infirmity, with individual sin often
the proximate cause. Spiritual salvation and physical healing stood
as parallel ben-efits of the cross, available to all believers who
would surrender by
16. Woodworth-Etter's largest recorded meeting was held thirteen
miles northwest of Muncie, Indiana, near the town of Alexandria, in
Madison County, in September 1885. "Repentance Run Mad,"
Indianapolis Times, 22 Sept. 1885,1, reported twenty thousand
people in attendance, while Warner, Woman Evangelist, 51, cites
estimates of between twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand.
Though Woodworth-Etter tended to preach in smaller cities, she held
revivals in Memphis and Cleveland (1885), India-napolis (1886),
Louisville (1888), Oakland (1889-90), St. Louis (1890), and Dallas,
Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles between 1912 and 1918. Her huge
success at F. F. Bosworth's Dallas church in 1912 marked her entry
onto the Pentecostal stage. Bos-worth became a nationally-known
healing evangelist in the 1920s.
17. Charles W. Wendte, "A Timely Call," Oakland Daily Evening
Tribune, 30 Nov. 1889; "Religious Craze in Indiana," 1; "Cataleptic
Capers," Indianapolis Sentinel, 15 Dec. 1886.
18. "Under the Woman's Spell," San Francisco Examiner, 11 Jan.
1890. Woodworth-Etter did not explicitly advocate a blurring of
social and class lines, though she believed that in the power of
the Spirit such distinctions disappeared.
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744 CHURCH HISTORY
faith to the power of the Holy Spirit.19 Over the course of her
career she claimed to be the instrument of healing for almost every
known disease. Asked once by a reporter if she ever failed to heal
the sick, Woodworth-Etter replied, "Never. I can not fail while God
is with me. Personally, I could accomplish nothing, but to him all
things are possible; therefore, when I put my hands upon a sufferer
and tell him or her to rise, I know that if the sufferer has faith
in Christ he will be cured/'20 Woodworth-Etter believed that
healings, as part of the broader category of signs and wonders, had
been available to the church throughout its existence, and that its
failure to claim these benefits of faith demonstrated its long
apostasy. The restoration to the faithful of the gifts of the Holy
Spirit, with full apostolic authority and accompanying signs and
wonders, revealed that the end times loomed.21 Signs and wonders
demonstrated God's love to believers and his awesome, terrible
power to non-Christians, providing a fore-taste of heaven and
warnings of hell. Through Woodworth-Etter and others, God was
reconstituting a faithful remnant to carry full salva-tion for soul
and body to the lost multitudes.22
19. M. B. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons (Indianapolis:
n.p., 1921), 43,42-54,77-82; Woodworth, Life and Experience,
214-18,239-47; Woodworth-Etter, Holy Ghost Sermons (Indianapolis:
n.p., 1918), 48-54; Woodworth-Etter, Divine Healing: Health for
Body, Soul and Spirit (Indianapolis: n.p., n.d. [ca. 1923]), an
unpaginated tract located in the Woodworth-Etter Papers, Flower
Pentecostal Heritage Center, Assemblies of God, Springfield, MO
(hereafter, AOG). The belief that Satan caused all illness was
com-monplace in incipient Pentecostalism. See Wacker, "Pentecostal
Tradition/' 523-24; Anderson, Vision, 95-96. As Anderson suggests,
"Healing and 'casting out demons' were almost synonymous terms in
Pentecostal vocabulary" (95). In addition to per-sonal sins,
Woodworth-Etter stressed that the sins of parents could be the
proxi-mate cause of sickness in children. Likewise, the faith of
parents could claim the blessing of healing in dire cases, such as
that of a girl in Springfield, Illinois, suffering from spinal
meningitis and paralysis, who was in no condition to exercise her
own faith. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 94-95.
20. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, passim; "Cancer Cured by
Faith," St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 3 Sept. 1887,12.
21. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons, 72-75; idem, Signs
and Wonders, 187-96,223-33, 535; "Pentecostal Power," San Francisco
Examiner, 11 Jan. 1890; Feick, comp., Life and Testimony, 24. For
interpretations of early Pentecostal restorationism and
millennial-ism, see Grant Wacker, "Playing for Keeps: The
Primitivist Impulse in Early Pentecos-talism," in The American
Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. Richard T. Hughes (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), 196-219; Faupel, Everlasting
Gospel; Anderson, Vision; and Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith.
22. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons, 72-75,122-27;
Woodworth-Etter, Questions and Answers on Divine Healing, rev. and
enl. (Indianapolis: n.p., n.d. [ca. 1922]), 23. Warner, Woman
Evangelist, 194-99, has demonstrated that significant portions of
Questions and Answers (a large part of which was first published in
Life and Experience [1904], 258-74) were lifted verbatim without
attribution from J. W. Byers, The Grace of Healing (Moundsville,
W.Va.: Gospel Trumpet, 1899), 265-85. Byers was a minister with the
Church of God (Anderson, Ind.). Nevertheless, the material
accurately reflects the teachings of Woodworth-Etter throughout her
ministry.
-
DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 745
Newspaper reports of a Woodworth-Etter camp meeting revival near
Urbana, Illinois, from late July through late August 1887, offer a
glimpse of her healing ministry early in her career. The St. Louis
Globe-Democrat provided a detailed account. Woodworth-Etter's
"magnetic influence communicated itself mysteriously to her entire
audience" of about two thousand, the paper reported. At every
ser-vice in "that alleged cradle of infidelity," there were rows of
people three and four deep at the altar praying for salvation or
healing, including prominent citizens.
After two or three meetings, and when the people had been worked
up to a degree of religious intensity, Mrs. Woodworth began her
ministrations among the sick Eye-witnesses, residents of Urbana,
describe the scenes which then took place as the personifi-cation
of frenzy. When the excitement was at its whitest heat Mrs.
Woodworth seemed ubiquitous. One moment she would face her
shrieking auditors from the platform, wringing her hands, screaming
to God for mercy in a voice that sounded high and shrill above the
wailings of her congregation; the next, prostrate upon her face,
tearing her hair, and writhing in the imaginary embrace of some
demon from below; then flying about among the people, encourag-ing,
arguing, commanding them to help her drive the fiend from their
midst; again upon the stage, stamping her feet tragically upon the
imaginary form of the "Old Boy" himself, and then, as the great
climax to her exhausting efforts, shrieking "victory!" at the full
power of her lungs.
Amidst the resulting pandemonium, Woodworth-Etter called forward
those who desired healing, "and with each demonstration of her
certainly inexplicable power the enthusiasm would break out anew,"
with hundreds hurling themselves to the ground, crying out to God
for mercy for their sins.23
According to the Globe-Democrat, Woodworth-Etter then
ap-proached an old deaf farmer named Grover who suffered from
severe back pain. She laid her hands on his ears and yelled that he
was deaf no more, then repeated the procedure with his back.
Afterwards she moved toward a Mrs. Harris lying on her cot. A
resident of Urbana, Harris had been a paralytic for twenty years.
