Redeemed Bodies

Redeemed Bodies: The Functions of Divine
Healing in Incipient Pentecostalism

JONATHAN R. BAER
Pentecostalism originated in the body as much as the spirit. The

"full gospel" it proclaimed promised renewed health along with
saved souls, and its embryonic ethos prized the human embodiment
of divine initiative. Glossolalia and other ecstatic manifestations authenticated God's presence and power, reflecting the reality of the
Holy Spirit within believers. But the materiality of the culture that
gave rise to Pentecostalism received its fullest expression in "divine
healing." 1 Suffering men and women yearned for the restoration of
their broken bodies, and their faith provided it.
Historians have traced the origins of Pentecostalism to the latenineteenth-century radicalization of the holiness movement that first
arose within American Methodism at mid-century and later spread to
large segments of evangelical Protestantism.2 Through the ministries
I wish to thank the former Pew Program in Religion and American History at Yale
Universitynow the Institute for the Advanced Study of Religion at Yale, still funded by
the Pew Charitable Trustsfor invaluable fellowship support. Thanks also to the following
for helpful critical readings of earlier drafts: Harry S. Stout, Jon Butler, Grant Wacker,
Cheryl Townsend Gilkes, William Inboden, John Stauffer, Corey Beals, Chris Armstrong, D.
William Faupel, William Kostlevy, Richard Baer, Joan Baer, and two anonymous readers.
1. Participants in the holiness and Pentecostal movements generally used the term
"divine healing/' while other contemporaries also used "faith healing" and "faith
cure." I use the term here and throughout without any intent to convey an evaluative
judgment. Likewise, I employ throughout the term "healers" without evaluative intent
to describe those who taught and practiced divine healing, though they themselves
rejected it because they believed healing power came solely from God. Finally, I refer
to healings from the perspective of participants, removing the awkward necessity of
using qualifications like "alleged" or "claimed."
2. Donald W. Dayton, Theological Roots of Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson,
1987); Vinson Synan, The Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition: Charismatic Movements in th
Twentieth Century (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Eerdmans, 1997), 1-83; Robert Mapes Anderson, Vision of the Disinherited: The Making of American Pentecostalism (Peabody, Mass.
Hendrickson, 1979), 28-61; D. William Faupel, The Everlasting Gospel: The Significance
of Eschatology in the Development of Pentecostal Thought (Sheffield, England: Sheffield
Academic, 1996), 44-186; Edith Lydia Waldvogel, "The 'Overcoming Life': A Study in
the Reformed Evangelical Origins of Pentecostalism" (Ph.D. diss., Harvard University,
1977).
Jonathan R. Baer is a doctoral candidate in American religious history in the

Department of Religious Studies at Yale University.
2001, The American Society of Church History
Church History 70:4 (December 2001)
735
736
CHURCH HISTORY
of figures like Charles Cullis, A. B. Simpson, and Martin Wells Knapp,

divine healing became a common feature of the radical wing of the
holiness movement by century's end. 3 Yet historians of early Pentecostalism have given only limited attention to divine healing, generally placing it in the larger context of the revival of signs and wonders
that accompanied radical holiness and early Pentecostal restorationism and premillennialism. Instead, they have examined more
fully the emergence of the distinctive Pentecostal teaching, the baptism of the Holy Spirit evidenced by speaking in tongues. As one
recent scholar has remarked, this shows a degree of historical amnesia, for healing was at least as prominent a part of early Pentecostalism as glossolalia.4 By overlooking the multiple roles of healing in the
ministries of those who bridged the two movements, historians obscure one of the central lines of continuity between radical holiness
expressions and arly Pentecostalism.
This essay examines three divine healers critical to the emergence of
Pentecostalism in the United States: Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, John
Alexander Dowie, and Charles F. Parham. After surveying their respective careers, it analyzes the functions of divine healing in their
ministries over the two decades following the mid-1880s. It employs
the term "incipient Pentecostalism7' as shorthand for the general
religious milieu of the radical holiness movement and early Pentecostalism. Like almost all incipient Pentecostals, Woodworth-Etter,
Dowie, and Parham adopted the more absolute articulations of the
teaching. They insisted that Christ secured full bodily healing through
his atoning sacrifice on the cross and that embracing this form of
healing entailed rejecting doctors and medicine. These claims rested
upon holiness understandings of sanctification as either the immediate removal or the suppression of personal sin through a second crisis
3. Paul G. Chappell, "The Divine Healing Movement in America" (Ph.D. diss., Drew
University, 1983); Dayton, Theological Roots, 115-41; Raymond J. Cunningham, "From
Holiness to Healing: The Faith Cure in America, 1872-1892," Church History 43 (Dec.
1974): 499-513; Grant Wacker, "The Pentecostal Tradition," in Caring and Curing:
Health and Medicine in the Western Religious Traditions, eds. Ronald L. Numbers and
Darrel W. Amundsen (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986), 516-20; Gary
B. Ferngren, "The Evangelical-Fundamentalist Tradition," in Caring and Curing, 49095; and Harold Y. Vanderpool, "The Wesleyan-Methodist Tradition," in Caring and
Curing, 336-39.
4. See Wacker, "Pentecostal Tradition," 520-21, for the "loss of historical memory"
involved in downplaying healing. Wacker's essay is the most thorough treatment of
early Pentecostal healing. Others include: Edith L. Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith: The
Assemblies of God, Pentecostalism, and American Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 1993), 19-24; Grant Wacker, Heaven Below: Early Pentecostals and American Culture
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001), 26-28, 65-67; Anderson, Vision, 93-97;
Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 130-33; and Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 192-93.
DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM
737
experience following conversion, caused by the direct action of the

Holy Spirit. Divine healing represented an extension of this holiness
perfectionism from the spirit to the body. Just as faith alone could
produce sanctification, so too only faith could lead to the renewal of
the body. 5
Divine healing in incipient Pentecostalism was one of many Christian healing practices that flourished around the turn of the century.
Catholic healing shrines at Lourdes in France, St. Anne de Beaupr in
Quebec, and Knock Chapel in Ireland drew millions of pilgrims in
search of cures and much American publicity. Mary Baker Eddy's
Christian Science and the various groups in the New Thought movement taught healing through mental therapeutics and metaphysical
monism. Across the Protestant spectrum, the Reformation doctrine of
the post-apostolic cessation of miracles weakened perceptibly, as
theologians and healers discovered more permeability in the barrier
between nature and supernature. In the first decade of the twentieth
century, the Emmanuel movement arose within Episcopalianism and
spread to other mainline Protestant churches, combining theological
modernism and psychotherapy to promote healing. Amid the disorienting social and cultural changes wrought by advanced industrialization, urbanization, waves of immigration, and scientific developments, many Christians searched for therapeutic resources within
their faith communities or developed innovative spiritual healing
programs to address their ailments.6
5. On holiness perfectionism, see Melvin Easterday Dieter, The Holiness Revival of the
Nineteenth Century, 2d ed. (Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow, 1996); and Charles Edwin Jones,
Perfectionist Persuasion: The holiness Movement and American Methodism, 1867-19
(Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow, 1974). Cunningham, "From Holiness to Healing," stresses
the connections between holiness sanctification and divine healing. Wesleyan holiness
advocates of the nineteenth century taught that "entire sanctification" immediately
removed inbred sin and perfected the believer's motives and volitional acts. The
Higher Life or Keswick form of holiness that spread among traditionally Reformed and
non-Wesleyan denominations after 1875 moderated this perfectionism by regarding
sanctification as a distinct crisis experience that began a process involving the suppression or counteraction of personal sin rather than its eradication. While this theological distinction is important, the practical expectation for believers on both sides
was a dramatic cleansing experience that produced "heart purity" and empowerment.
On the Higher Life movement, see Waldvogel, "The Overcoming Life'"; and David
Bundy, "Keswick and the Experience of Evangelical Piety," in Modern Christian Revivals, eds. Edith L. Blumhofer and Randall Balmer (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1993), 118-44.
6. Several of the essays in Caring and Curing provide information on turn-of-the-century
Christian healing practices. For newspaper reports on Catholic healings from the early
1880s, for example, see the following articles in the New York Times: "The Knock Mortar
Miracle," 20 July 1880, 2; "The Lourdes Miracles Again," 13 Jan. 1881, 4; and "Visited
by the Virgin Mary," 1 Aug. 1881, 5. For Christian Science and New Thought, see
Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy (Reading, Mass.: Perseus, 1998); Beryl Satter, Each Mind a
738
CHURCH HISTORY
All this occurred in the context of a crowded and complex medical

marketplace. While orthodox or "regular" doctors sought to professionalize under the banner of science and delegitimize their competitors, panaceas of all kinds clamored for the attention of patients. Not
surprisingly, medical advances like germ theory fueled claims and
expectations that often exceeded the capacities of regular physicians.
Doctors remained ill-equipped to address many frightening and fatal
diseases like tuberculosis, as well as chronic illnesses that involved
psychosomatic elements. "Neurasthenia" or "nervous prostration,"
which doctors suggested resulted from lack of nerve force, became a
common turn-of-the-century diagnosis for harried urbanits exhausted by the pace and demands of modern life.7 "Alternative"
therapies like homeopathy, chiropractic medicine, the water cure, and
dozens more found adherents among those disillusioned by regular
medicine or critical of its solidifying scientific paradigm. A burgeoning market for patent medicines and nostrumscompletely unregulated until the Food and Drug Act of 1906produced thousands of
tonics, pills, and medical devices backed by fantastical claims and
glowing testimonials. The proprietor of "Lydia E. Pinkham's Vegetable Compound" was perhaps the most recognizable woman in America in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, owing to the popularity of her product and the dominance of nostrum manufacturers in
advertising. Pinkham's alcohol-based tonic promised to cure all manner of infirmities, especially for women, and her motherly visage
adorned her advertisements and labels. Suggesting that male doctors
were insensitive to women's health, she invited customer inquiries
about delicate female maladies, promising confidentiality and indi-
Kingdom: American Women, Sexual Purity, and the New Thought Movement, 1875-1920
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); and Eugene Taylor, Shadow Culture:
Psychology and Spirituality in America (Washington, D. C: Counterpoint, 1999), 137-55.
On debates over cessationism, see Robert Bruce Mullin, Miracles and the Modern
Religious Imagination (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996). For the Emmanuel
Movement, see Allison Stokes, Ministry after Freud (New York: Pilgrim, 1985), 17-36;
and Sanford Gifford, The Emmanuel Movement (Boston, 1904-1929): The Origins of Group
Therapy and the Assault on Lay Psychotherapy (Boston: Francis Countway Library of
Medicine, 1996).
7. For the professionalization of medicine and its limitations, see Paul Starr, The Social
Transformation of American Medicine (New York: Basic, 1982), 79-144,180-97; and John
Duffy, From Humors to Medical Science: A History of American Medicine, 2d ed. (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1993), 167-228. Concerning neurasthenia, see Edward
Shorter, From Paralysis to Fatigue: A History of Psychosomatic Illness in the Modern Er
(New York: Free Press, 1992), 201-32; Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An
Anecdotal History (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Cynthia Russett,
Sexual Science: The Victorian Construction of Womanhood (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard
University Press, 1989), 104-29. The neurologist George M. Beard coined the term
"neurasthenia" in 1869; see his American Nervousness: Its Causes and Consequences (New
York: Putnam, 1881).
739
vidual responses. Some two decades after her tombstone settled,

Lydia Pinkham's personal signature graced thousands of letters each
year offering health tipsmainly increased consumption of her Vegetable Compoundto suffering women around the country. 8
In this religious and medical environment, incipient Pentecostals
formed part of a radical evangelical culture featuring divine healing
as a central element of a larger program that usually included ecstatic
religiosity, strong millennial expectations of Christ's return, a primitivist desire to replicate the early church, perfectionist spirituality, and
behavioral asceticism. Within this fabric of beliefs and practices, what
were the functions of divine healing in incipient Pentecostalism, in
addition to relieving sickness? The teachings of incipient Pentecostals
on the restoration of the apostolic church and the imminent second
coming of Christ helped foster an environment in which healing
thrived, but they offer limited insight into the nature and multiple
purposes of divine healing. Interpretations based on them treat a
profoundly experiential reality too fully in terms of its supporting
theological framework. At its most basic level, divine healing provided believers with tangible assurance of the present power and love
of God and the human capacity for wholeness in the face of pain,
illness, and death. The healed bodies of former sufferers symbolized
both their fresh understanding of God's relationship to sickness and
the new life world they had entered. For the healers themselves,
healing legitimated and demarcated their larger ministries and enhanced their personal power.
I. THE ECSTATIC HEALING REVIVALISM
OF MARIA WOODWORTH-ETTER
Woodworth-Etter (1844-1924), Dowie (1847-1907), and Parham

