Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

What this page is asking

The pattern is simple to describe and hard to argue with, which is its strength. A preacher tells a family to visit someone who is seriously ill, or to call him to the bedside. Afterwards he gives an account of what happened. If the person recovers, the recovery is attributed to the visit, the prayer, or the preacher’s presence. If the person dies, the preacher says God revealed to him that it was their time, so the death confirms his spiritual insight instead of questioning his prayer. The first half gives him the credit. The second half gives him the knowledge. Neither half can cost him anything.

Stated precisely:

Three positions, labelled, and used consistently throughout

A page that only attacked the preacher’s account could slide into the opposite error, as though prayer made no difference and visiting were a mere courtesy. The New Testament does not go there either.

Notice what E and C share. Both visit. Both pray. Both believe God heals and that God is sovereign over life and death. They disagree about one thing: whether the minister may afterwards narrate God’s action so that he is at its centre whichever way it went. That is the question the rest of the page follows.

What the page concludes, stated up front

The prompt behind this page

Everything below was produced by giving the following brief to a frontier language model with web search, which assembled and checked the sources. It is published so you can run it yourself, change it, sharpen it, or reverse it. Three experiments are worth more than reading this page. Reverse it: ask for the strongest biblical case that a minister may credit a recovery to his own visit, and see which texts it must lean on and whether they are read with their chapters. Widen it: ask the model to compare how the Catholic, Orthodox, Anglican, Lutheran and Reformed rites for the sick speak of the outcome, and look for one that lets the minister say which outcome God chose. Apply it: paste in an account you have actually heard, with names removed, and ask which of the areas below it passes or fails.

Write a detailed, source-first, interactive article, in British
English, for a general reader who is willing to work. Quote Scripture
from the Authorised Version. Date and attribute every other
quotation: give the work, the edition or translation, the section,
and the page where possible. Distinguish evidence from inference at
the point of use. Verify every quotation against a reliable published
source; where a quotation cannot be verified, cut it. Do not invent
quotes or statistics.

TITLE. Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

THE PATTERN. I have seen a preacher tell people to visit sick
relatives, claiming afterward that their visit saved the person if
they survive, or that God revealed it was their time if they die.
Test this against a New Testament and historic church perspective.

THESIS TO TEST. The visit itself is Christian; the "heads I win,
tails you lose" interpretation is not. It is a recognisable form of
unfalsifiable spiritual authority, and should not be treated as
normal or healthy Christian teaching.

AREAS TO TEST.
 1. Care for the sick. Visiting and praying for the sick is
    explicitly commended (Matthew 25:36; James 5:14-16). That duty
    does not prove the visitor caused either recovery or death.
 2. Claims of healing. The New Testament attributes healing to
    God's power, not a preacher's personal indispensability (Acts
    3:12-16). Historic Christianity treats healing as grace, never
    something a minister may safely claim after the fact.
 3. Claims of private revelation. "God revealed it was their time"
    should be tested, not accepted because a leader says it
    (1 Thessalonians 5:20-21; 1 John 4:1). Historic churches require
    humility and discernment concerning alleged revelations,
    especially unverifiable ones.
 4. Falsifiability and accountability. If every possible outcome
    confirms the preacher, no outcome can expose error. The biblical
    tests of prophecy assume that claims can be judged and sometimes
    found false (Deuteronomy 18:21-22; 1 Corinthians 14:29).
 5. Providence and human knowledge. Life and death remain under
    God's providence (Romans 14:7-9), but Scripture does not
    authorise ministers to narrate God's hidden reasons with
    certainty (Romans 11:33-34; James 4:13-16).
 6. Humility in ministry. Ministers plant and water, but God gives
    the growth (1 Corinthians 3:5-7). Historic pastoral practice
    favours "we prayed and entrusted them to God," not "my
    intervention saved them."
 7. Pastoral harm and misplaced guilt. Such teaching may imply that
    families who did not visit, pray correctly, or summon the
    preacher caused the death. The New Testament calls Christians
    to compassion and mutual burden-bearing, not retrospective
    blame (Galatians 6:2).
 8. Fruit and use of authority. Does the claim produce love, truth,
    humility and freedom, or fear, dependency and admiration of the
    leader (Matthew 7:15-20)? Historic churches have warned against
    spiritual authority that makes one personality unchallengeable.
 9. A sounder Christian conclusion. If the person recovers: give
    thanks to God, appreciate medical and human care, avoid claiming
    secret causation. If the person dies: grieve, offer Christian
    hope, refrain from pretending to know what God has not
    disclosed.

