Abstract
Jan-Olav Henriksen and Karl Olav Sandnes's Jesus as Healer: A Gospel for the Body represents a commendable interdisciplinary approach to healing from the perspectives of New Testament scholarship and systematic theology. Divided into two halves, the book first examines the role of healing within Jesus' ministry before turning in the second half to consider how this healing ministry might provide a foundation for theological understandings of healing and the Christological consequences of such understandings for theology today.
The first half of the book, written by Sandnes, explores the role of healings in Jesus' ministry and how those healings have been understood in New Testament scholarship. After outlining the work of John Pilch, John Dominic Crossan, Don Capps, Gerd Theissen, and Pieter Craffert, Sandnes confesses that their explanatory models of the healings offer “no more than partial help for understanding this aspect of Jesus' ministry” (p. 61). Sandnes contends that a proper model needs to account for the memory of Jesus as a healer that is preserved in both the New Testament and the early church. Furthermore, Sandnes recognizes that the healing ministry of the disciples, as it is recorded to a limited degree in the Gospels and to a greater extent in Acts, is an extension of Jesus' own healing ministry. Noticing how the association of Jesus with healing persists in apocryphal texts, Sandnes contends that Jesus' reputation as a healer remained important, even if later authors in the early church period regarded the miracles with increasing ambivalence because of a concern for distancing Jesus' ministry from anything that might appear to be sorcery.
Sandnes closes the book's first half by pointing toward a theology of Jesus as a healer. This final chapter of the first half serves as a good segue to the second as it notes the inherent difficulty with healings: “Healing is by nature a gift received beyond expectation, accessible only through prayer and hope. Any theology of healing must proceed from this ‘problem’” (p. 114). This problem, related to the attendant issue of whether healings represent an intervention into creation, serves as a helpful bridge from the biblical to the theological sections of the book.
The second half of the book, written by Henriksen, takes up the question of the theological implications of Jesus' healing ministry. Like Sandnes, Henriksen devotes significant attention to how modern thinkers have addressed the topic of healing. Surveying the work of scholars such as Rudolph Bultmann, Karl Barth, Wolfhart Pannenberg, and John Polkinghorne, among others, Henriksen notes an increasing scholarly openness to the possibility of healings occurring. Building upon the summaries of these scholars' work, Henriksen addresses the question of how healing interacts with nature, and he suggests that healings should not be understood as “miracles.” Rather, they can be “interpreted as unexpected events that open up to the reality of God” (p. 200). Such a view bypasses the potential theological problem of explaining how God would act contrary to God's own creation to bring about healings. Henriksen here adopts a more explicitly Johannine perspective of Jesus' healings as “signs” that ultimately point to a reality beyond themselves.
The authors indicate that their work “should be seen as an attempt to add to and even open up venues related to the discussion of the significance of Jesus' healing ministry” (p. 2). Insofar as the book addresses Jesus' healing from both biblical studies and theological perspectives, it enjoys modest success in that goal. However, one might wish for further venues of discussion even within the book itself. While both authors devote considerable space to engaging the ideas of other scholars in their field, they allocate far less space to engaging one another's ideas. To be sure, interdisciplinary work comes with challenges, and while it is refreshing to have both a New Testament and a systematic approach combined in a single volume, the result is more fragmented than integrated. There are limited occasions on which one half of the book anticipates or points back to the other, but for the most part, these parts are segregated. Even in the book's concluding chapter, a prime place for more integrative work, the authors simply provide numbered lists of the key points in each of the book's halves. Thus, insofar as the book sets up a goal of opening up venues of discussion, the authors themselves do not appear to capitalize on their particular interdisciplinary position to model such discussions.
Despite this minor critique, this volume offers a helpful reminder of the central place of the body within both the New Testament and systematic theology. As the authors write in the conclusion, “Jesus' practice as a healer means that the gospel for the body is at the basis of his ministry” (p, 251). This refreshing perspective has implications for understanding the fully incarnational aspect of Jesus' ministry. As such, this book will appeal to several audiences: scholars in the fields of both New Testament and systematic theology, church leaders interested in developing a more robust understanding of healing, and even, perhaps to a lesser extent, lay people who are curious about questions of healing. In sum, the book offers a helpful focus on the importance of the body in both biblical study and theological reflection.