Woodworth-Etter pro-claimed to the audience, "The success of this
crucial test should convince you all that God's power is present
among you." She pro-ceeded to ask Harris if she believed in God and
whether, if healed, she would devote her remaining years to his
service. Upon receiving an affirmative reply, Woodworth-Etter
commanded her, "Then, in God's
23. "Cancer Cured by Faith/' 12.
-
746 CHURCH HISTORY
name, get up and walk!" Harris lifted her head briefly, then
laid it back down on the cot. Woodworth-Etter cried out, "The Lord
of heaven commands you to rise!" Harris, who looked "unconscious of
what she was doing[,] put her feet on the floor and stood erect
before the multitude." The crowd surged forward as Woodworth-Etter
car-ried the unsteady Harris to the platform and urged her to help
convert the people. Harris proceeded to speak with great eloquence
in spite of her limited education. Thereafter another woman, with
advanced breast cancer declared incurable by her doctors, sought
healing. Woodworth-Etter had her promise never to take any medicine
except God's healing power, then laid hands on her breast and asked
her to pray in faith. One of the physicians who had attended her
case witnessed the healing and declared it miraculous.24
Such scenes provoked significant controversy. The Champaign
County Herald disputed the veracity of the claims in the
Globe-Democrat account, suggesting the cures were fabrications,
perhaps planted by someone in Woodworth-Etter's camp. Two weeks
earlier the Herald had called Woodworth-Etter's methods
"primitive," but said that her meetings were producing good and
that "it takes different ways to reach all people." The paper also
noted "[f]lying reports . . . of wonderful cures of disease
performed by Mrs. Woodworth." Citing her "wonderful magnetic power
over those with whom she comes in contact," the Herald granted that
she could cure "nervous diseases that are more imaginary than
real," but doubted her capacity with "diseases of a strictly
physical or deep seated character." The wealthy Urbana banker S. H.
Busey reported after the revival that nearly one hundred had
converted, including himself. The "Woodworth converts" gathered
twice a week for prayer meet-ings; later, members of established
churches started to join them. This reflected Woodworth-Etter's
general pattern of trying to plant churches or prayer bands before
departing an area.26
24. Ibid. 25. "A Cheerful Liar/' Champaign County Herald, 7
Sept. 1887; "The Camp Meeting/'
Champaign County Herald, 24 Aug. 1887, 1. Newspaper accounts of
healing revivals commonly made this distinction between nervous and
physical diseases. Dr. T. J. Bowles of Muncie, Indiana, for
example, offered a psychological explanation for Woodworth-Etter's
cure of Mrs. C. P. Diltz, whose "paralysis of the will" had led to
her total physical helplessness. "A Case That Passes for a Faith
Cure Reported from Madison County," 2.
26. S. H. Busey to the editor, The Church Advocate (Harrisburg,
Penn.), 14 Sept. 1887,4. This was the denominational organ of
Woodworth-Etter's Church of God (Winebren-nerian). For the heavy
opposition her ministry provoked in the church, see C. H. Forney,
History of the Churches of God in the United States of North
America (n.p.: Churches of God, 1914), 237, 356-57. "Cancer Cured
by Faith," 12, identifies Busey as
-
DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 747
A savvy self-promoter and controversialist, Woodworth-Etter
pub-lished at least eight versions of her journal-style
autobiography be-tween the early 1880s and 1922, with another
published in 1925 by August Feick, her successor at the
Woodworth-Etter Tabernacle in Indianapolis. Sold at her meetings,
these volumes recounted her re-vival and healing triumphs. Unlike
Dowie and Parham, she did not produce a periodical to publicize her
ministry, other than a monthly called The Bible Truth that lasted
only several issues in 1892.27 Though newspapers often expressed
hostility to Woodworth-Etter, she recog-nized the value of
publicity, good or bad, and cultivated it accord-ingly. Sensational
reports and sharp controversies drew crowds, and the power of God
convicted them.
Fearless and defiant, Woodworth-Etter took her confrontational
style to places other revivalists would sooner have skipped. She
first gained national publicity through her massive revival in
Hartford City, Indiana, in early 1885. According to one nearby
editor, who criticized her methods as containing too much of the
"biggest show on earth/' Hartford City was a rough place, but
Woodworth-Etter was up to the challenge: "A town of more iniquity
and bad odors to the square inch it has never been my misfortune to
encounter. A more importunate set of gamblers and whiskey-sellers
and a dirtier set of loafers have never escaped the penitentiary
Mrs. Woodworth has undoubtedly shown great wisdom in her manner of
converting Hart-ford City. She goes at it like a foot pad tackles
his prey. By some supernatural power she just knocks 'em silly when
they are not looking for it, and while they are down she applies
the hydraulic pressure and pumps the grace of God into them by the
bucketful.28" Woodworth-Etter faced scoffers at many of her
revivals. She en-tranced some and warned others: "The Lord will
send a terrible wrath on those who mock His religion by frivolous
conduct in these meet-ings Mockers, marked with His curse, have met
with swift pun-ishment, death, suicide, sickness or failure."29
Though little-known today outside holiness and Pentecostal
circles, Maria Woodworth-Etter was the most prominent female
revivalist in
the "millionaire banker" of Urbana. Woodworth, Trials and
Triumphs, 156; "Pentecostal Power," San Francisco Examiner, 11 Jan.
1890.
27. Warner, Woman Evangelist, 192-94. 28. Kokomo Dispatch
(Indiana), 5 Feb. 1885, 5. "Rigid Religion," Fort Wayne Sentinel,
31 Jan.
1885,1, reported that businessmen and saloonkeepers in Hartford
City closed early for lack of business and to attend
Woodworth-Etter's meetings.
29. "Mobbed Mrs. Woodworth," Missouri Republican (St. Louis), 18
June 1890, and "After Battle," Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 10
Dec. 1889, 1, provide examples of the mob violence and death
threats Woodworth-Etter braved. Fort Wayne Gazette, 23 Jan. 1885,
6; "Mockers to Meet with Punishment," Indianapolis Star, 27 Sept.
1904, 3.
-
748 CHURCH HISTORY
the United States prior to Aimee Semple McPherson. As it did for
McPherson, divine healing served as a hallmark for
Woodworth-Etter's ministry, the source of both the great crowds and
the conflict that followed her. For Woodworth-Etter, healings
demonstrated God's presence in surpassing power through the
ministrations of the Holy Spirit, and his desire to free captives
from Satan's shackles. Foremost among signs and wonders, healings
confirmed her mission to restore the purity and power of the
apostolic church in anticipation of the millennium.
