Journal
Faith Healing
24 May 2006 › 8 comments
Well, this semester is finally over, leaving me with six total classes left before I graduate. This time around, I only took two classes, not wanting to overly exert myself by doing a full-time schedule of three classes, on top of a job and freelance work. One of the classes, Worship 510 was pretty grueling to get through. I probably wouldn’t have enrolled in it, had it been more aptly titled Obscure Litergical Trivia 510. We argued the minutia of different denominational views on various sacraments, and I was generally bored.
However, the other class was very cool: Pastoral Counseling 510 with Dr. Tony Headley, who is an awesome teacher and author. We used one of his books for the class, and I must say it was one of the better ones I’ve ever read. It focused on setting up boundaries, learning when to say no, and in general sorting out your priorities and making time for them. The book is entitled Achieving Balance in Ministry, and is an easy read at only 88 pages long. Don’t scoff at the brevity. It is concise and poignant. I would highly recommend it for anyone in ministry or those with workaholic tendencies.
Anyway, to get the point of this post, I wrote a research paper entitled Faith Healing Fallout. It pertains to counseling in cross cultural situations where people have been burned by “name it and claim it” promises of riches or physical relief. When initially doing research, I figured there would be hard evidence that faith healing works. What I found however, was a string of cases gone awry, and a solid Harvard study in which those prayed for actually fared worse in their recovery time from heart surgery.
Now, do I still believe that God has the power to heal? Absolutely. However, what I have started to wonder is: Does God really want to be scrutinized and quantified by our human efforts? Conducting scientific studies on prayer and healing presupposes the Lord’s willingness to play along. Suffice it to say, God is not a vending machine. Even those with great faith still die physical deaths. I won’t reiterate the whole paper now, since you can go read it for yourself:
Faith Healing Fallout (Flashpaper, 104 kb)
It is in SWF format for consistency. I opted to do this because many of my seminary papers contain Greek and Hebrew fonts, which cannot be embedded into PDF, but can be converted just fine into vector graphics for Flashpaper. I realize this is not super accessible, so if anyone wants my papers as plaintext, PDF or Microsoft Word just let me know and I will email you a copy.
Discussion + Dissension
Comments closed after 2 weeks.
#1 Nathan Logan
Congrats on enduring the semester! Great job on getting a lot of work done.
The book and your paper both sound interesting – I’ll have to catch them soon.
#2 Nathan Smith
Nate: I’ll let you borrow the book if you want, no problemo. I’ll give you a call to try to see when you can hang out. Hopefully we can collaborate on some stuff this summer, now that the semester is through.
#3 David Barrett
Nice one. You graduating in 2006?
Have you tried printing from the Flashpaper to a PDF? That might circumvent the Greek and Hebrew font problem (which is a pretty lame problem, you’d think they would have sorted that out).
#4 Chris Harrison
I definitely like your use of FlashPaper. Flash is the reason Adobe bought Macromedia, imho. Acrobat is way too bloated. When Flash introduced the FlashPaper format, it introduced an immediate way to view documents on about 95% of computer out there, without requiring a huge app. Adobe Acrobat Reader comes in at 20.3Mb without the add-ons. FlashPlayer is generally less than 1Mb to install, I believe…
Anyways… sorry to go off on a tangent there …
#5 Nathan Smith
Chris: That is one of the reasons I chose to use Flashpaper, because of the wide base of people that already have Flash player installed. That, coupled with the way it gets around font embedding by simply making them vectors, sold me on it. So, don’t worry about going off on a tangent.
David: Actually, I will be graduating sometime in 2007. I am taking the summer off to focus on other projects. Plus, there isn’t much offered online that I need to take, except for during normal semesters.
#6 matthew
Nathan,
congrats. per the prayer bit: I wonder often if we have totally overlooked the fruit of God not just “allowing”, but intending suffering in our lives (given the nature of the fall), as a way of teaching us, reminding us, of our need for him. Not unlike how God “provided” the worm to eat the vine for Jonah as he stood before the ninivites. I know the hardest times in life for me have brought much faith. Just thinking out loud. :)
#7 Ryan
Regarding your statement, “Does God really want to be scrutinized and quantified by our human efforts?”
What is the objection to the scientific examination of prayer and/or God? Science is simply one method, one perspective of attempting to understand God.
I imagine the only true objection would be believers believe God cannot rationally or logically be understood; that people must create their relationship with God through faith alone.
Nevertheless, scientific research may offer mild support or refutation regarding the existence of God; however, to say God may have preferences for or against such research, seems quite unlikely.
#8 Nathan Smith
Ryan: If you read through the paper, I reference a few verses which talk about not putting God to the test needlessly. Think of it this way – God is real and living, not the “Force” like in Star Wars movies, some nebulous power to be tapped into. Would you want to be studied just for the sake of seeing your reactions to various scenarios? Would any living thing really want that?
I appreciate you raising the counter-argument, and believe it to be a valid one. However, I feel that it doesn’t really encompass the aspects of God that cover a certain measure of personality. Obviously, as the Creator, he would have to be somwhat muti-faceted, to have created all of us. When we think of God only as some cosmic power, we do an injustice by compartmentalizing him as an impersonal concept, rather than living and loving.