POSITIONS. Label and use consistently: E - the Entrusted (we prayed
and entrusted them to God) HELD; C - the Coin (heads my visit saved
them, tails God showed me it was their time) UNDER TEST; N - the
Nothing (visiting and praying change nothing) REJECTED.

OBJECTIONS. Answer them inside the argument, in their proponents'
strongest terms (James 5:15; Elisha; Hezekiah; Lazarus; "our days
are numbered"). No separate counter-case section.

NAMING. No living person named as an example of anything. No
present-day preacher, ministry or congregation described or implied.
Every modern example is composed and labelled as composed.
Historical figures named where the record is closed; organisations
only from their own published documents. Cross-link rather than
repeat earlier dossiers (03 on prophecy, 15 on "covering", 16 on
reading misfortune).

INTERACTIVES. A priors quiz up front. A two-by-two grid (visited or
not, recovered or died) showing that the claim wins in every square.
A zoom-out reader for James 5:14-16. A predict-then-reveal on what
the apostles said after healings. Tabs for the prayed-for sick in
Scripture who were not healed. A ward simulator of ten visits. A
sort of bedside and funeral sentences into comfort, claim and blame.
An objection drill the reader answers before seeing a reply. Memory
cards. A verdict board. A closing diagnostic for testing the next
such claim the reader hears.

OUTPUT: a single self-contained interactive HTML page, professional
and readable, light theme by default with a dark switch, stating the
question at the top, publishing this prompt in full, repeating key
points in prominent boxes for skimming readers, and giving the reader
something to do in every major section. Also produce a plain-English
quick version of about fifteen minutes with three short exercises.

The page you are reading is the output of that brief after the sources were checked. In three places the evidence added something the brief did not expect. First, the historic rites for the sick do not merely avoid the coin; they are written against it. The 1662 Book of Common Prayer prays in a single sentence for recovery “or else” for grace to die well, and the Catholic Catechism describes the sacrament of the sick as leading to healing of the body “if such is God’s will” (Part XI). Second, the New Testament records Paul leaving a colleague sick without a word of explanation, and crediting another colleague’s recovery not to his own prayer but to God’s mercy on the sick man (Part IV). Third, in 601 a pope wrote to a missionary bishop who was reported to be working miracles, not to congratulate him but to warn him that such gifts tempt the mind to be “puffed up with self-esteem” (Part VIII).

What do you currently think?

Ten questions. Each has an answer you can check in the texts and sources in Part XIV. Answer before reading and lock them in; they come back in Part XIII beside the sources.

What follows

The two-headed coin

Begin with what is actually said. The examples below are composed by this page; none is quoted from any person. They are built to show a pattern many readers will recognise, and each is kept to things commonly heard.

Each sentence on its own could be sincere. Christians do pray, the sick do recover, and some die even when everyone prayed. What makes the pattern is the way the sentences are shared out across outcomes. Put them in a grid and a shape appears.

Try it: every square wins

Two things vary in any illness: whether the preacher was called to the bedside, and whether the sick person recovered. That makes four possible cases. Click each square to see the composed account the pattern supplies for it, and what that account does. Then switch to Position E and click them again.

Four features

“I was sick, and ye visited me”

Begin with what the preacher gets right, because it is a great deal. The instruction to visit is not his invention. It is one of the few actions Christ names at the last judgement:

Matthew 25:35–36, 40
For I was an hungred, and ye gave me meat: I was thirsty, and ye gave me drink: I was a stranger, and ye took me in: Naked, and ye clothed me: I was sick, and ye visited me: I was in prison, and ye came unto me. … Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.

