The ‘Gospel’ Of Perfect Health
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THE ‘GOSPEL’ OF PERFECT HEALTH
The second part of the “wealth and health Gospel,” that God wills our perfect health, differs from the cult of prosperity in several significant ways. In the first place, the physical and mental healing of human life is part of the redemptive activity of God. In contrast to the cult of prosperity, the “gospel” of perfect health is a distortion of something which in fact is biblical, since the New Testament stands squarely on the side of healing: It is part of Jesus’ and the apostles’ ministries; gifts of healing are part of the church’s charismata; and at least one text (James 5:14-15) specifically enjoins believers to pray for the sick with the promise of answered prayer.
Furthermore, whereas material possessions are irrelevant to the people of God (they freely give if they have them, but they do not seek them), the same is not true of the human body. At least one of the reasons Christians pray for the sick to be healed is their conviction that the body, though still subject to decay and death in the present age, nonetheless belongs to the Lord and is destined for resurrection (1 Corinthians 6:13-14). A body healed—or healthy—because of God’s gracious activity in our behalf is a sign of the future already at work in the present age.
If this is true, that both Scripture and theology support our praying in faith for the gracious healing of the sick, then wherein lies the problem? What is the “disease” nature of the “gospel” of total health for Christians? Basically, it lies in some biblical and theological distortions which insist: (1) that God wills perfect health and complete healing for every believer, and (2) that God has obligated Himself to heal every sickness for those who have faith (unless the sickness is the result of breaking God’s “health” laws). Integral to this theology is the insistence that faith canclaim such healing from God, and that any failure to be healed is not the fault of God but of the one who has not had enough faith. Very oftenclaiming healing means to confess it as done, even though the symptoms persist, so that at times one meets a blind, or diseased, person who claims to have been healed, even though the blind continue to grope in darkness and the sick still are riddled with pain.
Since l am obviously on the side of miraculous healing, I hesitate to try to combat this distortion, lest I sound like one who is against it altogether. But not so. I firmly believe that gifts of healing belong in the church. But I also believe that this over-zealous attempt to bring glory to God is in fact a distortion of truth that has created a number of neurotic believers (because they don’t seem to be able to muster up “enough faith”), and has kept the church as a whole from being open to the gift of healing. Therefore, although my sympathies lie with the evangelists here, I must protest the bad biblical interpretation and theology of this movement.
As with many such half-truths, the “gospel” of perfect health seeks (commendably) to base itself entirely on Scripture. However, the use of Scripture by evangelists of this gospel is faulty in precisely the same three ways as with the wealth side of their “gospel”: (1) some poor, or flat-out wrong, interpretations of key texts, (2) selective use of texts, and (3) failure to have a wholistic biblical view of things, especially a failure to understand the essential theological framework of the New Testament writers. As a result, they tend to repeat the Corinthian error and are unable to hear Paul’s answers in 1 and 2 Corinthians as over against themselves—although these evangelists are the unwitting descendants of the false apostles of 2 Corinthians 10-13.
1. As noted in the previous article, the aim of all biblical interpretation is the “plain meaning” of the text. What is meant by this, of course, is theoriginal meaning, that meaning which the author plainly intended and that the original readers should have plainly understood. Although the Bible is indeed a book for all seasons, and speaks out of the past directly to our present situation, it does so because it first spoke to them in their situation. Therefore, the first task of interpretation is not to find out what it says to us, but to find out what it originally said to them. God’s Word to us is not a new word, never before discovered; rather it must be the very same word that He originally spoke back then and there. And this is the only legitimate Word to be heard in Scripture.
All of this must be insisted upon because the basic biblical failure of the “perfect health” evangelists is the interpretation of their primary texts. They simply fail to do adequate exegesis, which has to do with determining the meaning of a text in its original context.
The arguments for full and complete health as God’s only will for all believers are based on three sets of texts: a) Paul’s statement that “Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law” (Galatians 3:14) coupled with Deuteronomy 28:21-22, where disease is one of the curses of disobedience to the law. It is argued from these texts that sickness is a part of the “curse of the law” from which Christ redeemed us. b) Isaiah 53 and the citation of 53:4 in Matthew and of 53:5 in 1 Peter 2:24. It is argued from these texts, and especially from the change to the past tense in 1 Peter, that healing is in the atonement in the same way as forgiveness. c) A whole host of texts that remind us that God honors faith; e.g., Matthew 9:29; Mark 11:23-24; John 14:12; Hebrews 11:6; James 1:6-8.
