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Healing
Nothingness: Lenore
Langsdorf
Although "faith healing" is an accepted concept and practice within many faith communities, many contemporary Christians assume, or even assert, that the healing events recounted in the New Testament are to be understood as a phenomenon of that time and place, rather than as contemporary possibilities for believers in the power of God to heal. That assertion is in keeping with modern sensibilities concerning science, in contrast to faith, that are traceable to the Enlightenment's success in curtailing faith and spiritual authority in order to make room for experimentation and physical science. Christian Science rejects that Enlightenment project. It is a spiritual or metaphysical (rather than natural or physical) science which bases its claims on practice, rather than authority. In other words, Christian Scientists appeal to evidence that is amenable to a pragmatic test of truth, in contrast to modern science's representational orientation. It's on the basis of that evidence (therefore: scientifically) that Christian Scientists affirm that healing through prayer constitutes ongoing evidence for--even, proof of--God's presence in the world. Organizationally, Christian Science may well exist as a distinct denomination because of that affirmation, since there is historical evidence that its founder, Mary Baker Eddy, intended to emphasize healing through prayer within the Protestant churches of her time and place, rather than to found a new church. Analysis of Christian Scientists' talk and their founder's writings about healing reveals rhetorical artifacts that are quite different from those in accounts of Jesus' healings. In this essay I seek to identify those differences as indicative of Christian Scientists' understanding of illness as (false) belief, amenable to healing, rather than as (physical) afflictions requiring cure. I rely on contemporary work in the rhetoric of science to analyze the rhetoric of this spiritual (in contrast to physical or social) science.
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