Notice what the visit is, in Christ’s account. It is a work of mercy done to him, and it is counted whether or not the sick person recovers. Nothing in the passage makes the visit valuable because of its effect on the illness. The righteous do not even know they have done it (25:37–39).

The early church took this literally. Around 110–140, Polycarp of Smyrna wrote that presbyters must be “compassionate and merciful to all, bringing back those that wander, visiting all the sick, and not neglecting the widow, the orphan, or the poor” (To the Philippians 6; trans. A. Roberts and J. Donaldson, Ante-Nicene Fathers, vol. 1). A century later, when plague struck Alexandria, its bishop Dionysius described what Christians did:

The most of our brethren were unsparing in their exceeding love and brotherly kindness. They held fast to each other and visited the sick fearlessly, and ministered to them continually, serving them in Christ.

Dionysius of Alexandria, Easter letter (c. 260), in Eusebius, Church History VII.22.7. Trans. A. C. McGiffert, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 2nd series, vol. 1 (1890).

Dionysius goes on to record that many of those who nursed the sick caught the plague and died, among them presbyters and deacons, and that the church honoured their deaths as a kind of martyrdom. The visitors did not always save the sick. Often the sick outlived the visitors. The church did not conclude from this that the visits had failed, or that God had shown anyone whose time it was. It concluded that the visits were love.

James 5: the text the pattern leans on

The strongest text for the preacher is James 5:14–16, and it deserves to be read slowly, because it does promise something. It is also the text most often read in part.

Try it: zoom out, one layer at a time

Read the promise on its own, then add context a layer at a time. At each layer, before revealing the note, ask: who acts, and who gets the credit?

Read whole, James 5 is a strong text for Position E and an awkward one for the coin. It sends for the elders of the church, not a particular man. It says “the Lord shall raise him up.” It makes prayer for healing a mutual duty of the whole congregation (“pray one for another”). It chooses as its model a prophet “subject to like passions as we are.” And it sits in a letter that has just said “If the Lord will” (4:15) and pointed to Job, whose sufferers’ friends had explanations for everything (5:11).

Who raised him up?

The book of Acts records a number of healings through the apostles, and it records something else with nearly equal care: what the apostles said when people looked at them afterwards. It is the closest thing in the New Testament to a record of retrospective credit being offered, and handled.

Try it: what did the apostle say next?

Four moments. In each, a healing has just happened or someone has just honoured an apostle. Predict what he said, then reveal the text.

Acts 3:12, 16
Ye men of Israel, why marvel ye at this? or why look ye so earnestly on us, as though by our own power or holiness we had made this man to walk? … And his name through faith in his name hath made this man strong, whom ye see and know: yea, the faith which is by him hath given him this perfect soundness in the presence of you all.

Peter anticipates the retrospective account before anyone can give it: “as though by our own power or holiness.” He names both halves of what a crowd assumes about a healer, power (he can do it) and holiness (he is the kind of man God listens to), and refuses both. The credit is placed on Christ’s name, twice in one sentence. The same pattern appears when Peter heals Aeneas: “Aeneas, Jesus Christ maketh thee whole” (9:34). The subject of the verb is Christ.

The one who welcomed it

The New Testament does describe a man who accepted a reputation for spiritual power, and it is not a flattering portrait. In Samaria, before the gospel arrived, Simon had amazed the city, “giving out that himself was some great one: To whom they all gave heed, from the least to the greatest, saying, This man is the great power of God” (Acts 8:9–10). When he later saw the apostles lay on hands, he offered money for the same ability, and Peter’s answer is the sharpest rebuke in Acts: “Thy money perish with thee … thy heart is not right in the sight of God” (8:20–21).

The contrast is not between a man who worked wonders and men who did not. Both are said to have done remarkable things. It is between a man who let the crowd call him “the great power of God” and men who tore their clothes when a crowd began to say the same about them.