Space does not allow a thorough investigation of all these texts, but a few suggestions are in order.
a) The first set of texts may be quickly set aside. This is a typical example of a totally faulty “concordance” interpretation, which finds English catch words in various texts and then tries to make them all refer to the same thing. There is not even the remotest possibility that Paul was referring to the “curses” of Deuteronomy 28 when he spoke of the “curse of the law.” And “redemption” in Galatians has to do with one thing only: how does one have rightstanding with God—through faith (= trust in God’s gracious acceptance and forgiveness of sinners), or by works of the law (=acceptance by obedience to prescribed rules)? Thus the Holy Spirit could scarcely have inspired a meaning of the text that is so totally foreign to the point Paul is making in this context in Galatians.
b) It is also questionable whether one can rightly argue that the Bible teaches that healing is provided for in the atonement. Such a doctrine has in fact been the position of historic Pentecostalism. However, the “position paper” on divine healing adopted by the General Presbytery of the Assemblies of God (dated August 20, 1974) makes it quite clear that the historic position does not see healing in the atonement in the same way as salvation. Healing is “provided for” because the “atonement brought release from the . . . consequences of sin”; nonetheless, since “we have not yet received the redemption of our bodies,” suffering and death are still our lot until the resurrection.
It would seem, therefore, that only in a circuitous way is it really possible to argue for bodily healing in the atonement. While there are scores of texts that explicitly tell us that our sin has been overcome through Christ’s death and resurrection, there is no text that explicitly says the same about healing, not even Isaiah 53 and its New Testament citations.
Matthew’s use of Isaiah 53:4 does not even refer to the cross; rather he clearly sees the text as being fulfilled in Jesus’ earthly ministry. Thisis made certain both by the context and by his choice of Greek verbs in his own unique translation of the Hebrew (elaben= he took; ebastasen = he removed).
The citation of Isaiah 53:5 in 1 Peter, on the other hand, does not refer to physical healing. The usage here is metaphorical, pure and simple. In a context in which slaves are urged to submit to their evil masters—even if it means their suffering for it—Peter appeals to the example of Christ, which Christian slaves are to follow. This appeal to Christ, beginning at verse 21, is filled with allusions to and citations of Isaiah 53, all of which refer to Christ’s having suffered unjustly as the source of the slave’s redemption from sin. Thus Peter says: “He himself bore our sins (Isaiah 53:12, cf. 53:4 in the Septuagint)... that we might die to sin.” He then goes on: “By his wounds you have been healed (53:5), for youwere as sheep going astray (53:6).” The allusions to both verses 5 and 6, joined by for and referring to “sheep going astray,” plus the change to the past tense, all make it abundantly clear that “healing” here is a metaphor for being restored to health from the sickness of their sins. Such a metaphorical usage would be natural for Peter, since sin as “wound,” “injury” or “sickness” and the “healing” of such “sickness” are thoroughgoing images in the Old Testament (see, e.g., 2 Chronicles 7:14; Psalm 6:2; Isaiah 1:5-6; Jeremiah 30:12-13, 51:8-9; Nahum 3:19). Furthermore, the Old Testament citations in 1Peter rather closely follow the Septuagint (the pre-Christian Greek translation of the Old Testament), even when this translation differs from the Hebrew; and the Septuagint had already translated Isaiah 53:4 metaphorically (“He himself bore our sins,” rather than “our sickness”).
My point: Matthew clearly saw Isaiah 53:4 as referring to physical healing, but as a part of the Messiah’s ministry, not as a part of the atonement. Peter, conversely, saw the “healing” in Isaiah 53 as being metaphorical and thus referring to the healing of our sin sickness. Thusneither New Testament reference sees the “healing” of Isaiah 53 as referring to physical healing in the atonement. But what did Isaiah himself intend? Almost certainly his first reference is metaphorical, as the Septuagint, the Targums, and Peter all recognize. Israel was diseased; she was grievously wounded for her sins (Isaiah 1:6-7). Yet God would restore His people. There would come one who himself would suffer so as to deliver. In grand cadences of Hebrew poetry (note the synonymous parallelism), Isaiah says of him: “The punishment that brought us peace was upon him, and by his wounds we are healed.” In the context of Isaiah, that refers first of all to the healing of the wounds and disease of sin. Yet, since physical disease was clearly recognized to be a consequence of the Fall, such a metaphor could also carry with it the literal sense, and this is what Matthew picked up.
The Bible, therefore, does not explicitly teach that healing is provided for in the atonement. However, the New Testament does see the cross as the focus of God’s redemptive activity. In this sense (and in the sense that sickness is ultimately a result of the Fall), one may perhaps argue that healing also finds its focal point in the atonement.
c) The “faith” passages are in fact the crucial ones for the total health movement. After all, other Christians have used the two previous sets of texts as a biblical basis for healing. The argument for perfect health, or healing on demand, lies finally in the joining of healing as a part of the atonement (the basis of the demand: God has provided for it, therefore He must heal when asked) with all the texts on faith (since it is fully provided for by God, it may be secured by the correct formula of faith). Thus the great emphasis in this movement is on “raising peoples’ faith.”
