Brian Baxter *

December 2005

I read quite a lot of Pentecostal literature and every now and then I come across references to ‘raising the dead’. This has nothing to do with the resurrection of Jesus or with people like Lazarus who are supposed to have been raised by him. Rather, some modern Pentecostal preachers claim that they can revive dead people and indeed that they have often done so.

I first saw this startling assertion a couple of years ago in a publication called the Jubilee News (Sept. 2003):

We have received invitations to lead missions to Tanzania and Zambia in Feb. 2004. If God wants you there and you can intercede, minister healing, raise the dead etc., please contact our office for details.

This little outfit is right out on the fringe even by fundamentalist and Pentecostal standards, so I simply passed the item on to the Skeptics who popped it in the Around the Traps column (the Skeptic 23:4, 5). Still, a disquieting aspect was the casual context in which the writer used the term ‘raise the dead’, as if it were the most natural thing in the world to possess such a talent.

A few months later I was looking up something on Pentecostalism in a reference text – Ward and Humphreys’ Religious Bodies in Australia (1995) – when this jumped out at me:

In 1969, a branch [of the Universal World Church] was formed in Townsville by Percy R. Nielson, an Australian returned from America. He claimed many healings including raising the dead. (251)

Then, during the Terri Schiavo euthanasia controversy in America earlier this year, I found this on an Australian website (www.believers.org/believe/bel165.htm, downloaded 29 Mar. 2005):

In China God is raising the dead. These are miracles. God can heal Terri in the blink of an eye.

As Ian Fleming wrote in Goldfinger, ‘Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, the third time it’s enemy action’. And hyper-Christians running around claiming to raise the dead looked pretty much like enemy action to me.

A. A. Allen and others

Careful reading of some older books disclosed a number of references to the practice of instant resurrection. James Randi’s 1989 edition of The Faith Healers told the story of Brother Ted Whitesell’s tour of Australia in 1970:

…[H]e claimed that he not only gave sight to a young boy, cleared up several arthritic conditions and cured astigmatism and stuttering cases, but lengthened sixteen short legs as an encore! Furthermore, he said he often raised the dead. (128-9)

Randi also mentioned the work of A. A. (Asa Alonso) Allen, a precursor of Assemblies of God televangelists such as Jim Bakker and Jimmy Swaggart:

[Allen] specialised in visions, divine voices and prophecies. At one point, Allen advertised a plan to raise the dead, in accordance with biblical instructions to the apostles to do the same. (85)

Hank Hanegraaff’s (2001) Counterfeit Revival confirms this:

Allen actually launched a ‘raise the dead’ campaign in the mid-sixties. Thankfully, it died when his disciples refused to bury their departed, and their departed refused to come back from the dead. (148)

Alan Bestic (1971) in Praise the Lord and Pass the Contribution recounts this discussion with Raymond G. Hoekstra, a colleague of Allen’s:

[Bestic:] One national magazine quotes [Allen] as saying that he believes people can be raised from the dead by prayer. Is that true?

[Hoekstra:] I’m sure it is possible. There are well-documented instances of it in South Korea and Indonesia in recent years.

Documented by whom?

Evangelical leaders connected with such people as Billy Graham and World Vision.

Where were they reported?

I’ve seen them in evangelical publications. [This is a recommendation? Most 'popular' evangelical publications are notoriously credulous, especially when it comes to reporting missionaries' claims.] (122)

Allen died in 1970 of ‘acute alcoholism and fatty infiltration of the liver’. A pathology and toxicology examination disclosed a blood alcohol concentration of 0.36 per cent, enough to induce a deep coma. (ibid.)

Current work

A number of more recent books written by concerned Christians have criticised modern Pentecostalism for its descent into mysticism, including this vaunted power to raise the dead.