An objection, answered: “But Elisha’s presence mattered”

A defender of the pattern might point to the Old Testament, where the Shunammite woman will not leave until Elisha himself comes, and her son is raised only when he does (2 Kings 4:29–37). Does that not show that the man of God’s presence can be decisive?

Read the chapter and three details stand out. Elisha, when he arrives, “shut the door upon them twain, and prayed unto the LORD” (4:33): the power is asked for, not possessed. The episode is not generalised: nothing in the chapter tells Israel to call the prophet for every illness. And the same book records, without comment, that “Elisha was fallen sick of his sickness whereof he died” (13:14). The greatest healer among the prophets died of an illness, and Scripture offers no revelation about why his time had come. It simply records it.

When the sick were not healed

If the coin were the New Testament’s own way of speaking, one would expect its writers to explain every illness they mention: this one recovered because of the prayer, that one died because it was appointed. They do something else. They record prayed-for illnesses that did not end in healing, and they almost never explain them.

Try it: six cases, read with their settings

Choose a case. For each, notice three things: what happened, what was said about it, and what was not said.

Set side by side, the cases teach a consistent grammar. Prayer is urged and practised without reserve. David fasts for seven days; Paul asks three times; the Philippians send a man to care for Paul and grieve when he falls ill. The outcome is received, not explained. Paul does not say why Trophimus stayed sick, and David does not claim to have been told why the child died. Where a recovery is attributed, it is attributed to God’s mercy, and to mercy on the sick man first.

2 Samuel 12:22–23
And he said, While the child was yet alive, I fasted and wept: for I said, Who can tell whether GOD will be gracious to me, that the child may live? But now he is dead, wherefore should I fast? can I bring him back again? I shall go to him, but he shall not return to me.

David is a prophet, by the New Testament’s own account (Acts 2:29–30), and a king who had just been told by God, through Nathan, that the child would die (2 Samuel 12:14). Even so, he prayed as though the outcome were open, because “who can tell,” and when the child died he did not reinterpret his prayer. He got up, washed, worshipped, and ate. “Who can tell” is Position E in three words.

“God showed me it was their time”

The second face of the coin is a claim of revelation. It is usually spoken gently and at a painful moment, which makes it hard to question. But it is a specific claim: that God disclosed to this speaker something about this death that others did not know. Scripture has a good deal to say about claims of that kind.

Tested, not deferred to

There is also a practical difficulty. A retrospective revelation about a death cannot be tested at all. Nobody can check it; it arrives after the event it explains; and it is always consistent with what happened, because it was fitted to what happened. Whatever else it is, it is not the kind of word that 1 Thessalonians 5 imagines a church being able to “prove.”

What the historic churches say about private revelation

The historic churches have never denied that God can speak to individuals. They have consistently placed such claims below the public revelation completed in Christ, and under the discernment of the church. The Catholic Catechism puts the common view carefully:

Throughout the ages, there have been so-called “private” revelations, some of which have been recognized by the authority of the Church. They do not belong, however, to the deposit of faith. It is not their role to improve or complete Christ’s definitive Revelation, but to help live more fully by it in a certain period of history. Guided by the Magisterium of the Church, the sensus fidelium knows how to discern and welcome in these revelations whatever constitutes an authentic call of Christ or his saints to the Church.

Catechism of the Catholic Church §67 (2nd ed., 1997).

Protestant and Orthodox traditions frame authority differently, and this page does not adjudicate between them. But on the point that matters here they agree: a private word is tested by others, and it may not be used to settle what the church has no public way to know. A claim about why a particular person died, offered by the one person whose prayer did not bring recovery, is about as far from that standard as a claim can be.

Two objections, answered

“Isaiah told Hezekiah he would die, and then that he would live. Prophets do announce a person’s time.” They do, and Isaiah 38 shows how different that is from the coin. Isaiah spoke beforehand, publicly, in terms anyone could check: “thou shalt die, and not live” (38:1). When the word changed, it changed before the outcome, explicitly, with a date (“I will add unto thy days fifteen years,” 38:5) and with a sign anyone could see (38:7–8). The coin works in exactly the opposite order: nothing is said until the outcome is known, and then the revelation is found to have matched it.

