Healing Marks: Healing and Spirituality in Mark's Gospel

by Bruce G. Epperly

Book explores the idea of spiritual healing from a Progressive Christian perspective, using the Gospel of Mark as a focus.

Each chapter includes a spiritual practice related to the healing story being considered that is easily shaped for the reader's personal and spiritual needs. Rev. Epperly also includes questions and spiritual practices for group study and spiritual formation at the end of the book. Chapter titles include Transforming Faith, Forgiveness and Healing, Healing Takes Time, Healing Broken Spirits, A Healing Lifestyle, Healing in a Pluralistic Age, and God, Why am I Sick?

196 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2012

Reviews

[Lee Harmon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reverend Bruce Epperly, Ph.D., is more than an ordained minister: he is also a reiki practitioner and teacher. He has published many times, including a book about Process Theology that I found very intriguing.

Healing Marks is far from a fringe journey into alternative medicine; it is an examination of Jesus’ purpose and healing practices, and how they can relate to today’s world. Says Epperly, “I am a firm believer in prayer and Prozac and meditation and medication as instruments of God’s healing power.” Epperly’s discussion of his own healing experiences are short and practical (he considers effective healing to be gradual and subtle in nature), far from the flamboyance of popular televangelists (whom Epperly thinks do a disservice to everyday people), and they do not overshadow the theological purpose of his book.

While I hold a certain curiosity about the workings of the healing ministry of Jesus, I really just don’t know how much can be read literally, and therefore how much we can experience today, beyond the placebo effect. Epperly himself doesn’t insist that we take all biblical healings at face value, or think that we can replicate them all today. This is good: where holistic healing is concerned, I confess skepticism and near-ignorance on the matter. Epperly’s conclusion, however, that love is the key to effective healing, is thought-provoking. Healing in this manner depends upon the interconnectedness of mind, body and spirit.

There’s no question that emotions affect the immune system, but Healing Marks goes much deeper than that. Epperly’s concept of God is not clearly defined, and he appears satisfied with leaving God a mystery. Yet Epperly is clearly a believer in something very magical underneath the surface of our material living: “I believe that our prayers radiate across the universe, unlimited by spatial separation of temporality. Our prayers can heal past memories, influence the future, and influence peoples’ lives and situations in distant places. … In an interdependent and dynamic universe, I believe that prayer creates a positive field of force around those for whom we pray. … Our prayers create an energetic openness at every level of life from cellular to spiritual through which God can act more decisively…” (pp 82-84).

Is there something to all this? has Epperly shed some light on the healings of Jesus? I honestly don’t know. Read it with an open mind; it’s well worth it.

Energion Publications, © 2012, 183 pages

ISBN: 978-1-938434-13-6

[David Ackerman · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his recent book, “Healing Marks,” Bruce Epperly takes his readers on an amazing journey through the healing narratives in Mark’s Gospel. This is a resource I wish I had 20 years ago when I was finishing my M.Div. thesis on the components of healing in the story of the Gerasene Demoniac in Mark 5. I would have surely cited this work extensively as Epperly asks deep and profound questions of this and many other texts in terms of their implications for healing of the human person. Epperly thoroughly surveys different approaches to faith and healing and rightly appreciates the complexity of the issues. He notes the importance of human agency in healing while decrying a facile “new age” approach to the subject that tends to blame the victims for their diseases. He does the necessary spadework to bridge the cultural gap between the Biblical world and 21st century western culture, and even as he affirms the reality of spiritual healing, he is profoundly in tune with the truth that not everyone who has faith is healed in the ways in which they might want or expect. Epperly’s final chapter reminds Christians of how God’s victory over the powers of sin, evil and death in the resurrection is the ultimate healing and restoration to which we look with eschatological hope. I highly recommend this book to anyone who wrestles with the very pastoral and human question of how faith and healing are interwoven in Christian life.

[Robert D. Cornwall · Rating 5 out of 5]

For many progressive Christians the idea that God heals seems out of character with a rational understanding of reality. When we look at the Gospel accounts, we try to find naturalistic explanations. While there likely are naturalistic explanations, that doesn't rule out spiritual ones.

Bruce Epperly has taken the account from the Gospel of Mark and looked into these healing stories, discerns important truths, and offers us a new way of perceiving God's work of healing. Not mere metaphor for restoration of relationships, Bruce sees in these stories the restoration of bodies and spirits. He does so by bringing in to the conversation the contribution of Process Theology, but also his experiences with alternative healing modalities, including Reiki.

If you're interested in this topic, I think you'll find this book a great introduction to the concept as well as rooting it in the biblical story.