Between Two Worlds

Posted by Greg Gilbert

I posted a question on the elders' blog at Third Avenue Baptist Church a few days ago, but I thought it would be interesting to see what you all thought about it. While I was on vacation, I read a book called The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History. The book is a history of the 1918 influenza pandemic, which killed somewhere between 50 million and 100 million people in the space of a few weeks. It really is a tour de force--a primer on everything from the history of medicine to biology, immunology, World War I, sociology, chemistry, pharmacology, the philosophy of medicine, and other fields as well. And it’s a riveting story, to boot.

It’s been subtle, but there’s been a theme running through the book that one might describe as the gloating of science over theology. There are statements along the lines of, “They could hope in God, but it was science that would save their lives.” Not exactly that, but that’s the idea. One of the most obvious examples of this is that the old practice of “heroic medicine”—epitomized by the belief that disease was an imbalance in the body’s humors that could be remedied by purging, especially bleeding—is ridiculed, blamed for thousands of deaths, and . . . attributed to belief in God.

All of this essentially comes down to the old argument, “Look, science has cured disease, tamed electricity, put airplanes in the sky, made iPODS possible. And theology? What has theology ever done for humanity?” I imagine we could all make the very sound argument that science never would have developed without Christianity, but what about that other question? What has theology done for humanity? Can it even begin to compete with science on that playing field?

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