“Jesus himself said of Lazarus, ‘This sickness is not unto death, but for the glory of God.’” He did (John 11:4), and again the order matters: he said it before the event, in front of witnesses, and it was vindicated in public at the tomb. More importantly, it was Jesus who said it. When his disciples tried to give their own account of a man’s affliction, “Master, who did sin, this man, or his parents?”, he rejected their explanation outright (John 9:2–3). The one person in the Gospels entitled to narrate God’s purpose in a sickness is the one person the coin does not quote.

Two theologies on one coin

Look again at the two faces. When the sick person recovers, the explanation is human instrumentality: the visit, the prayer, the presence of the right man made the difference. When the sick person dies, the explanation is divine decree: it was appointed, and nothing would have changed it. These are two different accounts of how God acts in the world, and the coin selects between them according to the result.

Historic Christian teaching on providence does not choose. It holds that God governs all things and that he ordinarily does so through means, including human prayer and care, in every case at once. Thomas Aquinas put the classical position in a sentence:

For we pray not that we may change the Divine disposition, but that we may impetrate that which God has disposed to be fulfilled by our prayers.

Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II–II, q. 83, a. 2 (c. 1271–72). Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (2nd ed., 1920).

Four centuries later the Westminster Confession of Faith, the standard of the Presbyterian churches, said the same from the Reformed side: “God, in His ordinary providence, maketh use of means, yet is free to work without, above, and against them, at His pleasure” (Westminster Confession V.3, 1646). Prayer is a real means. God is really sovereign. Both are true in the case that recovers and in the case that dies.

That is why the historic position forbids both faces of the coin at once. If the sick person recovers, the Christian may say that God answered prayer, because God does use prayer, but may not say that the recovery would not have happened without this particular man, because God is “free to work without” any means. If the sick person dies, the Christian may say the death was within God’s providence, because every death is, but may not claim to have been shown why, because the reason belongs to “the secret things.” The same humility governs both outcomes.

Romans 14: one Lord of both outcomes

Romans 14:7–9
For none of us liveth to himself, and no man dieth to himself. For whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and whether we die, we die unto the Lord: whether we live therefore, or die, we are the Lord’s. For to this end Christ both died, and rose, and revived, that he might be Lord both of the dead and living.

Paul’s sentence is the reverse image of the coin. The coin says: whether he lives or dies, I was right. Paul says: whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s. Both sentences cover both outcomes. Only one of them puts someone other than the speaker at the centre.

A test that cannot be failed

Scripture’s test for a word spoken in God’s name assumes one thing above all: that the word could turn out to be wrong.

Deuteronomy 18:21–22
And if thou say in thine heart, How shall we know the word which the LORD hath not spoken? When a prophet speaketh in the name of the LORD, if the thing follow not, nor come to pass, that is the thing which the LORD hath not spoken, but the prophet hath spoken it presumptuously: thou shalt not be afraid of him.

The New Testament keeps the principle and hands it to the congregation: “Let the prophets speak two or three, and let the other judge” (1 Corinthians 14:29). Judging presupposes that a verdict against the speaker is possible. A church that could only ever find its prophets right would not be judging them.

The coin removes that possibility, and does so neatly. It makes no claim before the outcome, and after the outcome it has a claim to fit either result. The philosopher of science Karl Popper (1902–1994) made the general point well known: a theory that no possible observation could contradict is not thereby strong, but empty, because it forbids nothing. That is a paraphrase of his argument, not a quotation, and the point is older than Popper. It is Deuteronomy’s.

Try it: run the ward

Ten patients, ten visits. The simulator decides each outcome by chance, because it cannot know God’s will; neither, the page argues, can the visitor. For each bed, compare what the Coin says with what Position E says. Then look at the ledger.

The ledger’s last line is the whole argument of this Part. Position E never loses either, but for the opposite reason: it claims nothing that an outcome could contradict, because it gives thanks for what happened and admits what it does not know. The coin also never loses, but because it claims everything, and arranges the claim after the result. One is humility; the other is immunity.

