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Christianity, Plagues, Pandemics: Past and Present
By Lt-Colonel Ian Hutson
The arrival of Covid-19 to New Zealand caught many of us by surprise. Most of us had not experienced anything like it in our lifetimes. We live in a unique period of history where the advances of medical science have primarily kept the worst kind of infectious diseases at bay. It wasn’t always like this; plagues and epidemics have been part of human history for a long time.
Christianity has been around for two millennia and has wrestled with the understanding of where epidemics or plagues come from and what causes them. Is this God punishing us? Is God involved in the healing response? Do we put our faith in God and his will and resist medical intervention? Or is medical intervention a part of God’s healing response through human hands—something to be embraced?
Epidemics in history
According to historians, the prevalence of epidemics increased as humans moved from hunter-gatherer-type existences to pastoral communities where humans increasingly lived more continuously alongside animals through whom the various diseases were transmitted. The Christmas manger story where Jesus was born in a stable among the animals perhaps gives a glimpse of this. As cities developed and people came to live in densely populated and unsanitary living conditions, the context became the perfect breeding ground for all kinds of diseases. And so it was that at frequent points in history huge swathes of people were cut down by one infectious disease or another.
Many of these diseases developed centuries ago in the Northern Hemisphere as early civilisation developed. They were then carried by Europeans, who had over centuries developed a level of immunity, and subsequently passed on with devastating effects to indigenous populations, such as Māori here in New Zealand. Some estimates convey that from the years 1810 to 1840 there were around 120,000 deaths among Māori from illness and other ‘normal’ causes, an average of 4000 a year. In the same period, warfare caused perhaps 700 deaths per year. Here, as elsewhere, germs caused far greater loss of life than wars did. We catch many glimpses of plagues in biblical accounts, with the plagues inflicted on the Egyptians being one prominent example. Responses to various infectious diseases found their way into the Law of Moses, which in effect acted as an early set of public health policies. Something akin to face masks is mentioned in the Book of Leviticus, among other references, where the Hebrews are given orders about what to do with those with a leprous infection.
‘[H]is clothes shall be rent, his head shall be left bare, and he shall cover over his upper lip; and he shall call out, “Unclean! Unclean!”’ Leviticus 13:45 declares. But beyond those measures—some of which the World Health Organisation would not advise—is the practice of common courtesy, such as removing oneself from others. ‘Being unclean, he shall dwell apart; his dwelling shall be outside the camp.’
One early response to disease was to attribute it as being the result of the sin of those who were inflicted by it—a judgement of God. The Book of Job with its picture of a righteous man afflicted by disease should have dispelled this in Jewish thought, but it was still very much prevalent in Jesus’ time.
The emphasis on healing in the ministry of Jesus
In the book Bad Faith: When Religious Belief Undermines Modern Medicine, author Paul A. Offit contrasts the way religious healing was at the very heart of Jesus’ ministry with the absence of this healing emphasis in the Hebrew tradition. He references the 727 verses in the four Gospels that specifically relate to healing. It was a big part of Jesus’ ministry and involved the healing of people who suffered from leprosy, paralysis, dropsy, fever and epilepsy. He caused the deaf to hear and the mute to speak. He cured withered hands and severed ears and much more. In contrast to existing attitudes, Jesus didn’t see sickness as the result of sin but as affecting the just and the unjust alike.
Healing and early Christianity
That early Christians sought to emulate Jesus was demonstrated by Polycarp, a second century Church leader, who identified care of the sick as the principal responsibility of church elders. According to Offit, by the third century, no other entity had advanced healing more than Christian monasteries, which utilised medical treatment in ways that ultimately gave birth to the modern hospital. He claims that by the Middle Ages, Christians had created more hospitals than any other religious or secular entity. In addition, later Christian missionaries were often the first to bring modern medicine to the many parts of the world they went to—still a part of overseas mission for Christians today.
This emphasis on healing, especially in the context of epidemics, was to be one key aspect of the gospel that made Christianity stand out in the Roman world. In his book, The Rise of Christianity, Rodney Stark outlines how the early Christians response to plagues was one of the key reasons for the exponential growth of Christianity in the first few centuries of its existence. Plagues were common in this period, with a particularly devastating epidemic sweeping through the empire in 165 AD that was estimated to have wiped out the lives of around a quarter to a third of the people living in the Roman Empire in a period of around 15 years. The absolute misery and social dislocation cannot be overstated.
