The Lord's Rivals

The last time I discussed covid-scepticism I mentioned Florence who refuses to take the vaccines on ethical grounds - that is, their development using foetal cell material, like many modern medicines. I recently got into a discussion about it, rather to my trepidation, as she’d stated a quoted mortality rate for covid-19 of 1.37% made it ‘mild’, which I suppose it is compared to many other sicknesses, but of course 1.37% of a lot, is a lot, as any statistician knows. We disagree about the moral status of early-stage foetuses, but some of the other challenges Florence makes seem worth thinking about.

Should we not learn to rely on God rather than the idol of medicine, Florence asks. I don’t think anything in the Bible suggests that Christians ought in every situation to expect the miraculous intervention of God rather than ordinary secular healing. In Jesus’s time sickness was viewed as a sign of God’s displeasure on specific individuals and the Lord gave that very short shrift (John 3.1-3). His healing ministry was a way of revealing God’s will, and restoring individuals to the fellowship of Israel. Though Christians were also likely to slip into seeing illness and disability as a divine visitation, the Scriptures themselves don’t: in his short discussion of healing, St James (5.14-16) neither claims that, nor that Christians should not avail themselves of secular medicine as well as prayer. Miraculous healings still take place, but a) we now think about sickness differently and b) in order to reveal God’s will they necessarily have to be extraordinary events rather than things we expect to happen all the time. I don’t see any reason to believe that God wants us not to use ordinary, normal human methods of fighting covid.

Florence is a serious soul and also raised the fact that the word the New Testament uses for medicine, pharmakeia, also means ‘sorcery’, and ultimately derives from pharmakon, ‘poison’. Isn’t this a suspicious view of medical science, she suggests, and therefore presumably one Christians should also exercise. I hadn’t thought about the way the Scriptures deal with medicine: it’s easy enough to claim that it is merely a matter of ignorance (obviously at the time nobody (including the physicians themselves) would have understood the process of healing so the use of drugs was close to magic and therefore suspect); also, the texts use another word, iatros, for ‘doctor’ when talking about ordinary physicians and St Luke the evangelist himself. But we have to be more positive than that and assume that the Biblical language has something to tell us – that there might be a valuable point to that apparent connection between doctors and sorcerers. Perhaps there’s a link between both magic and medicine in our human desire for quick fixes to our problems that don’t require us to change anything about ourselves. There are all sorts of lessons to learn from the current pandemic involving our society and behaviour and early on almost everyone I spoke to talked about that, but now we’re just exhausted and yearn for it to be over: we really want the vaccines to be a get-out-of-jail-free-card. In terms of the pandemic's origins, for instance, we may never know whether the virus emerged from a laboratory accident or a crossover from animals being kept in bad conditions; but, whichever it was, human actions have played a major part. A purely medical solution that leaves out any spiritual reflection or room for repentance plays to the very understandable desire (which I feel as much as anyone) to ‘get back to normal’. Could that be the insight that lies underneath the Biblical language?