Abstract
Spiritual healing is contentious and mysterious. Many religions make important claims concerning spiritual healing, and more recently the spiritual dimension of healing has begun to receive increasing attention in non-religious as well as religious settings. However, the credibility of this multifaceted and mysterious phenomenon continues to be disputed in a context in which the authority of science and biomedicine prevails. In the time of the Covid-19 pandemic, when the world’s attention has been focused on illness and death and the science-driven search for protection and healing, the publication of this impressive volume on spiritual healing is timely. Indeed, it is even more so considering the apparent limitations of medical science to eradicate the Covid-19 virus and prevent millions of deaths. In the face of a default which ascribes healing to medical science, the concept of spiritual healing challenges this commonly held view and points to the possible part played by a metaphysical power in the healing process. Furthermore, this book raises the important issue of what characterises spiritual healing and the question of how it can be investigated and validated.
The fundamental desire for healing, by whatever means, ensures that this book will be of interest to many; as the book’s editor, Sarah Coakley, rightly asserts in her introduction, healing ‘has a certain timeless and universal allure’ (p. 1). However, following this unquestionable fact, conceptual issues and questions proliferate, each chapter adding to the number. But, by drawing together the work of distinguished scholars from biblical studies, history, neuroscience, philosophy, anthropology and pastoral studies, the book not only illuminates the complexity and challenge of spiritual healing but also draws welcome attention to its significance. It is undoubtedly ambitious in its interdisciplinary scope, but Coakley’s focus for the book—on how meaning-ascription and interpretation of the healing event impacts on the efficacy of healing—is not always discernible as the thread that holds the chapters together. The book offers, primarily, perspectives from a variety of disciplines, rather than an interdisciplinary conversation. That said, each chapter ably wrestles with the challenges of defining spiritual healing and identifying the methodological and epistemological issues which must be resolved to make progress in the field.
The introduction by Coakley necessarily includes her definition of spiritual healing and how the contributors specify their engagement with it. Her first definition refers to spiritual healing as ‘any healing that is not strictly physical, that is, which relates to the psychic, or non-somatic, or spiritual elements of the self’ (p. 3). Hence, the locus of the healing is not the body as such, although that it also likely to be affected. Seven of the book’s ten contributors work with this definition. The second definition refers to the source of the healing event and is ‘healing that is effected directly by God (or by other purported spiritual forces), or by God assisted by human others, secondarily or cooperatively’ (p. 4). However, it is important to recognise that these are not unrelated and, as the book bears witness, they can usefully be discussed separately and then drawn together to yield new insights and horizons for research. The problem of definition does not end with Coakley’s binary; indeed, Fraser Watts in one of the companion volumes to this book identifies three things that the term spiritual can be applied to in spiritual healing, namely: the spiritual practices involved, the spiritual aspects of the person presumed to be involved, and finally what are presumed to be spiritual processes (F. Watts, ed., Spiritual Healing: Scientific and Religious Perspectives, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011, p. 1). At root, the term spirituality in contemporary usage has garnered so many meanings that any attempt to define spiritual healing is fraught with difficulty. Likewise, what is described as healing is equally complex and multivalent, and deserving of more attention in many of the chapters in the book.
Following Coakley’s ground-clearing introduction, the book is set out in four sections covering ‘Biblical and Historical Perspectives’, ‘What Science Shows Us’, ‘Philosophical Insights’ and ‘Anthropological and Pastoral Perspectives’. The structure is effective in taking the reader on a journey beginning with an exploration of healing in the Christian tradition. Beverly Roberts Gaventa’s exploration of ‘Healing, Meaning and Discernment in the Biblical Text’ is followed by an analysis of healing in Marian shrines by Emma Anderson and Heather Curtis’s chapter on Christian Science and faith cure. The book then proceeds through the tricky terrain of the methodological, epistemological and philosophical issues raised by science and philosophy, with chapters discussing neurological aspects of pain by Howard Fields, the role of the brain and cognition in healing by Malcolm Jeeves, and research on prayer and placebo effects by Anne Harrington. Philip Clayton’s chapter provides an excellent exploration of the philosophy of mind in relation to healing and strives to answer the question of how theologians and those interested in spiritual healing engage with neuroscience and the philosophy of mind. The issues of mind/body relation and divine intervention or influence are present throughout this book—sometimes implicitly and sometimes explicitly—and Clayton’s chapter handles these with sophistication and a laudable sensibility. In a different vein, Stephen Clark’s chapter tackles ‘Healing and the Moral Problems of Efficacy’ by drawing on the work of the third-century philosopher Plotinus. Although this makes an interesting contribution to the pressing need for moral discernment, more space in the volume could have been given to moral problems and the question of the values involved in discernment and decision making. Indeed, Coakley’s conclusion to her introduction states that ‘the phenomenon of spiritual healing is at base a manifestation that calls forth a world of value. The question for any sufferer, therefore, is what values are finally at stake’ (p. 26).
The book concludes with two chapters that turn to the exploration of practice. Thomas Csordas examines Catholic and Anglican charismatic healing and Navajo healing rituals, and John Swinton offers a theological reflection on healing in pastoral care. Swinton opens by probing the question: What does it mean to be healed? This is a question pertinent to the whole volume and warrants more attention than it is given. However, Swinton seeks to address this and a number of other questions in relation to spiritual healing in the Christian tradition. He uses hermeneutics and the work of Hans Gadamer to ‘access the vital meaning dimensions of Christian healing’ and then moves to reframe spiritual healing using the story of the healing of the leper in the Gospel of Mark 1:40-45 as an example. From this hermeneutical approach, Swinton identifies several implications for the understanding and practice of spiritual healing, concluding that spiritual healing is dependent ‘not upon the absence of disease but the presence of certain forms of relationships that lead to the renegotiation of meanings of physical or psychological disease’ (p. 221).
At the end of her introduction Coakley has written an editor’s note in which she refers to the Covid-19 pandemic and the demonstrations in the United States against racial injustice. She notes that the hermeneutics of healing and the related hermeneutics of injustice are ‘more pressing than ever’ and expresses her hope that this book will contribute to ameliorative reflection on ‘what deeply troubles’ the world (p. 26). Whether this hope is realised remains to be seen. This volume certainly provides considerable insights into spiritual healing, its elusive nature and multitextured complexity. It makes a strong case by its example of the need for a constructive, mutually critical conversation between the many disciplines that stand as stakeholders. Coakley’s introduction is an excellent piece for anyone interested in the field and her conclusion summarises the endeavour of this work and the conviction driving it. It is far from the final word, but the contributions of the fine scholars to this volume are to be applauded for their sophisticated approach to a phenomenon which defies definition and baffles science and religion. The book is written with the conviction that spiritual healing does take place and it is hoped that it will inspire others to take up the challenge to engage with this mysterious, spiritually and intellectually demanding healing phenomenon which has a ‘timeless and universal allure’ (p. 1).