Planting and watering

The coin’s deepest problem is not logical but spiritual. It makes the minister indispensable. The New Testament and the historic church went to considerable lengths to do the opposite.

1 Corinthians 3:5–7
Who then is Paul, and who is Apollos, but ministers by whom ye believed, even as the Lord gave to every man? I have planted, Apollos watered; but God gave the increase. So then neither is he that planteth any thing, neither he that watereth; but God that giveth the increase.

Paul is writing to a church that had begun to rank its ministers (“I am of Paul; and I of Apollos,” 3:4). His answer is not that one minister was more effective than the other. It is that “neither is he that planteth any thing.” The minister is a real instrument and, at the same time, nothing. The coin reverses the proportions: God is mentioned, but the story is about which man was called.

Jesus had said the same to seventy disciples who came back delighted with what had happened through them: “Notwithstanding in this rejoice not, that the spirits are subject unto you; but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven” (Luke 10:20). And of every servant who has done everything asked of him: “say, We are unprofitable servants: we have done that which was our duty to do” (Luke 17:10).

A pope’s letter to a miracle-worker, 601

The historic church did not only teach this in the abstract. In 601, Pope Gregory the Great wrote to Augustine, the monk he had sent to England four years earlier, who by then was bishop at Canterbury. Reports had reached Rome that God was working miracles through him. Gregory’s letter survives in his register and was copied by Bede into his history of the English church:

I know, dearly beloved brother, that Almighty God, by means of you, shows forth great miracles to the nation which it was His will to choose. Wherefore you must needs rejoice with fear, and fear with joy concerning that heavenly gift; for you will rejoice because the souls of the English are by outward miracles drawn to inward grace; but you will fear, lest, amidst the wonders that are wrought, the weak mind may be puffed up with self-esteem, and that whereby it is outwardly raised to honour cause it inwardly to fall through vain-glory. For we must call to mind, that when the disciples returned with joy from preaching, and said to their Heavenly Master, “Lord, even the devils are subject to us through Thy Name,” forthwith they received the reply, “In this rejoice not, but rather rejoice, because your names are written in heaven.”

Gregory the Great to Augustine of Canterbury (601; Register XI.36), in Bede, Ecclesiastical History of the English People I.31 (731). English translation as published by the Christian Classics Ethereal Library.

Notice what Gregory does not do. He does not doubt the miracles. He grants that God is working “by means of you.” And he treats that very fact as the danger: the gift is real, and because it is real, it can puff up the one through whom it comes. The coin is the puffing-up turned into a method.

The minister made dispensable

The early church faced a sharper form of the question in the fourth century. The Donatists of North Africa held that a sacrament was only valid if the minister was worthy. The church rejected this, and Augustine’s answer became the common inheritance of East and West, and later of the Reformation churches:

Peter may baptize, but this is He that baptizes; Paul may baptize, yet this is He that baptizes; Judas may baptize, still this is He that baptizes.

Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 6.7 (c. 406–07). Trans. John Gibb, Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, 1st series, vol. 7 (1888).

The Church of England wrote the same principle into Article XXVI of its Thirty-nine Articles (1571), under the title “Of the Unworthiness of the Ministers, which hinders not the effect of the Sacrament.” The purpose of the settlement was pastoral: a believer must never have to wonder whether the right man was present for God to act. The coin reintroduces exactly that wonder at the bedside.

The family left holding the blame

A coin with two winning faces has to have a losing side somewhere, and it does. It is the family. If a visit could save, then the absence of a visit could kill; if the right man’s prayer was decisive, then not calling him was decisive too. The coin rarely says this aloud, but its logic says it for it, and grieving people are very good at hearing what is implied.

The New Testament knows this move and rejects it. When the disciples asked whose sin had caused a man’s blindness, “this man, or his parents?”, Jesus refused both options: “Neither hath this man sinned, nor his parents” (John 9:2–3). When people assumed that the Galileans killed by Pilate, and the eighteen crushed by the tower in Siloam, must have been worse sinners, he said, “I tell you, Nay” (Luke 13:1–5). The pattern of reading a disaster backwards to find someone at fault is one Jesus meets repeatedly, and he never endorses it.