II. PHYSICAL RESTORATION IN JOHN ALEXANDER DOWIE'S ZION
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in May 1847, John Alexander Dowie
moved with his family to Australia as an adolescent. A sickly
youth, Dowie first experienced divine healing as a
sixteen-year-old, when he was saved from approaching death by God's
concession to his ulti-matum that he would abandon the faith if he
were not healed. After pursuing theological studies at the
University of Edinburgh, he re-turned to Australia and became
ordained in the Congregational Church in 1872. In 1876, while
serving in Newton, a suburb of Sydney, Dowie embraced divine
healing in the midst of an epidemic, after burying more than forty
of his church members in the prior few weeks. Deeply disturbed by
the loss of life, Dowie rejected the tradi-tional view that
sickness and death were part of God's inscrutable will. "I was
almost frenzied," he recounted years later, "with Divinely imparted
anger and hatred of that foul destroyer, disease, which was doing
Satan's will." Dowie then commenced his healing ministry; but it
was not until 1882, after the death of his daughter and a move to
Melbourne, that he made it the focus of his labors.30
30. James L. Dwyer, "Elijah the Third," American Mercury, July
1927, 291-92; John Alexander Dowie, "The Chains of Good and Evil,"
A Voice From Zion [hereafter, VFZ], Jan. 1905, 15-16; Dowie, "He Is
Just the Same Today," VFZ, Jan. 1900,10-13; Dowie, "Zion's Protest
Against Swine's Flesh as a Disease-Producer," VFZ, June 1898, 17;
Grant Wacker, "Marching to Zion: Religion in a Modern Utopian
Community," Church History 54 (1985): 498. The best sources for
Dowie's years in Australia are Edna Sheldrake, comp., The Personal
Letters of John Alexander Dowie (Zion City, 111.: Wilbur Glenn
Voliva, 1912); and Gordon Lindsay, The Life of John Alexander Dowie
. . . (n.p.: Voice of Healing, 1951), 17-89. "God's Witnesses to
Divine Healing: Mr. F. A. Graves," Leaves of Healing, 24 July 1897,
609, contains a cryptic reference by Dowie that appears to suggest
the death of ids daughter was associated with epilepsy, and that it
prompted his full entrance into the ministry of healing. Lindsay,
Life of Dowie, 70, quotes an uncited letter from Dowie to a friend
that says his daughter suffered from a "fit" and was "insensible,"
and that she also may have had the measles. Sheldrake, Personal
Letters of Dowie, 318-22, contains the full text of the letter. See
also "How God Gave Dowie the Ministry of Healing," in The Sermons
of John Alexander Dowie, Champion of the Faith, ed. Gordon Lindsay
(n.p.: Voice of Healing, n.d.), 22-28. The secondary literature
-
DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 749
In 1888 Dowie traveled to the United States to establish
satellites of his International Divine Healing Association. After
two successful years on the West coast convinced him America was
fertile soil for his healing ministry, Dowie moved his operations
to Chicago in 1890.31
From there he itinerated in the eastern half of the U.S. and in
parts of Canada until 1893, when he established a divine-healing
tabernacle across from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show and near
Dwight L. Moody's evangelistic crusade at the Chicago World's Fair.
The claims of miraculous healings that followed Dowie wherever he
went gen-erated enormous publicity for his ministry, and crowds
multiplied when the economy soured in the spring of 1894.32 His
success prompted Dowie to establish, later that year, a
wide-ranging ministry he called Zion, which involved several divine
healing homes, and publications including his influential weekly,
Leaves of Healing. In 1896 Dowie formed the Christian Catholic
Church, and in 1901 building began on his Christian Utopian
community, Zion City, Illinois, which peaked at around seven
thousand, five hundred residents several years later. During the
height of his ministry, from 1894 to 1905, Dowie unquestionably
reigned as the most important and notorious divine healer in
America.
on Dowie is extensive, though much of it dates before 1930.
Among more recent works, see Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 116-35;
Wacker, Marching to Zion; Mullin, Miracles, 203-8; Edith L.
Blumhofer, "The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church and the
Apostolic Faith: A Study in the 1906 Pentecostal Revival/' in
Charismatic Experiences in History, ed. Cecil M. Robeck, Jr.
(Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1985), 126-46; Chappell, "Divine
Healing Movement/' 284-340; Philip L. Cook, Zion City, Illinois:
Twentieth-Century Utopia (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University
Press, 1996); and Alden Heath, "Apostle in Zion," Journal of the
Illinois State Historcal Society 70 (1977): 98-113.
31. For Dowie's early ministry on the West Coast, see John
Alexander Dowie, American First Fruits, Being a Brief Record of
Eight Months' Divine Healing Missions in the State of California,
4th ed. (Chicago: Zion, 1895); Dowie, Our Second Year's Harvest,
Being a Brief Record of a Year of Divine Healing Missions on the
Pacific Coast of America . . . (Chicago: International Divine
Healing Association, 1891); Dowie, "Divine Healing Vindicated,"
VFZ, Sept. 1898, 21-23; "J. A. Dowie's Cures," Oakland Daily
Evening Tribune, 16 Apr. 1890; Freeman D. Bovard, "Dowie's Story of
the Pacific Coast," Christian Advocate, 10 Dec. 1903, 2001-2; and
Robert C. Reinders, "Training for a Prophet: The West Coast
Missions of John Alexander Dowie, 1888-1890," Pacific Historian 30
(1986): 3-14.
32. Cook, Zion City, 12-13; Wacker, "Marching to Zion," 498. 33.
Cook, Zion City is the most thorough account of the city (later
renamed Zion) under
Dowie. For other views of its early days, see Jabez Taylor, The
Development of the City of Zion (Zion, 111: n.p., n.d.); Grover
Townshend, "A City of the Plains," Munsey's Magazine, Sept.
1902,843-45; and I. K. Friedman, "John Alexander Dowie,"
Everybody's Magazine, Nov. 1903,567-75. "Who's Who in Zion," Zion
Historical Society ser. 4 (1971): 1-30, box 59, file 16, John W.
Carver Healing Collection, B. L. Fisher Library, Asbury Theological
Seminary, Wilmore, Ky. (hereafter, ATS), identifies key figures in
Zion both during and after Dowie's lifetime. P. G. Chappell,
"Healing Movements," in Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic
Movements, 366-67, claims Dowie as the most prominent American
divine healer between 1894 and 1905. Various accounts put the
-
750 CHURCH HISTORY
In his prime Dowie packed auditoriums in Chicago, New York, and
elsewhere with ten to fifteen thousand participants. Week after
week he preached to crowds of six to eight thousand in Chicago and
Zion City. Whereas Woodworth-Etter's ministry of healing focused on
ecstatic behavior caused by the power of the Holy Spirit, Dowie had
a teaching ministry. Order characterized his meetings, which often
included healing testimonials but centered on Dowie and his lengthy
sermons. These were anything but boring. Dowie had the talents and
charisma of a demagogue, offering a dichotomous, moralistic reading
of life that was one minute winsome and the next rhetorically
violent. His commanding bass voice was rhythmic and spellbinding,
filled with emotion and weightiness. Masterful at connecting with
his crowds, he drew them in and reinforced his teaching by
eliciting audience participation and applying his engaging, if
barbed, sense of humor. Throughout the occasional eruptions of
applause, laughter, or seemingly impromptu interactions, Dowie
remained in complete con-trol.34
Restorationism drove Dowie's larger theological project. He
re-garded Zion as the Lord's designated force for restoring the
power and purity of the apostolic church and hastening the
premillennial return of Christ. If his millennialism was not quite
as urgent as Woodworth-Etter's, his restorationism was more so.
