Five Christian Principles Used to Give the Bible a Pass (2 of 2)

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Let the Bible clarify the BibleStarting with the popular Christian principle, “Let the easy Bible passages interpret the hard ones,” we’ve been examining five principles for biblical interpretation (beginning with this post). Here are the final three.
Principle #3: Begin with the assumption that the Bible has no contradictions
Here’s the principle stated in “How to Interpret the Bible” (HIB):

The “analogy of faith” is a reformed hermeneutical principle which states that, since all scriptures are harmoniously united with no essential contradictions, therefore, every proposed interpretation of any passage must be compared with what the other parts of the Bible teach. In other words, the body of doctrine, which the scriptures as a whole proclaim will not be contradicted in any way by any passage. Therefore, if two or three different interpretations of a verse are equally possible, any interpretation that contradicts the clear teaching of any other scriptures must be ruled out from the beginning.

So before you say, “Aha—there’s a contradiction here in the Bible,” go back and rethink that, because there are no contradictions. (The first rule of Look for Contradictions in the Bible Club is that there are no contradictions in the Bible.)
You can see the problem. “There are no contradictions” would be a conclusion, not a starting assumption, and there is a huge mountain to climb before this principle can be validated.
As an aside, this principle, where Christians simply declare that the Bible has no contradictions, has a parallel in Islam. The Principle of Abrogation states that if there’s a contradiction in the Quran, the later passage (that is, the one written later) wins out over the earlier. Problem solved—no more contradiction.
As damning as the Muslim principle is (how could the Prophet have gotten it wrong the first time?), at least it’s a rule. Principle 3 simply makes a groundless assertion.
Let’s let the Bible itself speak on this.

All Scripture is God-breathed and is useful for teaching, rebuking, correcting, and training in righteousness (2 Timothy 3:16).
You shall not add to the word which I command you, nor take anything from it, that you may keep the commandments of Yahweh which I command you (Deuteronomy 4:2).

The verse from 1 Timothy tells us that any passage, even the ones that make Christians squirm, should be read and followed, and the one from Deuteronomy says that the Bible must be allowed to speak for itself and not be treated like a marionette. So next time you pick the more pleasing verse and pretend the “difficult” verse doesn’t exist, don’t!
Principle #4: Begin with the assumption that the Bible is infallible and inerrant.
Here are a few excerpts from the 1978 Chicago Statement on Biblical Inerrancy, a joint project of more than 200 evangelical leaders:

We affirm that canonical Scripture should always be interpreted on the basis that it is infallible and inerrant.
We deny that alleged errors and discrepancies that have not yet been resolved vitiate the truth claims of the Bible.

(Infallible means reliable and trustworthy, and inerrant means containing no mistakes in statements of fact.)
There is no interest here in following evidence. You don’t need to make a reasoned argument if you’re simply going to declare this as a faith position. “The Bible is manmade” has been ruled out, not because the evidence points elsewhere but simply as fiat.
What’s the point of scholarship in this environment? This is intellectual in the same way that discussing strategy in a card game is intellectual. Sure, much mental energy can be spent on the project and interesting ideas can come from it, but in the end it’s just a game. It becomes just one stake in the field of Dogma. Without any empirical evidence to ground this view, other Christians will simply put their stakes where they please.
Principle 5: Avoid claims built on uncertain grounds
From HIB:

Don’t build a doctrine upon a single verse or an uncertain textual reading. We should not erect an entire teaching or system of doctrine upon a verse in isolation from its context, or which has dubious textual support. Christian doctrine should be built upon passages which exist in the original manuscripts and can be confirmed through the science of textual criticism.