We cannot here examine all these texts. But a few words are in order. First, not all the texts frequently cited by the evangelists refer to faith in God for the miraculous. Nonetheless, several of them clearly do (e.g., Mark 11:22-24; James 5:14-15), and a restoration of these texts into the life of the church is not a totally bad thing. In fact, these texts on faith have regularly been a bit of an embarrassment to the church. They are all clearly there in the biblical text, yet seldom does one see them “at work”—except in rare instances. One must ruefully admit that evangelical Christianity by and large does not expect much from God. He is given credit for all the ordinary things in our lives—as well He should be—but most Christians’ expectation level, when it comes to the miraculous, is somewhere between zero and minus five. In fact, Dispensationalism and certain sectors of the Reformed tradition have circumvented all these texts with a theology that would leave the miraculous in the apostolic age. Even though evangelicals often pray, “If it be Thy will, please heal so-and-so,” they would probably fall over in a dead faint if God actually answered their prayer.
The God of standard-brand evangelicalism is very much a God of the ordinary.
On the other hand, there is a way of interpreting these texts that can make a mockery of the divine will. “God promises us whatever we ask,” is the battle cry. Fortunately, however, God does not grant everything we ask. For our asking is based on our own limited knowledge, and all too often it is colored by our self-interest. We can only praise God that He does not answer every prayer “prayed in faith.” Hezekiah, after all, had his prayer answered and was granted fifteen more years, but it was during those years that Manasseh was born!
The real issue, therefore, when it comes to these texts, is not how “to get them to work for us,” but how we are to understand them in the light of the full biblical revelation. How do they relate to the reality of God’s sovereignty and His overall purposes with mankind? For the concerns of this paper, the crucial question is whether God specifically wills all Christians to know perfect health. If that were true, and there is not a text that supports it, then “failure” to be healed miraculously would indeed be a failure of our faith. But if it is not true, and it does not appear to be so, then faith not only believes specifically for healing, but also knows how to trust God when the effects of the Fall continue to be very much with us.
2. As with its “wealth” counterpart, the “gospel” of perfect health is also guilty of hermeneutical selectivity. Only those texts are selected which fit the scheme, and a whole series of hermeneutical gymnastics is devised to evade or explain away the texts that are an embarrassment to it.
Tied to this is the insistence on conventional wisdom as biblical. It is argued that every child of God should enjoy perfect health simply because he or she is a child of God; if they do notexperience healing, then, of course, it is due to their lack of genuine trust in God. All of this simply refuses to take the Bible, the Fall, or common grace seriously. From their perspective Christ has redeemed us from the curse, therefore these evangelists will not allow the biblical view, which sees the Fall as permeating the whole fabric of the created order.
The Bible itself is much more realistic—and much more genuinely hopeful. God is revealed to have limitless power and resources; He regularly shows Himself strong on behalf of His people. Yet His people still live out their redeemed lives in a fallen world, where the whole creation, including the human body, is in “bondage to decay” (Romans 8:21), and will continue to be so until we receive “the redemption of our bodies” (8:23).
Thus the Bible records many of Elisha’s miracles, including healings; yet quite matter-of-factly, without judgment, it also records that he “was suffering from the illness from which he died” (2 Kings 13:14). In a similar manner, it records that James was martyred and Peter delivered (Acts 12)—and Peter’s deliverance was surely no direct result of his or the church’s great faith!
Above all it is the Apostle Paul who presents problems for this point of view. On the one hand, his ministry was accompanied by “signs, wonders and miracles” (2 Corinthians 12:12; Romans 15:19); yet neither he nor his associates always experienced perfect health. And never is their sickness attributed to lack of faith, nor their recovery to great faith. Epaphroditus fell ill and nearly died, and in his case “God had mercy on him” (Philippians 2:26); yet Trophimus is left sick in Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20). For the sake of his frequent stomach disorders, Paul does not tell Timothy to pray or exercise faith for his healing. Again very matter-of-factly, he urges him to take wine for his sickness (1 Timothy 5:23). Why is it, one wonders, that the evangelists do not make this Scripture a part of their healing ministry?
Some have argued that in all these cases, and especially the latter, Paul was exhibiting a lack of faith. But such an approach must be vigorously resisted, because it means to sit in judgment on the Holy Spirit Himself. If we believe all of Scripture to be inspired of the Spirit, then He inspired “wine for the stomach” in Timothy’s case, just as He inspired the laying on of hands and oil in James 5:14- 15.
