Recovering Medicine
Have we Christians handed over medicine and medical science to the pagans? Have they (and many Christians) made an idol out of it? Have we made idols out of cdoctors? Could this be because as Christians we have been so fixated on the so-called “spiritual” that we have forgotten that we are soul-spirits with bodies, i.e., human beings? And as such, our bodies are as important as every other aspect of us.
Just because some foolishly make idols of our modern medical industry and aspects thereof does not mean that it should be excluded from the transforming power of the world-changing Gospel.
In Christian anthropology,
What is man? Well, in short, We are fearfully and wonderfully made (Psa.
139:14). This refers to the whole man, not just our bodies. No aspect of man,
body or soul or spirit, is less important than any other aspect. We are a
soul-spirit with a body.
Plato and Gnosticism view
the body as unimportant, even evil, along with the rest of material creation,
something to be escaped from. However, Christians should look out for the
wellbeing, not just of souls, but the whole man (who is a soul-spirit with a
body). However, much of Christianity has spiritualised the Gospel, by which I
mean that they have made it all about getting souls into heaven rather than the
whole man, i.e., body, soul, and spirit, being redeemed, renewed, and restored
to live on the planet Earth.
The resurrected Jesus is
our paradigm. “Behold My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Handle Me and
see, for a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see I have” (Luke
24:26). He, body and soul and spirit, is returning to Earth.
We mustn’t make an idol
out of medicine, which is to obsess about our body and, to a certain extent,
our soul (psych/mind) while ignoring the disconnect of our spirit from God. We
are spiritually dead until the Holy Spirit working with the Word in our heart
makes us spiritually alive. “But the natural man does not receive the things of
the Spirit of God, for they are foolishness to him; nor can he know them,
because they are spiritually discerned” (1 Cor. 2:14).
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The whole man (body and
soul and spirit) was made in the image and likeness of God. E.g., “May God
himself, the God of peace, sanctify you through and through. May your whole
spirit, soul and body be kept blameless at the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ”
(1 Thess. 5:23).
Says Abraham Kuyper,
Christendom,
it must be confessed, did not escape this error. A dualistic conception of
regeneration was the cause of the rupture between the life of nature and the
life of grace. It has, on account of its too intense contemplation of celestial
things, neglected to give due attention to the world of God’s creation. It has,
on account of its exclusive love of things eternal, been backward in the
fulfilment of its temporal duties. It has neglected the care of the body because
it cared too exclusively for the soul. And this one-sided, inharmonious
conception in the course of time has led more than one sect to a mystic
worshipping of Christ alone, to the exclusion of God the Father Almighty, Maker
of heaven and earth.
Christ
was conceived exclusively as the Savior, and His cosmological significance was
lost out of sight. This dualism, however, is countenanced nowhere by the Holy
Scriptures. When John is describing the Savior, he first tells us that Christ
is the “eternal Word, by whom all things are made, and who is the life of men.”
Paul also testifies that “all things were created by Christ and consist by
Him;” and further, that the object of the work of redemption is not limited to
the salvation of individual sinners, but extends itself to the redemption of
the world, and to the organic reunion of all things in heaven and on earth
under Christ as their original head. Christ Himself does not speak only of the
regeneration of the earth, but also of a regeneration of the cosmos (Matt.
19:28).
Paul
declares: “The whole creation groaneth waiting for the bursting forth of the
glory of the children of God.” And when John on Patmos listened to the hymns of
the Cherubim and the Redeemed, all honor, praise and thanks were given to God.
“Who created the heaven and the earth.” The Apocalypse returns to the
starting-point of Gen. 1:1 – “In the beginning God created the heaven and the
earth.” In keeping with this, the final outcome of the future, foreshadowed in
the Holy Scriptures, is not the merely spiritual existence of saved souls, but
the restoration of the entire cosmos, when God will be all in all under the
renewed heaven and the renewed earth. Now this wide, comprehensible, cosmical
meaning of the gospel has been apprehended again by Calvin, apprehended not as
a result of a dialectical process, but of the deep impressions of God’s
majesty, which had moulded his personal life.[1]
As Christians, let us
never forget that we believe in, as per The Apostles’ Creed, “The
Resurrection of the body.” Therefore, since we will be resurrected body, soul,
and spirit, (yes, every aspect of our humanity, apart from our sin, will be raised again), let us with the Gospel recapture every area of medicine. Why? Because, whereas much of Christianity neglects this, modern medicine treats every aspect of fallen man. How so? Because our body, soul and spirit are interconnected because this is who and what we are. For Christ
to the glory of God.
[1]
Abraham
Kuyper, Christianity as a Life-System, The Witness of a World-View,(
Christian Studies Center, United States, 1980), 60-61. Also, Abraham
Kuyper, Lectures on Calvinism, (Hendrickson
Publishers, Inc., Massachusetts, 2008), 105-6.
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