I agree that the manuscript tradition should be reliable, but keep in mind how difficult it is to know what the originals said. Scholars do a good job deciding which of two variant traditions is the older one. What they don’t do well is deciding between two traditions when they only have copies of one. We have a centuries-long dark ages before the earliest codices of the fourth century—who knows how many hundreds or thousands of changes were made that we don’t know of?
The principle argues that we not build anything substantial on a verse that is an outlier. That sounds sensible until we consider that this conflict—the general consensus versus the outlier—means that there’s a contradiction in the Bible. Principle #3 declares that contradictions don’t exist, but of course that’s a declaration built on nothing.
The second problem is that one of the most important Christian doctrines, the Trinity, violates this principle. There are a few verses that speak of the three persons separately in one sentence (for example, “Make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit” from Matthew 28:19), but this is a long way from the elaborate Trinitarian handwaving in the Athanasian Creed of around 500 CE. This is the one principle that makes sense, and it tells us that there’s scant evidence for Paul or Jesus having a Trinitarian concept of God.
I wonder why Christians don’t apply these principles to other religions’ holy books (or even apply them consistently to their own).

The Bible is the world’s oldest, longest-running, most widespread,
and least deservedly respected Rorschach Test.
You can look at it and see whatever you want.
And everybody does.
— Richard S. Russell

No man ever believes that the Bible means what it says.
He is always convinced that it says what he means.
— George Bernard Shaw

Image credit: Photo Editing Services Tucia, flickr, CC

Five Christian Principles Used to Give the Bible a Pass

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Let the Bible clarify the BibleIn Christians’ Damning Refuge in “Difficult Verses,” we looked at a Christian response to the well-known Dawkins Quote (“The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction …”). This response tried to distinguish between “clear” and “hard” passages in the Bible. But is the problem that some verses are unclear or that they’re actually unpleasant, with clear/hard simply misdirection to justify ignoring verses where God’s barbaric behavior is on display?
Christians will tell me to look without bias at what the Bible says and I’ll do my honest best, but I have no patience for when they don’t follow their own rules. Or when their own rules demand that they be biased.
Consider these Christian recommendations for how to interpret the Bible. We’ll start with an elaboration of the one we’ve just seen, “take the clearer passages to interpret the harder passages.”
Two of my sources are “How to Interpret the Bible” and “Ten principles when considering alleged Bible contradictions.” From this point forward, I’ll abbreviate these as HIB and 10P. (I’ve responded to 10P in depth here.)
Principle #1: Let the Bible clarify the Bible
Or, as HIB puts it, “The Clear Must Interpret the Unclear”:

Murky passages can often be clarified by other scriptures which address the particular topic in a more straightforward way. For example, a very specific interpretation of the highly symbolic visions of John’s apocalypse [that is, the book of Revelation], may never “trump” the clear teachings of Paul’s epistles, which are more didactic and less symbolic, and hence clearer.

Here’s another way to see that clear/unclear simply mean pleasing/displeasing. When someone says that verse A is clear and B unclear (so we should focus on verse A, ignore verse B, and pretend we didn’t notice any contradiction), ask why that’s the order. Why isn’t B the clear one? For example, Paul says, “[All I’ve been saying is] that the Messiah would suffer and, as the first to rise from the dead, would bring the message of light to his own people and to the Gentiles” (Acts 26:23). But this is contradicted by (1) the zombies that came out of their graves on the death of Jesus (Matthew 27:52), who were actually the first to rise from the dead, and (2) the gospels themselves, which say that Jesus had a long ministry before his resurrection, not after as Paul says it. Why do the gospels trump Paul?
Or take the duration of Jesus’s time on earth after the resurrection. Why is it popularly seen as forty days (Acts 1:3)? Why not one day (Luke 24:51)?
Here’s another example. Harold Camping famously made a fool of himself when he predicted the Rapture on May 21, 2011. The first lesson from the Camping fiasco is that testability is not the prophet’s friend. If you’re going to predict something, make it vague to give you plausible deniability after your inevitable failure. (John Hagee didn’t get the message when he said in 2013, “The coming four blood moons points to a world-shaking event that will happen between April 2014 and October 2015.” Whoops—wrong again.)
But the second lesson is that the Bible is a sock puppet that can say almost anything you want, despite the principle of “Let the Bible clarify the Bible.” Christian apologists, embarrassed by Camping’s date for the Last Days®, quoted Paul speaking about the end: “The day of the Lord will come like a thief in the night.… Destruction will come on them suddenly, as labor pains on a pregnant woman” (1 Thessalonians 5:2–3). That is, the end must be a surprise, and Camping couldn’t have correctly calculated the date of the Rapture.
Camping trumped that by quoting the very next verse: “But you, brothers and sisters, are not in darkness so that this day should surprise you like a thief.” That is, the chosen won’t be surprised by the end.
The lack of biblical clarity and the inadequacy of Principle #1 is made particularly clear by Christianity’s 45,000 denominations (and counting). If the Bible were the clear message from an omniscient Creator, there would be just one.
Principle #2: “Description is different than approval”
10P says:

Sometimes critics of the Bible (or critics of Christianity in general) point to an evil or corrupt situation described in the Bible to argue God (or Christianity) approves of the situation (or is the source of the evil). Remember, just because a Biblical author writes about something, this does not mean God condones it or supports it.

This principle attempts to tap dance away from God’s approval of things we find horrifying today like slavery and genocide.
Here’s an exercise that will explore what God does and doesn’t approval of. Consider the following lists, each containing three items mentioned in the Bible. For each list, think about what connects the items in that list and how it is different from the other lists:

  1. Murder, lying, and stealing
  2. Slavery, genocide, and polygamy
  3. Weights and measures for commerce, sheep herding, and eating meat

The items in List 1 (murder, lying, and stealing) are all prohibited in Exodus 20. They’re typically numbered 6, 8, and 9 in the Ten Commandments. (As an aside, it’s interesting that they’re not on the second version in Exodus 34, the one that found its way into the Ark of the Covenant.)
The items in List 2 (slavery, genocide, and polygamy) are never prohibited. They can be restricted, however (for example, elders are to have just one wife according to 1 Timothy 3:2), and rules can apply (for example, slaves can be beaten, but not so much that they die according to Exodus 21:20).
The items in List 3 (weights and measures, herding, and meat) are also never prohibited. Rules can apply to them as well (“The Lord detests dishonest scales, but accurate weights find favor with him”).
Lists 2 and 3 are distinguishable only in how we judge them—we prohibit List 2 but accept List 3—but that’s not in the Bible. This leaves us with the biblical view of prohibited things in List 1 versus acceptable things (though possibly regulated by God-given rules) in Lists 2 and 3.
Only modern sensibilities tell us that slavery, genocide, and polygamy are bad. Not only did God regulate slavery and polygamy just like he did accurate weights and measures, Jesus had nothing bad to say about them either.
This principle, “Description is different than approval,” is a transparent attempt to give God a pass when he goes off his meds. It fails.
Conclusion: three more principles in part 2.

You give me the awful impression, I hate to have to say it,
of someone who hasn’t read any of the arguments against your position ever.
— Christopher Hitchens

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Christians’ Damning Refuge in “Difficult Verses”

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Let the Bible clarify the Bible
Dan Barker of the Freedom From Religion Foundation has a new book, God: The Most Unpleasant Character in All Fiction, that builds off Richard Dawkins’ famous quote:

The God of the Old Testament is arguably the most unpleasant character in all fiction: jealous and proud of it; a petty, unjust, unforgiving control-freak; a vindictive, bloodthirsty ethnic cleanser; a misogynistic, homophobic, racist, infanticidal, genocidal, filicidal, pestilential, megalomaniacal, sadomasochistic, capriciously malevolent bully.  — Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion

In his book, Barker’s theological expertise shows that Dawkins’ eloquent summary is actually understated.
What’s curious, though, is that Christians seem to cite the Dawkins Quote more than atheists. On the Unbelievable radio show for 12/7/13, Christian Chris Sinkinson gives his critique:

[The Dawkins Quote] is clearly a very slanted view of how to read the text of the Old Testament. Most of us would take the clearer passages to interpret the harder passages. We would be talking about Leviticus 19 “Love your neighbor as yourself” before we look at the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. We would have an approach to scripture that would weight things in such a way that that description of God just does not sound like the god who I believe in or the god who I worship. (@ 36:23)

For starters, “Love your neighbor as yourself” means, “Love your fellow Jewish neighbor as yourself,” so let’s not imagine a big worldwide hug from Yahweh.
But set that aside. I can see that Christians prefer “love your neighbor” to death and destruction, but they make a mistake when they call the former a “clearer” passage when it’s actually just a more pleasing passage.
You can see that in the last sentence: “We would have an approach to scripture that would weight things in such a way that that description of God just does not sound like the god who I believe in or the god who I worship.” It’s clumsily worded, as live radio often is, but he’s saying that he adjusts how he interprets the Bible to preserve his preconceived god belief. That is, he hammers the copper of the Bible on the anvil of his belief, not the other way around.
I see this approach frequently, though it’s unusual to see it so plainly stated.
Thought experiment
My study of the Bible has been haphazard, and I jump around based on whatever I’m researching at the moment. But suppose I wanted to improve my understanding by reading the Bible cover to cover. I find an experienced Christian friend who will mentor me and give me their interpretation as needed.
At any point, I might have a question about social customs at the time, or I might complain about the miracles. But things get interesting when we get to the morally questionable activities—God hardening Pharaoh’s heart to prevent him from giving Moses what he wants, demanding genocide, supporting slavery and polygamy, insisting on a human sacrifice to satisfy his divine wrath, and so on.
When we hit one of these, my mentor will say, “Okay, now let’s take things slowly to unpack this one.” But what’s to unpack? Seen from the standpoint of modern Western morality, God is obviously a savage monster—what’s confusing or difficult? It’s just that my mentor doesn’t like that.
He can respond by saying that God is unjudgeable or that God’s ways are not our ways so it shouldn’t be surprising that we don’t understand. He can say that that reading of the passage is displeasing. What he can’t say is that it’s unclear. He can say that acceptance of chattel slavery (Leviticus 25:44–6) is unpleasant or disturbing and “For God so loved the world” (John 3:16) is happy or satisfying, but only an agenda would cause him to say that those verses are unclear and clear, respectively.
Continue: I critique five online guidelines for biblical interpretation that are variations on this biased approach to the Bible here.

One of the saddest lessons of history is this:
if we’ve been bamboozled long enough,
we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.
We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth.
The bamboozle has captured us.
It is simply too painful to acknowledge—
even to ourselves—that we’ve been so credulous.
(So the old bamboozles tend to persist
as the new bamboozles rise.)
— Carl Sagan, “The Fine Art of Baloney Detection”

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Does Secularism Have a Debt to Christianity?

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A popular article among some conservatives is “Secularism’s Ongoing Debt to Christianity” by John Steinrucken in the conservative online magazine American Thinker.
I didn’t think much of it.
Steinrucken says that he’s an atheist, but he has an odd accommodationist point of view. I don’t see him making many new atheist friends, and his view of Christianity as a false but useful fiction to keep the Proletariat in line can’t endear him to Christians either. Still, dozens of sites reference his article, many of them Christian.
First, let’s understand his thesis.

Religious faith has made possible the advancement of Western civilization. That is, the glue that has held Western civilization together over the centuries is the Judeo-Christian tradition. … Western civilization’s survival, including the survival of open secular thought, depends on the continuance within our society of the Judeo-Christian tradition.

