Next week I am scheduled to receive my second Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. And I am thrilled. The prospect of finally, after one whole year (so far!), seeing light at the end of the tunnel and the beginning of the end of of a nightmarish lost year, of a full calendar year of having to move into my garage and keep socially distant from my kids and grandkids, is a thrill people of my age rarely experience.
Alas, one demographic isn't fully on board with the program and, consequently, may slow efforts to bring about the herd immunity necessary for the country to return to something resembling "normal." And I'm sure you're not shocked to hear that this group is white evangelical Christians. Last week, the Pew Research Center and YouGov for Yahoo News each released surveys on the state of vaccine acceptance in America. In each case the results were somewhat heartening, showing increased, though still suboptimal, levels of acceptance. The fly in the ointment was, of course, the fact that 36% of "white Republicans" and 30% of "white Americans with no college education" say they would "never" get the vaccine. Quite troubling, for those of us who are confessing Christians, is that only 54 percent of white evangelicals “definitely or probably” plan to get vaccinated. Worse, only 48 percent of white evangelicals said they would consider the community health effects “a lot” when deciding to be vaccinated. When compared with the 70 percent of Black Protestants, 65 percent of Catholics and 68 percent of unaffiliated Americans who answered the question affirmatively, the light this sheds on the thinking and, yes, morality, of these self-described "evangelicals," is troubling indeed.
Some evangelicals, thankfully, have responded to the horror of these revelations, including Washington Post columnist, former Bush 43 head speechwriter, and Wheaton College graduate Michael Gerson. Even more substantive was the newsletter written by the evangelical Presbyterian David French, in which he made the case that "Evangelical vaccine hesitancy is both an information problem and a spiritual problem (emphasis his)." He goes on:
Yes, you can and should flood the zone with more and better information about the safety and effectiveness of the vaccine, but we also need to flood the zone with better and more effective spiritual teaching about loving our neighbors and—critically—about trust, faith, and courage.
"Low information" is, to be frank, not unexpected from this demographic. A 2017 survey by Statistica Research Department showed that only 15% of white evangelicals have earned 4-year college degrees, a far lower percentage than adherents of other Christian traditions or non-Christian faiths. It is also what I have found to be true in my own experience, where distrust of academic achievement and "elitism," even in matters of biblical and theological studies, has run rampant in the churches and even in the educational institutions with which I have been involved. And if this is true in theological matters, the problem is exponentially more severe in matters of science, whether it be biology, geology, astronomy, climate science, or―what matters now―virology and epidemiology.
To be sure, in my efforts to disabuse students or evangelical acquaintances of such opinions, I have often been reminded of Paul the Apostle's words to the Corinthians:
For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. For it is written,
"I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.”
Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe …
Consider your own call, brothers and sisters: not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not, to reduce to nothing things that are, so that no one might boast in the presence of God. (1 Corinthians 1:18-21, 26-29, NRSV)
Of course, to use one of the most brilliant men of his age, using learned rhetoric to reinforce the Corinthians' belief in the counterintuitive―for both Jews and Greeks!―"wisdom" of the Christian faith, is self-defeating. God's elective choice may may not take learning into consideration, but that fact has nothing to say about the desirability of training one's mind academically, and of valuing expertise in all fields whenever and wherever it is to be found. Indeed, the history of the church, from St. Augustine to St. Thomas Aquinas to Martin Luther to John Calvin to Jonathan Edwards to Joseph Barber Lightfoot to Martin Hengel to N. T. Wright, or―to move into the scientific sphere, from Blaise Pascal to Lord Kelvin to James Clerk Maxwell to George Washington Carver to Werner Heisenberg to Francis Collins―demonstrates this beyond dispute. Where one gets one's information matters, and there is no excuse for anyone in the Western world, in this day and age, to fall for presupposition-friendly disinformation, let alone crackpot conspiracy theories.
It is French's second accusation, however, that really got my attention. In their articles, both Gerson and French refer to the aforementioned Collins, the UNC (MD)- and Yale (PhD)-educated Director of the National Institutes for Health and former Director of the Human Genome Project. Gerson cites an interview Collins had with the Christian Broadcasting Network, in which he said, “This is a ‘love your neighbor’ moment, where we all have a chance to do something not just for ourselves but for everybody around us.”