Like her, he preached individual empowerment and purification, but
he also sought to embody apostolic glory in his church, in Zion
City, and in himself. Dowie bolstered his authority by assuming the
mantle of prophetic office. In March 1899 he announced that he was
the "Mes-senger of God's Covenant'7 referred to in Mai. 3:1. In
June 1901 he additionally declared himself "Elijah the Restorer,"
the third incarna-tion of the Old Testament prophet (John the
Baptist having been the second). Finally, in September 1904, he
proclaimed himself also the "First Apostle of the Lord
Jesus."35
membership of the Christian Catholic Church in 1900 at between
twenty-five and fifty thousand; see Wacker, "Marching to Zion/'
502.
34. Just about any of Dowie's sermons display the
characteristics mentioned here. See, for example, John Alexander
Dowie, "Reasonings for Inquirers Concerning Divine Heal-ing
Teaching," VFZ, July 1900, 1-31. John Alexander Dowie, sound
recording, 1903, Carver Healing Collection, ATS. Dowie proved adept
at handling the rare opposition that arose in his meetings. See,
for example, Dowie, "'Christ's Methods of Healing': Reply to the
Exposition of the Sunday School Lesson by the Rev. Dr. John Lindsay
Withrow, Pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church, Chicago, in the
[Chicago] Record of Jan. 8,1898," VFZ, May 1898, 28. Like
Woodworth-Etter, Dowie suggested that death would come to mockers
of divine healing. Dowie, "Lessons on Divine Healing from the Story
of the Leper," VFZ, Dec. 1900,12.
35. John Alexander Dowie, "The Coming of Elijah, Restorer of All
Things," VFZ, July 1901, 8-57; Dowie, "Power of the Covenant of
Final Restoration...," VFZ, Oct. 1902, 27 ff;
-
DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 751
Divine healing supplied the foundation for Dowie's
restorationism. His apostolic authorityand by extension that of his
church and communityrested ultimately on his gifts of healing.
Crowds flocked to Dowie and devoted their lives to him because of
his extraordinary capacity to induce physical restoration. Even his
critics were amazed: "His success was not limited to cases of
hypochondria [PJilgrims came on crutches and went away whole.
Paralytics were borne in on litters, and literally 'took up their
beds and walked/" Regardless of his topic, Dowie almost invariably
returned to divine healing in his sermons, and his Leaves of
Healing offered a continuous stream of healing narratives.36
Healing formed the experiential core of his ministry, the palpable
conduit of divine grace to the suffering.
Dowie preached a straightforward message with the basic premise
that "God cannot make you sick." Like Woodworth-Etter, Dowie argued
that God never ordained that Christians become ill or disabled.
"The greatest lie that was ever uttered concerning the Word of God
since the [Reformation," he thundered, "is to be found in Christian
theologya lie that has been the abomination of the Church and its
pollution; a lie which has made it incapable of sustaining its
position; a lie which asserts that God worked in such a way as to
be the author of or the willing permitter of sin or disease; the
Calvinistic lie . . . the infernal lie to which in my boyhood days
I had to listen."37
Dowie mocked ministers who taught that God chastens those he
loves for their greater good, inscrutable though it may be:
[I]f disease is a love-token as the ministers preach, why do
they not practice it? I heard one the other day that said the
Grippe came to him; he found himself gripped. Did he kneel down and
say, 'Whom the Lord love He chasteneth; it is so good for you to
give me Grippe. (Laughter.) Oh, how you do love me. (Laughter.) Oh,
how you love me. Oh Lord, just love my wife Jennie too, and give
her the Grippe. (Laughter.) And love Betty too; let her have the
Grippe. Oh let us all be loved and gripped?' No he did not They are
only a pack of clerical fools or liars who preach that; because the
very moment they get sick they send off for [the] doctor . . . to
come and take the Lord's love token away. (Laughter and
applause.)38
Dowie, "The Principles, Practices and Purposes of the Christian
Catholic Church in Zion," VFZ, Aug. 1900, 3-15; Dowie, "Faith the
Mightiest Power," VFZ, Oct. 1904,13; Cook, Zion City,
57-59,171-73.
36. John Swain, "John Alexander Dowie: The Prophet and His
Profits," Century Magazine, Oct. 1902, 937.
37. John Alexander Dowie, " Will': An Address on Divine Healing
With Answers to Questions," VFZ, Sept. 1897, 20-21; Dowie, "Satan
the Dfiler," VFZ, Feb. 1900, 23.
38. Dowie, "Reasonings for Inquirers," 28-29.
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752 CHURCH HISTORY
Instead, asserted Dowie, God wills that Christians experience
now the sanctification of the body as well as of the spirit. Since
he has provided for this in Christ's atonement, it is never
appropriate for a believer to pray for God's already clear will
when seeking healing. All Christians who truly repent of their sins
and claim the promise in faith are healed. As the root cause of
illness, Satan "wields such stupendous power that if we did not
know God overrules all things and will ultimately triumph, we would
despair of humanity/' Even more than Woodworth-Etter, Parham, and
other incipient Pentecostals, Dowie stressed the pervasive,
assailing nature of Satan. God called upon his children to do
battle with the devil and his minionsand Dowie was not at all
reticent to name them. Anyone who opposed him in any fashion he
branded a tool of Satan. Atop the lengthy list were physi-cians,
for whom his enmity burned with holy fire; others included pastors
and churches, tobacco and pork manufacturers, municipal
politicians, and even other divine healers.39
In his healing homeswhich provided lodging and intense teach-ing
and prayer for the sickor after his services in designated prayer
rooms, Dowie would meet individually or in small groups with
patients, laying his hands upon them and praying. He also prayed
for the thousands of requests sent by mail. In 1890 Dowie met F. A.
Graves during a healing mission in Minneapolis. Orphaned at the age
of eight, Graves had suffered from epilepsy for twenty years and
"was constantly using medicine but getting no relief." Having
learned of divine healing the year before, he attended several of
Dowie's meet-ings. Dowie then saw him in his home shortly after
Graves almost drowned while having an epileptic fit during a bath,
causing an internal hemorrhage and vomiting of large amounts of
blood. Seven years later, Dowie described the scene: "He had the
teaching, and I knew he was a man of God. I put my hand upon his
body, and asked God that the hemorrhage should cease. It ceased
that moment. I prayed t o o . . . for his deliverance from
epilepsy. A day or so after-
39. Ibid., 17; Dowie, "Jesus the Healer/7 VFZ, Feb. 1900, 3;
"Divine Healing Vindicated/' 34-35; "Talks With Ministers on Divine
Healing," VFZ, June 1897, 4; "Satan the Dfiler," 19. Dowie stressed
individual human sin as the proximate cause of illness, though he
also intimated it could be inherited. See Dowie, "Do You Know God's
Way of Healing?" VFZ, Jan. 1900, 5; and '"I Will/" 41. For examples
of his demonizing, see Dowie, Zion's Holy War Against the Hosts of
Hell in Chicago (Chicago: Zion, 1900); Zion's Conflict With
Methodist Apostasy, Especially in Connection With Freemasonry
(Chicago: Zion, 1900). For his attack on Woodworth-Etter, see
"Trance Evangelism," Leaves of Healing, 8 Mar. 1895, 380-82. He
also savaged Martin Wells Knapp, a radical holiness healer in
Cincinnati, in "Spurious holiness Exposed," 12, and A. B. Simpson,
head of the Christian and Missionary Alliance and a noted divine
healer, in "The Great Neglected Chapter/' Leaves of Healing, 25
Sept. 1897, 762-67.
