Moses Raises the Healing Serpent in the Wilderness

Over the past year no issue has had more attention given to it than healthcare in America.  In the process, the various bills passed by both houses of Congress (along partisan lines), as well as the general political attempt to address the heathcare crisis in America by the President and the Democrats has been dubbed by many, “Obamacare.”  Just as Ronald Reagan’s economic policies were christened “Reaganomics” and George W. Bush’s response to the terrorist attacks of 9-11 became known as “The Bush Doctrine,” President Obama’s signature campaign agenda has become his namesake.  Obviously for Republicans and many independent conservatives the term Obamacare is employed as an incrimination upon the government’s tendency to encroach evermore inappropriately into persons’ private lives.  Conversely, the term for some Democrats and other self-styled Progressives, is a moniker for the role that a serious-minded, citizen-oriented government ought to ordain.  The issue is obviously political, not to mention personal for all, but are there any theological considerations that Christians need to bear in mind as we seek to wade through the maze of rhetoric from all sides, as well as attempt to peer through the haze of Congressional furtiveness.

There are plenty of Christian voices who have weighed in on this from varying ecumenical and theological traditions.   It has troubled me that many of those Christians whose political convictions tend to be conservative, when commenting upon this issue, seem to speak in political values, not biblical or theological ones.  On the other hand, one of the leading voices among those Christian Progressives–a magazinge called Sojourners–has endeavored to provide a biblical case for their belief that the federal government ought to be involved in assuring that all persons in the United States are PROVIDED care by some state-operated mechanism.  

 They have a statement of faith about health care, which I am glad they have provided.  We should always welcome the endeavor by any group of Christians to call us to take the scriptural revelation seriously.  As someone who disagrees, however, with the convictions of Sojourners over the means, but not the ends, of acheiving greater (perhaps even universal, ultimately) health care coverage for Americans, I want to examine this “statement of faith.” My goal is not to critique the spirit of compassion and responsibility for neighbor it shows, but to suggest that the kind of compassion it evidences is not comprehensively Christian enough in its convictions. Below you will find the “statement of faith” in red followed by my comments. 

THE SOJOURNERS STATEMENT OF FAITH ON HEALTH CARE & COMMENTARY

“As one of God’s children, I believe that protecting the health of each human being is a profoundly important personal and communal responsibility for people of faith.”

 To what extent are we called upon to protect the health of each human being?  Where does this responsibility begin and end?  Such a statement is not really the Bibilical perspective regarding our duties to one another. The focus that one finds in the scripture regarding how to treat each human being is not the language of “responsibility.”  Rather, the language of justice and mercy (which biblically can never be removed from one another) is the true calling.  Biblical justice is not giving a person something he is due, but is a matter of persons living in relationship to each other in ways that are consistent with the character of God.  And mercy is at the heart of God’s character toward us.  What, however, would such justice and mercy look like?

When Sojourners simply makes the blanket statement about “responsibility,” some important qualifications are missing.  For instance, are “people of faith” (as they put it) more responsible to protect the health of each human being or is our calling better understood as honoring the dignity of our neighbors by realizing the freedom of will that each human being has been granted by God.   While the scriptures do call us to care for the needy and show mercy, an underlying principle of Creation is God’s staggering decision to allow us to make decisions (even bad ones).  So, where does the responsibility begin and where does it stop?  And why? These questions are not diversions from the issue, nor a call for the status quo.  They must be addressed if we are to keep our response from being guided by something other than a full-orbed Christian faith.

Unless a statement such as Sojourners is measured theologically by the recognition of the responsibility of each of us for our own lives, the door may be opened to the worst sort of paternalism. And compassion can quickly turn to coercion.  There is nothing more insidious than the well-motivated belief that it is a good thing to compel a person to do that which we know is really good for them (such as forcing young people to pay for health insurance).   Only a biblical perspective that acknowledges the complexity of “being responsible” for the health care of each human being AND the responsibility to honor the freedom of others to make choices will be adequate to shape our views as Christians on the topic of health care reform.  In the final analysis, the best theological perspective will be one that helps us all learn compassion for others and how to be responsible for ourselves as a way to be a good steward of our lives. 

“I believe God created each person in the divine image to be spiritually and physically healthy. I feel the pain of sickness and disease in our broken world (Genesis 1:27, Romans 8:22).”

