Christoffer Grundmann

Abstract From time immemorial to the present, numerous people all over the world have perceived hearings as the victory of a mighty power over inferior, life-threatening evil spirits, demons and bewitchment. The conviction once cherished by proponents of Western civilization that, in the course of time, such beliefs would vanish in proportion to the growth of rational enlightenment proved false. However, since the subject of spirit-worlds has hardly ever been seriously addressed before in modern times, let alone by missiology, a vacuum has been left which is prone to be filled by whatever anyone pleases. Today, pneumatology and demonology remain missiological liabilities that, when seriously addressed, may eventually necessitate a complete re-evaluation of missions in the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The following article is an attempt to address this lacuna by focusing on the phenomenon of healing, and discussing it from a perspective within the Christian tradition. For the sake of establishing common ground for dialogue across dividing denominational and theological lines, the article draws heavily on biblical references, especially from the New Testament. It opens with principle considerations regarding the church, the Holy Spirit, and healing, while the second part reflects on missiological implications that result from any serious recognition of spirit-worlds, and then applies these to healing in an attempt to identify to what extent healing bears legitimate witness to the Holy Spirit. It turns out in the end that inviting the Spirit to fight the spirits so that healing happens is not the proper question to ask because the Holy Spirit can never be turned into an instrument; if it is so turned, then it is not the Holy Spirit. Instead, the proper question to ask is, 'How can we bear witness to the Holy Spirit in such a way that healing really does come about?' This turns the question back to those who pose it. Introduction The theme of the 2004 IAMS General Conference, "Integrity of Mission in Light of the Gospel: Bearing the Witness of the Spirit", is a stimulus for in-depth exploration of the question, 'How far and to what extent are or can healings bear a genuine witness to the Spirit--the Holy Spirit, to be precise?' From time immemorial up to the present, numerous people the world over have perceived healings as the victory of a mighty power over inferior life-threatening evil spirits, demons and bewitchment. The conviction once cherished by proponents of Western civilization that, in the course of time, such readings will vanish in proportion to the growth of rational enlightenment (1) proved false. Nowadays, spirit-talk has come vividly to the fore again, not only in Asia, Latin America and Africa (2), but also in Europe and North America, as the fascination with The Lord of the Rings and the Harry Potter stories clearly shows. (3) However, issues of spirit-worlds were hardly ever seriously addressed before in modern times by anyone, let alone by missiology. This left a vacuum prone to be filled by whatever anyone pleased. Though missionaries always recognized the pivotal religious importance of spirits in the respective cultures in which they were working, they generally tended to view such spirits negatively and opposed them outright. This attitude became noticeably strong in the age of rationalism, as can be seen for instance in the report by Carl Edelmann from the Berlin Mission Society. In 1864, Edelmann commented on his work among the Pedi in Transvaal: "Their religion is the religion of the devil, their priests are sorcerers ... sorcery and superstition associated with it is the main bulwark of Satan which we campaign against here. " (4) Edelmann was not alone in his opinion. His pointed remarks represent an attitude common to the majority of 19th-century missionaries, especially Protestants, as any study of their writings quickly discloses. Yet, while fighting the belief in spirits was one of their main challenges, missionaries lacked a sound and proper theological rationale. …

The formation of the Hermannsburg Mission in 1849 by Pastor Ludwig Harms (1808–1865) represents the beginning of a vibrant mission initiative that became one of the largest within German Protestantism. It also set the stage for a particular perception of missionary service and practice, a perception still worth serious consideration today. The article, first of all, familiarizes the reader with the person of Ludwig Harms, then it presents his missionary principles, and finally, it offers a critical evaluation of his legacy that can be summarized as follows: If you want to win the world for Christ, start living a Christian life at home.