(1873-1929) knew the pain and grief of protracted illnesses and the
loss of family members and friends. As they each endured many such
situations, they faced the necessity of making sense out of their
experiences in light of their Christian beliefs. All of them adopted
divine healing amidst deep personal suffering, as they struggled to
8. For nineteenth-century alternative medicine, see Robert C. Fuller, Alternative Medicine
and American Religious Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). On nostrums
and patent medicines, see James Harvey Young, American Health Quackery: Collected
Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 23-31,59-62,89-102; Sarah Stage,
Female Complaints: Lydia Pinkham and the Business of Women's Medicine (New York:
W. W. Norton, 1979); and Stewart H. Holbrook, The Golden Age of Quackery (New York:
Macmillan, 1959), 58-66. Edward Bok, muckraking editor of the Ladies' Home Journal,
exposed the Pinkham scandal by publishing a photograph of her tombstone, showing
that she died in 1883. "Pictures that Tell Their Own Stories," Ladies' Home Journal Sept.
1905, 15.
740
CHURCH HISTORY
understand how God could will the death of a child or a disabling

disease. Like the patients they healed in their ministries, they also
knew firsthand the limitations of medicine; each one had seen doctors
repeatedly fail to bring about healing. Throughout their respective
ministries, they referred frequently to their own healing experiences,
which served as archetypes for their followers.
Suffering and death marked the life of Maria Woodworth-Etter
prior to her turn to public ministry in the early 1880s. Born in New
Lisbon, Ohio, in July 1844, Maria Beulah Underwood was almost
twelve years old when her father, "addicted to the accursed cup,"
died suddenly of sunstroke in 1856, leaving her mother to care for
eight children with no source of income. Along with her older sisters,
Maria had to leave school and work as a domestic away from home.
Despite limited religious influence from her parents, Maria converted
at the age of thirteen through a Disciples of Christ meeting. She soon
sensed a call to evangelism, but since "the Disciples did not believe
that women had any right to work for Jesus," she resolved to marry
an earnest Christian with whom she could engage in missionary
labors. Several years later she entered an unhappy marriage with P. H.
Woodworth, a Civil War veteran who had sustained a head injury
during military service that limited his capacities. Together they
scratched out a living farming near New Lisbon, while Maria's health
deteriorated. Over the next fifteen years or so she bore six children,
only to see death claim five of them in infancy or early youth.
Throughout these ordeals her "nervous system became prostrated,"
and several times she seemed close to death. 9
Whereas many other bereaved mothers of her era turned to spiri
tualism to salve their heartbreak, Woodworth-Etter found- solace
9. Maria Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders God Wrought in the Ministry for Forty Years
(1916; reprint, Bartlesville, Okla.: Oak Tree Publications, n.d.), 20, 21, 20-27; Maria B.
Woodworth, Life and Experiences of Maria B. /oodzvorth (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren
Publishing House, 1885), 28. Signs and Wonders, 19, states she was born in July 1844 and
her father died in July 1855, while Life and Experiences, 15, indicates she was born in July
1845 and her father died in 1856. Wayne E. Warner, The Woman Evangelist: The Life and
Times of Charismatic Evangelist Maria B. Woodworth-Etter (Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow,
1986), 3, suggests July 1844 and July 1856, which I have followed. For the sake of
simplicity, I will refer to Woodworth-Etter as such hereafter. In 1891, she and P. H.
Woodworth divorced, and she remarried in 1902 to Samuel Etter. Secondary literature
on Woodworth-Etter is limited. Along with Warner's biography, see Wayne E. Warner,
"Maria Beulah Woodworth-Etter/' Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements,
eds. Stanley M. Burgess and Gary B. McGee (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1988), 900901; Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experienc
from Wesley to James (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999), 241-47; Faupel,
Everlasting Gospel, 273-79; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 24; Anderson, Vision, 34-35,
36; and Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 191.1 am grateful to Wayne Warner for
making available to me his personal files on Woodworth-Etter.
741
through her evangelistic and healing ministry. She later interpreted

her hardships as trials God used to deepen her faith and prepare her
for ministry. During this time of preparation she experienced several
dramatic visions that improved her health and impelled her to evangelistic labors, but timidity and the opposition of her husband and
daughter caused her to hesitate. Eventually she prevailed and began
preaching locally around 1880, shortly after losing her last remaining
child to death.
By 1883 Woodworth-Etter had convinced her husband to accompany her as she itinerated; while she preached, he sold books and
pamphlets, food, and pictures of her to help support the work. 11 As
thousands flocked to her revivals in the upper Midwest, national
press coverage followed by early 1885. Woodworth-Etter began her
healing ministry that spring after receiving the gifts of healing (described in 1 Cor. 12:9) during a revival in Columbia City, Indiana. In
her typical fashion, she gave no indication of human influences,
saying simply, "The Lord showed me . . . that I had the gift of healing,
and of laying on of hands for the recovery of the sick/' Thereafter, her
fame rested on her capacity to induce both healings and trances in
revival participants, with healing becoming increasingly central to her
ministry. 12 Though Woodworth-Etter ministered under the auspices
of the United Brethren Church (18807-84), the Church of God (Winebrennerian) (1884-1904), and the Pentecostal movement (19127-24),
she operated as an independent evangelist. In 1918 she settled in
10. Ann Braude, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century
America (Boston: Beacon, 1989). For Woodworth-Etter's visions and interpretation of
her hardships, see Signs and Wonders, 26-30.
11. Woodworth, Life and Experiences, 31-33; Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 26-34;
Warner, Woman Evangelist, 15-18. observers, including some supporters of WoodworthEtter's ministry, criticized "her avaricious husband and his money making adjuncts/'
"Woodworth Meeting," Kokomo Gazette Tribune (Indiana), 18 May 1886, 5.
12. For examples of press coverage, see "Religious Craze in Indiana," New York Times, 30
Jan. 1885,1; "Trance Evangelism," Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 Jan. 1885; "Rigid Religion,"
Fort Wayne Sentinel, 31 Jan. 1885, 1; "A Farcical Religion," Indianapolis Times, 11 May
1885,1. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 70-71; 70; M. B. Woodworth, Trials and
Triumphs of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth (Dayton, Ohio: United Brethren Publishing House,
1886), 192; Warner, Woman Evangelist, 68 n. 6; Taves, Fits, Trances, & Visions, 241-47.
During the 1880s and early 1890s, Woodworth-Etter's ability to induce trances in
revival-goers caused great wonder and agitation. Entranced participants would lay
cold and rigid, with significantly reduced pulses, for hours on end; upon coming to,
they often would describe glorious visions of heaven and reassuring contact with
departed loved ones. Woodworth-Etter herself frequently went into trances. See, for
instance, Trials and Triumphs, 187. For an example of the controversy caused by trances,
see "Ring the Riot Alarm!" and "Flora Briggs' Story," San Francisco Examiner, 9 Jan.
1890,1.
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CHURCH HISTORY
Indianapolis, building an eponymous tabernacle, which she ran until

her death in 1924.13
By all accounts, Woodworth-Etter's revivals were unmatched spectacles that anticipated the drama and flavor of early Pentecostalism.
Throughout her ministry, she stressed the immanence of God through
the power of the Holy Spirit, and various ecstatic behaviors accompanied the conversions, sanctifications, and healings at her revivals.
Carrie Judd Montgomery, a holiness divine healer in Buffalo and then
Oakland, said of Woodworth-Etter's 1889-90 Oakland revival: "It was
a revelation to me to see the immense crowds that poured into these
meetings. I have never before or since attended any gatherings where
there was such conviction upon the people
The noise of penitential
prayer went forth like the sound of a wailing s e a . . . . Mrs. Woodworth
was wonderfully anointed when she preached. The power of God
rested upon many of the people in a remarkable way and there were
unusual manifestations of the Lord's presence in the midst/' Newspapers called her the "voodoo priestess," the "trance evangelist," and
the "priestess of the doctrine of 'divine healing.'" 14 A strong majority
of reporters and editors were skeptical or antagonistic, some charging
her with propagating "bare-faced lies," but others considered her
revivals beneficial to the religious life of their communities. 15
Most of Woodworth-Etter's healings occurred in revival settings,
generally outdoors under large tents or in open fields or parks, with
13. Woodworth-Etter remained silent as to the reasons for two long periods of diminished
public activitybetween about 1894 and 1902, and between 1904 and 1912that
interrupted her ministry. Like many itinerant eyangelists, she suffered from the
grueling demands of her work, often preaching three times daily for weeks on end.
Hence, it is possible that health problems forced her to slow down. A more likely
explanation for the second period would be Samuel Etter's ongoing invalidism, which
was the subject of criticism from reporters. See Warner, Woman Evangelist, 157,183 n.
3. Maria B. Woodworth-Etter, Life and Experiences, Including Sermons and Visions of Mrs.
M. B. Woodworth-Etter (n.p., 1904), iii, indicates that she and Etter were building a home
for Christian work about 100 miles east of St. Louis, in Cisna, Illinois, at the time of
publication. Perhaps they maintained a settled ministry there for several years, accounting for the second gap in the record.
14. For examples of ecstatic behaviors in Woodworth-Etter revivals, see August Feick,
comp., Life and Testimony of Mrs. M. B. Woodworth-Etter, Evangelist: Finished Biograph
Nearly Fifty Years of Ministry (Indianapolis, Ind.: n.p., 1925), 23-24; and WoodworthEtter, Signs and Wonders, passim. Carrie Judd Montgomery, "Under His Wings'': The
Story of My Life (Oakland, Calif.: Office of Triumphs of Faith, 1936), 130. "The Voodoo
Priestess/' Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 2 Dec. 1889; "The Trance Evangelist," Indianapolis Journal, 26 Sept. 1885, 8; "The Trance Evangelist," San Francisco Examiner, 11
Feb. 1890; Muscatine Journal (Iowa), 7 Aug. 1894.
15. "A Case That Passes for a Faith Cure Reported from Madison County," Indianapolis
Journal, 9 Sept. 1885, 2; "A Farcical Religion," 1; "A Cheerful Liar," The Champaign
County Herald (Illinois), 7 Sept. 1887,1; "Let There Be Faith," Daily Illinois State Journal
(Springfield), 7 July 1888.
743
anywhere from several hundred to twenty thousand or more people

in attendance. Typically she preached in or near small to mid-sized
cities, with each engagement lasting from several weeks to months. 16
She was a gripping orator whose charisma held the masses spellbound; her critics claimed she practiced hypnotism, mesmerism, or
catalepsy, and attributed her cures to these devices.17 Though her
style tended to appeal to the working class, many reports indicate that
all types attended her meetings. The San Francisco Examiner described
the scene at Woodworth-Etter's Oakland revival in January 1890:
The usual motley throng of converts, idlers, church people, roughs,
children, sailors and artisans, athletes and invalids, assembled at
Mrs. Woodworth's big tent this afternoon
Wan mothers, with
nursing babies in their arms, troop in by the dozens
Invalids
with sunken eyes, narrow-chested consumptives and men with all
sorts of hurts and bruises are there to pass an afternoon, work being
beyond their power. Slouchy, unkempt matrons and slatternly creatures of the street sit side by side with dainty damosels in sealskins
and fetching flat turbans
Hoodlums are there in bell-bottomed
trousers, and solid men of business drop in on the way from the train
to their homes . . . all sorts, kinds and conditions of people ready to
shout or sing, or pray; given to rigid conditions of the body and
mental ecstasy; making strange motions with their hands and uttering strange cries, all are under the spell of the pleasant-faced woman
who walks her platform smiling and self-possessed.18
In such settings Woodworth-Etter preached the radical holiness
gospel of salvation and entire sanctification, but her healings lifted the
meetings to a fever pitch. She taught that Satan or his demons caused
all disease and infirmity, with individual sin often the proximate
cause. Spiritual salvation and physical healing stood as parallel benefits of the cross, available to all believers who would surrender by
16. Woodworth-Etter's largest recorded meeting was held thirteen miles northwest of
Muncie, Indiana, near the town of Alexandria, in Madison County, in September 1885.
"Repentance Run Mad," Indianapolis Times, 22 Sept. 1885,1, reported twenty thousand
people in attendance, while Warner, Woman Evangelist, 51, cites estimates of between
twenty thousand and twenty-five thousand. Though Woodworth-Etter tended to
preach in smaller cities, she held revivals in Memphis and Cleveland (1885), Indianapolis (1886), Louisville (1888), Oakland (1889-90), St. Louis (1890), and Dallas,
Chicago, Atlanta, and Los Angeles between 1912 and 1918. Her huge success at F. F.
Bosworth's Dallas church in 1912 marked her entry onto the Pentecostal stage. Bosworth became a nationally-known healing evangelist in the 1920s.
17. Charles W. Wendte, "A Timely Call," Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 30 Nov. 1889;
"Religious Craze in Indiana," 1; "Cataleptic Capers," Indianapolis Sentinel, 15 Dec. 1886.
18. "Under the Woman's Spell," San Francisco Examiner, 11 Jan. 1890. Woodworth-Etter did
not explicitly advocate a blurring of social and class lines, though she believed that in
the power of the Spirit such distinctions disappeared.
744
CHURCH HISTORY
faith to the power of the Holy Spirit.19 Over the course of her career
she claimed to be the instrument of healing for almost every known
disease. Asked once by a reporter if she ever failed to heal the sick,
Woodworth-Etter replied, "Never. I can not fail while God is with me.
Personally, I could accomplish nothing, but to him all things are
possible; therefore, when I put my hands upon a sufferer and tell him
or her to rise, I know that if the sufferer has faith in Christ he will be
cured/' 20 Woodworth-Etter believed that healings, as part of the
broader category of signs and wonders, had been available to the
church throughout its existence, and that its failure to claim these
benefits of faith demonstrated its long apostasy. The restoration to the
faithful of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, with full apostolic authority and
accompanying signs and wonders, revealed that the end times
loomed. 21 Signs and wonders demonstrated God's love to believers
and his awesome, terrible power to non-Christians, providing a foretaste of heaven and warnings of hell. Through Woodworth-Etter and
others, God was reconstituting a faithful remnant to carry full salvation for soul and body to the lost multitudes. 22
19. M. B. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons (Indianapolis: n.p., 1921), 43,42-54,77-82;
Woodworth, Life and Experience, 214-18,239-47; Woodworth-Etter, Holy Ghost Sermons
(Indianapolis: n.p., 1918), 48-54; Woodworth-Etter, Divine Healing: Health for Body, Soul
and Spirit (Indianapolis: n.p., n.d. [ca. 1923]), an unpaginated tract located in the
Woodworth-Etter Papers, Flower Pentecostal Heritage Center, Assemblies of God,
Springfield, MO (hereafter, AOG). The belief that Satan caused all illness was commonplace in incipient Pentecostalism. See Wacker, "Pentecostal Tradition/' 523-24;
Anderson, Vision, 95-96. As Anderson suggests, "Healing and 'casting out demons'
were almost synonymous terms in Pentecostal vocabulary" (95). In addition to personal sins, Woodworth-Etter stressed that the sins of parents could be the proximate cause of sickness in children. Likewise, the faith of parents could claim the
blessing of healing in dire cases, such as that of a girl in Springfield, Illinois,
suffering from spinal meningitis and paralysis, who was in no condition to exercise
her own faith. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 94-95.
20. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, passim; "Cancer Cured by Faith," St. Louis
Globe-Democrat, 3 Sept. 1887,12.
21. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons, 72-75; idem, Signs and Wonders, 187-96,223-33,
535; "Pentecostal Power," San Francisco Examiner, 11 Jan. 1890; Feick, comp., Life and
Testimony, 24. For interpretations of early Pentecostal restorationism and millennialism, see Grant Wacker, "Playing for Keeps: The Primitivist Impulse in Early Pentecostalism," in The American Quest for the Primitive Church, ed. Richard T. Hughes (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1988), 196-219; Faupel, Everlasting Gospel; Anderson,
Vision; and Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith.
22. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons, 72-75,122-27; Woodworth-Etter, Questions and
Answers on Divine Healing, rev. and enl. (Indianapolis: n.p., n.d. [ca. 1922]), 23. Warner,
Woman Evangelist, 194-99, has demonstrated that significant portions of Questions and
Answers (a large part of which was first published in Life and Experience [1904], 258-74)
were lifted verbatim without attribution from J. W. Byers, The Grace of Healing
(Moundsville, W.Va.: Gospel Trumpet, 1899), 265-85. Byers was a minister with the
Church of God (Anderson, Ind.). Nevertheless, the material accurately reflects the
teachings of Woodworth-Etter throughout her ministry.
745
Newspaper reports of a Woodworth-Etter camp meeting revival