It is unclear what this means, as well.  For instance, if one believes this (and I affirm it), what are the implications?  What is one called upon to do when he or she feels the pain of sickness and disease in our broken world?  The center of the issue is precisely WHAT to do, if we believe this.  So, even having affirmed this, we have just started the discussion, not decided it. 

“I believe life and healing are core tenets of the Christian life. Christ’s ministry included physical healing, and we are called to participate in God’s new creation as instruments of healing and redemption (Matthew 4:23, Luke 9:1-6; Mark 7:32-35, Acts 10:38). Our nation should strive to ensure all people have access to life-giving treatments and care.”

Yes, Christ’s ministry included “physical healing.”  However, Christ and the early Christians (following his example) took personal responsibility for the life of the sick.  Jesus touched them himself and healed them.  The early disciples sold their own property (Acts 3) and gave it for the needs of others.  This is very different than the Christian Progressives perspective that leans toward State-operated control.  All Christian reponses begin with the question “what should we do,” not with the question “what should we insist others do.”  (Not that we should never be prophetic, just always after the fact of our own action.) 

Jesus called upon the Jews of his day to “remember the weightier matters of the Law” (Matthew 23).  He did not, however, mean by this a call for others to be forced through taxation (by any other name) to give of their resources so that Pontius Pilate could carry out justice in Israel.  Rather, Jesus was reminding the Pharisees and others of the immediate calling of God to care for the neighbor.  (That is, as well, the point of the Good Samaritan parable.)  The Christian response to persons’ health care needs, if it is faithful to Christ’s ministry, is to incarnate in the world today the mercy of God and be a community that bears witness in deed and word to the salvation that is in Christ and the eschatological promise of God.  It is a personal involvement, not a call for bureaucratic oversight, whether governmental or market-driven.  Resorting to the beuracratic is to depersonalize the needy.  This theological perspective seems to be missing in much of the Christian progressive movement.

“I believe, as taught by the Hebrew prophets and Jesus, that the measure of a society is seen in how it treats the most vulnerable. The current discussion about health-care reform is important for the United States to move toward a more just system of providing care to all people (Isaiah 1:16-17, Jeremiah 7:5-7, Matthew 25:31-45).”

“To move toward a more just system of providing care to all people.”  Fine and Amen.  But what on earth does a more just system look like?  Is it the so-called public option or something else?  In calling for a more just system, Sojourners (and all Christian progressives) should be involved in discussion about whether or not a truly free-market might not end up being the most just system, just as conservatives must question our current status quo.  But, progressives seem to be allergic to the very possibility that the market could ever be moral.  Yet, what if a move to decentralize the source of health care is actually the most morally agreeable way to provide it?  Of course, there must be oversight, but oversight is not necessarily regulation and control.

We do not have in our current health care system a free and competitive market place that can allow people to get what they need.  State regulations don’t allow for interstate competition to exist between insurance providers.  And there is not system in place where by people can compare prices and results of hospitals and doctors.  Why not?   Creating real competition among private insurers, offering people a way to compare and contrast the price of health care between providers could do for health care costs and quality what it has done for telephone service, computer technology, and a host of other industries. 

The problem that progressives have, however, is with the idea that profit can be involved in caring for people’s basic needs.  Yet, there is nothing inherently evil about profit.  Profit does not automatically equal abuse of persons or oppression.  So long as the system is not rigged to allow the powerful interests to control any certain segment of the economy, we have the capacity for profit as a moral concept. 

 Health care is no different.  In fact as simple issue of justice, insisting upon free market competition and accountability is much better than the centralized approach involving a “public option.”  Any serious minded reader of the Bible ought to realize that Christian faith in its biblical expression is highly suspicious of the secular power of government.  While a really free market can keep in check abuses through competition between those who want to make a living providing health care (and thus keeping down prices and pushing up quality–since people want maximum value for their dollar), any public option has no accountability, for the power of Caesar (or Babylon, to seize the apocalyptic image of The Revelation) is totalizing.  To whom do you appeal, if your resort is to the government? And when there is the chance for a Big Government to be allied to Big Business we begin to have the worst of all possible worlds. 

A free market de-centralizes both the power of the government and the power of Wall Street.  Such a move to decentralize control could be an economic/health care expression of the Christian conviction about the Church that all of us together must be the Body of Christ and that each human being is a part of the Image of God found in the human race.  It is a corrective to the inherent tendency of centralized control (in any endeavor) to become unaccountable.   Surely, this would be a better system to demand. 

