Six months ago, on the eve of receiving my second Moderna jab, I wrote a post, in shock and, if I am honest, in anger as much as in horror, detailing the hesitation of large numbers of self-described white "evangelicals"―54%, compared to 68% of religiously unaffiliated Americans―to "definitely or probably" get vaccinated against the COVID virus. Speaking to my fellow Christians, I concluded my post thus:
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.
What I wrote then remains true today. And with the impressive vaccine rollout under the Biden Administration this past spring, it appeared matters were looking up, and that we were finally starting to get the pandemic under control. But then along came the mutation known today as the Delta variant, thought originally to have arisen in December 2020 in India. This variant, it now seems, is both more virulent and highly transmissible than the original SARS-CoV-2 virus, and is the cause of the current third wave of the pandemic that has wreaked havoc on the country, particularly on the swath of the Sunbelt from Texas to Florida and now in the interior of the South and Appalachia from Tennessee to West Virginia. As a result, last week President Biden issued an executive order, detailing a COVID-19 mandate covering upwards of 100 million Americans in an effort to right the ship and get the country's ship of health back on track.
What happened? Politically-generated COVID resurgence, that's what. In an NBC poll last month, 91% of Biden voters claim to have been vaccinated, compared to only 50% of Trump voters. As a result, the early lead the US had in vaccinations has evaporated, to the point that it now lags behind every other G7 nation in vaccination rates: Canada at close to 75%, France, Italy, and Britain between 70 and 73%, and Germany and Japan at around 65%. The US? 63%. And the needle is hardly moving. The results of this lag are as unsurprising as they are infuriating, as this graph from Johns Hopkins University shows:
But, and this likewise is unsurprising, the American problem is not a uniform, across-the-board problem. Indeed, Paul Krugman, citing the same Johns Hopkins statistics, shows that so-called "blue" states like New York, Massachusetts, and even California resemble Canada and Germany more than they do "red state" COVID hotspots like Texas and Florida, hamstrung as the latter are by MAGA, GOP governors like Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis who have done everything in their power to frame the issue in terms of "freedom" by restricting the freedom of municipalities and companies to institute mask mandates or vaccine passports.
In view of such statistics, one could have hoped evangelical Christians would have reversed their earlier skepticism about the vaccines and realized their God-given responsibility vis-à-vis the welfare of their neighbors (not to mention their own self-interest). Alas, however, large numbers of them―higher percentages than even white Republicans who did not identify as evangelicals―continue to be either hesitant to get the vaccine or adamant in their refusal to do so. Indeed, earlier this summer studies showed a distinct correlation between COVID hot spots and high concentrations of white evangelicals. This nasty fact has been the source of much grief and frustration for many thinking Christians, not least Francis Collins, director of the National Institutes of Health.
Yet the reaction of evangelicals, by and large, to President Biden's COVID mandate, has been as predictable as it has been disappointing. Even though a poll this week showed that upwards of 58% of Americans supported Biden's vaccine mandate, large numbers of evangelicals demur. They don't have a degree in science, let alone a relevant Ph.D., yet they take the word of (the vaccinated and admitted fibmeister) Tucker Carlson over Dr. Anthony Fauci and the overwhelming scientific consensus, and decide to do their own online "research" (for which they have no training or competence) to validate their own preconceived beliefs or wishes. Alternatively, as some on my Facebook feed have done, they take the puerile "libertarian" option and cast the issue in terms of "freedom," proudly proclaiming #iwillnotcomply and accusing those who want to act so as to control the pandemic (!) of "politicizing" the virus in order to "strip Americans of their rights" in the interest of seizing power and control over them .