near Urbana, Illinois, from late July through late August 1887, offer a
glimpse of her healing ministry early in her career. The St. Louis
Globe-Democrat provided a detailed account. Woodworth-Etter's
"magnetic influence communicated itself mysteriously to her entire
audience" of about two thousand, the paper reported. At every service in "that alleged cradle of infidelity," there were rows of people
three and four deep at the altar praying for salvation or healing,
including prominent citizens.
After two or three meetings, and when the people had been worked
up to a degree of religious intensity, Mrs. Woodworth began her
ministrations among the sick
Eye-witnesses, residents of
Urbana, describe the scenes which then took place as the personification of frenzy. When the excitement was at its whitest heat Mrs.
Woodworth seemed ubiquitous. One moment she would face her
shrieking auditors from the platform, wringing her hands, screaming
to God for mercy in a voice that sounded high and shrill above the
wailings of her congregation; the next, prostrate upon her face,
tearing her hair, and writhing in the imaginary embrace of some
demon from below; then flying about among the people, encouraging, arguing, commanding them to help her drive the fiend from
their midst; again upon the stage, stamping her feet tragically upon
the imaginary form of the "Old Boy" himself, and then, as the great
climax to her exhausting efforts, shrieking "victory!" at the full
power of her lungs.
Amidst the resulting pandemonium, Woodworth-Etter called forward
those who desired healing, "and with each demonstration of her
certainly inexplicable power the enthusiasm would break out anew,"
with hundreds hurling themselves to the ground, crying out to God
for mercy for their sins. 23
According to the Globe-Democrat, Woodworth-Etter then approached an old deaf farmer named Grover who suffered from severe
back pain. She laid her hands on his ears and yelled that he was deaf
no more, then repeated the procedure with his back. Afterwards she
moved toward a Mrs. Harris lying on her cot. A resident of Urbana,
Harris had been a paralytic for twenty years. Woodworth-Etter proclaimed to the audience, "The success of this crucial test should
convince you all that God's power is present among you." She proceeded to ask Harris if she believed in God and whether, if healed, she
would devote her remaining years to his service. Upon receiving an
affirmative reply, Woodworth-Etter commanded her, "Then, in God's
23. "Cancer Cured by Faith/' 12.
746
CHURCH HISTORY
name, get up and walk!" Harris lifted her head briefly, then laid it
back down on the cot. Woodworth-Etter cried out, "The Lord of
heaven commands you to rise!" Harris, who looked "unconscious of
what she was doing[,] put her feet on the floor and stood erect before
the multitude." The crowd surged forward as Woodworth-Etter carried the unsteady Harris to the platform and urged her to help convert
the people. Harris proceeded to speak with great eloquence in spite of
her limited education. Thereafter another woman, with advanced
breast cancer declared incurable by her doctors, sought healing.
Woodworth-Etter had her promise never to take any medicine except
God's healing power, then laid hands on her breast and asked her to
pray in faith. One of the physicians who had attended her case
witnessed the healing and declared it miraculous. 24
Such scenes provoked significant controversy. The Champaign
County Herald disputed the veracity of the claims in the GlobeDemocrat account, suggesting the cures were fabrications, perhaps
planted by someone in Woodworth-Etter's camp. Two weeks earlier
the Herald had called Woodworth-Etter's methods "primitive," but
said that her meetings were producing good and that "it takes
different ways to reach all people." The paper also noted "[f]lying
r e p o r t s . . . of wonderful cures of disease performed by Mrs.
Woodworth." Citing her "wonderful magnetic power over those with
whom she comes in contact," the Herald granted that she could cure
"nervous diseases that are more imaginary than real," but doubted
her capacity with "diseases of a strictly physical or deep seated
character." The wealthy Urbana banker S. H. Busey reported after
the revival that nearly one hundred had converted, including himself.
The "Woodworth converts" gathered twice a week for prayer meetings; later, members of established churches started to join them. This
reflected Woodworth-Etter's general pattern of trying to plant
churches or prayer bands before departing an area.26
24. Ibid.
25. "A Cheerful Liar/' Champaign County Herald, 7 Sept. 1887; "The Camp Meeting/'
Champaign County Herald, 24 Aug. 1887, 1. Newspaper accounts of healing revivals
commonly made this distinction between nervous and physical diseases. Dr. T. J.
Bowles of Muncie, Indiana, for example, offered a psychological explanation for
Woodworth-Etter's cure of Mrs. C. P. Diltz, whose "paralysis of the will" had led to her
total physical helplessness. "A Case That Passes for a Faith Cure Reported from
Madison County," 2.
26. S. H. Busey to the editor, The Church Advocate (Harrisburg, Penn.), 14 Sept. 1887,4. This
was the denominational organ of Woodworth-Etter's Church of God (Winebrennerian). For the heavy opposition her ministry provoked in the church, see C. H.
Forney, History of the Churches of God in the United States of North America (n.p.:
Churches of God, 1914), 237, 356-57. "Cancer Cured by Faith," 12, identifies Busey as
747
A savvy self-promoter and controversialist, Woodworth-Etter published at least eight versions of her journal-style autobiography between the early 1880s and 1922, with another published in 1925 by
August Feick, her successor at the Woodworth-Etter Tabernacle in
Indianapolis. Sold at her meetings, these volumes recounted her revival and healing triumphs. Unlike Dowie and Parham, she did not
produce a periodical to publicize her ministry, other than a monthly
called The Bible Truth that lasted only several issues in 1892.27 Though
newspapers often expressed hostility to Woodworth-Etter, she recognized the value of publicity, good or bad, and cultivated it accordingly. Sensational reports and sharp controversies drew crowds, and
the power of God convicted them.
Fearless and defiant, Woodworth-Etter took her confrontational
style to places other revivalists would sooner have skipped. She first
gained national publicity through her massive revival in Hartford
City, Indiana, in early 1885. According to one nearby editor, who
criticized her methods as containing too much of the "biggest show on
earth/' Hartford City was a rough place, but Woodworth-Etter was up
to the challenge: "A town of more iniquity and bad odors to the
square inch it has never been my misfortune to encounter. A more
importunate set of gamblers and whiskey-sellers and a dirtier set of
loafers have never escaped the penitentiary
Mrs. Woodworth has
undoubtedly shown great wisdom in her manner of converting Hartford City. She goes at it like a foot pad tackles his prey. By some
supernatural power she just knocks 'em silly when they are not
looking for it, and while they are down she applies the hydraulic
pressure and pumps the grace of God into them by the bucketful.28"
Woodworth-Etter faced scoffers at many of her revivals. She entranced some and warned others: "The Lord will send a terrible wrath
on those who mock His religion by frivolous conduct in these meetings
Mockers, marked with His curse, have met with swift punishment, death, suicide, sickness or failure."29
Though little-known today outside holiness and Pentecostal circles,
Maria Woodworth-Etter was the most prominent female revivalist in
the "millionaire banker" of Urbana. Woodworth, Trials and Triumphs, 156; "Pentecostal
Power," San Francisco Examiner, 11 Jan. 1890.
27. Warner, Woman Evangelist, 192-94.
28. Kokomo Dispatch (Indiana), 5 Feb. 1885, 5. "Rigid Religion," Fort Wayne Sentinel, 31 Jan.
1885,1, reported that businessmen and saloonkeepers in Hartford City closed early for
lack of business and to attend Woodworth-Etter's meetings.
29. "Mobbed Mrs. Woodworth," Missouri Republican (St. Louis), 18 June 1890, and "After
Battle," Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 10 Dec. 1889, 1, provide examples of the mob
violence and death threats Woodworth-Etter braved. Fort Wayne Gazette, 23 Jan. 1885,
6; "Mockers to Meet with Punishment," Indianapolis Star, 27 Sept. 1904, 3.
748
CHURCH HISTORY
the United States prior to Aimee Semple McPherson. As it did for

McPherson, divine healing served as a hallmark for WoodworthEtter's ministry, the source of both the great crowds and the conflict
that followed her. For Woodworth-Etter, healings demonstrated
God's presence in surpassing power through the ministrations of the
Holy Spirit, and his desire to free captives from Satan's shackles.
Foremost among signs and wonders, healings confirmed her mission
to restore the purity and power of the apostolic church in anticipation
of the millennium.
II. PHYSICAL RESTORATION IN JOHN ALEXANDER DOWIE'S ZION
Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in May 1847, John Alexander Dowie

moved with his family to Australia as an adolescent. A sickly youth,
Dowie first experienced divine healing as a sixteen-year-old, when he
was saved from approaching death by God's concession to his ultimatum that he would abandon the faith if he were not healed. After
pursuing theological studies at the University of Edinburgh, he returned to Australia and became ordained in the Congregational
Church in 1872. In 1876, while serving in Newton, a suburb of Sydney,
Dowie embraced divine healing in the midst of an epidemic, after
burying more than forty of his church members in the prior few
weeks. Deeply disturbed by the loss of life, Dowie rejected the traditional view that sickness and death were part of God's inscrutable
will. "I was almost frenzied," he recounted years later, "with Divinely
imparted anger and hatred of that foul destroyer, disease, which was
doing Satan's will." Dowie then commenced his healing ministry; but
it was not until 1882, after the death of his daughter and a move to
Melbourne, that he made it the focus of his labors. 30
30. James L. Dwyer, "Elijah the Third," American Mercury, July 1927, 291-92; John
Alexander Dowie, "The Chains of Good and Evil," A Voice From Zion [hereafter, VFZ],
Jan. 1905, 15-16; Dowie, "He Is Just the Same Today," VFZ, Jan. 1900,10-13; Dowie,
"Zion's Protest Against Swine's Flesh as a Disease-Producer," VFZ, June 1898, 17;
Grant Wacker, "Marching to Zion: Religion in a Modern Utopian Community," Church
History 54 (1985): 498. The best sources for Dowie's years in Australia are Edna
Sheldrake, comp., The Personal Letters of John Alexander Dowie (Zion City, 111.: Wilbur
Glenn Voliva, 1912); and Gordon Lindsay, The Life of John Alexander Dowie . . . (n.p.:
Voice of Healing, 1951), 17-89. "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mr. F. A. Graves,"
Leaves of Healing, 24 July 1897, 609, contains a cryptic reference by Dowie that appears
to suggest the death of ids daughter was associated with epilepsy, and that it prompted
his full entrance into the ministry of healing. Lindsay, Life of Dowie, 70, quotes an
uncited letter from Dowie to a friend that says his daughter suffered from a "fit" and
was "insensible," and that she also may have had the measles. Sheldrake, Personal
Letters of Dowie, 318-22, contains the full text of the letter. See also "How God Gave
Dowie the Ministry of Healing," in The Sermons of John Alexander Dowie, Champion of the
Faith, ed. Gordon Lindsay (n.p.: Voice of Healing, n.d.), 22-28. The secondary literature
749
In 1888 Dowie traveled to the United States to establish satellites of

