Do Not Let the Doctor Leave You! (Evil Geniuses Series)
Photo by Piron Guillaume on Unsplash
This is the third in a series of posts where Dr. Brueggemann reflects on the book Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen. Read the first posts here.
* See note about title
In his remarkable, important book, Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History (2020), Kurt Andersen has traced the planning of a political party to take over the government. Near the end of his book, Andersen lists eight claims in the playbook that he believes generate their action. It is my intention in this and following weekly blogs to take up each of these eight claims and to consider how we may in good faith respond to them. I have no doubt that such a careful pointed response to each of these distortions is an effort worth making. I will take up each claim in turn.
The third claim is Establishment experts are wrong, science is suspect. This statement reflects the odd alliance between big business and less educated people who (perhaps for good reason) harbor resentment against the “elites” who control a good deal of social power and the knowledge industry. The stake of big business is to refuse scientific data that leads to government intervention and regulation that impinges upon profit. The stake of the “resenting class” is to insist that ordinary folk know what they need to know, and “expert knowledge” is a misrepresentation of the interests and “truth” of ordinary folk. Thus this strategy has turned into a significant political movement wherein scientific learning is left suspect, and we are free to follow our interest and our passion without regard to what is known and established by science.
The church of course has a great stake in resisting such sentiment. It is not, however, so easy or obvious to appeal directly to scripture on this issue, because the Bible was formulated in a pre-scientific age. The Bible places great accent on wisdom that is grounded in the reality and the rule of God.
The fear of the Lord is the beginning of knowledge;
fools despise wisdom and instruction (Proverbs 1:7).
It is easy enough for anyone and everyone to claim to have wisdom without the claim making any appeal to knowledge.
In what follows, I will pursue one suggestive connection between biblical claims and scientific knowledge. The case I consider is in Ben Sirach 38:1-15, a case I judge pertinent to us because it pertains to respect for medical science carried by doctors. Ben Sirach, is a book in the Apocrypha of the Old Testament dated in the second century BCE, thus late in the Old Testament. Its lateness suggests that the writer, a scribe, lived and wrote at a time when Greek rationality was pressing upon covenantal faith, so that faith had to come to terms with the work of scientific knowledge. In this scribal text, one can see the intertwining of faith and scientific knowledge.
The writer is quite forthcoming concerning the claim made for the rule of God in the midst of scientific health care:
The Lord created them (doctors) (v. 1).
The Lord created medicine out of the earth (v. 4).
He gave skill to human beings (v. 6).
From him health spreads over the earth (v. 8).
The writer commends the practice of normal piety:
My child, when your are ill, do not delay,
but pray to the Lord, and he will heal you.
Give up your faults and direct your hands rightly,
and cleanse your heart from all sin.
Offer a sweet-smelling sacrifice, and a memorial portion of choice flour,
and pour oil on your offering, as much as you can afford (vv. 9-11).
This is a quite traditional menu for the practice of traditional faith, with the affirmation that healing is in God’s good hands.
The counter theme of this text, however, is a commendation of doctors, medical science, and medical practice:
Honor physicians for their services (v. 1).
The skill of physicians makes them distinguished,
and in the presence of the great they are admired (v. 3).
In addition to doctors, pharmacists are recognized as holy agents:
By them (marvelous works) the physician heals and takes away pain;
the pharmacist makes a mixture from them (v. 7).
And after the willing accommodation of traditional piety (prayer, confession, sacrifice), the writer continues:
Then [that is, after conventional piety has been fully enacted],
Give the physician his place, for the Lord created him;
Do not let him leave you, for you need him (v. 12).
The doctor has a legitimate, indispensable role to play in the healing process. The final line of verse 13 is quite insistent and noteworthy:
Do not let him leave you, for you need him
There may come a time when recovery lies in the hands of the physicians (vv. 12-13).