When I read or hear such things, I have to sit back and breathe deeply before I let the metaphorical "gathering gloom" envelop me. After all, what is this if not a manifestation of the tribalism to which all of humanity is, unfortunately, prone? And evangelicals have, over the past 50 years, devolved to the point where they have largely become simply the religious arm of the right wing of the Republican Party. This is, then, not simply a theological problem, involving a fundamental misunderstanding of the nature of what Christianity entails; it is also a missional problem: the world sees evangelicals and what they stand for clearly, and they just as clearly don't like what they see. The issue, consequently, is this: Is this rejection a matter of rejecting them because of their witness for Christ, or is the rejection based in more fundamental issues, namely, demonstrable ethical and/or intellectual failures of the evangelicals themselves? To use the language of one of the evangelicals' primary texts for their self-understanding, Is their pronounced vaccine hesitancy/rejection a manifestation of what Paul the Apostle called God's counterintuitive "wisdom?" Or is it simply run of the mill "foolishness" that the "world in its wisdom" rightly rejects? The text in question is 1 Corinthians 1:18-31, which reads as follows:
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. For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength.
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. He is the source of your life in Christ Jesus, who became for us wisdom from God, and righteousness and sanctification and redemption, in order that, as it is written, “Let the one who boasts, boast in the Lord.” (1 Corinthians 1:18-31, NRSV)
What this remarkable passage affirms is that the cross is, not merely an apocalyptic event effecting a definitive change in world orders [1], but an epistemologically revolutionary and transformational one as well: the cross serves as the definitive criterion for that in which true wisdom consists. The Corinthians, as is being increasingly recognized, [2] were in thrall to the sort of popular sophistry and rhetoric indigenous to Corinth, and which led to the boastfulness and competitiveness for which the church has become notorious. In view of the Corinthians' fascination with such sophistry, Paul takes pains in verse 17 to point out that Christ commissioned him, not to baptize, but to proclaim the gospel [3]―and that he did so without the sophistry of the "clever rhetoric" (ἐν σοφίᾳ λόγου) [4] his readers so admired, designed as it was to confer status on the speaker, lest by doing so the cross of Christ would be "emptied" (κένωθῇ) of its saving, transformative, and paradigmatic power.
The aim of the Apostle in these verses is to subvert the Corinthians' conceptions of what genuinely counted as "wisdom." In doing so, he sets up an apocalyptic contrast between two groups of people confronted with the "proclamation" (λόγος) of the cross: to those who are "on the road to destruction" (τοῖς ἀπολλυμένοις), this proclamation smacks of sheer madness or folly (μωρία); to "us" (ἡμῖν) who are in the process of being saved (τοῖς σῳζομένοις), however, this proclamation is the word of God's power (δύναμις), in that the cross serves both as the means of God's rescuing intervention and the modus operandi of how his power is worked out in the lives of his people.[5]
Paul calls for what Richard Hays has deemed a "conversion of the imagination," placing the term "wisdom" in the scriptural/prophetic context of Isaiah 29:14 (1 Cor 1:19), asking his readers to see, in the crucifixion of Jesus, an indictment of the human sophistry prized by the Corinthians. [6] To Jews looking for signs that their promises were about to be fulfilled, Paul's message of a "crucified Messiah" (κηρύσσομεν χρίστον ἐσταυρωμένον) was an offensive, oxymoronic stumbling block (σκάνδαλον). To Greeks such as his Corinthian readers, such a message was inanity (μωρία), the opposite of the type of life that would lead to the success and honor to which the "wise" would strive (1 Cor 1:23).
It is imperative to realize that, as an apocalyptic contrast, the shift in perspective needed is not one that a person can undertake on his or her own; one, whether one is a Jew or Greek, must be effectively "called" (κλητοῖς) by God, as a result of which one recognizes, by experience, the Messiah as both God's power and wisdom (1 Cor 1:24). If indeed the cross is the definitive criterion of genuine wisdom, then, as the Apostle will go on to say a couple chapters down the line, "the wisdom of this world is foolishness with God" (1 Cor 3:19).
