Who is john alexander dowie

His father, John Murray Dowie, was a tailor and part time preacher. In his family immigrated to Australia, and moved to the town of Adelaide. Dowie became a member of the Congregational church, and decided he wanted to enter the ministry. He went to the University of Edinburgh to study. While there he was exposed to the teachings of Edward Irving, who had been a student there. Irving believed that cessassionist theology was wrong, and the gifts were still available to the church today.

Upon graduation he returned to Australia, and became pastor of a Congregational church at a small town, about 50 miles from Adelaide. In he moved to Sydney and became minister of the Newtown Congregational church. It was here that God revealed that healing was still for today.

Several members of his church became sick and died during a wave of disease that hit the city. God spoke to Dowie, and showed him that sickness was of the devil and to be resisted. He began to pray for his parishioner, and from that day forward none died. This revelation so impacted Dowie that he left the pastorate, and became a full-time healing evangelist. He moved to Melbourne in the early eighteen-eighties, began to gather a following, and eventually built a church there.

He published a magazine about healing called "Jehovah Rophi". Two years later to he went to the Chicago world's fair, and had healing meetings outside the fairgrounds. These meetings were so spectacular that the front wall of the meeting room was covered with crutches, braces, and other medical paraphernalia left by those healed in the meetings.

Next, he set up his headquarters in Chicago, where he preached to thousands every Sunday. He bought a building so that people who traveled to Chicago, for healing, would have a place to stay. He began to publish a journal called "Leaves of Healing", which went to thousands of people, promoting the divine healing message.

Hundreds of people were flocking to his ministry to receive teaching and prayer. Many were healed dramatically. Dowie's congregation fed the poor, were highly evangelistic, and had a major impact on a notoriously corrupt city. Five years later he recognized the 'deceased' in Melbourne and prosecuted him. In Adelaide Dowie became involved with the Salvation Army and won publicity by his legal action against the commissioner of police for obstructing the Army's work.

In November at Melbourne Dowie joined battle with Thomas Walker , a leading Spiritualist, and published a pamphlet on their controversy.

His authoritarian rule soon bred revolt; his story of it was recorded in Sin in The Camp. On 15 February he led a breakaway group to form a new tabernacle in Johnston Street, Fitzroy. In disputes over ownership the opposition barricaded themselves in the tabernacle; Dowie led his followers against them and was charged with organizing unauthorized processions. He insisted that he must obey the law of God rather than of man but then declared that if the court wanted its pound of flesh, he had fourteen stone 89 kg to offer.

He was gaoled for a month and fined for a second offence; when his sentence expired he refused to pay the fine and was gaoled again for seven days. Many liberals supported him and he was soon released. Dowie had already turned to faith healing and after a mission to New Zealand he left for the United States in June After two years in San Francisco he went to Chicago where by he was so notorious that a hundred charges were laid against him, although none succeeded.

After trying in vain to convert New York in he launched a mission to the world in It is almost impossible to assess Dowie's motives and sincerity from this distance. He was not the first — and will not be the last — religious leader to inspire both great devotion and great skepticism during his lifetime; forming an accurate judgment is even more difficult a century later.

It is possible that he suffered mental deterioration or personality change in later life, perhaps a result of undiagnosed vascular events prior to the massive strokes which, in , severely disabled and then, in , killed him — although he would also not be the first public figure to secure his downfall by starting to believe his own publicity.

Two contemporary and fairly even-handed appreciations of the man and his work are given below, one a personal observation and the other a typical press report. Many of Dowie's ideas appear eccentric at best in the early twenty-first century; it should not be forgotten, however, that he was well ahead of his time in espousing beliefs considered similarly eccentric at the dawn of the twentieth — such as equality of the races.

Zion City was one of the first communities in the world planned as an integrated city. Today some two to three thousand Christians still describe themselves as "Dowieites," many in South Africa, where Zionites represent the largest Christian sect. In the rest of the world, John Alexander Dowie is better remembered by Muslims as a false prophet and enemy of Islam than by Christians as an early faith healer and forerunner of Pentecostalism — and also, of course, by Joyceans, for his guest appearance in Ulysses.

Read the complete text online. Did you ever meet him? The difference between Mohammed and Joseph Smith is of degree rather than kind. Dowie is down towards the small end of the scale, but he is none the less there, and differs in kind from your average citizen in his power to influence and control others.

I crossed the lake with him one night and spent the evening in conversation. After all, perhaps it does not matter so much what we believe as how we believe. A few moments later we were passing the new Christian Science Temple on Drexel Boulevard, — a building quite simple and delightful, barring some garish lamps in front.

The connecting link is faith. But the very architecture of the temple we have just passed illustrates the vast interval that separates the two. The temple at Karnak and the tabernacle at Salt Lake City are petrifactions of faith. In time the places of worship are the only tangible remains — witness Stonehenge. A scanned version of the entire paper is available online. It begins to look very much as if the recent Dowieite invasion of New York should rank with Napoleon's advance upon Moswco [ sic ], so far as the life and adventures of John Alexander Dowie are concerned.

That unquestionably clever organizer apparently overreached himself in his expedition to the metropolis. The "invasion" was a dismal failure, as indeed it was doomed to be from the first. The disaster in the East not only weakened the financial position of "Elijah II," but it seems quite apparent that to some extent at least it lessened his rather remarkable influence over his followers.

As a result, when the creditors of "Zion" became urgent in their demands, the appeals of Dowie for more money from his followers were not answered with sufficient unanimity to suit the occasion. The financial downfall of Zion was the result. The future of Dowie will be watched with interest. It has been charged that the ventures of the self-styled prophet have been immensely profitable to himself, and that he has already put most of the money so obtained in places where it can [ sic ] be jeopardized by any possible disaster at Zion City.

If Dowie deserts his followers in the present crisis, there will be some cause to believe in the justice of these accusations. If he stands by his followers and is able to speak for himself during the investigation that will be carried on by the receivers appointed by the court, three [ sic ] will be ample opportunity to judge in just what category the financial activities of the founder of Zion belong.

Dowie is certainly an unique character for these early years of the twentieth century. In the Middle Ages he would probably have been thought a great man.

More than one self-styled prohet [ sic ] in the history of the East has risen to positions of fame and lasting influence by the use of much the same sort of claims that Dowie makes for the religious side of his enterprises.