More troublesome yet are Paul’s own physical illnesses and sufferings. His own body was weak, or sickly (2 Corinthians 10:10). Indeed, he says he always carried about in his body the death of Jesus (2 Corinthians 4:11), and the context makes it clear that he is referring to his bodily weaknesses. Outwardly he groaned (4:16), longing to replace his present earthly tent with the heavenly dwelling (5:1-2). He preached in Galatia as a direct result of illness (Galatians 4:12-15), which almost certainly was some kind of ailment of the eye. Whether or not this was also his “thorn in the flesh” (2 Corinthians 12:7), there can be little question that the problem for which he thrice sought deliverance was a physical one. Some, to be sure, have suggested that the “flesh” here is Paul’s sinful nature and that some “person” (=messenger) from Satan was attacking his sinful tendencies. But that is to play havoc not only with this text and its context, but also with Paul’s theology of life in the Spirit (Galatians 5; Romans 8).
The most common way to “get around” these texts has been to argue for a distinction between suffering and sickness. Suffering is something external to us, which comes as the result of our following Christ. This, it is argued, is what Paul suffered, and we may expect to as well. Sickness and disease, on the other hand, are a part of the Fall and the curse, and these have now been overcome by Christ.
But this is a distinction that cannot be sustained biblically. It is not that the biblical writers did not, or could not, know the differences; they simply do not make such distinctions. The clearest evidence of this is the fact that in both the Old and New Testaments the most common word for sickness is in fact the word weakness, so that frequently only the context alone tells us what kind of “weakness” is involved. (Compare for example, the differences in the NIV and the NASB on 2 Kings 1:2-3.)
The obvious reason for this usage is that all evil is seen to be the result of the Fall, not just sickness. And God can and does deliver from all evil, not just sickness. But in neither case does He always so deliver. Just as Satan was responsible for Paul’s “thorn in the flesh,” so also Paul was hindered by Satan from returning to Thessalonica (1 Thessalonians 2:18), yet there is no hint in either case that he or God “failed.” Sickness, therefore, is not some unique part of the Fall, deliverance from which is ours on demand; it is simply a part of the whole of fallenness. We are promised healing; yet there is also a place in the present age for “a little wine” for one’s frequent ailments.
3. The third area of weakness in the biblical interpretation of this movement is closely related to what has just been said. It is the failure to have, or to construct, an adequate biblical theology.
The essential framework of New Testament theology is eschatological; that is, it has to do with the coming of the End. By the time of the coming of Jesus, Jewish hopes for salvation had become totally eschatological. The present age was seen as under Satan’s dominion, and thus totally evil. Evil men ruled, and they oppressed the righteous. The Jews had therefore come to give up on any salvation within history. They looked for God to vindicate them by bringing an end to the present age; He would do this through His Messiah, who would judge evil and usher in the New Age, the Kingdom of God.
It was into this kind of hope that Jesus came. He announced the Kingdom as present in His own ministry and proceeded to demonstrate it by healing the sick, casting out demons, and freely accepting the outcasts. Eschatological excitement reached fever pitch. But instead of ushering in the glorious New Age of their expectations, Jesus was crucified—and the lights went out.
But no, there was a glorious sequel. He was raised from the dead. Surely now is the time for the Kingdom, his disciples thought. But instead, He returned to the Father and sent the promised Holy Spirit. Right here is where the problems come in, both for the early church and for us. Jesus announced the coming Kingdom as having arrived with His own coming. The Spirit’s coming in fullness and power were also signs that the New Age had arrived. Yet the End of this age apparently had not yet taken place. Evil and its effects are still very much in evidence. How were they to reconcile this?
Very easily, beginning with Peter’s sermon in Acts 3, the church came to realize that Jesus had not come to usher in the “final” End, but the “beginning” of the End, as it were. Thus they came to see that with Jesus’ death and resurrection, and with the coming of the Spirit, the blessings and benefits of the Future had already come. In a sense, therefore, the End had already come. But in another sense it had not yet fully come. Thus they saw the Kingdom, and salvation, as both already and not yet.
The early believers, therefore, saw themselves as a truly eschatological people, who lived “between the times”—that is, between the time of the beginning of the End and the consummation of the End. At the Lord’s Table, they celebrated their eschatological existence by proclaiming “the Lord’s death until he comes” (1 Corinthians 11:26).Already they knew God’s free and full forgiveness, but they had not yetbeen perfected (Philippians 3:7-14). Already death was theirs (1 Corinthians 3:22), yet they would still die (Philippians 3:20-22). Already they lived in the Spirit, yet they still lived in the world where Satan could attack. Already they had been justified and faced no condemnation, yet there was still to be a future judgment. They were God’s “future people.” They had been conditioned by the future; they knew its benefits, lived in light of its values. But they still had to live out these benefits and values in the present world.