-
DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 753
wards he suddenly realized . . . that God had not only spared
his life, blessed him and stopped the hemorrhage, but he realized
he was delivered from epilepsy/' Dowie further stated that during
the first three years after this incident "there were attempts on
the part of the enemy to take possession of [Graves] again, but I
co-operated with him in prayer quite frequently, and for four years
now the deliverance has been perfect." Graves, who was present as
Dowie's account was read in Zion Tabernacle, certified its accuracy
and told how he had played the organ and led the singing at a YMCA
convention two days after the incident. "I stand before you,
friends, a miracle of grace and God's power."40
Before turning to divine healing, Dowie's patients had tried
various medical regimens without success. Maggie E. Parsons of
Madison, Wisconsin had been incapacitated for five years with
"severe uterine trouble, displacement, adhesion, and inflammation.
My husband's death in the meantime," she explained, "greatly
aggravated the dis-ease and completely prostrated me." Parsons
tried numerous regular doctors, the "rest cure," magnetic healing,
and a six-month stay at the Seventh-Day Adventist Battle Creek
Sanitarium, under the care of Dr. J. H. Kellogg. Two noted
physicians then told her that a hysterotomy held out her only hope
for health. Instead, she decided to visit one of Dowie's divine
healing homes in Chicago. "[0]ne clasp of this good man's hand, one
look into his face/' Parsons exulted, "and I knew I was indeed in
the presence of God's servant, and that through him would I not
only receive this physical blessing, but spiritual blessing." After
Dowie laid hands upon her in prayer a few days later, she "was free
from all pain, and made whole from the very hour." Parsons stayed
at the home for nine weeks, with no further distress. Upon her
return to Madison, the Wisconsin State Journal carried her story of
"Remarkable Healing."41
fri September 1905 Dowie suffered a stroke before his flock in
Shiloh Tabernacle at Zion City. The impact of his illness combined
with
40. "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mr. F. A. Graves/7
609-11, 621; 611. Dowie believed epilepsy resulted from demon
possession.
41. "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mrs. Maggie E. Parsons,"
Leaves of Healing, 28 Sept. 1894, 65-67; 66 (the Wisconsin State
Journal account is reprinted on 67). For "women's diseases" and the
sometimes barbaric way the medical community treated them around
the turn of the century, see Russett, Sexual Science; Shorter, From
Paralysis to Fatigue, 69-92. The illnesses of Maggie Parsons and
many other patients Dowie cured are open to psychosomatic
interpretations, but others are less so. Blindness, deafness,
shortened limbs, typhoid fever and countless other afflictions
yielded to Dowie's touch. See, for example, A. W. N., "God's
Witnesses to Divine Healing: Quickly Healed of Lameness, Tumor,
Rheumatic Gout, and Spinal Curvature," Leaves of Healing, 23 May
1903,129-30; and Jane Dowie, "How Jesus Heals the Little Ones,"
VFZ, Feb. 1901, 1-35.
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754 CHURCH HISTORY
allegations of financial and sexual misdeeds to bring about his
down-fall. By the time of his death in March 1907, Dowie had been
forsaken by all but a handful of his followers. Though Dowie never
became Pentecostal, and Zion continued after his death in the
radical holiness tradition, many former Zion members became leaders
in early Pen-tecostalism. After Dowie's grip on Zion loosened as a
result of his failing health and a campaign of vilification
directed by his successor, Wilbur Glenn Voliva, a young Midwestern
evangelist saw an oppor-tunity to make inroads into Zion City.
Charles Parham's visit to Zion City in the fall of 1906 marked the
beginning of the city's Pentecostal revival that eventually
channeled Dowie's legacy, and many of his most capable disciples,
into the fledgling Pentecostal movement.42
III. CHARLES F. PARHAM'S APOSTOLIC HEALING
Charles F. Parham was the theological founder of Pentecostalism,
and his student, William J. Seymour, led the Azusa Street revival
in Los Angeles in 1906 that sparked its worldwide spread. Born in
Muscatine, Iowa, in June 1873, at six months of age Parham
contracted a nearly fatal fever, likely caused by encephalitis,
that imperiled his health for the next five years. After his family
moved to the frontier region of Sedgwick County, Kansas, in 1878,
Parham continued in poor health. Several years later, at the age of
nine, he contracted rheumatic fever, which emaciated him and
stunted his growth. Due to his illnesses and generally weak
constitution, Parhamunlike his four brotherswas unable to perform
demanding work on the family farm. He closely identified with his
mother, who nursed him and
42. For an account of Dowie's downfall, see William E. Barton,
"The Dream of Dowie and the Awakening of Zion," The Independent, 12
Apr. 1906, 915-17. Concerning the financial allegations against
Dowie, proof of deliberate fraud is lacking, though it is clear he
enjoyed a lavish lifestyle as Zion City's economy crumbled after
1903. Rumors circulated about Dowie's undue fondness for Ruth
Hofer, a young Swiss deaconess living in Zion City in 1904-5, and
about his supposed plans for a polygamous colony in Mexico. See
Cook, Zion City, 204-5, 200-201, 159; Wacker, "Marching to Zion,"
507-8. Donna Quaife Knoth, "John Alexander Dowie: White Lake's
Healing Evange-list," Michigan History, May/June 1990, 36-38, tells
of the expensive summer home where the Dowies vacationed after
1899. For newspaper accounts of these and other controversies
surrounding Dowie, see the Hannah Whitall Smith Papers, "Fanaticism
Collection," box 6, files 19-25, ATS. Gordon P. Gardiner, Out of
Zion and Into the World (Shippensburg, Perm.: Companion Press,
1990), identifies many former Dowie follow-ers who assumed
leadership in early Pentecostalism. On Parham, see Blumhofer, "The
Christian Catholic Apostolic Church and the Apostolic Faith"; Edith
Blumhofer, "A Pentecostal Branch Grows in Dowie's Zion: Charles F.
Parham's 1906 Invasion," Assemblies of God Heritage, Fall 1986,3-5.
The Waukegan Daily Gazette, based in Wauke-gan, Illinois, adjacent
to Zion City, covered events in the fall of 1906. See, for example,
"Dowie Loses Zion," 19 Sept. 1906; "Is Voliva's Hold in Danger?" 26
Sept. 1906; "Declare Parham Is Gaining," 28 Sept. 1906.