Michael Moriarty’s 1992 text The New Charismatics contains several references to this claim, dating from the 1930s:

[Revivalists] believed God’s property was being reclaimed as the sick were healed, the dead were raised, and those taken captive by demon powers were set free. (41)

Prominent among these ‘prophets’ and ‘apostles’ was William Marrion Branham (1909-65), whose ‘ability to heal the sick and raise the dead was fervently promoted by his followers’. (47) The current ’signs and wonders’ movement in modern Pentecostalism owes much to the influence of people like Branham, and according to ‘prophet’ Bill Hamon:

The gift of miracles will be restored to its full function … The working of miracles will cause creative miracles among the maimed and deformed. New limbs will grow back … As needs arise, the working of miracles will enable the Church to ‘walk on water’, be transported by the Spirit from one geographical location to another … and involve a greater number of incidents of people being raised from the dead. (100)

Hank Hanegraaff (op.cit.) tells us that:

[L]eaders at the Brownsville Revival in Pensacola have begun citing resurrections from the dead. For $75, the Brownsville Revival School of Ministry will sell you a video series titled ‘Faith to Raise the Dead’. Brownsville leaders are claiming that David Hogan and his ministry associates have seen more than 200 people raised from the dead.

The expectations of people have reached such a fever pitch that some time ago a parent who lost a child put his baby on ice and drove 350 miles to the Brownsville Assembly of God to have the baby raised from the dead. (xxii-xxiii)

As you would expect, most of these claims are rather imprecise. The resurrections themselves never seem to happen in front of independent medical witnesses or even television cameras, but ‘in China’, ‘in Indonesia’, ‘in Mexico and Guatemala’, or according to evangelist Randy Clark:

[P]eople are being raised from the dead … It’s all over. Germany and Africa. It’s everywhere. God’s doing it. (252)

Even when a story is slightly more specific, it is generally second-hand at best, and often ridiculous. Take ‘prophet’ Rodney Howard-Browne’s story about the English healing evangelist Smith Wigglesworth (1859-1947) and his treatment of a man dying of cancer:

‘Wigglesworth punched him in the stomach so hard he flew through the air and hit the floor, dead! He killed him!’ … [But] ten minutes later the man was running around the church, healed. (38)

This raises an intriguing legal question: if you kill someone and then immediately resurrect your victim, are you guilty of murder? Seriously though, what a lot of rot – and yet millions of people accept these tales without question.

Resurrection on the Web

Go to Google and search ‘raising the dead’ and you’ll find that most of the material is of no interest to you whatsoever. However, if you persevere you’ll find a number of relevant sites, some of which appear to move you tantalisingly close to the grail, which in this case is a convincing and fully-documented resurrection event.

Some sites consist merely of biblical quotations indicating that attempts to raise the dead are scriptural provided that the Holy Spirit has given you the all-clear – www.believers.org/believe/bel165.htm:

Jesus told His disciples to raise the dead … We should never try to raise someone from death unless we are sure it is the will of God. In this, we must be led by God’s Spirit. When we are certain of God’s will, we should command with authority and not give up. Death is an enemy … and at the Name of Jesus every knee must bow …

Other web-authors claim to have witnessed one of these miracles but the stories are fundamentally flawed e.g. www.miracleshealing.com/mhc_index1/story_07_cr2.htm, where it’s clear that the resurrectee, a stabbing victim, wasn’t dead in the first place! In another case, a hospital patient was ‘miraculously raised’ through resuscitation techniques employed by her doctors. This doesn’t count.

Let’s cut to the chase and examine two detailed stories.

Rev. Idrifua of Uganda

According to Jim Bramlett, writing in 2003 – www.choicesforliving.com/spirit/part4/raising_dead.htm- he had recently ‘received a letter from a long-time missionary friend who just returned from Uganda’, telling a story about one of his ‘pastor friends’, one Rev. Idrifua. Bramlett’s friend wrote as follows:

On September 25, 1999, after preaching in a village near the town of Bostime, Uganda, [Rev. Idrifua] was preparing to leave the meeting when a Muslim man approached him. The man had met a weeping mother walking along the road on her way to bury her dead child. He had told her that there was a man in town preaching about Jesus’ power to raise the dead.

What a coincidence that of all the subjects Idrifua could have been preaching about, it just happened to be that one. Note also the resemblance between the setting and phrasing of this story and, say, one of Jesus’ miracle stories.

The Muslim man brought the woman with the dead infant to Rev. Idrifua wanting him to pray for the dead child. Rev. Idrifua asked the mother if she was a believer. She said she was. The Spirit of God came on him …

… [H]e laid hands on the baby and strongly rebuked the spirit of death, then commanded life to return. Immediately the baby came to life crying and began to swing its arms and legs, then quieted down and began to nurse!