As an atheist, he doesn’t believe that there is anything behind Christian faith. And though the somewhat-Christian West is at the top of the pyramid at the moment, other societies have advanced quite well without Christianity—consider the Islamic Golden Age, China’s many dynasties, India, the Aztecs and Olmecs in Central America, the Incas and Aymara in the Andes, Mali and Egypt in Africa, Greece and Babylon in the Eastern Mediterranean, Angkor and Sukhothai in Southeast Asia. He has a long way to go to show that Christianity does something that other religions don’t.
Next, it’s Christianity as a “moral compass.”

Can anyone seriously argue that crime and debauchery are not held in check by religion?

I say to any Christian who would be a rampaging maniac without religion: please remain a Christian! Since prisons aren’t overflowing with atheists, they may avoid crime simply because it’s the right thing to do. This reminds me of Penn Jilette’s observation

The question I get asked by religious people all the time is, without God, what’s to stop me from raping all I want? And my answer is: I do rape all I want. And the amount I want is zero. And I do murder all I want, and the amount I want is zero. The fact that these people think that if they didn’t have this person watching over them that they would go on killing, raping rampages is the most self-damning thing I can imagine.

If you wondered if Steinrucken is really an atheist, he really looks like a clumsy Poe when he says:

Has there ever been a more perfect and concise moral code than the one Moses brought down from the mountain?

Wow—how many ways would this be wrong in American society? No, the law that Moses brought down from the mountain would be worse than useless. The Ten Commandments demand allegiance to God; the First Amendment allows religion but says that government must stay out of it. The Ten Commandments say nothing against slavery, genocide, and rape; today, we have a very different view of what’s right and wrong. The Ten Commandments presuppose a theocracy; the Constitution outlines a representative democracy.
You want a moral code that’s concise but doesn’t suck? Here are some suggestions from commenter Playonwords:

“Be excellent to each other” – Bill and Ted
“Do as you would be done by” and all the other versions of the Golden Rule
Primum nil nocere (first, do no harm)

Steinrucken next blunders into the question of morality and says that the secularist

can cite no overriding authority other than that of fashion.

Wrong again. Atheists point to a shared moral instinct. We’re all the same species, so we have pretty much the same moral programming. If Steinrucken is pointing to objective morality, I want evidence of such a thing. I’ve seen none.
For some reason, he has a chip on his shoulder about “secularists.” He pauses to paint a bizarre picture of how they fill their God-shaped hole. If it’s not nutty New Age nonsense,

they surrender themselves to secular ideologies or do-good causes, especially those in which they can mass with others in solidarity, shouting in unison mindless, ritualistic simplicities and waving placards of hackneyed and inane slogans.

My local atheist group organizes an event at the local blood center every eight weeks. At Christmas, we wrap presents at book stores, with donations going to a children’s hospital. We answer phones for the local public radio station pledge drive. We get together for social events and lectures. We don’t shout mindless simplicities or wave signs with inane slogans—should we?
Next, we’re told that

secularism has never offered the people a practical substitute for religion.

Do you substitute something for malaria or cancer? Or do you simply make victims healthy? But if you want to see it that way, the substitute for religion is reality.

We secularists should recognize that we owe much to the religionists, that we are not threatened by them, that we should grant to them their world.

They already have their world—read the First Amendment. I strongly support the demand that “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.”
As for our not being threatened, guess again. Some Christians are eager to see prayer in public schools. To see Creationism taught in science class. To see prayers in government buildings from City Hall to Congress. To see “In God We Trust” continue as our official motto and placed on the walls of government chambers. To have the phrase “under God” remain in the Pledge. To see a de facto Christian requirement for public office.

Why should we be exercised over a Christmas Crèche in front of the county court house?

Because it spits on our governing document, that’s why. (Unlike what you may have heard, there actually are stupid questions.) Do we care about the First Amendment or not? If so, respect it and protect it.

And what harm will come to a child who hears prayer in the schoolroom?