his International Divine Healing Association. After two successful
years on the West coast convinced him America was fertile soil for his
healing ministry, Dowie moved his operations to Chicago in 1890.31
From there he itinerated in the eastern half of the U.S. and in parts of
Canada until 1893, when he established a divine-healing tabernacle
across from Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show and near Dwight L.
Moody's evangelistic crusade at the Chicago World's Fair. The claims
of miraculous healings that followed Dowie wherever he went generated enormous publicity for his ministry, and crowds multiplied
when the economy soured in the spring of 1894.32 His success
prompted Dowie to establish, later that year, a wide-ranging ministry
he called Zion, which involved several divine healing homes, and
publications including his influential weekly, Leaves of Healing. In 1896
Dowie formed the Christian Catholic Church, and in 1901 building
began on his Christian Utopian community, Zion City, Illinois, which
peaked at around seven thousand, five hundred residents several
years later. During the height of his ministry, from 1894 to 1905,
Dowie unquestionably reigned as the most important and notorious
divine healer in America.
on Dowie is extensive, though much of it dates before 1930. Among more recent works,
see Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 116-35; Wacker, Marching to Zion; Mullin, Miracles,
203-8; Edith L. Blumhofer, "The Christian Catholic Apostolic Church and the
Apostolic Faith: A Study in the 1906 Pentecostal Revival/' in Charismatic Experiences
in History, ed. Cecil M. Robeck, Jr. (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson, 1985), 126-46;
Chappell, "Divine Healing Movement/' 284-340; Philip L. Cook, Zion City, Illinois:
Twentieth-Century Utopia (Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press, 1996); and Alden
Heath, "Apostle in Zion," Journal of the Illinois State Historcal Society 70 (1977): 98-113.
31. For Dowie's early ministry on the West Coast, see John Alexander Dowie, American
First Fruits, Being a Brief Record of Eight Months' Divine Healing Missions in the State
California, 4th ed. (Chicago: Zion, 1895); Dowie, Our Second Year's Harvest, Being a Brie
Record of a Year of Divine Healing Missions on the Pacific Coast of America . . . (Chicago
International Divine Healing Association, 1891); Dowie, "Divine Healing Vindicated,"
VFZ, Sept. 1898, 21-23; "J. A. Dowie's Cures," Oakland Daily Evening Tribune, 16 Apr.
1890; Freeman D. Bovard, "Dowie's Story of the Pacific Coast," Christian Advocate, 10
Dec. 1903, 2001-2; and Robert C. Reinders, "Training for a Prophet: The West Coast
Missions of John Alexander Dowie, 1888-1890," Pacific Historian 30 (1986): 3-14.
32. Cook, Zion City, 12-13; Wacker, "Marching to Zion," 498.
33. Cook, Zion City is the most thorough account of the city (later renamed Zion) under
Dowie. For other views of its early days, see Jabez Taylor, The Development of the City
of Zion (Zion, 111: n.p., n.d.); Grover Townshend, "A City of the Plains," Munsey's
Magazine, Sept. 1902,843-45; and I. K. Friedman, "John Alexander Dowie," Everybody's
Magazine, Nov. 1903,567-75. "Who's Who in Zion," Zion Historical Society ser. 4 (1971):
1-30, box 59, file 16, John W. Carver Healing Collection, B. L. Fisher Library, Asbury
Theological Seminary, Wilmore, Ky. (hereafter, ATS), identifies key figures in Zion
both during and after Dowie's lifetime. P. G. Chappell, "Healing Movements," in
Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements, 366-67, claims Dowie as the most
prominent American divine healer between 1894 and 1905. Various accounts put the
750
CHURCH HISTORY
In his prime Dowie packed auditoriums in Chicago, New York, and

elsewhere with ten to fifteen thousand participants. Week after week
he preached to crowds of six to eight thousand in Chicago and Zion
City. Whereas Woodworth-Etter's ministry of healing focused on
ecstatic behavior caused by the power of the Holy Spirit, Dowie had
a teaching ministry. Order characterized his meetings, which often
included healing testimonials but centered on Dowie and his lengthy
sermons. These were anything but boring. Dowie had the talents and
charisma of a demagogue, offering a dichotomous, moralistic reading
of life that was one minute winsome and the next rhetorically violent.
His commanding bass voice was rhythmic and spellbinding, filled
with emotion and weightiness. Masterful at connecting with his
crowds, he drew them in and reinforced his teaching by eliciting
audience participation and applying his engaging, if barbed, sense of
humor. Throughout the occasional eruptions of applause, laughter, or
seemingly impromptu interactions, Dowie remained in complete control.34
Restorationism drove Dowie's larger theological project. He regarded Zion as the Lord's designated force for restoring the power
and purity of the apostolic church and hastening the premillennial
return of Christ. If his millennialism was not quite as urgent as
Woodworth-Etter's, his restorationism was more so. Like her, he
preached individual empowerment and purification, but he also
sought to embody apostolic glory in his church, in Zion City, and in
himself. Dowie bolstered his authority by assuming the mantle of
prophetic office. In March 1899 he announced that he was the "Messenger of God's Covenant'7 referred to in Mai. 3:1. In June 1901 he
additionally declared himself "Elijah the Restorer," the third incarnation of the Old Testament prophet (John the Baptist having been the
second). Finally, in September 1904, he proclaimed himself also the
"First Apostle of the Lord Jesus." 35
membership of the Christian Catholic Church in 1900 at between twenty-five and fifty
thousand; see Wacker, "Marching to Zion/' 502.
34. Just about any of Dowie's sermons display the characteristics mentioned here. See, for
example, John Alexander Dowie, "Reasonings for Inquirers Concerning Divine Healing Teaching," VFZ, July 1900, 1-31. John Alexander Dowie, sound recording, 1903,
Carver Healing Collection, ATS. Dowie proved adept at handling the rare opposition
that arose in his meetings. See, for example, Dowie, "'Christ's Methods of Healing':
Reply to the Exposition of the Sunday School Lesson by the Rev. Dr. John Lindsay
Withrow, Pastor of the Third Presbyterian Church, Chicago, in the [Chicago] Record of
Jan. 8,1898," VFZ, May 1898, 28. Like Woodworth-Etter, Dowie suggested that death
would come to mockers of divine healing. Dowie, "Lessons on Divine Healing from
the Story of the Leper," VFZ, Dec. 1900,12.
35. John Alexander Dowie, "The Coming of Elijah, Restorer of All Things," VFZ, July 1901,
8-57; Dowie, "Power of the Covenant of Final Restoration...," VFZ, Oct. 1902, 27 ff;
751
Divine healing supplied the foundation for Dowie's restorationism.

His apostolic authorityand by extension that of his church and
communityrested ultimately on his gifts of healing. Crowds flocked
to Dowie and devoted their lives to him because of his extraordinary
capacity to induce physical restoration. Even his critics were amazed:
"His success was not limited to cases of hypochondria
[PJilgrims
came on crutches and went away whole. Paralytics were borne in on
litters, and literally 'took up their beds and walked/" Regardless of
his topic, Dowie almost invariably returned to divine healing in his
sermons, and his Leaves of Healing offered a continuous stream of
healing narratives. 36 Healing formed the experiential core of his min
istry, the palpable conduit of divine grace to the suffering.
Dowie preached a straightforward message with the basic premise
that "God cannot make you sick." Like Woodworth-Etter, Dowie
argued that God never ordained that Christians become ill or dis
abled. "The greatest lie that was ever uttered concerning the Word of
God since the [Reformation," he thundered, "is to be found in Chris
tian theologya lie that has been the abomination of the Church and
its pollution; a lie which has made it incapable of sustaining its
position; a lie which asserts that God worked in such a way as to be
the author of or the willing permitter of sin or disease; the Calvinistic
lie . . . the infernal lie to which in my boyhood days I had to listen." 3 7
Dowie mocked ministers who taught that God chastens those he loves
for their greater good, inscrutable though it may be:
[I]f disease is a love-token as the ministers preach, why do they not
practice it? I heard one the other day that said the Grippe came to
him; he found himself gripped. Did he kneel down and say, 'Whom
the Lord love He chasteneth; it is so good for you to give me Grippe.
(Laughter.) Oh, how you do love me. (Laughter.) Oh, how you love
me. Oh Lord, just love my wife Jennie too, and give her the Grippe.
(Laughter.) And love Betty too; let her have the Grippe. Oh let us all
be loved and gripped?' No he did not
They are only a pack of
clerical fools or liars who preach that; because the very moment they
get sick they send off for [the] doctor . . . to come and take the Lord's
love token away. (Laughter and applause.)38
Dowie, "The Principles, Practices and Purposes of the Christian Catholic Church in
Zion," VFZ, Aug. 1900, 3-15; Dowie, "Faith the Mightiest Power," VFZ, Oct. 1904,13;
Cook, Zion City, 57-59,171-73.
36. John Swain, "John Alexander Dowie: The Prophet and His Profits," Century Magazine,
Oct. 1902, 937.
37. John Alexander Dowie, " Will': An Address on Divine Healing With Answers to
Questions," VFZ, Sept. 1897, 20-21; Dowie, "Satan the Dfiler," VFZ, Feb. 1900, 23.
38. Dowie, "Reasonings for Inquirers," 28-29.
752
CHURCH HISTORY
Instead, asserted Dowie, God wills that Christians experience now the
sanctification of the body as well as of the spirit. Since he has provided
for this in Christ's atonement, it is never appropriate for a believer to
pray for God's already clear will when seeking healing. All Christians
who truly repent of their sins and claim the promise in faith are
healed. As the root cause of illness, Satan "wields such stupendous
power that if we did not know God overrules all things and will
ultimately triumph, we would despair of humanity/' Even more than
Woodworth-Etter, Parham, and other incipient Pentecostals, Dowie
stressed the pervasive, assailing nature of Satan. God called upon his
children to do battle with the devil and his minionsand Dowie was
not at all reticent to name them. Anyone who opposed him in any
fashion he branded a tool of Satan. Atop the lengthy list were physicians, for whom his enmity burned with holy fire; others included
pastors and churches, tobacco and pork manufacturers, municipal
politicians, and even other divine healers. 39
In his healing homeswhich provided lodging and intense teaching and prayer for the sickor after his services in designated prayer
rooms, Dowie would meet individually or in small groups with
patients, laying his hands upon them and praying. He also prayed for
the thousands of requests sent by mail. In 1890 Dowie met F. A.
Graves during a healing mission in Minneapolis. Orphaned at the age
of eight, Graves had suffered from epilepsy for twenty years and "was
constantly using medicine but getting no relief." Having learned of
divine healing the year before, he attended several of Dowie's meetings. Dowie then saw him in his home shortly after Graves almost
drowned while having an epileptic fit during a bath, causing an
internal hemorrhage and vomiting of large amounts of blood. Seven
years later, Dowie described the scene: "He had the teaching, and I
knew he was a man of God. I put my hand upon his body, and asked
God that the hemorrhage should cease. It ceased that moment. I
prayed t o o . . . for his deliverance from epilepsy. A day or so after-
39. Ibid., 17; Dowie, "Jesus the Healer/7 VFZ, Feb. 1900, 3; "Divine Healing Vindicated/'
34-35; "Talks With Ministers on Divine Healing," VFZ, June 1897, 4; "Satan the
Dfiler," 19. Dowie stressed individual human sin as the proximate cause of illness,
though he also intimated it could be inherited. See Dowie, "Do You Know God's Way
of Healing?" VFZ, Jan. 1900, 5; and '"I Will/" 41. For examples of his demonizing, see
Dowie, Zion's Holy War Against the Hosts of Hell in Chicago (Chicago: Zion, 1900); Zion's
Conflict With Methodist Apostasy, Especially in Connection With Freemasonry (Chicag
Zion, 1900). For his attack on Woodworth-Etter, see "Trance Evangelism," Leaves of
Healing, 8 Mar. 1895, 380-82. He also savaged Martin Wells Knapp, a radical holiness
healer in Cincinnati, in "Spurious holiness Exposed," 12, and A. B. Simpson, head of
the Christian and Missionary Alliance and a noted divine healer, in "The Great
Neglected Chapter/' Leaves of Healing, 25 Sept. 1897, 762-67.
753
wards he suddenly realized . . . that God had not only spared his life,
blessed him and stopped the hemorrhage, but he realized he was
delivered from epilepsy/' Dowie further stated that during the first
three years after this incident "there were attempts on the part of the
enemy to take possession of [Graves] again, but I co-operated with
him in prayer quite frequently, and for four years now the deliverance
has been perfect." Graves, who was present as Dowie's account was
read in Zion Tabernacle, certified its accuracy and told how he had
played the organ and led the singing at a YMCA convention two days
after the incident. "I stand before you, friends, a miracle of grace and
God's power." 40
Before turning to divine healing, Dowie's patients had tried various
medical regimens without success. Maggie E. Parsons of Madison,
Wisconsin had been incapacitated for five years with "severe uterine
trouble, displacement, adhesion, and inflammation. My husband's
death in the meantime," she explained, "greatly aggravated the disease and completely prostrated me." Parsons tried numerous regular
doctors, the "rest cure," magnetic healing, and a six-month stay at the
Seventh-Day Adventist Battle Creek Sanitarium, under the care of Dr.
J. H. Kellogg. Two noted physicians then told her that a hysterotomy
held out her only hope for health. Instead, she decided to visit one of
Dowie's divine healing homes in Chicago. "[0]ne clasp of this good
man's hand, one look into his face/' Parsons exulted, "and I knew I
was indeed in the presence of God's servant, and that through him
would I not only receive this physical blessing, but spiritual blessing."
After Dowie laid hands upon her in prayer a few days later, she "was
free from all pain, and made whole from the very hour." Parsons
stayed at the home for nine weeks, with no further distress. Upon her
return to Madison, the Wisconsin State Journal carried her story of
"Remarkable Healing." 41
fri September 1905 Dowie suffered a stroke before his flock in Shiloh
Tabernacle at Zion City. The impact of his illness combined with
40. "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mr. F. A. Graves/7 609-11, 621; 611. Dowie
believed epilepsy resulted from demon possession.
41. "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mrs. Maggie E. Parsons," Leaves of Healing, 28
Sept. 1894, 65-67; 66 (the Wisconsin State Journal account is reprinted on 67). For
"women's diseases" and the sometimes barbaric way the medical community treated
them around the turn of the century, see Russett, Sexual Science; Shorter, From Paralysis
to Fatigue, 69-92. The illnesses of Maggie Parsons and many other patients Dowie
cured are open to psychosomatic interpretations, but others are less so. Blindness,
deafness, shortened limbs, typhoid fever and countless other afflictions yielded to
Dowie's touch. See, for example, A. W. N., "God's Witnesses to Divine Healing:
Quickly Healed of Lameness, Tumor, Rheumatic Gout, and Spinal Curvature," Leaves
of Healing, 23 May 1903,129-30; and Jane Dowie, "How Jesus Heals the Little Ones,"
VFZ, Feb. 1901, 1-35.
754
CHURCH HISTORY
allegations of financial and sexual misdeeds to bring about his downfall. By the time of his death in March 1907, Dowie had been forsaken
by all but a handful of his followers. Though Dowie never became
Pentecostal, and Zion continued after his death in the radical holiness
tradition, many former Zion members became leaders in early Pentecostalism. After Dowie's grip on Zion loosened as a result of his
failing health and a campaign of vilification directed by his successor,
Wilbur Glenn Voliva, a young Midwestern evangelist saw an opportunity to make inroads into Zion City. Charles Parham's visit to Zion
City in the fall of 1906 marked the beginning of the city's Pentecostal
revival that eventually channeled Dowie's legacy, and many of his
most capable disciples, into the fledgling Pentecostal movement. 42
III. CHARLES F. PARHAM'S APOSTOLIC HEALING
Charles F. Parham was the theological founder of Pentecostalism,

