Christian Worldview Concepts

Medical Practitioners

The Spiritual Component of Sickness

For the most part, we in America have made sickness a physical issue to be attended to by physicians and other medical personnel, and it only becomes a spiritual one when the person's condition is thought to be terminal. Until then, we tend to think that the pastor's only role is to visit occasionally, pray and read Scripture. This reflects the general failure of the Church to think about medicine as a theological issue. We've divorced medical practice (and receiving medical care) from its connection to the sin-sickness-death motif so prevalent in Scripture. Yet few seminaries offer their students any training in medical ethics.

One of the criticisms leveled at modern medicine is that it tends to depersonalize people, to treat them as things rather than persons. By ignoring sin-sickness-death causality, modern medicine fails to comprehend an essential component of understanding human beings. In fact, I would argue that this is at the heart of depersonalized medicine. Modern medicine has a flawed view of human beings; a view of people where the machine is a common metaphor for the human body. How can physicians and nurses care for whole persons when they do not understand the supernatural dimensions of sickness and death? If the cause of death is not "natural," if it is both moral and supernatural (divine judgment for sin), how are physicians to adequately provide care if they ignore these dimensions?

Since sickness and death are reminders of our sinfulness, healing should be viewed as a foretaste of our future resurrection and complete restoration. We must not forget that the Lord Jesus Christ was a healer. Although He did not completely abolish sickness and death from Israel during His earthly ministry, Jesus' encounter with sickness and death was decidedly one-sided; the blind could see, the lame could walk, the deaf could hear.

Jesus demonstrated through these acts of healing that sickness and death are spiritual issues, and that He alone possesses the power to eradicate them from human experience. He is the Source of our hope, not HMOs, pharmaceutical companies, genetic engineers, medical societies or the National Institutes of Health. What this means is that those who minister to the sick — physicians, nurses and other allied professions — are involved in a uniquely spiritual vocation whose task is to alleviate some of the adverse effects of sin and the universal fact of death. If Christian physicians and nurses really understand this and if they allow it to affect their practice of medicine, they will become the true dissidents in our culture.