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DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 755
supervised his light household chores. Her death in 1885 was a
terrible blow to Parham, who often spoke fondly of her in later
years.43
Parham enrolled in Southwestern Kansas College to study for the
ministry. Once there, however, he became interested in medicine. He
later wrote: "Having been an invalid for many years, the devil
sug-gested that it would be a great philanthropic work to become a
physician; to relieve suffering humanity, and then, by and by, have
a nice home and some ease and comfort in the world The devil tried
to make me believe I could be a physician and a Christian too/7
Parham acceded to Satan's wiles and then suffered a recurrence
of rheumatic fever, which left his doctors helpless and his life
endan-gered. After several months of suffering, he repented in
prayer and yielded his life to God, who healed him. Another healing
experience followed some months later, but it was not until Parham
was twenty-four years old that he fully "realized the mighty power
of God in sanctifying the body from disease as He had from inbred
sin."44
Following two years in the Methodist ministry, Parham struck out
on his own as an independent evangelist. In the fall of 1897,
Parham faced another serious illness, which his physician diagnosed
as heart disease. Simultaneously, his infant son took deathly ill
with a raging fever that doctors could not bring under control.
These dangers prompted Parham to embrace the full implications of
divine healing, including renouncing doctors and medicine and
trusting God alone for healing. Like Woodworth-Etter and Dowie
before him, Parham reasoned that relying on human means of healing
constituted putting one's faith in "works" rather than in God and
his gracious provision. Shortly after Parham and his son recovered,
Parham established in 1898 the Bethel Healing Home in Topeka,
Kansas, as part of a broad holiness social and evangelistic
mission. By the fall of 1900, he had established Bethel Bible
College on the outskirts of Topeka, where Parham and his students
identified speaking in tongues as the evidence of Spirit baptism on
New Year's Day, 1901. In the years following,
43. Sarah E. Parham, The Life of Charles F. Parham: Founder of
the Apostolic Faith Movement (1930; reprint, New York: Garland,
1985), 1-2; James R. Goff, Jr., Fields White Unto Harvest: Charles
F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism
(Fayetteville, Ark.: University of Arkansas Press, 1988), 23-26.
Along with Goff s biography, secondary sources n Parham include:
Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 158-86; Anderson, Vision, 47-61; Synan,
Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 89-92; and Chappell, "Divine
Healing Movement/7 340-57.
44. Parham, Life of Parham, 6; Charles F. Parham, A Voice Crying
in the Wilderness, 4th ed. (1944 [1902]; reprinted in The Sermons
of Charles F. Parham, New York: Garland, 1985), 15-18.
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756 CHURCH HISTORY
Parham's healing ministry played a vital role in his efforts to
spread his version of Pentecostalism, which he Called the
"Apostolic Faith.//45
Parham combined the practices of Woodworth-Etter and Dowie by
healing both in revivals and in private settings. With minor
variations, he shared the same healing theology and the same basic
message: God does not will sickness for his children, and faith
will secure his healing power. Like Woodworth-Etter and Dowie,
Parham identified Satan as the ultimate source of all sickness, but
he recognized a minor role for God's permissive will in allowing
sickness to come to the disobedient. More clearly than the others,
Parham articulated an understanding of healing as the physical
expression of sanctification. Though enthusi-astic, Parham's
revivals were sedate in comparison with Woodworth-Etter's.
Generally, he preferred to conduct healings in private and to avoid
the sensationalism that attended healing revivalismthough some of
his greatest successes were in revivals. His healing home in
Topeka, like Dowie's larger homes in Chicago, served as the
divine-healing equivalent of a hospital. In both settings, Parham's
magnetism won over his patients. A contemporary described him as "a
slight, spare man" who was "extremely delicate looking" owing to
his early health problems, but who "possessed such a wonderful
personality that some . . . accused him of hypnotizing his
followers." Unlike Woodworth-Etter and Dowie, Parham never claimed
to possess the gifts of healing, though his wife Sarah believed he
had been granted them, at least for a time.46
Ora Harris of Ottawa, Kansas, was a typical patient of Parham's.
She had suffered from consumption, stomach and bowel problems, and
poor eyesight for ten years, living off of a government invalid's
pension. Six doctors examined her in early 1898 and gave her
two
45. Parham, Life of Parham, 31-33; Goff, Fields White, 38-39.
Contemporary news accounts suggest something of the stir caused by
the outbreak of glossolala in 1901: "A Queer Faith," TopeL Daily
Capital 6 Jan. 1901, 2; "New Sect in Kansas Speaks with Strange
Tongues," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 Jan. 1901; "Parham's New
Religion Practiced at 'Stone's Folly/" Kansas City Times, 27 Jan.
1901; and "New Religion 'Discovered' at 'Stone's Folly' Near
Topeka," TopeL Mail & Breeze, 22 Feb. 1901. "Stone's Folly" was
the local name given to the eclectic, unfinished mansion that
housed Parham's school. See John W. Ripley, "Erastus Stone's Dream
CastleBirthplace of Pentecostalism," Shawnee County Historical
Bulletin, June 1975, 42-53.
46. For Parham's healing theology and practices, see Parham,
Life of Parham, 29-50; Parham, Voice Crying, 39-52; Robert L.
Parham, comp., Selected Sermons of the Late Charles F. Parham,
Sarah E. Parham: Co-Founders of the Original Apostolic Faith
Movement (Baxter Springs, Kans: Apostolic Faith Bible College,
1941), 23-50; "Healing," Apostolic Faith (Melrose, Kans.), Aug.
1905,1-6; Charles F. Parham, Divine Health, tract (Baxter Springs,
Kans.: Apostolic Faith Paper, n.d.); and Goff, Fields White, 41-42.
For healing as an expression of sanctification, see Parham, Voice
Crying, 50-52. The contemporary description is from "Three Months
of Religious Fervor," Joplin Daily News Herald (Mo.), 24 Jan.
1904,11. For Sarah Parham, see Parham, Life of Parham, 33.
-
DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 757
weeks to live. Shortly thereafter, in a meeting in the old
Salvation Army Hall in Ottawa, Harris "knelt with assurance that I
would be every whit whole . . . . When Brothers Parham and Duby
said to me: 'Sister, receive thy healing in the name of Jesus ' . .
. [a] great tearing-loose sensation passed through my chest, and
lo! I was instantly healed." Within days she was doing the family
washing and scrub-bing floors. She soon took up sewing for a
living, gave up her pension, and married, later raising several
children.47
When Parham attempted to spread the experience of speaking in
tongues in the two years following the Topeka outbreak, he met with
great frustration. In February 1901, Parham told his audience at
the Academy of Music in Kansas City, "Our religion is capable of
dem-onstration and the people will be made to believe when the
proper time comes. We will convince people that God is a reality."
The proper time did not come, however, until Parham returned the
focus of his ministry from glossolalia to healing in the summer of
1903. He then found an audience receptive to his message at El
Dorado Springs, Missouri, a health resort that drew sufferers from
great distances seeking a "water cure" for their ailments. Parham
preached outdoors at the entrance to the springs, drawing in
hundreds on their way to the waters. Fascinating to some and
repulsive to others, glossolalia did not attract the same crowds
for Parham as did healing, perhaps because of its lack of
accessible verification. The healed body of a long-standing invalid
offered more powerful testimony to outsiders than strange noises
that received a favorable interpretation from an insider.48
A notable healing in El Dorado Springs was that of Mary A.
