If healing includes freedom from death, then this paper examines an understudied form of healing in Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. This paper takes up resurrections—i.e., divine healing prayer intended to bring dead persons back to life. It sketches historical outlines of prayers for resurrection in transnational contexts and delineates debates that shape attempts to bring the dead back over the line. Resurrections are at once empirically exceptional, entangled in theological questions central to the history of Christianity, and have served as a source of Pentecostalism’s appeal. Dead-raising is a limit case of divine healing through which scholars of religion can look afresh on Pentecostal biblical hermeneutics, theodicies, and theories of the atonement. It sheds new light on Pentecostal-Charismatic approaches to prayer, modern medical technology, spiritual warfare, time, the body, and conceptualizing the meaning of human life and death.
Since the first century, some Christians have resisted the finality of death by praying that God would revive recently deceased persons. When the dead rise, these events are considered miracles–dubbed “raisings,” “resurrections,” or, especially in modern medical settings, “resuscitations.” The biblical lineup of dead-raisers is star-studded, featuring the ancient Hebrew prophets Elijah and Elisha, Jesus, and the Apostles Peter and Paul. Near the end of the second century, Irenaeus identified the ability to raise the dead as one criterion for distinguishing genuine Christians from imposters, and both Eusebius and Augustine mentioned this particular class of miracle with approval (Keener 2021). Resurrections were not uncommon in medieval hagiography (Bartlett 2013) and they have continued to appear in Catholic and Protestant testimonial literature in the modern period. In the century or so since the Azusa Street Revival began in 1906, Pentecostals and Charismatics have built on and modified the varied history of resurrection miracles they inherited, producing distinct ways of relating to death and dying in part by generating new theologies, discourses, and practices around raising the dead.
The historiography of modern resurrection miracles is patchy. A range of historians have noted the existence of dead-raising testimonies in Pentecostalism without casting suspicion on or necessarily trying to establish the credibility of such claims (several contributors in Brown, ed., 2011; Brown 2012; Espinosa 2014; Tarango 2014). Others flag dead-raising testimonies with noticeable discomfort (Wacker 2003). Regardless of how historians handle resurrections, these miracles usually dot the accounts of divine healing in which they appear without becoming a main focus of historical analysis. When they have received sustained attention, however, resurrections have not always fared well. Dead-raising, in its assumed impossibility and excessive engagement with lifeless flesh, is “certainly deranged” (Johnson and Wilentz 1994), and those who attempt it are “extreme,” “radical,” “bizarre,” and “overzealous.” (Harrell 1975). It is a scandal that rudely discloses the normative terrain of the historical study of modern Christianity.
In response to that interpretive anxiety, this paper begins constructing an approach to the study of dead-raising by considering case studies drawn from an array of Pentecostals and Charismatics across the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Resurrection disturbs normative modern understandings of what is possible, real, and good that have shaped the interpretive background of the study of religion. The appearance of resurrection thus marks a potential (but not inevitable) disjuncture between the scholar’s sense of the real and that of their historical, anthropological, or sociological subjects. This paper attempts to address that gap without assuming the impossibility or metaphysical error of attempting to raise the dead. Rather, in order to take dead-raising as a central object of historical analysis, this paper follows Robert Orsi’s call for scholars of religion to adopt an “attitude of disciplined openness and attentiveness before a religious practice or idea of another era or culture on which we do not impose our wishes, dreams, or anxieties” (Orsi 2004). This means bracing ourselves for ontological turbulence (Orsi 2016), refusing to reduce or translate Pentecostal-Charismatic senses of reality in which raising the dead is possible, real, and good.
Such measures are necessary precisely because reports of resurrections have surfaced in defining moments in Pentecostal-Charismatic history. In the May 1908 issue of the Apostolic Faith, William Seymour, leader of the Azusa Street Revival, grappled with what it meant for humans to live with the presence of the Holy Ghost. To him, it meant power. Power to heal the sick, cleanse “lepers,” drive out demons, and raise the dead—that is, the miraculous capacity to carry out the instructions Jesus gave his disciples according to Matthew 10:8 or to imitate Elijah, the dead-raising Hebrew prophet (Espinosa 2014). These arguments raise a series of questions for historians: did Seymour designate praying for the dead to rise a mandatory Christian practice? Did other early Pentecostals share this interpretation of Matthew 10:8? Did they or their spiritual descendants even semi-regularly pray for recently-deceased persons to breathe again? Since reports of raisings surfaced at the Azusa Street Revival itself (Brown 2012), we cannot definitively answer “no.” Resurrection miracles have been part of Pentecostalism from the first.
And Pentecostal engagement with resurrection has always crisscrossed boundaries of race and nation. In 1909, the Apostolic Faith featured reports of raisings at revivals in South Africa (Espinosa 2014). Alta Washburn, a white pastor and missionary in the Assemblies of God, reported resurrections in her ministry among Athabaskan-speaking Native Americans in Arizona around the middle of the twentieth century (Tarango 2014). Also around mid-century, the healing and deliverance revivals and Latter Rain movement, both of which involved prayers for resurrection (Hall 1960, Harrell 1975), burned across North America and influenced Charismatic Christianity abroad (Taylor 2024). In fact, Charismatics who take an interest in resurrection seem to agree that raisings (and other miracles) occur more frequently outside the United States than inside its borders. Resurrection, the German evangelist Reinhard Bonnke wrote in 2014, is “the miracle that brings promise to America” (Bonnke 2014). Implication being that it had already come to other nations and had not, in any real sense, taken root in the United States. This paper argues that Bonnke was wrong.
This paper examines resurrection miracles—forms of divine healing prayer intended to bring dead bodies back to life. Resurrections (also called “raisings” and “resuscitations”) have appeared across the history of Pentecostal-Charismatic Christianity. Reports of raisings surfaced at the Azusa Street Revival, in the healing and deliverance revivals of the mid-twentieth century, and in later fires of independent Charismatic Christianity. In each iteration, dead-raising has been a transnational phenomenon subject to variation and debate. It is simultaneously empirically exceptional, perennially entangled in theological questions central to the history of Christianity, and has served as a source of Pentecostalism’s appeal. Dead-raising is a limit case of divine healing through which scholars of religion can look afresh on Pentecostal-Charismatic biblical hermeneutics, theodicies, and atonement theories. Examining resurrection sheds new light on approaches to prayer, modern medical technology, spiritual warfare, time, the body, and conceptualizing the meaning of human life and death.