“I believe that all people have a moral obligation to tell the truth. To serve the common good of our entire nation, all parties debating reform should tell the truth and refrain from distorting facts or using fear-based messaging (Leviticus 19:11; Ephesians 4:14-15, 25; Proverbs 6:16-19).”

What on earth is fear based messaging?  What if “telling the truth” involves some unpleasant and disconcerting possibilities.  For the Christian progressives, is Sarah Palin’s use of the term “death panels” to describe the govenment-based committees who will operate as actuaries to determine who gets what treatment more fear-mongering than that of the President who tells us that health care costs are going to “bankrupt” the nation?  What if both statements have some truth to them.  How does one decide what is fear-mongering?  Surely robust debate, even when it might be hyperbolic is better than any alternative we might desire.  The truth has a better chance of getting old ultimately in public discourse by the unfettered exchange of ideas, where people must defend what they say.

“I believe that Christians should seek to bring health and well-being (shalom) to the society into which God has placed us, for a healthy society benefits all members (Jeremiah 29:7).

Yes, indeed!  But the question is, again, what is the most efficient mechanism to do this? All empirical evidence (or at least the overwhelming majority) indicates that centralized (government run) health care is the most inefficient, actually reducing the quality of care for all members of a society, except those who (as is the case in our present system, ironically) can afford to travel and get better care.  So, those Christian progressives (such as Sojourners) who are convinced that it is a matter of justice to have a centralized approach to this problem have stopped asking about efficiency.  Furthermore, why would a Progressive stop with health care.  Surely nutrition is more important than health care, since science and common sense would indicate that people eating healthy is an incredibly important matter for “societal” health.  Should, then, we seek a “public option” for the grocery business.  Could a bureaucracy provide better access and cheaper food than our current competition based market?  Would the Dept. of Health and Human Services be more fair and more efficient that your local Kroger or Sam’s Club? 

There are tremendous problems in the health insurance system of our country.  And many of them stem from a lack of competitive options for purchasers.  Why should Christians not insist upon decentralization and a dimishment of government control–both Federal and state.

“I believe in a time when all will live long and healthy lives, from infancy to old age (Isaiah 65:20), and “mourning and crying and pain will be no more” (Revelation 21:4). My heart breaks for my brothers and sisters who watch their loved ones suffer, or who suffer themselves, because they cannot afford a trip to the doctor. I stand with them in their suffering.

Is this an eschatological hope, one that depends finally upon God’s restoration of the Creation?  If not, then it is suspiciously utopian and has a purely immanentistic view of God’s work in the world.  Also, to “stand with” someone in their suffering requires generosity of one’s person, not an insistence that someone else (the government) make sure that people are cared for.  If churches want to stand with the needy, stop spending so much money on plush buildings and planting new churches in the suburbs and start providing FREE clinics with those same resources to persons who need primary care. Or start an interchurch fund to provide money for persons who need surgery, chemo therapy, etc.  Biblical faith is clear in its insistence that all our hope is in God’s great eschatological promise.  Biblical faith eschews all utopian ideas that fail to acknowledge our utter dependence upon God’s gracious salvation which must come to us from beyond our own efforts. 

Should we labor for the world to be more just? Certainly.  Is health care a moral issue? Definitely.  Because we believe in God’s promise, we live in this world as strangers to its values.  However, “progressivism” as a political orientation that sees government control as preferable is just as worldly a value as the most radical anarchistic libertarian or the most capitalistic Republican.   Sojourners must understand that any Christian reading of the issue of health care and justice must entail an eschatological dependence upon God to “break in” again in Christ.   To lack such a vision is to fail to be adequately Christian, no matter how many Bible verses one quotes.

“I believe health-care reform must rest on a foundation of values that affirm each and every life as a sacred gift from the Creator (Genesis 2:7).”

This is a fine foundation.  However, one wonders how this can help us solve the health care issue in the US without a further vision of the relationship between freedom, responsibility and justice.

Furthermore, in this current climate of “debate” about health care and health insurance and whether or not a government in a Constitutional Republic ought to be more involved in health care, the conviction stated above “every life is a sacred gift from the Creator” has implications far beyond the issue of health care.  For example, if each and every life is such a gift from the Creator, then we have to ask about the Creator-imposed moral limits of the State upon each life.  The consent of the governed, then, is not a mere political phrase, but is profoundly theological.  Hence, no Christian progressive movement should seek to short-circuit the debate about means or the debate about the limits of government intervention, unless of course they don’t believe that the sacredness of each and every life includes the right to self-governance.  That would be odd!