and his student, William J. Seymour, led the Azusa Street revival in
Los Angeles in 1906 that sparked its worldwide spread. Born in
Muscatine, Iowa, in June 1873, at six months of age Parham contracted
a nearly fatal fever, likely caused by encephalitis, that imperiled his
health for the next five years. After his family moved to the frontier
region of Sedgwick County, Kansas, in 1878, Parham continued in
poor health. Several years later, at the age of nine, he contracted
rheumatic fever, which emaciated him and stunted his growth. Due to
his illnesses and generally weak constitution, Parhamunlike his
four brotherswas unable to perform demanding work on the family
farm. He closely identified with his mother, who nursed him and
42. For an account of Dowie's downfall, see William E. Barton, "The Dream of Dowie
and the Awakening of Zion," The Independent, 12 Apr. 1906, 915-17. Concerning the
financial allegations against Dowie, proof of deliberate fraud is lacking, though it is
clear he enjoyed a lavish lifestyle as Zion City's economy crumbled after 1903. Rumors
circulated about Dowie's undue fondness for Ruth Hofer, a young Swiss deaconess
living in Zion City in 1904-5, and about his supposed plans for a polygamous colony
in Mexico. See Cook, Zion City, 204-5, 200-201, 159; Wacker, "Marching to Zion,"
507-8. Donna Quaife Knoth, "John Alexander Dowie: White Lake's Healing Evangelist," Michigan History, May/June 1990, 36-38, tells of the expensive summer home
where the Dowies vacationed after 1899. For newspaper accounts of these and other
controversies surrounding Dowie, see the Hannah Whitall Smith Papers, "Fanaticism
Collection," box 6, files 19-25, ATS. Gordon P. Gardiner, Out of Zion and Into the World
(Shippensburg, Perm.: Companion Press, 1990), identifies many former Dowie followers who assumed leadership in early Pentecostalism. On Parham, see Blumhofer, "The
Christian Catholic Apostolic Church and the Apostolic Faith"; Edith Blumhofer, "A
Pentecostal Branch Grows in Dowie's Zion: Charles F. Parham's 1906 Invasion,"
Assemblies of God Heritage, Fall 1986,3-5. The Waukegan Daily Gazette, based in Waukegan, Illinois, adjacent to Zion City, covered events in the fall of 1906. See, for example,
"Dowie Loses Zion," 19 Sept. 1906; "Is Voliva's Hold in Danger?" 26 Sept. 1906;
"Declare Parham Is Gaining," 28 Sept. 1906.
755
supervised his light household chores. Her death in 1885 was a

terrible blow to Parham, who often spoke fondly of her in later
years. 43
Parham enrolled in Southwestern Kansas College to study for the
ministry. Once there, however, he became interested in medicine. He
later wrote: "Having been an invalid for many years, the devil suggested that it would be a great philanthropic work to become a
physician; to relieve suffering humanity, and then, by and by, have a
nice home and some ease and comfort in the world
The devil
tried to make me believe I could be a physician and a Christian too/ 7
Parham acceded to Satan's wiles and then suffered a recurrence of
rheumatic fever, which left his doctors helpless and his life endangered. After several months of suffering, he repented in prayer and
yielded his life to God, who healed him. Another healing experience
followed some months later, but it was not until Parham was twentyfour years old that he fully "realized the mighty power of God in
sanctifying the body from disease as He had from inbred sin."44
Following two years in the Methodist ministry, Parham struck out
on his own as an independent evangelist. In the fall of 1897, Parham
faced another serious illness, which his physician diagnosed as heart
disease. Simultaneously, his infant son took deathly ill with a raging
fever that doctors could not bring under control. These dangers
prompted Parham to embrace the full implications of divine healing,
including renouncing doctors and medicine and trusting God alone
for healing. Like Woodworth-Etter and Dowie before him, Parham
reasoned that relying on human means of healing constituted putting
one's faith in "works" rather than in God and his gracious provision.
Shortly after Parham and his son recovered, Parham established in
1898 the Bethel Healing Home in Topeka, Kansas, as part of a broad
holiness social and evangelistic mission. By the fall of 1900, he had
established Bethel Bible College on the outskirts of Topeka, where
Parham and his students identified speaking in tongues as the evidence
of Spirit baptism on New Year's Day, 1901. In the years following,
43. Sarah E. Parham, The Life of Charles F. Parham: Founder of the Apostolic Faith Movement
(1930; reprint, New York: Garland, 1985), 1-2; James R. Goff, Jr., Fields White Unto
Harvest: Charles F. Parham and the Missionary Origins of Pentecostalism (Fayetteville, Ark.:
University of Arkansas Press, 1988), 23-26. Along with Goff s biography, secondary
sources n Parham include: Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 158-86; Anderson, Vision,
47-61; Synan, Holiness-Pentecostal Tradition, 89-92; and Chappell, "Divine Healing
Movement/7 340-57.
44. Parham, Life of Parham, 6; Charles F. Parham, A Voice Crying in the Wilderness, 4th ed.
(1944 [1902]; reprinted in The Sermons of Charles F. Parham, New York: Garland, 1985),
15-18.
756
CHURCH HISTORY
Parham's healing ministry played a vital role in his efforts to spread

his version of Pentecostalism, which he Called the "Apostolic Faith. //45
Parham combined the practices of Woodworth-Etter and Dowie by
healing both in revivals and in private settings. With minor variations,
he shared the same healing theology and the same basic message: God
does not will sickness for his children, and faith will secure his healing
power. Like Woodworth-Etter and Dowie, Parham identified Satan as
the ultimate source of all sickness, but he recognized a minor role for
God's permissive will in allowing sickness to come to the disobedient.
More clearly than the others, Parham articulated an understanding of
healing as the physical expression of sanctification. Though enthusiastic, Parham's revivals were sedate in comparison with WoodworthEtter's. Generally, he preferred to conduct healings in private and to
avoid the sensationalism that attended healing revivalismthough
some of his greatest successes were in revivals. His healing home in
Topeka, like Dowie's larger homes in Chicago, served as the divinehealing equivalent of a hospital. In both settings, Parham's magnetism
won over his patients. A contemporary described him as "a slight,
spare man" who was "extremely delicate looking" owing to his early
health problems, but who "possessed such a wonderful personality
that s o m e . . . accused him of hypnotizing his followers." Unlike
Woodworth-Etter and Dowie, Parham never claimed to possess the
gifts of healing, though his wife Sarah believed he had been granted
them, at least for a time. 46
Ora Harris of Ottawa, Kansas, was a typical patient of Parham's.
She had suffered from consumption, stomach and bowel problems,
and poor eyesight for ten years, living off of a government invalid's
pension. Six doctors examined her in early 1898 and gave her two
45. Parham, Life of Parham, 31-33; Goff, Fields White, 38-39. Contemporary news accounts
suggest something of the stir caused by the outbreak of glossolala in 1901: "A Queer
Faith," TopeL Daily Capital 6 Jan. 1901, 2; "New Sect in Kansas Speaks with Strange
Tongues," St. Louis Post-Dispatch, 25 Jan. 1901; "Parham's New Religion Practiced at
'Stone's Folly/" Kansas City Times, 27 Jan. 1901; and "New Religion 'Discovered' at
'Stone's Folly' Near Topeka," TopeL Mail & Breeze, 22 Feb. 1901. "Stone's Folly" was
the local name given to the eclectic, unfinished mansion that housed Parham's school.
See John W. Ripley, "Erastus Stone's Dream CastleBirthplace of Pentecostalism,"
Shawnee County Historical Bulletin, June 1975, 42-53.
46. For Parham's healing theology and practices, see Parham, Life of Parham, 29-50;
Parham, Voice Crying, 39-52; Robert L. Parham, comp., Selected Sermons of the Late
Charles F. Parham, Sarah E. Parham: Co-Founders of the Original Apostolic Faith Movem
(Baxter Springs, Kans: Apostolic Faith Bible College, 1941), 23-50; "Healing," Apostolic
Faith (Melrose, Kans.), Aug. 1905,1-6; Charles F. Parham, Divine Health, tract (Baxter
Springs, Kans.: Apostolic Faith Paper, n.d.); and Goff, Fields White, 41-42. For healing
as an expression of sanctification, see Parham, Voice Crying, 50-52. The contemporary
description is from "Three Months of Religious Fervor," Joplin Daily News Herald (Mo.),
24 Jan. 1904,11. For Sarah Parham, see Parham, Life of Parham, 33.
757
weeks to live. Shortly thereafter, in a meeting in the old Salvation

