Healing the Imago Dei: A Wesleyan Perspective [Firebrand Big Read]
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The twentieth-century Church, with the rise and explosive growth of the Pentecostal/Charismatic movement, has seen a renewed interest in healing. This has not been limited to churches in the Pentecostal or charismatic traditions; with the Charismatic movement that began in the 1960s, an emphasis on healing spread into mainline Protestant and Roman Catholic churches. Healing prayer, healing services and liturgies, healing seminars and trainings—all of these are common in numerous Christian traditions today. While the Church had never completely lost an understanding and practice of healing, the previous century saw an unprecedented and widespread recovery of healing in the church which continues to the present day.
This renewed emphasis concerning healing across Christian traditions has led to theological disagreement on its nature and practice. The liberal theological tradition contains segments that doubt or even deny miraculous healing, in biblical times or today. Others who hold to cessationism may posit that God did heal supernaturally in biblical times, but the exercise of such a gift is not for believers today. Still others within the Pentecostal/Charismatic tradition have advocated a theology of healing that is doctrinally aberrant. There is a need for a balanced treatment of healing, one that is informed by solid biblical teaching and faithful practice.
This article will argue that a Christian understanding of healing should take an integrative approach: it should not separate the physical and inner person but should instead develop a theology and practice that seeks to bring healing to the entire person, looking to the gracious activity of the Holy Spirit within the life of the believer and the church. John Wesley’s teaching on the imago Dei offers both sound theology and a holistic practice regarding healing. Specific attention will be given to how healing is understood within the key Wesleyan theme of the image of God and how God’s grace, conveyed by the person and work of the Holy Spirit, restores this image to its intended nature and expression. Wesley advanced the notion that God’s grace restores the marred image of God in the individual. The resulting restoration has significant relational effects; restoration of relationship to self, others, and God is the result of healing. This article will also give attention to how the Holy Spirit, both individually and within the community of believers, applies the healing balm of grace so that believers may reflect God in all his goodness.
What Needs Healing and Why?
In his sermon “The New Birth,” John Wesley spoke of three aspects of the image of God: the natural, the political, and the moral. For Wesley, the natural image centered on the affections and the living of humanity, the political image concerned itself with the humanity’s dominion over creation as elucidated in Genesis 1:26-28, and the moral image dealt with those divine attributes bestowed upon humanity, such as love, justice, holiness, and righteousness. While it would be improper to separate these aspects completely one from the other, it is clear from this sermon that Wesley understood the moral image as being what truly constituted humanity being in the image of God:
“And God,” the three-one God, “said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him”…chiefly in his moral image, which, according to the Apostle, is “righteousness and true holiness.” In this image of God was man made. “God is love”: accordingly man at his creation was full of love, which was the sole principle of all his tempers, thoughts, words, and actions. God is full of justice, mercy, and truth: so was man as he came from the hands of the Creator. God is spotless purity: and so man was in the beginning pure from every simple blot. Otherwise God could not have pronounced him as well as all the other works of his hands, “very good” (Outler & Heitzenrater, John Wesley’s Sermons, 336).
John Wesley viewed the moral image as foundational to understanding both humanity and the image of the God in which they were created, and to understanding the natural and political image. Scott Jones makes this observation:
For Wesley, the most important way in which creation in the image of God should be understood concerns the moral image…in short, the doctrines of sanctification, Christian perfection, personal holiness, and social justice all have to do with the renewal of this moral image of God…Creation is by God, and human beings are created in God’s image, especially like God’s reigning attribute, love (Jones, United Methodist Doctrine, 148).
Numerous Christian beliefs hinge upon the doctrine of the image of God. Love, which Jones refers to as “God’s reigning attribute,” is at the core of the moral image of God. A restoration of this image, with all the passions, emotions, desires, and inner lives of humanity, is dependent on grace. It is God’s grace alone that restores and makes new. According to Wesley, this image is still marred by sin and unrestored until “the bent of our nature is changed, that is, till we are born again.” It is this ultimate act of grace – the gift of new life – that restores the image of God.
The grace of God is of primary concern in Wesleyan theology; it undergirds the entire theological enterprise. God’s grace, while not dependent upon nor defined by human response, works in concert with human will. In other words, it is not grace itself but the effects of grace that are accomplished by humanity’s cooperation with God’s initiative. Wesley’s understanding of the effectual outworking of grace was shaped to some degree by the Eastern Church Fathers, from which he gained a therapeutic understanding of the restoration of the image of God. The Fall affected the pursuit and flourishing of this image, but through prevenient grace, individuals are able to respond to and receive God’s gracious offer of restoration in Christ. Along with the Eastern Church, Wesley spent significant time focusing on a third human condition, after the first (pre-Fall) and second (post-Fall): the grace-filled restoration of humanity to reflect God’s nature and attributes.
Francis MacNutt writes that restoration of the whole person was, in fact, the mission of Jesus himself:
The time of the Messiah would be a time of healing, of liberation, of salvation. Because the Hebrews did not think of human beings as divided into body and soul, but as whole persons, when they spoke of salvation they thought not only of saving but of healing persons. And our person includes our body, our feelings, and our spirits…the healing acts of Jesus were themselves the message that he had come to set us free; they were not just to prove that his message was true. In a very basic sense, his medium was his message. The sign of salvation was that people were actually being saved, restored to all that they had lost (MacNutt, Healing, 41-42).
This point is made evident in Luke chapter 4, where Jesus’ holistic message of salvation is revealed, showing that the restoration of the image of God in the individual encompasses the entire human condition. When Jesus reads from Isaiah in the temple, he proclaimed that “the Spirit of the Lord is on me because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” Jesus’ salvific message, therefore, was to redeem and restore all that had become marred, bound, and held captive. His mission is to bring freedom to the whole person – body, soul, and spirit. Restoring the image of God within the individual was not to prove his message; it was his message.