Arthur, a prominent citizen of Galena, Kansas, who had suffered for
fourteen years with dyspepsia, prolapsis, hemorrhoids, and
"paralysis of the bowels." Upon her return to Galena, where her
poor health was common knowledge, she invited Parham to hold
meetings in town. Three months into the engagement in the winter of
1903-4, a news-paper in nearby Joplin, Missouri, claimed that more
than one thou-sand had been healed and eight hundred converted
through the
47. Ora (Harris) Childers, "Consumption," Apostolic Faith
(Topeka), 22 Mar. 1899, 5; Parham, Life of Parham, 34. Parham
published his periodical Apostolic Faith from several different
locations between 1899 and 1906; by May 1906, he had settled it in
Baxter Springs, Kansas.
48. "Story of His Beliefs," Kansas City Times, 4 Feb. 1901;
Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 52-53; Parham, Life of Parham, 87.
"Was a Pentecost," Kansas City Journal, 22 Jan. 1901, 1, describes
an unsuccessful meeting in Kansas City at which Parham focused on
glossolalia and seems not to have discussed healing.
-
75S CHURCH HISTORY
ministry of "the Divine Healer/' with patients coming from a
hundred-mile radius around Galena.49
When Parham took the Apostolic Faith to Texas in 1905, healing
again proved central to its spread. His meetings in Houston
generated broad interest after the healing of Mrs. J. M. Dulaney,
wife of a noted local attorney. Dulaney had endured total paralysis
of the left side of her body and awful spasms since receiving an
electric shock during a streetcar accident in November 1902. She
and her husband had in-curred $2,300 in medical bills, only to have
her pronounced incurable and likely near death. The Dulaneys'
lawsuit against the streetcar company publicized her condition in
Houston. Dulaney later re-counted that, in response to prayer in
May 1905, she had seen a vision of a man whom she had never met and
who would heal her. Three months later she saw Parham preaching on
a street corner. Recogniz-ing him as the man in her vision, she and
her husband attended his meeting in Bryan Hall two nights later.
After Parham and his workers had been singing and praying for
Dulaney for ten to fifteen minutes, she heard a voice say, "Arise
and go, my child." According to a local paper, "Mrs. Dulaney arose
from her chair and walked about the hall in a state of ecstatic joy
shouting, clapping her hands, and praising the Lord for
restoration. The incident created much excitement. Mrs. Dulaney
walked down the stairs from the hall and went home. She has
attended their meetings daily since, but not in the chair, and is
still rejoicing and praising God for her recovery."50
Several months after Dulaney's healing, Parham established a
Bible school in Houston. One of his students and converts to
Pentecostalism was the African-American holiness evangelist William
Seymour, him-self a practitioner of divine healing. In early 1906,
Seymour received an offer to help pastor a small holiness mission
in Los Angeles. When the leaders of the mission rejected his
Parham-derived teaching on tongues, Seymour held a series of
meetings that led to the famous
49. Parham, Life of Parham, 88-89; Blumhofer, Restoring the
Faith, 53; "Three Months of Religious Fervor/' 11. Directly below
the Daily News Herald story, an advertisement promised "No More
Aches and Pains" to women suffering menstrual difficulties, which
can drive "women into the direst stages of nervous excitement."
Mrs. Anna D. Moore, Vice President of the United Daughters'
Industrial Club in New Orleans, testified that after only
twenty-two bottles of Wine of Cardui her problems ceased.
50. Parham, Life of Parham, 113-15; Goff, Fields White, 96-97;
Suburbanite (Houston Heights, Tex.), 12 Aug. 1905, quoted in Goff,
Fields White, 97. One of Parham's workers wrote to her family in
the days preceding Dulaney's healing: "Each week is better &
better, but the events of the last few days, simply beggar
description " Rilda Cole to "Dear Ones," Houston, Tex., 1 Aug.
1905, Charles F. Parham Papers, AOG. W. W. Gray, "The Houston
Meeting," Apostolic Faith (Melrose, Kans.), Aug. 1905, 8-9,
provides another account of the Houston revival.
-
DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 759
Azusa Street revival, begun in April 1906. Upon visiting Azusa
Street in October 1906, Parham pronounced the movement there a
"counterfeit Pentecost," filled with fanaticism, spiritualist and
hypnotic influences, and gibberish instead of known foreign
languages.51 This rejection, combined with a 1907 arrest in San
Antonio on the charge of sodomy, greatly diminished Parham's
influence in the growing Pentecostal movement.52
IV. THE FUNCTIONS OF DIVINE HEALING
The healing ministries of Woodworth-Etter, Dowie, and Parham
suggest that divine healing in incipient Pentecostalism functioned
in three primary ways. Most obviously, healing provided the
tangible benefit of renewed health. Second, divine healing was the
principal means healing evangelists used to fulfill Jesus' mandate
in the Great Commission (Matt. 28:18-20) to "make disciples," by
attracting, converting, initiating, and assuring believers.
Finally, healing authenticated and defined the ministries of the
healers, and it augmented their personal power.
The above testimonies and thousands more like them suggest that
many people found in healing ministries the physical restoration
they sought. Critics claimed that the healed suffered from
psychosomatic illnesses susceptible to various forms of suggestion,
but many of the healing claims do not yield easily to this
explanation. Contemporary
51. Parham, Life of Parham, 163-64; Blumhofer, Restoring the
Faith, 61. Until his death in 1929, Parham maintained that true
tongues speech was xenoglossolalic, or that it reflected actual
foreign languages unknown to the speaker. There is ample evidence
to suggest that Parham's negative reaction to Azusa was based in
part on his antipathy to racial mixing and equality. Goff, Fields
White, 130-32. By contrast, a notable aspect of Dowie's ministry
was its interracial nature. Cook, Zion City, 91-97; and "God's
Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mrs. Emma Parker," Leaves of Healing,
27 Nov. 1896, 65-67. Woodworth-Etter's revivals were sometimes
interracial. Willard . Gatewood Jr., ed., Slave and Freeman: The
Autobiography of George L. Knox (Lexington: University of Kentucky
Press, 1979), 126-27. For Seymour and Azusa, see Blumhofer,
Restoring the Faith, 56-62; and Anderson, Vision, 60-61, 65-74.
52. "Evangelist Is Arrested," San Antonio Light, 19 July 1907,1,
reported that Parham was arrested, along with a young man, for
committing "an unnatural offense." See also "Sensation at San
Antonio," Houston Chronicle, 21 July 1907,14; and "Voliva Split
Hits Preacher," San Antonio Light, 24 July 1907, 2. Contemporaries
and historians agree about the sexual nature of Parham's act, but
they disagree as to whether it was sodomy, adultery, or
masturbation. By far the most detailed account of the incident is
Goff, Fields White, 136-41, and esp. 222-28 nn. 31-53. See also
Anderson, Vision, 272-73 n. 8; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 68
n. 82. Parham argued that the charges, for which he was never
indicted because of lack of evidence, were false rumors spread by
enemies, including Wilbur G. Voliva, Dowie's successor in Zion
City. Goff, Fields White, 138-40, shows that Voliva capitalized on
the chargesand seemingly embellished themto discredit Parham.
