Two Paradigms For Divine Healing

Two distinct theologies of healing as represented by some of the foremost protagonists of the twentieth-century United States are analyzed and a solution is proposed to the tension generated by their differing approaches.

F. F. Bosworth was the only major living link between the late-nineteenth-century divine healing movement that gave birth to Pentecostalism and the post-World-War II healing revival that brought Pentecostalism into American popular culture. At once on the fringes and in the mainstream of American Pentecostalism, Bosworth has largely been ignored by historians. Richmann demonstrates that Bosworth's story not only draws together disparate threads of the Pentecostal story but critiques traditional interpretations of speaking in tongues, Azusa Street, denominational affiliation, divine healing, the relationship to fundamentalism, the Word of Faith movement, and eschatology. In this critique, Richmann provides a much-needed critical biography of Bosworth as well as a fresh interpretation of Pentecostalism.

This fourth volume in Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's ambitious five volume systematic theology develops a constructive Christian pneumatology and soteriology in dialogue with the Christian tradition, with contemporary theology in all its global and contextual diversity, and with other major living faiths -- Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. Kärkkäinen constructs a wide and deep theology of the Holy Spirit, examining creation and the sciences, other cosmic powers and beings, the concepts of spirits in other religions, and the Spirit's place in society and politics. He also goes beyond traditional ways of understanding salvation -- election, forgiveness, justification, sanctification, and glorification -- and includes discussions of Spirit-baptism, healing and restoration, reconciliation, liberation, and peace-building, carefully comparing Christian perspectives with the salvific views of other religions.

In the present volume James Robinson completes his trilogy, which deals with the history of divine healing in the period 1906-1930. The first volume is a study of the years 1830-1890, and was hailed as "a standard reference for years to come." The second book covers the years 1890-1906, and was acclaimed as "a monumental achievement" that combines "careful historical scholarship and a high degree of accessibility." This volume completes the study up to the early 1930s and, like the other two works, has a transatlantic frame of reference. Though the book gives prominence to the theology and practice of divine healing in early Pentecostalism, it also discusses two other models of healing, the therapeutic and sacramental, promoted within sections of British and American Anglicanism. Some otherwise rigorous Fundamentalists were also prepared to practice divine healing. The text contributes more widely to medical and sociocultural histories, exemplified in the rise of psychotherapy and the cultural shift referred to as the Jazz Age of the 1920s. The book concludes by discussing the major role that divine healing plays in the present rapid growth of global Christianity.

Healings and miracles play a prominent role in the New Testament accounts of Jesus’ life and ministry. In the Western Christian tradition, however, Jesus’ works of healing tend to be downplayed and understood as little more than a demonstration of his divine power. In this book Jan-Olav Henriksen and Karl Olav Sandnes draw on both contemporary systematic theology and New Testament scholarship to challenge and investigate the reasons for that oversight. They constructively consider what it can mean for Christian theology today to understand Jesus as a healer, to embrace fully the embodied character of the Christian faith, and to recognize the many ways in which God can still be seen to have a healing presence in the world.

Insofar as Christian theology aims to make truthful claims about the nature of reality, it is necessarily involved in the enterprise of metaphysics. Pentecostals, precisely as Christians, are thus obliged to participate. Through this study it becomes evident that pentecostals aim to participate in the metaphysical discipline in the same way they theologize - that is, informed by the norms, practices, and speech acts that constitute their spirituality. This book aims to construct a Christian metaphysics that is at once attuned to pentecostal spirituality/theology and informed by the classical tradition of Christian metaphysics. Ultimately, this work offers a constructive and critical engagement with pentecostal spirituality, and with pentecostal theology via the larger ecumenical, creedal, and dogmatic metaphysical tradition. Thus, this book is explicitly and intentionally limited to understand metaphysics in conversation with the historical Christian tradition, and to understand a pentecostal vision of it.

Kärkkäinen’s acclaimed five-volume constructive theology abridged in one accessible volume Providing a new and unique way of doing theology in our pluralistic world, Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen presents historic Christian doctrines in relation to the natural sciences and four other living faiths—Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. This textbook covers all systematic topics along with a host of current issues such as violence, colonialism, inclusivity, sociopolitical liberation, environmental care, and more. Accessible and student-friendly, Christian Theology in the Pluralistic World is the ideal text for exploring a theological vision at once rooted in the Christian tradition and constructive in its engagement with the complexities of our global, pluralistic world.

The culmination of Kärkkäinen's multivolume magnum opus This fifth and final volume of Veli-Matti Kärkkäinen's ambitious five-volume systematic theology develops a constructive Christian eschatology and ecclesiology in dialogue with the Christian tradition, with contemporary theology in all its global and contextual diversity, and with other major living faiths--Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Hinduism. In Part One of the book Kärkkäinen discusses eschatology in the contexts of world faiths and natural sciences, including physical, cosmological, and neuroscientific theories. In Part Two, on ecclesiology, he adopts a deeply ecumenical approach. His proposal for greater Christian unity includes the various dimensions of the church's missional existence and a robust dialogical witness to other faith communities.