Abstract This solicited article reflects on two major ecumenical events marking the first steps of Christianity into its third millennium. The first is the CWME Conference held at Athens, May 9-16, 2005, the second is the ninth Assembly of the WCC at Porto Alegre, Brazil, February 14-23, 2006. The introduction begins with the symbol-laden opening ceremony of the Athens Conference where a huge cross shipped from Jerusalem was received, a cross, which also will be referred to in Porto Alegre. This provided a telling image about Christianity along its way from local to global significance. The article first reviews the Athens conference in light of ecumenical innovations. These include the genuine embrace of a larger ecumenical community than just the WCC membership and an appeal to the basic commonalities of Christian life beyond dogmatic constraints by turning to Bible-study and prayer. The same perspective also informs the second part of the article, which looks at the forthcoming Assembly and points to some significant changes such as giving up the majority vote in favor of a "consensus model" and embedding the discussion of hot topics within the larger framework of "ecumenical conversations". While these changes reflect an ecumenical maturity they are also bold and risky steps, which deserve to be regarded with appreciation and care. They are held to be expressions of a new spirit, bringing the church more truly in line with the kenotic love of God in Christ, something regarded us most telling about Christianity's self-perception upon entering its third millennium. Introduction The symbolism could hardly have been more powerful on the morning of Tuesday, 10 May 2005. The place is the tiny harbour of Aghios Andreas, thirty kilometres northeast of Athens, Greece. It is crowded with people from around the world, official statistics speak of more than 600 coming from 105 nations and representing not less than 300 different churches, denominations, Christian organizations and networks. The occasion is the opening ceremony of the Conference on World Mission and Evangelism, also counted as the thirteenth world mission conference. While a small choir of priests and seminarians chant Greek Orthodox hymns a mid-sized fishing boat appears, slowly approaching the pier where it delivers a huge cross pieced together by numerous bits of olive wood. Carefully the cross is unloaded and carried in a procession to the makeshift worship space--a tent put up on this site for use during the conference. It is placed at the tent's main entrance to remind all present of the desperate need for reconciliation. But how? What's so special about it? Well, this cross serves as a reminder of the pivotal reconciliation of humankind to God in Christ. Crafted by Palestinian artisans from the wood of trees chopped clown by order of the Israeli government to make room for the so-called security wall being erected to brutally divide Palestinian and Israeli peoples, this cross was sent as a greeting by Palestinian Christians to the conference and shipped from Jerusalem to Athens to alert participants to their persistent striving for reconciliation in the Middle East. Yet, the symbolism of the ceremony was not exhausted by this fact. The action also recalled the way along which the gospel once came from Jerusalem to Athens, then the center of Hellenistic philosophy. It was in Athens, that Paul preached a famous sermon on the Areopagos, which turned into something of a failure (Acts 17:16-34) foreshadowing the marginalization of the Christian faith by affluent and sophisticated societies. Beyond that it recalled the question posed by the North African church father Tertullian (~150-223/35 CE) at the beginning of the third century: "What indeed has Athens to do with Jerusalem? What concord is there between the Academy and the Church? What between heretics and Christians? ... Away with all attempts to produce a mottled Christianity of Stoic, Platonic, and dialectic composition! …