These lines imagine a doctor giving constant uninterrupted attention to the ill. This calls to mind for me a time when I was, in my high school days in a rural community, severely ill with pneumonia. I remember, even amid a high fever, that our family doctor, Dr. Koelling, drove twelve miles across country roads to call at our house every day. We waited each day for his arrival. We were reluctant to have him leave at the end of his call. Finally, as my illness continued, the doctor one day came with a new drug, “sulpha.” (Thus even the pharmacist from Waverly, Missouri got into the act.) This was before the discovery of penicillin. My family was deeply into faith and prayer, but we counted on the regular, reliable visits of the doctor, and did not want him to leave. In our faith, we counted heavily on his medical learning and his attentiveness. It must have been so for Ben Sirach, as he knew well about illness and healing. He knew about the importance of doctors and pharmacists. He had no reluctance about the reliability or urgency of scientific learning.
Finally, his text reaches its conclusion with this affirmation:
There may come a time when recovery lies in the hands of physicians,
for they too pray to the Lord
that he grant them success in diagnosis and in healing,
for the sake of preserving life (vv. 13-14).
The doctor is included in the sphere of faith! The doctor prays, even while the doctor practices the arts that belong to her science. Ben Sirach can discern no conflict between faith and piety and trust in good medical science. There need be no conflict because God created the doctors, God created medicine, and presides over the best scientific practice of medicine.
In his commentary on this passage, Gerhard von Rad, Wisdom in Israel, can observe, in his study of the wisdom tradition, that the term kairos (used as many as sixty times in Ben Sirach) denotes the right time for the moment of “discovery” (p. 251). Among the remarkable discoveries that Ben Sirach notes, is medical knowledge, just at the right time! Von Rad further observes that in general the Old Testament affirms that healing belongs to God. It is God who heals and who is the healer (see Exodus 15:26). Because of this claim, medical science was not greatly developed:
As in the whole of the ancient Near East, medical science in Israel only succeeded very slowly in freeing itself from the strait-jacket of sacral ideas. But in Israel this process was also hampered by particular difficulties. It was expected to free itself not only from a deep-seated belief in demons or from taking renowned gods of healing into consideration (cf. II Kings 1:6), but also from what was a function and right of Yahweh’s; for the idea that Yahweh alone could heal was represented in Israel in a particularly exclusive way (Exodus 15:26). And was not Yahweh also the one who caused illness? Was the latter perhaps a punishment? From this there arose the question whether one could prejudice Yahweh’s privilege of healing. Here, in fact, the search for knowledge, otherwise active in a very impartial way, suddenly found itself with a problem which touched the very roots of faith in Yahweh (135-136).
Because of this claim, questions had to be raised about medical science:
What was debatable was not the use of healing itself; the question, rather, was whether the practice of the art of medicine could be accorded a secular position which dispensed with sacral authorization (136).
Thus the work was to establish a zone of human possibility and human capacity based on knowledge. Von Rad judges that our text in Ben Sirach is a “last, decisive step of the enlightenment” (136). By this “decisive step” the scriptural tradition establishes that healing by YHWH and the practice of medical knowledge constitute a both/and and not an either/or. That is the wise, informed settlement that faith reaches with knowledge in the confident affirmation that such human knowledge is exactly the gift of the creator God. That settlement, von Rad judges, was less than secure. He notices that verse 15, according to his translation, “threatens to nullify the carefully worked out process of legitimation” (136):
Whoever sins in the eyes of his Maker,
falls into the hands of the physician.
The matter is somewhat different in the rendering of the NRSV:
He who sins against his Maker
will be defiant toward the physician.
Either way, Ben Sirach made the case for the legitimacy of medical practice with a strong affirmation of the both/and of faith and science. In our own time and place scientific knowledge concerning both global warming and viruses and vaccines need not be challenged by faith, because faith affirms that it is the creator God who has ordered the world in reliable ways that permit scientific learning.
