Healing and the Christian Tradition

Healing and the Christian Tradition   [HIST 0660 ]

Course Description

Note: This course will be held in Newfoundland

Human experience has been dogged by disease and injury, prompting universal  attempts to deal with the effects. Religions have played an important role in most cultures in the quest for wellness. In particular, Christianity has devoted a great deal of attention to healing the ill and broken, leading famous church historian, Adolph von Harnack to call it, “. . . a religion for the sick.”

This course does not focus simply on healing defined as a general return to wholeness. Rather it explores Christian thought and practice in response to the belief that God intervenes directly to ensure physical and emotional health. Historically, this belief has found expression in several identifiable models, which I call confrontational, intercessory, reliquarial, incubational, revelational, and soteriological. While the models are not mutually exclusive, each has evolved its own characteristic theology and practice.

After an introductory discussion of definitions and verification, the course will proceed to an examination of the healing ministry of Jesus. This will be followed by treatments of ministries and movements which illustrate the various models of healing. Of necessity, this will be selective, but it will range through the three millennia of Christian experience, reaching beyond North America and beyond Protestantism.

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