CHRISTOFFER H. GRUNDMANN [*] From time immemorial, experiences of sickness and healing have gone hand in hand. The longing for healing has been as much a universal human desire, as has been the search for an adequate remedy. That is why evidence of efforts to maintain health and to overcome diseases in order to prevent untimely death can be found in all cultures everywhere. In some cultures such efforts resulted in regular systems of healing, leading to the development of formal bodies of the healing art, e.g. the Ayurveda system in India, the indigenous Chinese medical system or the Hippocratic medicine of classical Greece, while in most of the other cultures such efforts never progressed beyond modest beginnings. Likewise, healing is a pan-religious phenomenon; it exists in all the religions we know of, be they of a primal kind or be they highly sophisticated. Healing thus cannot be monopolized by Christian groups or the church even though it nowadays has become a typical feature for a particular kind of conventions, congregations and movements around the globe, not just within the Catholic or Protestant folds but outside them too. The topic of healing is not new to the Christian church nor has it been irrelevant to her. The biblical findings are unambiguous in principle, as is the history of the early church up to the present. The apologetics and the church fathers of the early church often employed the motive of healing in order to illustrate the intention of the gospel. Besides this, the Hellenistic healing cult of Asclepios was very popular when the early church took shape. This context clearly left its mark on New Testament texts such as the Lucan and Johannine writings, and particularly on the Acts of the Apostles, the gospel of John and the Revelation. Asclepios was considered to be "the saviour" [of life] [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] i.e. healer) while Jesus Christ was confessed to be the "saviour of the world" [LANGUAGE NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII] see John 4:42; 1 John 4:14) who, unlike Asclepios, was not only able to let people rise from the dead (see Luke 7:11ff; John 11) but overcame death himself once and for all thu s saving us not only from diseases but from all bonds of death in whatever form. When the North African theologian Origen of Alexandria (185-254), while staying at Caesarea (south of today's Haifa), wrote his apology "Contra Celsum" (Against Celsus) in 248 he remarked: "Were I to ... admit that a demon, Asclepios by name, has the power to heal physical illness, then I could remark to those who are astounded ... by this healing, that this power to heal the sick is neither good nor evil, that it is a thing which is bestowed not only upon the righteous, but upon the godless as well...Nothing divine is revealed in the power to heal the sick in and of itself." (Contra Celsum, III, 25). So Origen more than 1700 years ago does not deny that miraculous healings do occur and that they reveal the power to heal. What he does deny is that a healing experience is a divine revelation as such. Healings do not bear proof of Christian authority just by themselves. Going back to the very ministry of Jesus Christ, one notices with surprise that even the healings Christ brought about were doubted, as in the case of the blind and mute one according to Matthew 12:22ff. Whilst not denying the positive effects of his ministry, the Pharisees questioned their revelatory quality: "It is only by Beelzebub, the prince of demons, that this fellow drives out demons." (24) To which Jesus replied, "If I drive out demons by Beelzebub, by whom do your people drive them out?" (27) Healings are ambiguous indeed; they put a genuine challenge to Christianity, the church and her theology. Having become aware of this situation one is taken aback by realizing the factual absence of an adequate response to it in common theology, liturgy and congregational life at least so far as the traditional churches are concerned. …

Im Zusammenhang anderweitiger Archivstudien in der Robert E. Speer Library des Princeton Theological Seminary, Princeton, New Jersey, stieß der Unterzeichnete auf einen umfangreichen Bestand aus dem Nachlaß des Bismarcks Kulturminister Adal. Falk als Berater dienenden protestantischen Kirchenrechtlers Paul Hinschius (1835-1898) . Das Material wird in etwa fünfzig Archiv-Kästen mit je 25 — 30 Stück Inhalt aufbewahrt und ist, so weit ich es stichprobenmäßig ha je einsehen können, von Hinschius zusammengetragenes Kleinschrifttum, bestehend aus Broschüren, Sonderdrucken, Flugblättern, Schulberichten (z. Ii. vom Altstädtischen Gymnasium in Königsberg, von Schulpforta u. a.), Dissertationen seiner Schüler in Lateinisch oder Deutsch zu unterschiedlichen Fragen des Rechts, der Kirchenordnungen, der Kultur; auch wertvolle ältere Druckschriften, wie z. B. das seltene Exemplar einer Tetrapia der CA (Confessio Augustana) in Lateinisch, Deutsch, Lettisch und Livländisch fiel mir bei der Durchsicht in die Hände. Auf Hinschius Autographen (Notizen, Tagebücher, Manuskripte) bin ich nicht gestoßen, was aber nicht notwendigerweise auch für den übrigen, den nicht gesichteten und weitaus größten Teil dieses Nachlasses zutreffen muß. Wie dieses Material, das sowohl für das Verständnis des Bismarckschen Kulturkampfes als auch für die allgemeine Geistesund Kulturgeschichte wie für die Kirchenund Rechtsgeschichte des vorigen Jahrhunderts höchst interessant sein dürfte, nach Princeton gelangt ist, ist unklar und konnte in der zur Verfügung stehenden Zeit nicht ermittelt werden. Es wurde dort bereits 1900 inventarisiert und im Archiv-Keller unter dem Stichwort ,Hinschius-Papers' aufbewahrt. Zur Zeit ist diese Sammlung allerdings derart ungeschickt katalogisiert, daß sie nicht als solche erkannt werden kann. Damit sie der Forschung zugänglich wird, diese Mitteilung.