This is one of Paul's great texts, of course, and it should explain the reaction of people to the proclamation of the Christian gospel of the cross. All too often, however, it is illegitimately utilized to explain (and sometimes glory in) the world's hostility to evangelical Christian beliefs and actions. I used to remind my college students, "Yes, the Bible says that all who live godly lives in Christ will be persecuted; but all too often we are reviled, not because of Christ or the message of the cross, but because we are acting like idiots." In other words, we as Christians must make sure that opposition to us is due to our faithfulness, both to the message of the cross and to the cruciform pattern of our lives. After all, that is the counterintuitive divine "wisdom" of the cross.
And it is precisely here that the current evangelical hostility to the COVID vaccines in the name of personal "freedom" shows they have (once again) gone off the rails. Yes, the New Testament presents a narrative of liberation. But it is the narrative of the liberation of the Second Exodus/New Creation anticipated in Isaiah 40-66, not the bastard. modernist narrative of human individualism and autonomy so beloved in today's America, not least among self-identifying Christians. Freedom frees one for service, not license. It is the cross that serves as the touchstone of God's wisdom. Evangelicals rightly emphasize the atoning significance of the cross. Yet it is the cross as paradigm, the cross as the means by which God has made and makes his power known in the world, that truly demonstrates the counterintuitive and countercultural character of God's wisdom. And it is this cruciform pattern of life, exemplified by Paul and his apostolic colleagues (1 Cor 4:9-13), that exemplifies the "folly" the fissiparous, competitive Corinthians despised, and which today's evangelicals likewise appear unwilling to emulate.
For further reading:
- Duke Divinity School Professor Curtis Chang, on why he doesn't believe in Religious Exemptions to Mask Mandates
- Messiah University History Professor John Fea, on why he thinks President Biden made the right call on COVID mandates
- Western Seminary Theology Professor Todd Billings on how Calvin could help vaccine skeptics learn a bit of creation theology
- The evangelical Presbyterian David French: "It’s Time to Stop Rationalizing and Enabling Evangelical Vaccine Rejection"
[1] Cf. Verse 20, "Where is the debater of this age?" (ποῦ συζηζητὴϛ τοῦ αἰῶνοϛ τούτου;), which reflects the classic Jewish apocalyptic two-age schema (this age/the age to come), which the early church―not least under the influence of the erstwhile rabbinic scholar Paul―modified in light of the Christ event to reflect the "already/not yet" dialectic of Christian eschatology.
[2] Cf., inter alia, Stephen M. Pogoloff, Logos and Sophia: The Rhetorical Situation of 1 Corinthians (SBLDS 134; Atlanta: Scholars, 1992); Duane Litfin, St. Paul's Theology of Proclamation: 1 Corinthians 1-4 and Greco-Roman Rhetoric (SNTSMS 79; Cambridge: CUP, 1994); Bruce W. Winter, Philo and Paul among the Sophists: Alexandrian and Corinthian Responses to a Julio-Claudian Movement, 2d ed. (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2001) 111-239.
[3] As Anthony Thiselton rightly points out, since Paul elsewhere is at pains to show how the sacraments of baptism and the Lord's Supper actually do "proclaim" the truths of the gospel (cf. Rom 6:3-11; 1 Cor 11:24-27 [!]), "to baptize" here must mean "to perform baptisms" (The First Epistle to the Corinthians: A Commentary on the Greek Text [NIGTC; Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans/Carlisle: Paternoster, 2001] 143).
[4] Thiselton, First Epistle, 143. BDAG (934) renders it "cleverness in speaking."
[5] Cf. 1 Corinthians 4:9-13 for the cruciform lifestyle adopted by the apostles for the benefit of God's people.
[6] Richard B. Hays, "The Conversion of the Imagination: Scripture and Eschatology in 1 Corinthians," in The Conversion of the Imagination: Paul as Interpreter of Israel's Scripture (Grand Rapids and Cambridge: Eerdmans, 2005) 1-24 (15).
No comments:
Post a Comment