Parham's wife Sarah supported him through the ordeal.
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760 CHURCH HISTORY
and historical critics also have argued that many claims were
exaggerated and perhaps others fabricated, and that even those that
seemed genuine usually did not endure. While it is impossible to
evaluate the competing assertions with any degree of certainty, the
fact remains that large numbers of people experienced sufficient
physical changes for Woodworth-Etter, Parham, and especially Dowie
to develop mass followings.53
Incipient Pentecostal healers argued that a good and loving God
could not coexist with the enduring presence of sickness in
Christians and the sin that caused it. They focused heavily on the
question of God's will in sickness and healing because this was a
central concern of the ill Christians who came to see them. The
vast majority of these believers inherited a long tradition of
theodicy that suggested that God willed or permitted the sicknesses
of those he loved for their greater good, though his purposes might
be unclear in the midst of suffering. Sickness thus challenged and
enlarged the faith of believers, and it promoted humility,
repentance, and perseverance. Whereas Christians in this tradition
took comfort in the belief that nothing happened outside the direct
or permissive will of God, who could transform human evil into
divine good, many of the patients who sought divine healing had
found this hope wanting. Instead, these sufferers discovered solace
in the belief that sickness was outside the will of God, though
remediable by him. They rejoiced with Ellen Tanner, who was healed
at Parham's Bethel Healing Home, that God "was not dead or gone on
a journey/' but that "His living presence and power" was available
to heal agonized bodies.54
Like all those who are seriously sick, divine-healing patients
sought to imbue their illness experiences with meaning. But the
incapacity of traditional Christian theodicy to provide them with
consolation and peace portended the terror of meaningless
suffering. Furthermore, as regular medicine professionalized on the
basis of its scientific credentials, its ability to offer patients
meaningful narratives within which they could situate their illness
experiences diminished. Instead, it
53. James Monroe Buckley, Methodist editor of the Christian
Advocate, was a prominent critic. See, for example, Christian
Advocate, 12 Feb. 1885,102; Christian Advocate, 12 Sept. 1889, 589;
and J. M. Buckley, Faith-Healing, Christian Science and Kindred
Phenomena (New York: Century, 1892). Anderson, Vision, 93-94, cites
evidence that casts doubt on the claims of both healers and the
healed. For studies of the still poorly understood influence of the
mind on the body, see Anne Harrington, ed., The Placebo Effect: An
Interdisciplinary Exploration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1997).
54. Woodworth-Etter, Life and Experience (1904), 215-16, 246;
Dowie, " Will'; Apostolic Faith (Topeka), 9 Aug. 1899, 2; Parham,
Life of Parham, 43. Tyron L. Inbody, The Transforming God: An
Interpretation of Suffering and Evil (Louisville: Westminster John
Knox, 1997), 39-42.
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DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM 761
resorted to the notion of chance, which failed to provide
compelling answers to the question of why one suffered. Alternative
therapies proliferated in the nineteenth century in part to fill
this need. When patients went to a Woodworth-Etter revival or to
Dowie's Zion, they learned that their sicknesses were part of a
cosmic battle between the forces of good and evil, and that God
called them to enlist. God desired his children to rebuke Satan and
experience complete health, the normative state for those who lived
in faithful obedience to his ways. The healing experience thus
overturned the idea that God had willed illness, which helps
explain the powerful sense of liberation and peace of mind that so
often accompanied it.55
Before the sick could assign meaning to their illnesses, they
needed a language to express themselves. As Elaine Scarry has
suggested, chronic pain is intensely internal and non-communicable,
lacking concrete external referents. Persistent physical and mental
suffering renders patients inarticulate and even mute, cutting them
off from human community by limiting their capacity to extend
beyond the confines of the self. In his own way, Dowie understood
this at some level: "When you are sick you have no time for others,
no matter how much your heart desires it. Your body cries out and
cries out, Help, help! Some of the most unselfish people in the
world have become the most selfish people through sickness. When
you are sick, you hate to think as much of yourself as you are
doing. You hate to be a trouble, many of you who are sick, to
others, but you cannot help it. You cannot walk. You cannot even
feed yourself sometimes, and you are a trouble Those who tell you
that disease drives you closer to God, makes you lose self, and all
that kind of thing, say what is not true." By supplying their
patients with effectual language and meaning based on supernatural
causality, divine healers enabled them to ob-jectify their
experiences and reenter a larger relational world. It is not
surprising that the followers of divine healers saw them as
parental figures, given the primordial parental role in the
transmission of language and meaning. "Mother Etter" and "Daddy
Parham" ordered the lives of the helpless, while Dowie clearly
served a paternal role as well, one that increasingly merged human
and divine traits.56
55. Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, 79-144;
Fuller, Alternative Medicine. See Andrew Delbanco, The Death of
Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1995), 125-53, for the "loss of providence" and
the growing reliance on the idea of chance to explain human affairs
in the postbellum era.
56. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of
the World (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985); Dowie, "Story
of the Leper," 18. Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude: Women's
Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven:
Yale
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762 CHURCH HISTORY
Once patients externalized their illnesses, they required a
means to overcome them. Divine healing provided empowerment to
those who had been helpless. They no longer had to accept their
diseases as an unavoidable part of living in a fallen natural
order. Rather, they could step forth in faith and grasp God's
standing offer of perfect health. Though divine healers stressed
that it was God's power that healed, their ministries made human
agency central to the healing experience. God's will in the matter
was fixed; human will activated the experi-ence and sustained it
thereafter. This gave enormous power and responsibility to
individuals in the matter of their health. The harsh side of this
teachingthat the sick were to blame for their state, whether
through sins of commission or the sin of unbeliefafflicted many and
certainly compounded their sufferings, including Dowie at the end
of his life. But others, like Ora Harris, became "every whit
whole." Even those not cured of their physical infirmities often
found a measure of restoration through the meaning-making and
empow-ering functions of divine healing.57
Divine healing also functioned to "make disciples" through its
capacity to attract, convert, initiate and retain believers to the
full gospel of the healers. Woodworth-Etter saw healing as the best
draw-ing card for the gospel: "If ministers could cast out devils
today in the name of Jesus, and lay hands on the sick and have them
restored to health, they would not preach to empty benches, nor
mourn over the dearth of revivals. On the contrary, every minister
who could do that would have crowded houses and a perpetual
revival." Dowie agreed: "When the gospel of Divine Healing comes
back to the church in all its glory and its power, multitudes will
press into the temple of the church of G o d . . . and they are
doing it even now." Contemporary accounts suggest that many
participants at healing revivals came because of their
sensationalism. Whether to worship or mock, to satisfy curiosity or
be entertained, people came in droves.58
University Press, 1996), 175-77, also draws upon Scarry's
insights to interpret the healings of twentieth-century American
Catholic women who prayed to St. Jude. Feick, comp., Life and
Testimony, 67, 128, 129; Parham, Life of Parham, dedication page.
Of course, other religious leaders, including some who did not
practice healing, received affectionate parental titles. They also
may have given life-altering language and meaning to their
followers in the manner suggested, though not necessarily through
healing.
57. For the centrali