People who do not remember are like trees with their roots cut and rivers with their feeders dried up. While there may still be water and foliage, neither river nor tree can sustain life for much longer; soon both will be gone. Humans need to remember--at least now and then--where they come from and what their calling is so to be able to stay human and act accordingly. While the day-to-day demands tend to swallow us up until nothing distinctive is left, remembrance makes us reconnect with the roots of our being and with what we have set out for to accomplish. Once we forget who we are and what we stand for, we not only lose focus and orientation, we lose ourselves. The consultation known as "Tubingen I" was held fifty years ago on account of a joint invitation by the World Council of Churches (WCC) and the Lutheran World Federation (LWF) and hosted by the German Institute for Medical Missions at Tubingen, Germany. Tubingen I was neither the first nor the biggest get-together of people working in medical missions concerned about the future of such engagement and something more. Tubingen I, rather, was a consultation of experts tasked to advise the LWF and the WCC on how best to grapple with the challenges faced by church-related hospitals and health-care programs notably in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. Yet, despite the secluded week-long deliberations of 19 (1) consultants, Tubingen I turned out to blaze the trail of a new understanding of the churches' involvement in health-care and healing, leading over time to significant practical changes. While the then-acting secretary of the World Council's Division of World Mission and Evangelism Charles H. Germany was confident that the "statements of the Tubingen Consultation will surely find an echo in the thought of Christian medical people throughout the world," (2) this came as a total surprise to most of the other participants. As Lesslie Newbigin stated in the Preface of the consultation report, In the course of the week spent together, certain common convictions were given to the group, and they felt bound to express them in a statement. Although this statement was not immediately published, the offices in Geneva began to receive very large numbers of enquiries about it. Many thousands of copies have been distributed in response to requests.... In a way which was not expected [the statement] seems to have spoken to the condition of many who were wrestling with the problems of medical missions, and ... with the healing ministry in one form or another. (3) In order to better understand the impact of and the legacy left by that very event, I will first situate Tubingen I within its historical and institutional context; second, analyze its finding; and conclude by looking at what happened to the insights gained in those days during the half century passed since. Tubingen I within the context of its time As previously stated, Tubingen I was not the first nor was it the biggest consultation addressing the challenges faced by medical missions and church-sponsored medical programs in the middle of the 20th century. Already in 1948, that is three years after World War II, the Church Missionary Society in London (CMS) published an elaborate statement on its medical policy (4) calling for the realignment of medical missions: "Realignment is designed to meet recurring need as circumstances alter.... Realignment may involve the use of new methods and the abandonment or subordination of old ones." (5) The new methods the statement envisioned were recognized as being "of great simplicity and of outmost importance." (6) They anticipated nearly everything of what some thirty years later would become known as Primary Health Care (PHC), namely: to focus on "preventive medicine," on "proper ... sanitation, working, and housing conditions," on "food supply, (7) on child welfare, (8) on the training of nurses, midwives, and auxiliaries, (9) on refresher courses for lay workers,1" on intersectoral and interdenominational cooperation, (11) on hospital outreach, (12) and, last but not least, on "the compilation of regional statistics and reports. …

The comparatively new scientific discipline of epidemiology of religion studying the interplay of religion on health calls for a reconsideration of religious practices, one among which is faith-healing addressed here. This article gives first a brief analysis of the structure of exemplary faith-healing accounts across cultures, religions, and times. The second part looks at how medical professionals interpret faith-healings and the proceedings of the Medical Bureau at Lourdes, France, which screens claims of miraculous healings. The third section examines faith-healing in the biblical tradition, especially the healing ministry of Jesus and his Apostles, uncovering unexpected aspects of the issue. The final section identifies some basic epistemological challenges posed by faith-healing. Concluding that the role faith plays in healing is not to be reduced to its therapeutic aspects, it is argued that the trustworthiness and reliability of what one believes in, the content of faith, also matters significantly. While a superficial hope of the credulous might lead to despair (when despite all efforts healing does not come about), hope emerging from an awareness of the truly Ultimate enables coping with whatever the result might be.