What he asks for instead is carried by Paul into two short commands: “Bear ye one another’s burdens, and so fulfil the law of Christ” (Galatians 6:2), and “Rejoice with them that do rejoice, and weep with them that weep” (Romans 12:15). Neither leaves any room for retrospective accounting. And when Paul writes to a church that has lost members, he does not explain the deaths; he tells them how to grieve: “that ye sorrow not, even as others which have no hope” (1 Thessalonians 4:13).

Try it: comfort, claim or blame?

Twelve sentences of the kind heard at bedsides and funerals. Some are Scripture, some are composed. Sort each into comfort (it bears the burden), claim (it asserts the speaker’s power or private knowledge), or blame (it places the outcome on the family or the sufferer).

Try it: answer the objection before reading a reply

By their fruits

Jesus gave his followers a test for teachers that does not require them to see into anyone’s heart:

Matthew 7:15–17, 20
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. … Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.

Applied to a teaching rather than a person, the question is what the teaching tends to grow in those who hear it. The page does not assess any actual minister or congregation. But the tendencies of the two positions can be compared.

The New Testament’s instructions to elders point firmly one way. “Neither as being lords over God’s heritage, but being ensamples to the flock” (1 Peter 5:3). “Not for that we have dominion over your faith, but are helpers of your joy” (2 Corinthians 1:24). A pattern of speech that leaves a minister unchallengeable, whatever happens, is a form of dominion over faith, however gently it is exercised.

The historic churches built their structures, with all their failures, partly against this danger: ministers ordained by others and answerable to them, preaching tied to appointed Scripture and the creeds, rites for the sick written down so that the words did not depend on the minister, and the Donatist settlement of Part VIII ensuring that God’s action never waited on the right man. None of these guarantees faithfulness. Each gives the ordinary Christian somewhere to stand.

Try it: ten texts to carry to a bedside

Read the question on each card, try to recall the text, then turn it over and mark whether you knew it.

What to say at the bedside and the graveside

It would be easy to end with criticism. The historic church did something better: it wrote down what to say, so that the words at a sickbed would not depend on any one minister’s gifts or temptations. Those words are the fullest answer to the coin, because they pray harder for healing than the coin ever does, and claim less.

The Book of Common Prayer, 1662

The Order for the Visitation of the Sick begins with the minister reminding the sick person that “Almighty God is the Lord of life and death, and of all things to them pertaining.” It then prays:

Hear us, Almighty and most merciful God and Saviour; extend thy accustomed goodness to this thy servant who is grieved with sickness. Sanctify, we beseech thee, this thy fatherly correction to him; that the sense of his weakness may add strength to his faith, and seriousness to his repentance: That, if it shall be thy good pleasure to restore him to his former health, he may lead the residue of his life in thy fear, and to thy glory: or else, give him grace so to take thy visitation, that, after this painful life ended, he may dwell with thee in life everlasting; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Order for the Visitation of the Sick, Book of Common Prayer (1662).

That single sentence is Position E written as a prayer. Both outcomes are named. Both are placed in God’s “good pleasure.” Each is given its own Christian purpose. And the minister is not mentioned at all, before or after.

The Catholic Catechism on the sacrament of the sick

The first grace of this sacrament is one of strengthening, peace and courage to overcome the difficulties that go with the condition of serious illness or the frailty of old age. … This assistance from the Lord by the power of his Spirit is meant to lead the sick person to healing of the soul, but also of the body if such is God’s will.

Catechism of the Catholic Church §1520 (2nd ed., 1997).

A sacrament, in Catholic teaching, is an act of Christ through his church, and the anointing of the sick is administered by a priest. Even here, where the minister’s role is most defined, the healing of the body is “if such is God’s will,” and the first grace named is courage, not recovery. The Orthodox service of Holy Unction and the Lutheran and Reformed orders for visiting the sick differ in form, but this page has found none that authorises the minister to announce afterwards which outcome God chose, or why.