This proper condition, the one in which humanity was created and the condition to which humanity may be restored through grace, is expressed relationally. Wesley understood God to be a relational God, and that the restoration of the image of God is seen most clearly where there are proper relational qualities between God, humanity, and creation. It is a return to the right condition that constitutes a restored image, and these relational aspects become the “fruits” that speak to the reality of the restored image. Randy Maddox is helpful here:
The proper relationship to God is knowing, loving, obeying, and enjoying God eternally (i.e. participation). The proper relationship to other humans is loving service. The proper relationship to all other animals is loving protection. When each of these relationships are properly expressed, we will also have a proper relationship to ourselves of self-acceptance (Maddox, Responsible Grace, 68).
Wesley adopted a comprehensive approach to healing, all of it being a gift of grace regardless of whether it was accomplished through natural means, such as medicine or diet (see Primitive Physick), or the supernatural result of fervent prayer and laying on of hands. Wesley perceived God’s gracious healing as part of the larger project of God’s grace in the present age, which is always to redeem and restore humanity after the image of its Creator.
The Role of the Holy Spirit in Healing
What is the role of the Holy Spirit in healing? While this must necessarily be a very brief overview, this cursory treatment is vital to a doctrinally sound theology of healing. This section will set forth three premises: 1) the Holy Spirit makes possible for each believer to minister healing through his gracious gifting; 2) the Holy Spirit builds the church, the impetus for greater unity, and spurs it forward in its mission (of which healing has been shown to be an integral part), and 3) the biblical model is that healing should be nurtured within the believing community for the exaltation of Christ, to whom the Holy Spirit always testifies.
Jesus’ purpose in calling believers together into the church and under his lordship is so they would represent him in faithful proclamation of the Good News, accompanied by signs and wonders (see the book of Acts). Jesus himself modeled for believers the way the church should live out the gospel message. Numerous biblical texts attest to this. Perhaps one of the most pertinent is John 14:12: “whoever believes in me will do the works I have been doing, and they will do even greater things than these, because I am going to the Father.” For Christians, doing the things Jesus did is a normative part of the believer’s life.
Two key points emerge from this verse. First, the healing ministry was an integral part of Jesus’ ministry, and in this verse, Jesus makes it implicit that it is to be a part of his followers’ ministry. Secondly, when this verse is taken in context with the rest of the farewell discourse and the book of Acts, Scripture teaches that it is the Holy Spirit who works healing through believers. It is through Jesus’ return to the Father that the promise of the Spirit is realized. When believers minister healing through the power of the Holy Spirit, the church is living into its mission: to represent Jesus to the world. Another inference from John 14:12 is that participating in the healing ministry is available to everyday believers; it is not something reserved for the ordained or someone with a particular degree of spiritual maturity. The priesthood of all believers, a tenet that has defined Protestantism since its inception, greatly affected the Methodist movement and its subsequent streams (the Holiness movement, Pentecostalism, various charismatic expressions) that have placed a heavy emphasis upon the ministry of the laity. Everyday laity can minister healing.
The pattern set forth in Acts 2 – the people of God, living in unity and operating in the power of the Holy Spirit – allows the church to have an impact on the wider world. In this context, healing can serve both to minister within the church among its members and as a tool for mission, bringing people into the body of Christ through an encounter with God’s grace. In this way, the body of Christ is built up through the empowering activity of the Holy Spirit.
It is through the gathered church that the Holy Spirit activates and mediates gifts of healing. 1 Corinthians 12 clearly teaches that healing is to operate within the community and in cooperation with other spiritual gifts. Christians receive various gifts of the Spirit for different functions in the community to edify and build it up. There is a deleterious effect upon the body of Christ and the wider world if the gift of healing is not nurtured and practiced among all the gifts in the church. The other gifts, and the ability of the entire body to function the way it was intended, suffers when any gift is denied or neglected. All gifts have their proper and essential place in the full functioning of the body of Christ. Even if one gift, one member, is missing or not functioning, the body is sorely handicapped (see 1 Corinthians 12). Just as none of the gifts are meant to operate independently of one another, so individuals are meant to exercise these gifts within the body of Christ where he is exalted and represented in the world. This becomes the setting for healing ministry.
Conclusion
This article has attempted to examine how the gift of healing can rehabilitate the imago Dei within the individual, and how the gracious activity of the Holy Spirit enables this work. For John Wesley, the restoration of the image of God was at the core of his via salutis (the way of salvation), which explicated God’s preventing grace in drawing people to himself, convicting grace in exposing the reality of sin, justifying grace in saving them, and sanctifying grace in making them holy. A reading of Wesley indicates that he understood healing as an integral and necessary part of the entire restorative project; healing had a place in his via salutis. These movements of God’s grace redeem, restore, and renew humanity.
The Holy Spirit mediates the benefit of Christ’s work on the cross, the work through which God’s healing grace is made available to humanity. The Holy Spirit is also the one who bestows this healing gift and works within the church to glorify Christ and to build up the body in its ministry and witness to the world. All of this – the work of the Holy Spirit in the church to heal and restore – is a gift of grace. We Wesleyan believers need a robust and clear understanding of God’s grace in restoring the image of God within the individual, the person and work of the Holy Spirit in restoring this image, and how the gift of healing functions within the church to restore and make new. When these come into focus, believers can lovingly minister healing in Jesus’ name.
Evan Rohrs-Dodge is senior pastor of St. Paul’s UMC in Brick, NJ, adjunct instructor at United Theological Seminary, and a member of the Firebrand Editorial Lead Team.