The problem in Corinth, and that which the wealth and health gospel is repeating, was to emphasize the “already” in such a way that they almost denied the continuing presence of the world. They saw Christ only as exalted, but not as crucified. They believed that the only thing that glorified God was signs and wonders and power. Because God heals, He must heal everyone. There is no place for weakness or hunger or thirst for this kind of eschatological existence.
This false theology lay at the very heart of the Corinthian rejection of Paul. His bodily weaknesses did not commend him to their view of apostleship. An apostle should be “spiritual,” eloquent, living in glory and perfect health. They rejected Paul and his theology of the cross (with its ongoing suffering in the present age), because they saw themselves as “spiritual,” redeemed from such weakness. In their view Paul looked like anything but an apostle of their “glorious” Jesus.
Paul tries everything in his power to get them back to his gospel. In I Corinthians 1:18-25, he reminds them that the gospel has as its very base a “crucified Messiah.” For the Corinthians that’s like saying “fried ice.” Messiah means power, glory, miracles; crucifixion means weakness, shame, suffering. Thus they gladly accepted the false apostles, who preached a “different Gospel” with “another Jesus” (2 Corinthians 11:4), and condemned Paul for his bodily weakness (10:10).
In 1 Corinthians 4:8-13 he tried irony. “Already you have all you want! Already you have come into your kingdom—and without us!” he tells them. Then, with absolutely brilliant strokes, he annihilates them with the stark contrasts between himself and them, with himself as the example of what it means to live out the future in the present age.
In 2 Corinthians 3-6, he tries to explain the true nature of apostleship, which has a glorious message but is proclaimed by a less-than-glorious messenger. “We have this treasure in jars of clay to show that this all-surpassing power is from God and not from us,” he explains (4:7).
Finally, in 2 Corinthians 10-13, he attacks their false teachers head-on. To do so he plays the role of the “fool” as in the ancient dramas. Paul is forced to boast (because of his opponents), so in what does he boast? In all the very things the Corinthians are against—Paul’s weaknesses. In total irony he finally sets himself alongside the boasts of the false apostles, with their great visions and miracle-stories. However—in keeping with his point—his vision turns out to have no great word of revelation (12:4; he was not even allowed to tell its content!), and his miracle story had no miracle! All of this because he was a true disciple of the Crucified One. God’s strength is perfected not in His delivering His Messiah from crucifixion, nor in delivering His apostle from physical suffering, but is seen in the crucifixion itself, and in the apostle’s weaknesses.
Thus the “perfect health” evangelists simply repeat the Corinthian error. They find it impossible to live in the tension between the already and the not yet. Because God has already brought the Kingdom, they demand all of the future in the present age—except for the final resurrection. But 1 and 2 Corinthians stand over against thisover-realized eschatology of theirs. Paul lived out a free, joyous existence in the already (in both want and plenty, in both sickness and health), because he knew that God had secured his life for the future—even though it was not yet fully realized. “Death is ours,” Paul says, yet we still die. So with healing. It is ours; yet our bodies are not yet perfected. And in this present age, even some of God’s choicest servants continue to be perfected through suffering, as was the Son of God Himself (Hebrews 5:8-9).
4. A final theological word. Again, as with the wealth side of their “gospel,” the preaching of perfect health tends to put the emphas’is on the wrong syllab’le. Healing ultimately resides in God, they will affirm. Yet in actual practice, it is the result of man’s faith. Indeed, they see God as under obligation to us in this matter.
Healing, therefore, instead of being a gracious expression of God’s unlimited grace, is something He has to do—at our bidding. By way of contrast, the first sentence of a sound biblical theology may well be, God must do nothing. God is free to be God. He is sovereign in all things and is simply not under our control. The second sentence of a sound biblical theology will be: Although Godmust do nothing, in grace He does all things. No healing has ever been deserved; it is always an expression of God’s grace. Some have asked, If God must do nothing, then why pray at all? Why not simply wait for Him to act sovereignly? The answer is simple: Because God answers prayer. The mystery of faith is that there is a wonderful correlation between our asking and trusting, and what goes on about us. God doesn’t have to answer prayer, but He does. God doesn’t have to heal, but He graciously does. Healing, therefore is not a divine obligation; it is a divine gift. And precisely because it is a gift, we can make no demands. But we can trust Him to do all things well!