Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing. By Joseph W. Williams. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. xi + 226 pp. $55.00 cloth.

Abstract

(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing . By Joseph W. Williams . New York : Oxford University Press , 2013. xi + 226 pp. $55.00 cloth.Book Reviews and NotesHistorians of pentecostalism have wrestled to understand how a movement that began in the early twentieth century with a pronounced antipathy to many features of modern American culture transformed into one that moves easily in culture's broad terrain, even as it retains distinctive elements. In the realm of healing, in particular, early pentecostals advocated divine healing by faith through Christ's atonement while ardently rejecting physicians, drugs, and all other aspects of modern medicine. But within two generations, leading pentecostals proclaimed God's superintendence of medical advances and promoted a union of spiritual and medical healing. By the turn of the twenty-first century, prominent pentecostal voices urged the faithful to embrace naturopathic healing regiments, weight-loss and other dietary innovations, and mental healing programs with deep roots in metaphysical religiosity, all baptized with the power and presence of the Holy Spirit and the ongoing conviction that God could bring healing directly through prayer. What had been a movement radically set apart from the world had come to embrace the world's practices and values and combine them with their own. Or so it seemed.In Spirit Cure: A History of Pentecostal Healing , Joseph Williams offers a fresh, nuanced, and dynamic reading of pentecostal healing. Williams argues that the divine healing of early pentecostals was not so separate as the faithful liked to think. Instead, it contained areas of meaningful overlap with alternative healing programs rooted in metaphysical spirituality. The mental healing of New Thought and Christian Science resonated with pentecostals' conviction that divine healing was guaranteed to those who had faith, which entailed pronouncing and acting out healing after prayer despite contrary symptoms. In concert with naturopathic healing, early pentecostals warned against dietary overindulgence and promoted fasting as a spiritual discipline with significant health benefits, including as a preparatory step for divine healing. Like metaphysical believers of various stripes, pentecostals tended to depersonalize the divine and minimize the gulf between nature and supernature. In relation to healing, God's declared intentions to heal the faithful were fixed in his Word, so the issue became how to tap into this source and actualize divine health. The pentecostal conception of the Holy Spirit as an immanent source of power and abundance often relied on natural and impersonal metaphors, like hydraulics and electricity, further emphasizing shared convictions with metaphysical believers. Although early pentecostals routinely anathematized metaphysical healers along with regular doctors, Williams highlights significant commonalities that linked their healing programs.Many historians have noted that treatment via orthodox medicine in the early twentieth century remained a crapshoot, but by mid-century diagnostic and therapeutic advances had enhanced the social and cultural standing of physicians. Simultaneously, pentecostals were climbing the social ladder and beginning to make peace with the surrounding culture. In this context, Oral Roberts played a crucial mediating role by envisioning the union of divine and medical healing. Even as the Latter Rain movement and postwar healing revivals hearkened back to radical early days of pentecostalism, rife with demonic etiology and anti-medical rhetoric, Roberts represented a larger development in pentecostalism that sought not only peace but union with medicine. …