Army Hall in Ottawa, Harris "knelt with assurance that I would be
every whit w h o l e . . . . When Brothers Parham and Duby said to me:
'Sister, receive thy healing in the name of J e s u s ' . . . [a] great tearingloose sensation passed through my chest, and lo! I was instantly
healed." Within days she was doing the family washing and scrubbing floors. She soon took up sewing for a living, gave up her pension,
and married, later raising several children. 47
When Parham attempted to spread the experience of speaking in
tongues in the two years following the Topeka outbreak, he met with
great frustration. In February 1901, Parham told his audience at the
Academy of Music in Kansas City, "Our religion is capable of demonstration and the people will be made to believe when the proper
time comes. We will convince people that God is a reality." The
proper time did not come, however, until Parham returned the focus
of his ministry from glossolalia to healing in the summer of 1903. He
then found an audience receptive to his message at El Dorado Springs,
Missouri, a health resort that drew sufferers from great distances
seeking a "water cure" for their ailments. Parham preached outdoors
at the entrance to the springs, drawing in hundreds on their way to
the waters. Fascinating to some and repulsive to others, glossolalia
did not attract the same crowds for Parham as did healing, perhaps
because of its lack of accessible verification. The healed body of a
long-standing invalid offered more powerful testimony to outsiders
than strange noises that received a favorable interpretation from an
insider. 48
A notable healing in El Dorado Springs was that of Mary A. Arthur,
a prominent citizen of Galena, Kansas, who had suffered for fourteen
years with dyspepsia, prolapsis, hemorrhoids, and "paralysis of the
bowels." Upon her return to Galena, where her poor health was
common knowledge, she invited Parham to hold meetings in town.
Three months into the engagement in the winter of 1903-4, a newspaper in nearby Joplin, Missouri, claimed that more than one thousand had been healed and eight hundred converted through the
47. Ora (Harris) Childers, "Consumption," Apostolic Faith (Topeka), 22 Mar. 1899, 5;
Parham, Life of Parham, 34. Parham published his periodical Apostolic Faith from several
different locations between 1899 and 1906; by May 1906, he had settled it in Baxter
Springs, Kansas.
48. "Story of His Beliefs," Kansas City Times, 4 Feb. 1901; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith,
52-53; Parham, Life of Parham, 87. "Was a Pentecost," Kansas City Journal, 22 Jan. 1901,
1, describes an unsuccessful meeting in Kansas City at which Parham focused on
glossolalia and seems not to have discussed healing.
75S
CHURCH HISTORY
ministry of "the Divine Healer/' with patients coming from a

hundred-mile radius around Galena.49
When Parham took the Apostolic Faith to Texas in 1905, healing
again proved central to its spread. His meetings in Houston generated
broad interest after the healing of Mrs. J. M. Dulaney, wife of a noted
local attorney. Dulaney had endured total paralysis of the left side of
her body and awful spasms since receiving an electric shock during a
streetcar accident in November 1902. She and her husband had incurred $2,300 in medical bills, only to have her pronounced incurable
and likely near death. The Dulaneys' lawsuit against the streetcar
company publicized her condition in Houston. Dulaney later recounted that, in response to prayer in May 1905, she had seen a vision
of a man whom she had never met and who would heal her. Three
months later she saw Parham preaching on a street corner. Recognizing him as the man in her vision, she and her husband attended his
meeting in Bryan Hall two nights later. After Parham and his workers
had been singing and praying for Dulaney for ten to fifteen minutes,
she heard a voice say, "Arise and go, my child." According to a local
paper, "Mrs. Dulaney arose from her chair and walked about the hall
in a state of ecstatic joy shouting, clapping her hands, and praising the
Lord for restoration. The incident created much excitement. Mrs.
Dulaney walked down the stairs from the hall and went home. She
has attended their meetings daily since, but not in the chair, and is still
rejoicing and praising God for her recovery."50
Several months after Dulaney's healing, Parham established a Bible
school in Houston. One of his students and converts to Pentecostalism
was the African-American holiness evangelist William Seymour, himself a practitioner of divine healing. In early 1906, Seymour received
an offer to help pastor a small holiness mission in Los Angeles. When
the leaders of the mission rejected his Parham-derived teaching on
tongues, Seymour held a series of meetings that led to the famous
49. Parham, Life of Parham, 88-89; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 53; "Three Months of
Religious Fervor/' 11. Directly below the Daily News Herald story, an advertisement
promised "No More Aches and Pains" to women suffering menstrual difficulties,
which can drive "women into the direst stages of nervous excitement." Mrs. Anna D.
Moore, Vice President of the United Daughters' Industrial Club in New Orleans,
testified that after only twenty-two bottles of Wine of Cardui her problems ceased.
50. Parham, Life of Parham, 113-15; Goff, Fields White, 96-97; Suburbanite (Houston Heights,
Tex.), 12 Aug. 1905, quoted in Goff, Fields White, 97. One of Parham's workers wrote to
her family in the days preceding Dulaney's healing: "Each week is better & better, but
the events of the last few days, simply beggar description
" Rilda Cole to "Dear
Ones," Houston, Tex., 1 Aug. 1905, Charles F. Parham Papers, AOG. W. W. Gray, "The
Houston Meeting," Apostolic Faith (Melrose, Kans.), Aug. 1905, 8-9, provides another
account of the Houston revival.
759
Azusa Street revival, begun in April 1906. Upon visiting Azusa

Street in October 1906, Parham pronounced the movement there
a "counterfeit Pentecost," filled with fanaticism, spiritualist and
hypnotic influences, and gibberish instead of known foreign lan
guages. 5 1 This rejection, combined with a 1907 arrest in San Antonio
on the charge of sodomy, greatly diminished Parham's influence in
the growing Pentecostal movement. 5 2
IV. THE FUNCTIONS OF DIVINE HEALING
The healing ministries of Woodworth-Etter, Dowie, and Parham

suggest that divine healing in incipient Pentecostalism functioned in
three primary ways. Most obviously, healing provided the tangible
benefit of renewed health. Second, divine healing was the principal
means healing evangelists used to fulfill Jesus' mandate in the Great
Commission (Matt. 28:18-20) to "make disciples," by attracting, con
verting, initiating, and assuring believers. Finally, healing authenti
cated and defined the ministries of the healers, and it augmented their
personal power.
The above testimonies and thousands more like them suggest that
many people found in healing ministries the physical restoration they
sought. Critics claimed that the healed suffered from psychosomatic
illnesses susceptible to various forms of suggestion, but many of the
healing claims do not yield easily to this explanation. Contemporary
51. Parham, Life of Parham, 163-64; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 61. Until his death in
1929, Parham maintained that true tongues speech was xenoglossolalic, or that it
reflected actual foreign languages unknown to the speaker. There is ample evidence to
suggest that Parham's negative reaction to Azusa was based in part on his antipathy
to racial mixing and equality. Goff, Fields White, 130-32. By contrast, a notable aspect
of Dowie's ministry was its interracial nature. Cook, Zion City, 91-97; and "God's
Witnesses to Divine Healing: Mrs. Emma Parker," Leaves of Healing, 27 Nov. 1896,
65-67. Woodworth-Etter's revivals were sometimes interracial. Willard . Gatewood
Jr., ed., Slave and Freeman: The Autobiography of George L. Knox (Lexington: University of
Kentucky Press, 1979), 126-27. For Seymour and Azusa, see Blumhofer, Restoring the
Faith, 56-62; and Anderson, Vision, 60-61, 65-74.
52. "Evangelist Is Arrested," San Antonio Light, 19 July 1907,1, reported that Parham was
arrested, along with a young man, for committing "an unnatural offense." See also
"Sensation at San Antonio," Houston Chronicle, 21 July 1907,14; and "Voliva Split Hits
Preacher," San Antonio Light, 24 July 1907, 2. Contemporaries and historians agree
about the sexual nature of Parham's act, but they disagree as to whether it was
sodomy, adultery, or masturbation. By far the most detailed account of the incident
is Goff, Fields White, 136-41, and esp. 222-28 nn. 31-53. See also Anderson, Vision,
272-73 n. 8; Blumhofer, Restoring the Faith, 68 n. 82. Parham argued that the charges,
for which he was never indicted because of lack of evidence, were false rumors
spread by enemies, including Wilbur G. Voliva, Dowie's successor in Zion City. Goff,
Fields White, 138-40, shows that Voliva capitalized on the chargesand seemingly
embellished themto discredit Parham. Parham's wife Sarah supported him through
the ordeal.
760
CHURCH HISTORY
and historical critics also have argued that many claims were exag
gerated and perhaps others fabricated, and that even those that
seemed genuine usually did not endure. While it is impossible to
evaluate the competing assertions with any degree of certainty, the
fact remains that large numbers of people experienced sufficient
physical changes for Woodworth-Etter, Parham, and especially Dowie
to develop mass followings.53
Incipient Pentecostal healers argued that a good and loving God
could not coexist with the enduring presence of sickness in Christians
and the sin that caused it. They focused heavily on the question of
God's will in sickness and healing because this was a central concern
of the ill Christians who came to see them. The vast majority of these
believers inherited a long tradition of theodicy that suggested that
God willed or permitted the sicknesses of those he loved for their
greater good, though his purposes might be unclear in the midst of
suffering. Sickness thus challenged and enlarged the faith of believers,
and it promoted humility, repentance, and perseverance. Whereas
Christians in this tradition took comfort in the belief that nothing
happened outside the direct or permissive will of God, who could
transform human evil into divine good, many of the patients who
sought divine healing had found this hope wanting. Instead, these
sufferers discovered solace in the belief that sickness was outside the
will of God, though remediable by him. They rejoiced with Ellen
Tanner, who was healed at Parham's Bethel Healing Home, that God
"was not dead or gone on a journey/' but that "His living presence
and power" was available to heal agonized bodies. 5 4
Like all those who are seriously sick, divine-healing patients sought
to imbue their illness experiences with meaning. But the incapacity of
traditional Christian theodicy to provide them with consolation and
peace portended the terror of meaningless suffering. Furthermore, as
regular medicine professionalized on the basis of its scientific creden
tials, its ability to offer patients meaningful narratives within which
they could situate their illness experiences diminished. Instead, it
53. James Monroe Buckley, Methodist editor of the Christian Advocate, was a prominent
critic. See, for example, Christian Advocate, 12 Feb. 1885,102; Christian Advocate, 12 Sept.
1889, 589; and J. M. Buckley, Faith-Healing, Christian Science and Kindred Phenomena
(New York: Century, 1892). Anderson, Vision, 93-94, cites evidence that casts doubt on
the claims of both healers and the healed. For studies of the still poorly understood
influence of the mind on the body, see Anne Harrington, ed., The Placebo Effect: An
Interdisciplinary Exploration (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997).
54. Woodworth-Etter, Life and Experience (1904), 215-16, 246; Dowie, " Will'; Apostolic
Faith (Topeka), 9 Aug. 1899, 2; Parham, Life of Parham, 43. Tyron L. Inbody, The
Transforming God: An Interpretation of Suffering and Evil (Louisville: Westminster John
Knox, 1997), 39-42.
761
resorted to the notion of chance, which failed to provide compelling

answers to the question of why one suffered. Alternative therapies
proliferated in the nineteenth century in part to fill this need. When
patients went to a Woodworth-Etter revival or to Dowie's Zion, they
learned that their sicknesses were part of a cosmic battle between the
forces of good and evil, and that God called them to enlist. God
desired his children to rebuke Satan and experience complete health,
the normative state for those who lived in faithful obedience to his
ways. The healing experience thus overturned the idea that God had
willed illness, which helps explain the powerful sense of liberation
and peace of mind that so often accompanied it.55
Before the sick could assign meaning to their illnesses, they needed
a language to express themselves. As Elaine Scarry has suggested,
chronic pain is intensely internal and non-communicable, lacking
concrete external referents. Persistent physical and mental suffering
renders patients inarticulate and even mute, cutting them off from
human community by limiting their capacity to extend beyond the
confines of the self. In his own way, Dowie understood this at some
level: "When you are sick you have no time for others, no matter how
much your heart desires it. Your body cries out and cries out, Help,
help! Some of the most unselfish people in the world have become the
most selfish people through sickness. When you are sick, you hate to
think as much of yourself as you are doing. You hate to be a trouble,
many of you who are sick, to others, but you cannot help it. You
cannot walk. You cannot even feed yourself sometimes, and you are
a trouble
Those who tell you that disease drives you closer to God,
makes you lose self, and all that kind of thing, say what is not true."
By supplying their patients with effectual language and meaning
based on supernatural causality, divine healers enabled them to objectify their experiences and reenter a larger relational world. It is not
surprising that the followers of divine healers saw them as parental
figures, given the primordial parental role in the transmission of
language and meaning. "Mother Etter" and "Daddy Parham" ordered
the lives of the helpless, while Dowie clearly served a paternal role as
well, one that increasingly merged human and divine traits. 56
55. Starr, Social Transformation of American Medicine, 79-144; Fuller, Alternative Medicine.
See Andrew Delbanco, The Death of Satan: How Americans Have Lost the Sense of Evil
(New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995), 125-53, for the "loss of providence" and
the growing reliance on the idea of chance to explain human affairs in the postbellum
era.
56. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1985); Dowie, "Story of the Leper," 18. Robert Orsi, Thank
You, St. Jude: Women's Devotion to the Patron Saint of Hopeless Causes (New Haven: Ya
762
CHURCH HISTORY
Once patients externalized their illnesses, they required a means to