You tell me. Should we deliver morning prayers by cycling through the religions represented in America, giving turns to Muslims, Mormons, Satanists, Wiccans, Hindus, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Catholics, and so on? No conceivable harm to the schoolchildren, right?
Or—crazy idea—maybe we should leave the religious indoctrination at home and just focus on education at school.
Steinrucken doesn’t think much of “elitists,” which pop up occasionally as scoundrels in his essay. They stand on the shoulders of the Christian masses to practice “their conceits and dilettantes.” But it would be wise of them to

publicly hold in high esteem the institutions of Christianity and Judaism, and to respect those who do believe and to encourage and to give leeway to those who, in truth, will be foremost in the trenches defending us against those who would have us all bow down to a different and unaccommodating faith.

So fight fire with fire? When the Muslim believers attack, we must respond with Christian believers for some reason.
No, you don’t fight fire with fire; you fight it with water. A civilization that is immune to the siren call of Christianity won’t care much for Islam either.
But from Steinrucken’s standpoint, what’s the problem? If Christianity is the special sauce that makes a civilization run, what’s the problem with replacing it with Islam? Wouldn’t it provide the same thing? He’s asserted that Christianity is the best but provided no evidence.
This flabby apology for American Christianity never gets off the ground. It’s not that Christianity is the foundation on which is built American democracy; it’s the other way around. The Constitution is what we should defend and hold in high esteem. It’s the Constitution that gives religion its freedom.

A religious war 
is like children fighting over 
who has the strongest imaginary friend.
— Anonymous

(This is an update of a post that originally appeared 3/11/13.)
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The Election-Year Issue No One Is Talking About

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churches’ closed financial recordsLots of polls are monitoring the concerns of U.S. voters, and the usual issues come to the top: the economy and jobs, terrorism, dissatisfaction with government, and so on. What also seems to be an election-year staple is Pulpit Freedom Sunday, an initiative of the conservative Christian group Alliance Defending Freedom, in which pastors deliberately break tax rules against endorsing candidates. Said another way, it’s where American Christianity lobbies for even more handouts from the government. They want an exception to the Johnson amendment that prohibits nonprofits (all of them, not just churches) from endorsing or opposing political candidates.
An issue that never gets the attention it deserves is another exception, churches’ closed financial records. Every U.S. nonprofit can receive tax-free donations, but in return it must annually fill out an IRS 990 form that divulges to the public its income, expenses, assets, the salaries of its executives, and more. Every nonprofit, that is, except churches.
Why is this embarrassing exception not on more people’s radar?
I’m a nonbeliever, but let me emphasize that the issue here isn’t nonbelievers annoyed that they must help pick up the slack (the subsidy that American society gives religion because of its tax-exempt status is estimated at $83.5 billion per year). The issue also isn’t to challenge churches’ nonprofit status. Those are worthwhile conversations, but the real issue is the embarrassment the closed books should cause Christians. What do churches have to hide? Nothing, you say? It sure doesn’t looks like it. American Christians, this exception makes your religion look bad.
Christians should be leading the charge on this issue. They should be telling their representatives that churches don’t need the secrecy of closed financial records. The only benefit would be to hide fraud or financial excesses such as lavish mansions or excessive salaries. Does a high-profile televangelist deserve an enormous salary? I’m not sure that that’s how Jesus rolled, but whatever—simply make it public to the society that is helping to foot the bill.
You remember Jesus, right? He’s the guy who told the rich man, “Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven.” What would Jesus say about churches’ secrecy?
If executives at public corporations and other nonprofits can make their salaries known, surely God’s representatives can do the same.
Isn’t it ironic that an atheist must point this out? If Christianity has something to teach society about morality, shouldn’t it be setting the example by taking the narrow path? And if God can critique the books—and consequently judge the church’s leadership in eternity—what possible concern could there be about letting the rest of us see?
Sensitive to the problem, some organizations within the Christian community have emerged to restore confidence. The Evangelical Council for Financial Accountability imposes on its members standards of financial accountability and transparency. Membership becomes a seal of approval. Another organization is MinistryWatch, which evaluates ministries for the benefit of potential donors. While these affect some big ministries, they do nothing to illuminate the workings of the vast majority of the 350,000 congregations in the United States.
In 2007, Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) investigated six high-profile ministries that each had revenue in the $100-million-per-year range. He wasn’t an insignificant busybody; this was a U.S. Senator on the Senate Finance Committee, and understanding where the money went and trying to restore confidence and accountability was his job. However, the playing field has been so tipped in Christianity’s favor that five of them felt comfortable not cooperating, and they got away with it.
The solution is available and it already works for the 1.5 million nonprofits large and small that fill out IRS 990 forms every year. The 990 does the job, it’s been in use for 75 years, and it should be our window into the operation of all nonprofits, including churches. These forms are easily and anonymously accessible from sites like GuideStar or Charity Navigator. If a church has enough revenue to keep records, it can fill out the form. There is a four-page 990-EZ for organizations with less than $200,000 in revenue, and an even simpler 990-N for those with less than $50,000.
The change is trivial to make: simply amend the document “Instructions for Form 990” by striking the first four items from section B, “Organizations Not Required To File Form 990.” That’s it. The only difficult part might be the church leadership taking a deep breath and disclosing to the world how they spend your money.
Keep in mind who benefits from the status quo. Wouldn’t you like to see Scientology and other cults forced to disclose their assets?
Christians, I know that many in Congress are eager to subsidize Christianity, but tell them that you don’t want it. Tell them that your religion doesn’t need a crutch and that its activities can withstand the light of scrutiny like every other nonprofit. Secret financial records benefit no one except those with something to hide.

