Freedom from Death

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.