Rather typically, the story concludes with a fine piece of lily-gilding:

The Muslim man got so excited he went to a friend’s house whose baby also had died several hours before the first baby. This dead baby was the child of a Muslim cleric …, a Haji. He brought this dead child and its mother to Rev. Idrifua. God raised the second baby to life too! Five Muslims gave their hearts to Jesus that day – including the Haji!

Clearly we can’t prove that this tale is untrue, but there are many problems: the second- (or third-)hand source, the stylistic similarity to scriptural precedents, even the fact that the babies had apparently only been ‘dead’ for a short time. In terms of the possibility of confirmation, the only things the story has going for it are the names of the pastor and the town, and the precise date. There are very few ‘Idrifuas’ mentioned on the Web, although a German site refers to a ‘Father Richard Idrifua’ in Uganda. Bostime, if it exists, is certainly not a large town and indeed the only reference to it that I can find on the Net is in this ‘raising the dead’ story. As for September 25, 1999, well, I guess pastors can preach on Saturday as well as Sunday.

I remain unconvinced.

Smith Wigglesworth

Malcolm B. Heap of Midnight Ministries doesn’t like our kind:

Sceptics argue about the miracles of healing being performed in the name of Jesus … However, there is one thing they cannot refute. Raising the dead!

When dead people come to life, sceptics may like to argue, but they haven’t got a leg to stand on.

Heap informs us that in recent times there have been ‘verifiable accounts of several people being brought back from death’, six in Nigeria, ten others ‘from various sources around the world’ etc. But his only worthwhile story concerns our old mate Smith Wigglesworth who ‘raised at least 14 people from the dead’ and ‘even called his wife back from death …’ One of Wigglesworth’s biographers, George Stormont, relates an Australian incident in Wigglesworth, A Man Who Walked With God (55-6):

Bishop Ronald Coady and his wife were ministering in New South Wales, Australia, in 1950 where they met a Methodist deaconess called ‘Sister Mary’ … While there, they were reading Stanley Frodsham’s book, ‘Smith Wigglesworth, Apostle of Faith’. The incident of his raising a young woman from the dead … had gripped them, and when Sister Mary came in they read it to her … [Sister Mary said], ‘You’ve known [that lady] for some time. I am that lady.’

Mary then told them of her experience with the evangelist. In 1922 she had been seriously ill and partly paralysed. Wigglesworth was visiting her town but she did not believe in divine healing and declined to attend his meetings. Her condition deteriorated and she agreed to have Wigglesworth come to her house, but before he arrived she died.

Sister Mary Pople related that she went to heaven and was allowed in the throne room. She saw the Lord Jesus sitting on His throne. She saw light such as she had never seen and heard music such as she had never heard. Her heart was filled with rapturous joy.

Wigglesworth then walked into Mary’s room and spoiled the whole party.

…[S]he heard a voice that later she knew was Smith Wigglesworth’s. He was saying, ‘Death, I rebuke you in the name of Jesus’. Then he commanded Mary to live. Her eyes opened and those who had been weeping around her bed began to rejoice … Not only was she raised from the dead, but she was totally healed of her sickness … and of the paralysis …

Unfortunately we are not told the nature of Mary’s illness nor the basis of her paralysis. There is no mention of a doctor being present at her bedside and the facts as related seem perfectly consistent with a ‘near-death experience’ or even a dream.

And, as far as I can see, these Idrifua and Wigglesworth stories are the best the Web has to offer on the subject of modern resurrections. All the others that I found lack meaningful context (time and place etc.) or are disqualified through elementary flaws or obvious scriptural derivation (‘this resurrection took exactly three days’ etc.)

Conclusion

There is a very unhealthy mindset at work here. There is also an immense amount of scope for both fraud and heartache. Even some of the more thoughtful Pentecostals realise the primitive and dangerous nature of this type of thinking. Several of the people mentioned here are or were associated with the Assemblies of God, the largest Pentecostal denomination in Australia. I’d like to see our politicians consider the whole picture a lot more carefully before giving aid and comfort to these atavistic churches.

(This article was originally published in The Skeptic Summer 2005 (Vol. 25, No. 4).
Republished with permission.)