The overseer must be above reproach as God’s steward.
— Titus 1:7

Other relevant posts:

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Yeah, but Christianity Built Universities and Hospitals! (2 of 2)

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Christians have a long history of putting themselves at risk to help others during plagues. For example, the Plague of Cyprian (251–66) is estimated to have killed two-thirds of the population of Alexandria, Egypt. And yet,

During the Plague in Alexandria when nearly everyone else fled, the early Christians risked their lives for one another by simple deeds of washing the sick, offering water and food, and consoling the dying.

Many Christians will point to medieval hospitals to argue that they were pioneers in giving us the medical system that we know today. Let’s consider that claim.
(Part 1 considered the similar claim that Christianity is responsible for modern universities.)
Christianity Jesus HospitalsHealth care in the Bible
We can look to the Bible to see where Christian contributions to medical science come from.
We find Old Testament apotropaic medicine (medicine to ward off evil) in Numbers 21:5–9. When God grew tired of the Israelites whining about harsh conditions during the Exodus, he sent poisonous snakes to bite them. As a remedy, God told Moses to make a bronze snake (the Nehushtan). This didn’t get rid of the snakes or the snake bites, but it did mean that anyone who looked at it after being bitten would magically live. So praise the Lord, I guess.
This is a “hair of the dog” type of treatment, as is homeopathic “medicine.” Just as bronze snake statues are useless as medicine today, Jesus and his ideas of disease as a manifestation of demon possession was also useless. To those who point to Jesus’s few individual healings as evidence that Jesus cared about public health, I ask why Jesus didn’t eliminate any diseases or at least give us the tools to do so.
The Father of Western Medicine was Hippocrates, not Jesus.
Medieval hospitals
Without science, a hospital can do nothing but provide food and comfort. Palliative care is certainly something, and let’s celebrate whatever comfort was provided by church-supported hospitals, but these medieval European institutions were little more than almshouses or places to die—think hospitals without the science.

Christian medicine did not advance past that of Galen, the Greek physician of 2nd century who wrote medical texts and whose theories dominated Western Christian medicine for over 1300 years. Not until the 1530s (during the Renaissance) did the physician Andreas Vesalius surpass Galen in the area of human anatomy.

