Note: Prior to pursuing medical studies, Dr. Rediger received a Master of Divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. A frequent speaker and writer, he recently contributed this opinion piece for The Washington Post.

“Harvard Medical School professor says Miracles from Heaven and other remarkable cures could be real” 

By Jeffrey Rediger

To doctors, events like the story [of a healing of a serious illness reenacted in a recent film] … are impossible to explain. Scientists call them “spontaneous remission” or “placebo responses.”

Religious people generally use a different word: “miracle.”

I’m trained in both medicine and theology. I’ve been investigating the medical evidence in stories like these since 2003.

[I]n medicine we have too long ignored or dismissed people with remarkable recoveries.

… I disagree with one common viewpoint that the movie espouses. At the very beginning, it defines a “miracle” as a contradiction of natural law.

I believe that miracles only contradict what we know of nature at this point in time. Modern physics is, for example, way ahead of traditional science, and its implications have not been fully incorporated into its perspectives and methods yet. So I believe that miracles actually are consistent with mental and spiritual laws that we are only beginning to study. This is the only way I can understand the similarities among all those with remarkable recoveries whom I have been interviewing.

_{Reprinted by permission. Jeffrey Rediger, The Washington Post,March 29, 2016} 

Editors’ comment: The expectation that Christ Jesus’ followers would be, not personal miracle-workers, but consistent, definitive Christian healers, was a hallmark of his ministry. When Jesus sent seventy newly-minted disciples, or students, to lay a groundwork of healing in the cities and towns where he himself would be preaching and healing (see Luke, chap. 10), they reported back to him their initial successes. He rejoiced in their early healing work. And he gave them further instruction regarding the state of thought conducive to their own ongoing Christian healing ministry—deeper selflessness and a joy rooted in the understanding of their inseparability from their heavenly Father, their very “names … written in heaven” (verse 20).

It is interesting to learn of those, such as Dr. Rediger, who advocate looking at conventionally inexplicable healings in fresh ways, rather than simply consigning them to medical or religious labels, such as spontaneous remission or miracles.

It was through her own prayer, close Bible study, and her experience of Christian healing that the founder of this magazine, Mary Baker Eddy, became convinced that Christ Jesus’ healing works were more than fortuitous, unexplained events; they were the deliberate and expected result of his understanding of God, applied to the specific need. In her words, the master Christian’s healings were not miraculous anomalies, but “divinely natural” (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, p. 44).

Something of that holy naturalness comes through in the hundred pages of first-person accounts of spiritual healing that Mrs. Eddy appended to her major work, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures. For instance, one woman from Chicago wrote of her first encounter with Science and Health, which a stranger had mentioned. The book arrived “in the middle of October and [she and her mother] began to read it together. It seemed to me from the first that it was something I had always believed, but did not know how to express—it seemed such a natural thing” (p. 625). The writer’s healing of tuberculosis, her return to school, never spending “a day in bed since that time” nine years earlier—it was the mounting evidence of such healing that had led Mrs. Eddy to write: “Miracles are impossible in Science, and here Science takes issue with popular religions. The scientific manifestation of power is from the divine nature and is not supernatural, since Science is an explication of nature” (Science and Health, p. 83).

In the more than 6,000 weekly issues of the Sentinel since its founding in 1898, including this one, accounts of Christianly scientific healing are included—in the testimonies, as well as in many of the articles. Though these first-person accounts represent only a minor fraction of the healing flowing from the deepening scientific understanding and living of Christ Jesus’ teachings, they offer strong, tender encouragement to anyone seeking to draw closer to the God “who healeth all thy diseases” (Psalms 103:3) as the Bible promises. Through the study of the Bible and Science and Health, ordinary women, men, and children continue to find that Christian healing is not sporadic or miraculous, not dependent on a human mentality, not reserved for a random few—but as close for everyone as the ever-present divine Love that is God.