overcome them. Divine healing provided empowerment to those who
had been helpless. They no longer had to accept their diseases as an
unavoidable part of living in a fallen natural order. Rather, they could
step forth in faith and grasp God's standing offer of perfect health.
Though divine healers stressed that it was God's power that healed,
their ministries made human agency central to the healing experience.
God's will in the matter was fixed; human will activated the experience and sustained it thereafter. This gave enormous power and
responsibility to individuals in the matter of their health. The harsh
side of this teachingthat the sick were to blame for their state,
whether through sins of commission or the sin of unbeliefafflicted
many and certainly compounded their sufferings, including Dowie at
the end of his life. But others, like Ora Harris, became "every whit
whole." Even those not cured of their physical infirmities often found
a measure of restoration through the meaning-making and empowering functions of divine healing. 57
Divine healing also functioned to "make disciples" through its
capacity to attract, convert, initiate and retain believers to the full
gospel of the healers. Woodworth-Etter saw healing as the best drawing card for the gospel: "If ministers could cast out devils today in the
name of Jesus, and lay hands on the sick and have them restored to
health, they would not preach to empty benches, nor mourn over the
dearth of revivals. On the contrary, every minister who could do that
would have crowded houses and a perpetual revival." Dowie agreed:
"When the gospel of Divine Healing comes back to the church in all
its glory and its power, multitudes will press into the temple of the
church of G o d . . . and they are doing it even now." Contemporary
accounts suggest that many participants at healing revivals came
because of their sensationalism. Whether to worship or mock, to
satisfy curiosity or be entertained, people came in droves. 58
University Press, 1996), 175-77, also draws upon Scarry's insights to interpret the
healings of twentieth-century American Catholic women who prayed to St. Jude. Feick,
comp., Life and Testimony, 67, 128, 129; Parham, Life of Parham, dedication page. Of
course, other religious leaders, including some who did not practice healing, received
affectionate parental titles. They also may have given life-altering language and
meaning to their followers in the manner suggested, though not necessarily through
healing.
57. For the centrality of human agency in Dowie's healing ministry, for instance, see John
Alexander Dowie, "'Christ's Methods of Healing/" 22; Dowie, "Knowing and Doing
God's Will," VFZ, Dec. 1900, 24, 27; and Dowie, "Story of the Leper," 14. Ora (Harris)
Childers, "Consumption," 5.
58. Woodworth-Etter, Life and Experience (1904), 251-52; Woodworth-Etter, Holy Ghost
Sermons, 63-64; Dowie "Divine Healing Vindicated," 26. Anderson, Vision, 93, cites
early Pentecostal healing's capacity to generate large crowds.
763
Once there, some found in healings a spur to conversion. Each of

the healers taught that divine healing was an atonement right that
only Christians could claim. Furthermore, all other forms of healing,
whether medical or religious, were satanic counterfeits meant to
discredit and lead people astray from the Great Physician. Thus, when
patients saw others freed from their bondage, they had an incentive to
turn to God, whether from unbelief or apostate Christianity. Divine
healers asserted that when people beheld the raw, supernatural
power of God to heal human bodies, this sign left them afraid,
humbled, and without excuse. At a 1903 revival in Moline, Illinois,
God healed a woman dying of cancer through the prayers of
Woodworth-Etter. "Shouts arose from the gallery and all over the hall.
Strong men wept, and men and women came and knelt at the altar
saying, believe there is a God; I want to be a Christian/" 5 9
Further, the experience of healing initiated many believers into the
world of incipient Pentecostals. For radical holiness healers like
Dowie, along with Woodworth-Etter and Parham before they became
Pentecostal, divine healing was the principal initiation rite into their
beliefs and practices. Though scholars of early Pentecostalism rightly
identify glossolalia as the primary means of initiation, Parham's ex
perience between 1901 and 1906 suggests that divine healing was
at least as significant in the fledgling days of the movement. 6 0
Glossolalia soon became the defining badge of the Pentecostal move
ment, that which distinguished its members from radical holiness
adherents who also practiced divine healing. Yet Mary A. Arthur,
Mrs. J. M. Dulaney, and many more like them came to Parham's
Apostolic Faith through healing, with glossolalia following thereafter.
Their experiences of healing legitimated the larger claims and prac
tices of Pentecostalism, including the supernatural tongues God gave
the faithful to facilitate the end-times spreading of the gospel through
out the world.
This initiatory function held special import for Dowie's Zion, given
the communal nature of the enterprise. The dozens of crutches, braces,
plaster casts, "instruments of surgical torture," and other medical
59. Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, 141. See also Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled
Sermons, 103-5,118; and Mary [sic] Woodworth-Etter, "When God Visits St. Louis/' in
Touched by Fire: Eyewitness Accounts of the Early Twentieth-Century Pentecostal Revival,
Wayne E. Warner (Plainfield, N.J.: Logos International, 1978), 55. While radical holi
ness and early Pentecostal adherents practiced faith healing and generally assumed its
absence implied a lack of spiritual growth, many did not denounce medicine and
doctors as fully as did Woodworth-Etter, Dowie, and Parham.
60. For glossolalia as early Pentecostalism's main initiation rite, see, for example, Wacker,
Heaven Below, 40-44.
764
CHURCH HISTORY
devices that hung from the walls of Dowie's tabernacles were trophies
"captured from the enemy." Along with the healed bodies of members, these devices physically symbolized initiation into Zion, even as
healing testimonials audibly did so. The vast majority of such testimonials paralleled evangelical conversion narratives. They told of
patients being lost in their sicknesses; the failure of worldly means to
produce wholeness; consequent hopelessness; and God's dramatic
intervention, resulting in triumphant, integrative healing. 61
Grant Wacker has suggested that healing in the Pentecostal tradition has functioned as a sacrament, a manifest means of grace that
provides assurance and bolsters personal faith. This insight helps
explain why, in addition to ongoing health problems, believers had
repeated experiences of healing. The healing narratives produced by
revivalists usually highlighted only the first or most dramatic instance
of recovery in the lives of patients, but evidence shows they prayed
frequently for restoration. Carrie Judd Montgomery, the Oakland
divine healer who embraced Pentecostalism in 1908, displays the
sacramental function of healing in a passage from her 1909 diary:
"Have had a very troublesome sore on my hand. Think I poisoned it
on a wire on my suit case, where the handle broke off. Once it seemed
to be causing blood poison, & I became very ill in the night, but Louise
& I had earnest prayer, & God delivered. Praise His Name! He is such
a wonderful Saviour." Two weeks later her hand still bothered her,
but she wrote, "The Lord answered prayer for my finger, which was
very sore. Praise His Name!" Additionally, divine healing contained a
confessional element. To the extent that healers identified personal sin
as a cause of sickness, they called for repentance prior to prayer for
healing. Parham taught that "unless there is sincere repentance, the
prayer of faith cannot prevail, for the healing will never take place
until the sin is forgiven." The healing experience thus cleansed the
believer and transmitted God's forgiveness.62
As healing functioned sacramentally, it helped identify the body as
a site of divine grace and power. Incipient Pentecostalism was charol. See the photos of medical devices in Dowie tabernacles in Leaves of Healing, 21 Dec.
1894,224 (where the quotations are located); and Leaves of Healing, 3 July 1897,568-69.
It was not uncommon for Dowie, when calling upon individuals for responses during
a sermon, to point out their former medical instruments. See 'Testimony of Mrs. Amos
Dresser, Jr./' Leaves of Healing, 6 Nov. 1896, 20, for the suggestion that Lily Ferry's
failure to publicly testify after her healing caused her to become ill again.
62. Wacker, "Pentecostal Tradition/' 532; Wacker, "Marching to Zion," 510. Carrie
Judd Montgomery, personal diary, 5 Aug. and 19 Aug. 1909, Papers of Carrie Judd
Montgomery and George S. Montgomery, AOG, box 17. See also Carrie Judd
Montgomery to "My darling Mother," 14 Jan. 1907,4,5, in Montgomery Papers, AOG,
box 17. Parham, Voice Crying, 40.
765
acterized in part by its tangibility and physicality. Various ecstatic

behaviors and manifestations located religious assurance in the physical expressions of the body. Woodworth-Etter's trances authenticated
the experience of the Holy Spirit's infilling power, while for Pentecostals speaking in tongues evidenced Spirit baptism. This partly
reflected a radical evangelical take on a broader Protestant focus on
the body as a site of moral and religious meaning around the turn of
the century. The cultural and religious fascination with athletics demonstrated this trend, as seen in the growth in YMCA gymnasiums in
North America. In 1869 the ministry dedicated its first gym. Around
one hundred existed by 1885, with all new YMCA buildings including
them. By 1912 there were 613. The journal Physical Culture, committed
to strengthening and beautifying the body and to the belief that (as its
masthead proclaimed) "weakness is a crime/ 7 printed a laudatory
article on Dowie in 1903in which the author proclaimed him "the
greatest leader and most remarkable reformer in a century"and a
sanitized version of his scurrilous sermon "Doctors, Drugs, and Devils" the following year. This turn to the moralized body challenged
Protestantism's traditional tendency to secularize the body through
the denial of post-apostolic miracles. Even more than others, incipient
Pentecostals resacralized the body and rejected secular authority over
it. Divine healing was the apex of this process, representing not only
bodily expressions but concrete physical changes. In urging healing upon inquirers, Dowie argued "THE TIME TO KNOW THE
REDEMPTION OF THE BODY IS NOW, the redemption not only of
the spirit, but the redemption of the body, so that the body might be
purified, and be the temple of the Holy Ghost; that God might use a
man's body just as much as use a man's words." Woodworth-Etter
added, "Our bodies are God's Power House, they are the channels for
the Holy Ghost to flow out of like rivers of living waters." 63
Finally, divine healing served the purposes of the healers themselves. First, it functioned as an experiential proof text for their larger
theological programs. It confirmed that each one was rightly restor-
63. For the Protestant focus on athletics and the body, see Tony Ladd and James A.
Mathisen, Muscular Christianity: Evangelical Protestants and the Development of America
Sport (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Baker Books, 1999), 22-68; and Richard C. Morse, History
of the North American Young Men's Christian Associations (New York: Association Press,
1919), 75-78,166,170-71. W. M. Hundley, "The Flag of the Salvation Army Eclipsed
by the Standard of Zion City/' Physical Culture, Apr. 1903, 271-74; 271; Dowie, "Doctors, Drugs and Devils: Or, the Foes of Christ the Healer," Physical Culture, Jan. 1904,
81-86. Though Dowie rejected worldly entertainments, Zion City developed sports
leagues under the direction of his son Gladstone. See Cook, Zion City, 136-38. Dowie,
"Reasonings for Inquirers," 17; Woodworth-Etter, Holy Ghost Sermons, 145. See also
Parham, Voice Crying, 50-52.
766
CHURCH HISTORY
ing apostolic Christianity in anticipation of the coming return of

Christ. Even as Jesus had authenticated his ministry with healings,
Woodworth-Etter, Dowie, and Parham believed God was authenticating theirs in the same way. Healings also verified the immanence of
God through the Holy Spirit and his awesome power to do what was
impossible in human and natural terms. Perhaps most important,
healing justified God's goodness amidst sickness and suffering. Satan
and sinful human actions bore responsibility for illness. God did
not. 64
The ways Dowie and Parham rejected the traditional Protestant
doctrine of the eternal punishment of the damned suggest the power
of this impulse to excuse God from responsibility for humanity's
suffering. Dowie fumed against "the Calvinist l i e . . . that God had
foreordained the damnation of the wicked and therefore had created
them Vessels of wrath 7 to be subjects for His vengeance, and made
them incapable of virtue or holiness." Just as people must have a
chance to repent while alive, he envisioned hell as a place where
people yet would have a chance to repent. "I believe that hell will be
cleaned out one day
That will be the end of death and hell, when
God shall burn up hell
I believe that the time is coming when
God's Kingdom shall be All and in All, and there shall be neither
death nor hell. That is a little distance off yet, and I am going to fight
on until that time. I am going to fight better after I am dead. After this
body is dead, I am prophetically exulting in the thought that the Lord
may permit me to do some fighting even in hell
1 have a great
desire to see hell destroyed. I would like to see sin and disease and
death destroyed. I believe I shall see them destroyed." Parham believed the "endless hell" of "orthodoxy," "wherein souls have been,
and are, in a horrible torture and torment" is "impossible, as well as
un-Scriptural." Instead, he preached that the damned are annihilated,
a doctrine he learned from his wife Sarah's Quaker grandfather. 65
64. Woodworth-Etter, Spirit Filled Sermons, 122, 132; Faupel, Everlasting Gospel, 116-35.
Grant Wacker, "The Holy Spirit and the Spirit of the Age in American Protestantism,
1880-1910," Journal of American History 72 (1985): 45-62, demonstrates the heightened
emphasis on the Holy Spirit across turn-of-the-century Protestantism. The healers'
stress on the immanence of God helps explain their antipathy for human and natural
means. Both Woodworth-Etter and Parham, for example, preached without notes
because they wanted to be open to the direct inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Warner,
Woman Evangelist, 261; Parham, Life of Parham, 18.
65. Dowie, "Satan the Dfiler," 23; Dowie, "Story of the Leper," 28; Charles F. Parham,
Everlasting Gospel ([ca. 1911]; reprinted in Sermons of Charles F. Parham), 51-52; Parham,
Life of Parham, 14. See also Sarah E. Parham, "Immortality," Selected Sermons, 93-115.
Woodworth-Etter taught the traditional understanding of hell. Woodworth-Etter,
Spirit Filled Sermons, 147-59. Dowie and Parham's views on hell and eternal suffering
were not typical of divine healers in incipient Pentecostalism. Nevertheless, they are
767
Divine healing also operated as a boundary-setting mechanism, a