Jesus, when asked by a scribe what the "first" or "foremost" (prōtos) commandment of the Torah was, answered:
Jesus answered, “The first is, ‘Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God, the Lord is one; you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no other commandment greater than these.” (Mark 12:29-31, NRSV).
I have often been disappointed with many of my fellow Christians, most notably evangelicals, who seems genuinely confused about what being a Christian means or entails. Indeed, many confuse being a Christian with becoming one, and thus say things like, "I'm no different from anybody else; I'm just forgiven." This may have about it the air of humility, but it is bad, indeed very bad, theology. Being a Christian means more than being a sinner with free, God-given fire insurance for the inevitable day of one's demise. Years ago I remember reading the late Anglican theologian Philip Edgcumbe Hughes's commentary on Paul's second letter to the Corinthians. The book remains packed up in a box somewhere in my daughter's attic, but I well remember the gist of what he wrote on the famous 2 Corinthians 5:17. Whereas many, influenced by the cadences of the old King James Version, have gloried in being "new creatures" as Christians, Hughes rightly saw otherwise. Paul's text is cryptic: ei tis en christos, kainē ktisis ("If anyone is in Christ, [there is a] new creation"). Hughes captured the thought well, to the effect that anyone who is united to Christ by faith is a reborn microcosm of the eschatological macrocosm of the new heavens and new earth. When I read this, a light bulb went on in my mind, giving me one of my first glimpses of Paul's theology of the new creation. A Christian is indeed such an eschatological microcosm because he or she is now a member of the eschatological, worldwide family promised to Abraham in Genesis 12 (cf. Galatians), and has been given the eschatological gift of the Spirit as the down payment (arrabōn) guaranteeing their full inheritance to be received at the resurrection on the last day (2 Cor 1:22; Eph 1:14).
What matters is this. No one, as Paul argues forcefully in Galatians, is "justified" or becomes a member of this eschatological covenant people of God by adherence to the "works of the Torah." But the Torah still matters, and not merely for antiquarian interest.* When Judah had been taken into exile by Babylon, YHWH spoke through the prophet Jeremiah, promising a new covenant, unlike the one promulgated at Sinai, in which "I will put my law within them, and I will write it on their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be my people" (Jeremiah 31:33, NRSV). Likewise, the exilic prophet Ezekiel relays this promise from YHWH: "A new heart I will give you, and a new spirit I will put within you; and I will remove from your body the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh. I will put my spirit within you, and make you follow my statutes and be careful to observe my ordinances" (Ezekiel 36:27-28, NRSV).
The defining characteristic of people who would be beneficiaries of this new covenant would be an interiorized Torah, both motivating and enabling them to live in ways that please God. Paul the Apostle reflects these texts when he writes, in his most important letter:
For what the Law was unable to do, in that it was weak through the flesh, God did, by sending his own Son in the likeness of sinful flesh and as a sin offering. He condemned sin in that flesh, in order that the righteous requirement of the Law might be fulfilled in us, who do not live according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. (Romans 8:3-4, trans. JRM)
This is what it means to be a Christian. To be a follower of Jesus of Nazareth necessarily entails a commitment to fulfilling "the righteous requirement of the Law," summed up by Jesus, in classic rabbinic fashion, in terms of the Shema and the love command. It is a Christian's duty, as a Christian, to be neighbors to everyone who comes across his or her path―cf. the parable of the Prodigal Son in Luke 10:25-37―including one's enemies (Matthew 5:43-48). And in the present circumstances, this means to wear a mask. It means to commit to social distancing. And it means to take the vaccine as soon as one can get it. Just do it.
* Perhaps the best study on this issue, demonstrating the influence of the Torah on Paul's ethical formation and instruction, remains Brian S. Rosner, Paul, Scripture and Ethics: A Study if 1 Corinthians 5-7 (Leiden: Brill, 1994). See now William Andrew Williamson and Brian S. Rosner, "The Influence of the Murder Commandment in 1 Corinthians," Tyndale Bulletin 71 (2020) 229-52.
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