Modes of Faith - Secular Surrogates for Lost Religious Belief. By Theodor Ziolkowski. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007. Pp. xii, 283. $35.00. Titles well chosen have a magic. They stir imagination and arouse curiosity. So it happened to me when I was asked to review Theodore Ziolkowski's Modes of Faith, just off the press. My curiosity was heightened when I finally held the neatly bound and pleasingly printed book in my hands with a jacket which did not depict any conventional religious symbol or image but rather Otto Dix's "Self-Portrait as Planet Mars" (1915), showing his open-eyed. Open-mouthed, red-lipped face torn between day and night, reason and desire. This made me wonder the more what might lie ahead, because so far I was naively expecting a socio-religious study about contemporary ways of belief. It turned out to be something quite different. Taking as his title a quotation from Alexander Pope's "An Essay on Man," the author, a well published professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton University, presents a very learned account of some thirty novelists and poets of Western culture living mainly in the times of and around World War I. Most of them had a significant impact on the emergent concept of modernity, a salient feature of which is secularism; hence the focus on the religious quest. He shows that once the faith of the upbringing of these people of letters has been shattered by biographical circumstances or the traumatic experience of the "big war" and its aftermath, only a few converted back to the church, mainly to Roman Catholicism, while most of them embraced surrogates like Art, Escapism, and Ideology. Convinced that it is important to know about this phase in history, for "our society today in the United States is undergoing a spiritual crisis and transition similar to that of the 1920s" (p. 6), the author wants his readers "to contemplate the period that marked the starting point for our situation today, to analyze the various modes through which those predecessors responded to their loss of faith, and to ponder the shift through which some of them regained some sort of faith that could be called religious" (p. 8; see also p. 238). The book is divided into three parts. "The Decline of Faith" (pp. 1-49) paints with bold but pointed strokes the intellectual situation and cultural atmosphere of the fin de siecle and the pre-war years in Europe. It culminates in the portrayal of Samuel Butler, Roger Martin du Gard, and Hermann Hesse as "Theologians of the Profane" because despite "their loss of conventional faith they were so profoundly shaped by the religious experiences of the late nineteenth century that they were incapable of describing even their secularization in other than religious terms" (p. 47). The core of the book is its 150+ page second part (pp. 51 -210) under the heading: "New Modes of Faith." It is subdivided into five chapters beginning with "The Religion of Art," followed by a section on escapist "Pilgrimages to India" and the East as mainly reflected in travel diaries, the materialist ideologies of socialism and communism ("The God that Failed"), "The Hunger for Myth" dealing especially with authors advocating the myth of the Third Reich in Germany, and, finally, "The Longing for Utopia. …

The formal approbation of the study project "The Church as a Healing Community" by I.A.M.S. Executive Committee (see: Mission Studies No. 5, Vol. III-1, 1986, p. 77) sets the scene for missiologists to embark upon the whole issue of healing on a large scale. It is hoped that by tapping the resources of the international, ecumenical and cross-cultural membership of the association the long felt need can be met to adequately respond to the challenge healing puts before us not only by the new religious movements all over the world and by the traditional societies, but also by the African Independent Churches and the charismatic movement within the established churches. There do exist monographs on several aspects of healing from nearly all over the world of course. But mostly they are concerned with a particular technique or with the health system and healing methods of a certain ethnic group. When it comes to missiology the phenomenon of healing outside the Christian fold often is looked at as something demoniac which as such has to be refused for the sake of the gospel. The only more recent missiological thesis I came across so far addressing the issue in a broader sense is Harold E. Dollar's "A Cross-Cultural Theology of Healing" (1980, Fuller) which actually tries to develop a cross-cultural liturgy or model of healing instead of a theology. This article tries to identify some of the most relevant issues any qualified study of the matter in question has to pay attention to.