Kissing the Sick: Healing in Church History

Amanda Porterfield is the Robert A. Spivey Professor of Religion at Florida State University in Tallahassee. She is the author of Healing in the History of Christianity (Oxford, 2005), and served as the President of the American Society of Church History in 2001. She talked with HopeandHealing.org about the history of Christianity and healing.

Could you talk about the first hospitals and their relationship with Christianity?

The history of Christianity and the history of medicine are closely intertwined. The first hospitals around Constantinople in the fourth and fifth centuries were expressions of Christian philanthropy. The metaphors theologians used in that early period – especially in the Greek part of the world – link medicine and Christianity such as Christ as a physician. Origen, Basel, and other church fathers talk a great deal about this.

In the hospital that he founded, Basel made a point of kissing patients. Kissing sick people was a manifestation of what a Christian did – not only compassion, but a show of bravery with respect to illness and death. There was a connection to the eternal and ultimately saving power of Christ which would ward off sickness and death.

Hospitals and out-patient clinics in the history of medieval Europe were closely associated with Christian shrines and monastic centers. The medicine in Europe during the Middle Ages was a far more primitive than it was in the ancient Greek and early Christian world. Despite this, there were shortened handbooks of Greek medicine that monks and nuns used in medieval monasteries and pilgrimage centers. People would come to these centers to be treated with herbs, poultices, and surgery, as well as to pray in the chapel. The medical and spiritual part of healing were linked.

You wrote that Christianity is a religion of healing and you see a healing aspect wherever you turn in Christianity. What do you think led to this emphasis on healing?

In Christianity, there is a powerful focus on the body – particularly the body of Christ – which is a body that suffers and dies. For the very first Christians, this was a problem: how to belong to a religion where the central person in the religion has been crucified and died an ignominious death.

In the early stages, Christian thought linked ideas of the importance of suffering to this story of resurrection in a particularly salient and powerful way. I think this conjunction of the suffering body with this faith in resurrection - ultimate healing – is a lot of what gives Christianity some distinctive characteristics that appear through its great diversity.

In early Christianity, this translated into concrete activity through bodily healing. Christians distinguished themselves as people familiar with medical terminology, people who cared for the sick and buried the dead, who were less afraid than other people of touching the sick and dead people. There is a relationship between the suffering body and the practice and idea of healing. Those are some of the things that make Christianity a religion of healing in a sense par excellance.

Could you talk about how the poor are marginalized and fit in to the history of healing in Christianity?

In the ancient world Christian healing was free, and you did not have to travel, unlike the shrines to Isis or Asclepius or other healing temples or places. Christian healing was extremely straightforward, accessible, and inexpensive. While it may have required a lot of dedication or emotional investment, you did not have to be wealthy.

One of the interesting things in your book is that you seem to trace Pentecostalism back through John Wesley. What would Wesley have to say about healing?

Wesley is such an interesting figure, with so many different aspects to his thought and practice. He believed that the Holy Spirit acted through the body and that natural sensations were the means by which people felt the work of the Holy Spirit. He felt that God worked with the body, worked with human nature. He had relatively positive views about the body and felt that God worked through our feelings, both our emotions and perceptions.

In practice, he was something of a healer himself. He experimented with the technologies of his day, particularly electrification. He had a clinic where people came and received small jolts of electricity to restore nature’s balance. Many people went through the clinic and felt better as a result. Wesley’s fascination with electricity carried over in the way he talks about the transforming power of the Holy Spirit. He believed that God worked through people in a way that was analogous to electricity working through people.

A lot of religious thinking and practice grows out of Wesley’s influence. Some of his ideas lie at the base of the more Christian Science-oriented approaches to healing and also at the base of Pentecostalism – neither of which Wesley would have agreed with. Yet, both of those movements or types of Christian healing come out of Wesley’s sense of God working with the human body.

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