Words for either ending

The judgement, and a test

Before seeing the page’s verdicts, give your own. Ten claims, drawn from the areas in the brief.

Try it: rate the thesis claim by claim

The page’s judgement

So the thesis stands. The visit is Christian; the account that makes every outcome confirm the visitor is not. The New Testament and the historic church give a minister every reason to go to the bedside and to pray there with all his strength. They give him no licence to take the credit if the sick recover, or to claim God’s secret if they die. What they give instead is harder to say and far kinder to hear: thanks to God in one case, hope and honest grief in the other, and in both, the three words David used, “who can tell.”

Try it: test the next claim you hear

Seven questions to ask about an account you have actually heard, after an illness or a death. Nothing you select is stored or sent anywhere. The result applies the tests of this page; it is a way of organising the evidence, not a verdict on any speaker.

Your answers, revisited

Here are your locked-in answers from the top of the page, beside what the sources say and where each is discussed.

Check it yourself

Fifteen items. The Scripture is free in any edition, and nearly all of the historic material is free online (New Advent; CCEL; the Church of England and Vatican websites). If you read only three, read the first three. Together they take about twenty minutes and settle the core question without any help from this page.

1. 1. Acts 3:1–16; 8:9–24; 14:8–18. Read this first. Ten minutes. Three scenes: a healing and a refusal of credit, a man who welcomed it, and apostles tearing their clothes.
2. 2. 2 Samuel 12:13–23 and Philippians 2:25–30. Read this first. Five minutes. “Who can tell,” and “God had mercy on him.”
3. 3. The Order for the Visitation of the Sick, Book of Common Prayer (1662). Read this first. Free at the Church of England website. Read how many times the minister is mentioned as the cause of anything.
4. 4. Matthew 25:31–46 and James 5:7–20. The visit as a work of mercy, and the whole of the passage about calling the elders.
5. 5. 2 Corinthians 12:7–10; 1 Timothy 5:23; 2 Timothy 4:20; 2 Kings 13:14. Prayed-for and unexplained sickness, including Elisha’s.
6. 6. Isaiah 38 and John 9–11. Words about sickness spoken beforehand and publicly; and Jesus refusing the disciples’ explanation of blindness.
7. 7. Deuteronomy 18:15–22; 29:29; 1 Corinthians 14:29–33; 1 Thessalonians 5:19–22; 1 John 4:1–6. How a claimed word from God is tested. Then Dossier 03.
8. 8. Romans 11:33–36; 14:7–9; 1 Corinthians 3:1–9; Luke 10:17–20; 17:7–10. Providence, and the minister’s place in it.
9. 9. Luke 13:1–5; Galatians 6:1–5; Romans 12:9–21; 1 Thessalonians 4:13–18. Refusing to read disaster backwards, and how to grieve.
10. 10. Polycarp, To the Philippians 6 (early 2nd century), ANF vol. 1; and Eusebius, Church History VII.22, quoting Dionysius of Alexandria on the plague (c. 260), NPNF II/1. Both free at New Advent.
11. 11. Augustine, Tractates on the Gospel of John 5–6 (c. 406–07), NPNF I/7; and Article XXVI of the Thirty-nine Articles (1571). The minister made dispensable.
12. 12. Bede, Ecclesiastical History I.31 (731): Gregory the Great’s letter to Augustine of Canterbury (601). Free at CCEL and Project Gutenberg.
13. 13. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae II–II, q. 83, a. 2; and Westminster Confession of Faith, chapter V (1646). Providence and means, from two traditions.
14. 14. Catechism of the Catholic Church §§66–67 and 1499–1532 (1997). Private revelation, and the sacrament of the anointing of the sick. Free at the Vatican website.
15. 15. Your own memory. Think of the last time you heard a recovery attributed to a particular person’s visit or prayer. Then ask whether you ever heard the same person say, after a death, “we prayed, and I don’t know why.”

No living person is named on this page as an example of anything. No present-day preacher, ministry or congregation is assessed or identified. Every modern statement of the pattern is composed by this page and labelled as composed.