means for separating the pure from the impure. The requirement that
those experiencing healing reject doctors and medicine most obviously established boundaries between the godly and the worldly.
Woodworth-Etter advised her revival participants to "just throw
physic to the dogs, and take the standard prescription which acts
with power and glory/' Though Dowie had his followers call him
"Doctor" until he assumed prophetic office, he unmercifully savaged
"clinical hellhounds," arguing they needed to have devils cast out of
them. Healers commonly employed the tactic of assembling writings
from doctors acknowledging the harmful nature of the medicines they
prescribed and the superiority of divine healing.66 In an age when
physicians7 growing (but still limited) diagnostic capabilities outstripped their therapeutic options, when morphine and other opiates
were prescribed without regulation, this critique resonated with audiences. Doctors gave as good as they got: Dowie claimed to have
been arrested almost one hundred times and to have spent portions of
126 days in jail or court in 1895 alone for violating an ordinance
passed by the Chicago Board of Health requiring establishments that
cared for the sick to be staffed by a licensed physician.67
Opposition to regular medicine reflected a larger pattern of renunciative behavior advocated by divine healers. They each prohibited
followers from using alcohol and tobaccoDowie added pork and
significant because they reflect the more extreme implications of their radical healing
teachings and practices.
66. See Dowie, "Spurious holiness," 23, where he defines sickness in terms of being
unclean and impure. Woodworth-Etter quoted in "Throw Physic to the Dogs," Daily
Illinois State Journal (Springfield), 28 July 1888; Dowie, "Zion's Protest Against Swine's
Flesh," 15; "Doctors and Medicine," Leaves of Healing, 21 Sept. 1894, 61; James B. Bell,
M.D., "Divine Healing From a Medical Standpoint," Apostolic Faith (Topeka), 30 Mar.
1899,1. John Alexander Dowie, "Doctors, Drugs, and Devils; or, the Foes of Christ the
Healer," VFZ, Oct. 1897,17, recounts a case where a young woman with "idiopathic
muscular atrophy" was paraded naked in front of fifty to sixty "wicked doctors."
Dowie had neither a medical degree nor a doctorate.
67. For nineteenth-century therapeutics, see John Harley Warner, The Therapeutic Perspective: Medical Practice, Knowledge, and Identity in America, 1820-1885 (Princeton, N.J:
Princeton University Press, 1997); and Charles E. Rosenberg, "The Therapeutic Revolution: Medicine, Meaning, and Social Change in Nineteenth-Century America," in The
Therapeutic Revolution: Essays in the Social History of American Medicine, eds. Morris J
Vogel and Rosenberg (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1979), 3-25.
Wacker, "Marching to Zion," 499-500, cites Dowie's claims regarding his legal battles;
the ordinance at issue was later overturned. "Divine Healer Tells Why Husband's Ills
Defy Her Treatment," Atlanta Journal, 13 Apr. 1914, 1, suggests Woodworth-Etter's
opposition to doctors may have mellowed over the years, though the case in question
was that of her husband. Like Dowie, Woodworth-Etter encountered legal troubles
because of her healing practices. See Wayne E. Warner, "1914: Pentecostal Evangelist
Arrested in Framingham Tent," Middlesex News (Framingham, Mass.), 18 Nov. 1989,
7A.
768
CHURCH HISTORY
shellfish to the listand from participating in dancing, card playing,

and other worldly entertainments. Churches that did not preach the
full gospel were also out of bounds. Parham claimed that "you
cannot expect God's blessed healing power to come into your life,
while you aid or abet in any way, such ministers, churches, or missions, who fight the full atonement for soul and body." In Oakland in
1889, a Unitarian pastor called on city authorities to shut down
Woodworth-Etter's revival; two years earlier she had been repudiated
by her own church; crowds pelted Parham with eggs in Houston in
1906; and in Gladwin, Michigan, three years later, as Parham told a
colleague, "Angry mobs lie in wait for us & no telling what the
outcome will be." Far from discouraging them, the opposition they
encountered was as useful as the opposition they fostered, for it
helped confirm their status as a righteous remnant despised by the
world but loved by God. 68
Even as divine healing relied on the power of God, it had the
capacity to increase the power of the healers themselves. All of them
were independent evangelists who depended on contributions for
their livelihood. None charged for healing, but they all accepted "free
will" donations. By all accounts, Woodworth-Etter and Parham did
not embrace the hard life of the sawdust trial for its limited remuneration. Neither of them developed an empire to govern; WoodworthEtter remained too wed to the road, and Parham's rejection of the Azusa
Street revival, his 1907 sexual scandal, and his anti-institutionalism
undermined his efforts to organize early Pentecostalism. Nevertheless, as God's agents of physical restoration, both received a public
platform and substantial influence in the lives of hurting believers.
Dowie, the archetypal empire-builder among healing evangelists, best
exemplifies the ways healing empowered the healers. He used his
ministry to promote personal devotion and obedience to himself and
to support his claims to divinely imbued authority. For example, just
after Dowie declared himself to be the Messenger of God's Covenant
in March 1899, he asked his audience whether his ministry was from
heaven or man. Receiving the right answer, he then asked those who
68. For examples of behavioral renunciation, see John Alexander Dowie, "Tobacco: Satan's
Consuming Fire, and Its Allies," VFZ, July 1898,1-22; Dowie, "Zion's Protest Against
Swine's Flesh"; Woodworth-Etter, Signs and Wonders, passim; Parham, Life of Parham,
passim; Parham, Voice Crying, 50. HaUeck Floyd, "Mrs. Woodworth's Work," Christian
Conservator, 15 July 1886, 2, points to the "anti-church spirit" that prevailed in her
revivals. Charles W. Wendte, "A Timely Call"; "Repudiated by Her Church," Manon
Chronicle (Indiana), 25 Nov. 1887,1; "Parhamites Were Disturbed," Houston Chronicle,
5 Oct. 1906, 8; Parham to "Bro. C" [J. G. Campbell], Gladwin, Michigan, 10 Sept. 1909,
Parham Papers, AOG.
769
had been healed through him to stand; their restored bodies legitimated his assumption of prophetic office.69
Though Dowie attributed cures to God, he used his healing gifts to
manipulate his followers. As the mediator between God's healing
force and sufferers, he held the implied power of life and death over
them. He threatened to withhold his healing hand if they did not
obey him:
There are some of you here this afternoon, for healing, because you
hear God has used me to multitudes of people. When I have prayed
with you, and after you have received healing, you intend to go right
back to the Methodists or Baptists, or some other dead denomination. You do not intend to stand by God's servant, and God's
work
"Oh God Almighty, disappoint every selfish wretch who
has entered this building today
They think they can get their
healing and go on their way and do just as they like." . . . I am
through praying for people who are going to do as they like. They
are abominable nuisances
If I am God's minister, am I not God's
representative?70
In 1902 Dowie's daughter Esther, a student at the University of
Chicago, suffered fatal third-degree burns after an alcohol lamp exploded while she was using it to heat her curling iron. Dowie told the
large crowd at her funeral in Zion City that Esther's dying words had
been to ask his forgiveness for using alcohol. He then drew the lesson
from her death that this one act of disobedience to God had led to
Satan striking her down. As ruling theocrat, Dowie exercised complete control over Zion City, a trust he abused in maintaining a
luxurious lifestyle as the city failed financially. Dowie's megalomania
seemed to grow with each passing year. Eventually, God appeared to
be serving him: "I am thankful most of all for the confidence which
God has shown in me/' By the time of his stroke in 1905, Dowie's
theocratic utopia had turned dystopian. His Methodist critic James M.
Buckley asserted, "Reason must first be paralyzed, faith drugged, and
this done, it would still seem too large and abnormal a conception for
open-mouthed credulity to believe that the Christ of the New Testament should choose the evolver and center of such a flamboyant
69. Woodworth-Etter charged a nominal fee for entry to some of her early camp-meeting
revivals. Forney, History of the Churches of God, 209. Gatewood, ed., Slave and Freeman,
126-27, suggests financial gain motivated at least some of Woodworth-Etter decisions
about where to preach. Even after Woodworth-Etter established her tabernacle, she
could not resist itinerating. Her last tour was in 1922, when she was nearing eighty
years of age. Warner, Woman Evangelist, 270-81. Goff, Fields White, 147-59, examines
Parham's diminishing influence in early Pentecostalism. Cook, Zion City, 56.
70. Dowie, "Story of the Leper," 21.
770
CHURCH HISTORY
mixture of flesh and spirit to be the Restorer and his special forerunner. If Dowie believes it, he is in the moonlit borderland of
insanity." 71 Buckley, however, had not been healed by Dowie.
While many found in divine healing a source of empowerment and
liberation from their sufferings, in the face of death the older tradition
of theodicy appeared to have enduring wisdom. Divine healers engaged in "death redefinition," viewing it as simply falling asleep, as
Dowie taught, or as a transition to a higher state. When critics asked
why Christians who had received divine healing died, healers had
recourse to God's sovereign will, saying the Lord had an appointed
time for each person to go and the healed could expect to die in
complete health. And when Parham's one-year old son died in March
1901, some of his students said, "Come let us all pray, God can raise
the dead. Surely He will bring him back to life." Years later Sarah
Parham recalled: "But as I looked at his little face so pure and
innocent, I felt it would be a selfish prayer to try to call him back to a
woild of sin and sorrow. As God had seen best to take him, we must
learn to say, 'Thy will be done/" 7 2
The multiple functions of divine healing suggest its centrality to
incipient Pentecostalism. As the ministries of Woodworth-Etter,
Dowie, and Parham demonstrate, healing formed a major line of
continuity between the radical wing of the holiness movement and
early Pentecostalism. Yet unlike restorationism and premillennialism,
which also linked radical holiness and Pentecostal expressions,
healing reflected the experiential and tangible essence of incipient
Pentecostalism.
Incipient Pentecostal healers offered their followers a realized
eschatology. They believed the benefits of heaven were available to
those who exercised faith, perhaps not in full but in large measure.
"We have found Him," Parham proclaimed, "the healer of all our
diseases. He takes out sickness, misery, woe, suffering and all these
things and brings to us life, health, peace and happiness." Just as
holiness sanctification offered the promise of a perfect walk with
Christ, divine healing secured perfect health. Amid their strident
denunciations of opponents and grim prophecies of approaching
doom for a lost world, incipient Pentecostal healers expressed striking
71. Cook, Zion City, 120-21; Wacker, "Marching to Zion," 506; Dowie, "Faith the Mightiest
Power/' 24; James M. Buckley, "Dowie, Analyzed and Classified," Century Magazine,
Oct. 1902, 930.
72. Wacker, "The Pentecostal Tradition," 529, uses the term "death redefinition"; Dowie,
"Jesus the Healer," 13; Dowie, "T Will/" 30-31; Parham, Life of Parham, 77. WoodworthEtter also referred to God's sovereign purposes in explaining her husband's continuing
sickness. "Husband's Ills," 1.
771
optimism about their own potentialities. As their focus on the body

suggests, they were not quite as otherworldly as some critics have
claimed. They believed in a "present Savior" who offered a "full
gospel," and they attacked those Christians who spoke of the intractable nature of sin and pain and claimed that true wholeness would be
found only in heaven. To incipient Pentecostals, the thousands of
healed bodies and restored lives among their followers suggested
otherwise. 73
73. Parham, "We Have Found Him," in Selected Sermons, 3; Parham, Voice Crying, 71.
Dowie, "Do You Know God's Way of Healing?" 7. Anderson, Vision, stresses the
otherworldly and regressive character of Pentecostalism. Wacker, Heaven Below, persuasively counters Anderson's argument by recognizing its worldly shrewdness.
^ s
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Redeemed Bodies: The Functions of Divine

Healing in Incipient Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism originated in the body as much as the spirit. The

Jonathan R. Baer is a doctoral candidate in American religious history in the

of figures like Charles Cullis, A. B. Simpson, and Martin Wells Knapp,

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

experience following conversion, caused by the direct action of the

All this occurred in the context of a crowded and complex medical

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

vidual responses. Some two decades after her tombstone settled,

Woodworth-Etter (1844-1924), Dowie (1847-1907), and Parham

understand how God could will the death of a child or a disabling

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

through her evangelistic and healing ministry. She later interpreted

Indianapolis, building an eponymous tabernacle, which she ran until

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

anywhere from several hundred to twenty thousand or more people

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

Newspaper reports of a Woodworth-Etter camp meeting revival

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

the United States prior to Aimee Semple McPherson. As it did for

Born in Edinburgh, Scotland, in May 1847, John Alexander Dowie

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

In 1888 Dowie traveled to the United States to establish satellites of

In his prime Dowie packed auditoriums in Chicago, New York, and

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

Divine healing supplied the foundation for Dowie's restorationism.

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

Charles F. Parham was the theological founder of Pentecostalism,

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

supervised his light household chores. Her death in 1885 was a

Parham's healing ministry played a vital role in his efforts to spread

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

weeks to live. Shortly thereafter, in a meeting in the old Salvation

ministry of "the Divine Healer/' with patients coming from a

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

Azusa Street revival, begun in April 1906. Upon visiting Azusa

The healing ministries of Woodworth-Etter, Dowie, and Parham

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

resorted to the notion of chance, which failed to provide compelling

Once patients externalized their illnesses, they required a means to

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

Once there, some found in healings a spur to conversion. Each of

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

acterized in part by its tangibility and physicality. Various ecstatic

ing apostolic Christianity in anticipation of the coming return of

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

Divine healing also operated as a boundary-setting mechanism, a

shellfish to the listand from participating in dancing, card playing,

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

DIVINE HEALING IN INCIPIENT PENTECOSTALISM

optimism about their own potentialities. As their focus on the body

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