Roberts Claims He’s Raised Dead, Will Return With Christ

Faith healer Oral Roberts, whose successful plea for $8 million to prevent God from taking his life drew controversy earlier this year, recaptured the television evangelist spotlight Friday with a claim that he has raised the dead.

Roberts’ comments, to about 5,000 people Thursday at a charismatic conference at Oral Roberts University in Tulsa, were broadcast nationally Friday on his son’s “Richard Roberts Live” program.

Richard Roberts acknowledged that his father’s statements were sure to stir criticism.

Indeed, even among conservative Protestants, fundamentalist leader Jerry Falwell was openly critical and a professor at Pasadena’s Fuller Theological Seminary said that documentation is needed to take such claims seriously.

He’s Not Alone

The elder Roberts, whose ministry began 40 years ago with tent revivals to which the sick came to be healed, contended Thursday that “all of us in the ministry could talk about” cases of people raised from the dead.

“I won’t tell you how many of the dead have been raised under my ministry,” Roberts said. He said a person died while he was preaching once. “I had to stop and go back in the crowd and raise the dead person so I could go ahead with the service.

“That did increase my altar call (people going forward to profess faith) that night,” Roberts said, drawing laughter from the crowd.

Son Recalls Event

Richard Roberts said Friday that he recalled one instance in his boyhood when a dead child was brought back to life by his father. He did not say it was the incident mentioned by his father.

“Right in the middle of my dad’s sermon, a woman came running up to the platform with her baby in her arms screaming ‘My baby has just died. My baby has just died,’ ” Richard Roberts said. “My dad had to stop in the middle of his sermon and lay hands on that child. And that child came back to life again.”

Falwell said, according to United Press International, that he hoped the Pentecostal evangelist’s claim “is either a misquote or totally out of context. It is too ludicrous to give it any other interpretation.”

Falwell laughed when asked if he ever revived a dead person.

Miracles Then and Now

“No, I haven’t and I don’t think anyone else has outside those in apostolic days,” he said. Fundamentalists tend to believe that miracles were confined to the biblical era, whereas Pentecostal Christians claim that some miracles occur today.

Pentecostal minister Cecil Robeck, assistant dean of Fuller Seminary’s school of theology, said of occasional reports of raising the dead: “I happen to believe that such a thing is possible, but I have not seen anything or any documentation that would convince me that it is happening today.”

A recently published Fuller study, “Ministry and the Miraculous,” warned that “making claims without the controls of careful testing” reduces credibility, especially in the eyes of the skeptics, to the level of magic or voodoo.

Another Miracle

Oral Roberts also told his audience Thursday that he would return after his death with Jesus Christ to rule with him on Earth.

“I’m looking to the world to come because I’m not going to stay over there,” Oral Roberts said Thursday. “I’m coming back. . . . And I’m going to get my rightful place. I’m going to rule and I’m going to reign. You look at Oral Roberts University, what happens to it when I get back from the other side.”

Richard Roberts said his father’s promise to return to Earth after his own death should be no surprise. He said “all born-again Christians” should expect to return to Earth with the second coming of Jesus Christ anticipated by many Christians.