In an early essay, “Job XXXVIII and Ancient Egyptian Wisdom,” The Problem of the Hexateuch and Other Essays, 181-291) provides a study of “lists” of “cosmic and meteorological phenomena as well as of the animal kingdom” (p. 285) that occur in Job 38 and Psalm 148. He concludes that these lists are part of a legacy of earlier Near Eastern learning, specifically from Egypt. I cite this study as evidence that scientific learning in the form of cataloging data was a long-term enterprise in the world of the Bible. When we consider that long-term enterprise, we may more fully appreciate the “last decisive step of the enlightenment” by Ben Sirach. The earlier evidence, as in Job 38, was still situated in a sacral sphere; but not so Ben Sirach.
Thus it follows, does it not, that the work of the church is to insist on the both/and of faith and scientific learning, and to make the case that good scientific learning is based in the broad, deep recognition of the ordered world willed and sustained by the creator God. From this it follows, further, that our best learning about global warming and our best learning about vaccines are to be seen as gifts made possible by the creator God, but then through the cumulative wisdom, insight, discipline, and imagination of research. The gain of “a secular position that dispensed with sacral authorization” is immense and our common life better for it. This gain needs to be valued and celebrated exactly on the grounds of faith.
The insistent refusal of the “community of resentment” is an attempt to roll back this “last decisive step” and to return our human destiny to the sacral sphere without reference to secular learning. A mantra of this attempted rollback is the recurring yard sign in our part of Michigan, “God’s got this.” I take this to voice an insistence that if we just trust God we do not need scientific learning and must not be seduced or deceived by such learning. That politically motivated roll back, backed by dark money, is an abandonment of the hard won understanding of both/and of faith and learning.
We might well pause amid our social crisis, to celebrate the “both” of a reliably ordered world and the shrewd discernments of science. One side of the matter is readily sung by the church:
Oh Lord my God when I in awesome wonder
Consider all the worlds Thy hands have made
I see the stars, I hear the rolling thunder
Thy power throughout the universe displayed
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee
How great thou art, how great thou art
Then sings my soul, my Savior God, to Thee
How great thou art, how great Thou art.
The words attest the glorious grandeur of the creator. We might also add a verse to complete the “and” of both/and:
Then lifts my heart in glad appreciation,
For wisdom keen, as doctors soar,
That shows in welcome education,
Good medicine, healing galore.
This both/and of mature faith requires vigilance for the sake of our world and for the truth of God.
*Because some readers will not have the text of Ben Sirach at hand, I have included the text itself.
Honor physicians for their services,
for the Lord created them;
for their gift of healing comes from the Most High,
and they are rewarded by the king.
The skill of physicians makes them distinguished,
and in the presence of the great they are admired.
The Lord created medicines out of the earth,
and the sensible will not despise them.
Was not water made sweet with a tree
in order that its power might be known?
And he gave skill to human beings
that he might be glorified in his marvelous works.
By them the physician heals and takes away pain;
the pharmacist makes a mixture from them.
God’s works will not be finished;
and from him health spreads over all the earth.
My child, when you are ill, do not delay,
But pray to the Lord, and he will heal you.
Give up your faults and direct your hands rightly,
and cleanse your heart from all sin.
Offer sweet-smelling sacrifice, and a memorial portion of choice flour,
and pour oil on your offering, as much as you can afford.
Then give the physician his place, for the Lord created him;
Do not let him leave you, for you need him.
There may come a time when recovery lies in the hands of physicians,
for they too pray to the Lord
that he grant them success in diagnosis and in healing,
for the sake of preserving life.
He who sins against his Maker,
will be defiant toward the physician (Ben Sirach 38:1-15).
Walter Brueggemann
August 4, 2022
Walter Brueggemann
Walter Brueggemann is one of the most influential Bible interpreters of our time. He is the author of over one hundred books and numerous scholarly articles. He continues to be a highly sought-after speaker.
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