Stark indicates that among other reasons, the Christian values of love and charity, expressed in norms of social service and community solidarity, made it possible for Christians to cope through the plague and resulted in substantially higher rates of survival. While Christians stayed with and tended to the afflicted—be they Christian or otherwise—the pagans generally fled, leaving their own to die alone. The provision of basic sustenance and care didn’t save everyone, but it did save many. The care of afflicted pagans those who had lost their pagan families in a devastating loss of community, led them to join an inclusive and open Christian family of faith that was desperately needed in such times.
The Middle Ages
Medieval Europe was scarred by the Black Death (bubonic plague) in the fourteenth century, when at least 25 percent of its population was lost. The despair of these times is caught so poignantly by Agnolo di Tura del Grasso: ‘There was no one who wept for any death, for all awaited death. And so many died that all believed that it was the end of the world. And no medicine or any other defence availed.’
The fifteenth century also witnessed at least four more epidemics. Martin Luther himself lived through three ‘pestilences’ during his lifetime. During one of these, Luther stayed in Wittenburg, where he lived and pastored his congregation, against the direction of civic leaders who advised him to leave to escape the plague. Instead, he stayed to minister to his people, setting up a temporary hospital in his own house. In the midst of a pandemic his words sound much like that of a modern health expert:
God has created medicines and provided us with intelligence to guard and take good care of the body so that we can live in good health. If one makes no use of intelligence or medicine when he could do so without detriment to his neighbor, such a person injures his body and must beware lest he become a suicide in God’s eyes…
You ought to think this way: ‘Very well, by God’s decree the enemy has sent us poison and deadly offal. Therefore, I shall ask God mercifully to protect us. Then I shall fumigate, help purify the air, administer medicine, and take it. I shall avoid places and persons where my presence is not needed in order not to become contaminated and thus perchance infect and pollute others, and so cause their death as a result of my negligence. If God should wish to take me, he will surely find me and I have done what he has expected of me and so I am not responsible for either my own death or the death of others. If my neighbor needs me, however, I shall not avoid place or person but will go freely, as stated above.’
Advances in medicine
Christians have been at the forefront of medical advances and continue to be so. Healing and medicine are characteristics of Christian ministry—arguably a gift to the wider world.
Joshua S. Loomis notes in Epidemics: The Impact of Germs and Their Power Over Humanity that modern medicine has developed sanitation measures, vaccines, antibiotics and diagnostic tools over the last 100 years which has meant, ‘we have taken more control over our health and reduced the incidence of epidemics’. The science behind vaccines has been painstakingly developed over time so that now vaccines are highly effective. Yearly flu vaccines are now routinely made available, often before particular flu strains have reached many countries because of the worldwide coordination of medical science and vaccination programmes. We saw this come into play in a massive way with Covid-19. The number of lives saved is incalculable.
Our ancestors did not have this kind of protection and in fact misunderstood the cause of pandemics. It is amazing to realise that it was only really in the nineteenth century that germ theory came into being. It was only then that natural disasters, corrupt morality, evil spirits, body fluid imbalances or contaminated air were gradually rejected as the cause of epidemics. The associated responses to disease arising from these theories had included bleedings, leech treatment, special diets or fresh air. Thankfully we have moved on.
Covid-19, pandemics and a Christian legacy of healing
As I write, the daily Covid-19 death toll average is around 14. If we allow for people who may have died from other causes while having Covid-19 at the time, then the toll is 10. This is a huge cost in lives, bringing grief to many families. A weary nation appears to want to move on and few take much notice of the daily Covid-19 related figures now. Health services are under stress, workers in short-staffed organisations are operating under huge pressure and schools are struggling to fully function. The impacts of Covid-19 seem likely to continue for the foreseeable future.
As Christians, we can take inspiration from our forebears, many of whom lived through pandemics leading the health responses of their day and laying the foundations of our modern health institutions and public health responses.
As followers of Jesus, with his emphasis on the ministry of healing, let us pray that we too in our time can leave such a legacy for our descendants, by fully contributing to the health response to the plagues of our day.