Let’s also be cautious about how much credit Christianity gets rather than simply Christians. People planning a hospital in Europe 500 years ago would’ve been Christians, not because no one but Christians were motivated to build hospitals but because in Europe at that time, pretty much everyone was Christian.
Hospitals of that time in other regions of the world would’ve been built by people who reflected those societies—Arabs, Chinese, and so on, and India, Greece, and Rome were trying to systematize health care long before Christians.
Christianity’s poor attitude toward learning
Christianity had an uneasy relationship with any ideas that didn’t directly support the Church. The 1559 Index Librorum Prohibitorum listed books by 550 authors that were prohibited by the Roman Catholic Church, though prior lists had prohibited books almost since the beginning of Christianity. The list is a Who’s Who of Western thought and included works by Sartre, Voltaire, Hugo, Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Hume, Descartes, Bacon, Milton, Locke, and Pascal. The List was abolished only in 1966.
Dr. Peter Harrison says, “From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeen century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice.” For example, Augustine compared physical lust to “vain desire and curiosity … of making experiments with the body’s aid, and cloaked under the name of learning and knowledge.” Martin Luther said, “Whoever wants to be a Christian should tear the eyes out of his reason.”
This aversion to knowledge is ironic because when the Church was motivated, it could accomplish great things. My favorite example is the thirteenth-century explosion of innovative cathedrals that still stand today.
A modern look at Christianity’s medieval hospitals
We can get a picture of medieval Christian hospitals by looking at Mother Teresa’s Missionaries of Charity hospitals. They have minor comforts, and at best they are comfortable places to die. They’re not meant for treating disease and often lack even pain medication. This isn’t for lack of funds—some estimates claim that the charity took in $100 million per year, though we can only guess because the finances are secret.
One critique noted the mission’s “caring for the sick by glorifying their suffering instead of relieving it.” Christopher Hitchens said, “[Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty.” Mother Teresa’s own philosophy confirms this: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering.”
This is the opposite of the approach of modern hospitals.
Hospitals and medicine today
Let’s return to the Malcolm Muggeridge quote with which I started this post series: “I’ve spent a number of years in India and Africa where I found much righteous endeavour undertaken by Christians of all denominations; but I never, as it happens, came across a hospital or orphanage run by the Fabian Society [a British socialist organization], or a humanist leper colony.”
Maybe the humanists were more focused on curing the problem than simply addressing the symptoms and having a good old pray.
I’d like to give credit where it’s due. If the medieval Church catalyzed human compassion into hospitals that wouldn’t have been there otherwise, that’s great, but don’t take that too far. The Church was largely in charge at that time. If the Church deserves praise for its hospitals, does it also deserve some condemnation for the social conditions that forced people into those hospitals? Did Christianity retard medical science with its anti-science attitude? We forget how long a road it was to reach our modern medical understanding. The book Bad Medicine argues that “until the invention of antibiotics in the 1930s doctors, in general, did their patients more harm than good.” Christianity might have set modern medical science back centuries.
How many diseases has faith cured? How many have reasoning and evidence? Smallpox killed 500 million people in the twentieth century alone. Today, zero. Thank you, science.
Catholic hospital systems are today busy gobbling up independent hospitals in the United States. This appears to have nothing to do with providing improved health but rather to be an opportunity to impose Catholic moral attitudes in areas such as abortion and euthanasia. And note that “Catholic” hospitals are publicly funded, just like all the rest.

For religious hospitals, 46 percent of all revenues came from Medicaid or Medicare, 51 percent was patient revenue from other third-party payers, such as commercial insurers, and only 3 percent was classified as non-patient revenues.
Of those non-patient revenues, the majority came from county appropriations (31 percent) and income from investments (30 percent). Only 5 percent derived from unrestricted contributions, such as charitable donations from church members. So, at best, charitable contributions made up a tiny faction of religious hospitals’ operating revenues. (Source: “No Strings Attached: Public Funding of Religiously-Sponsored Hospitals in the United States”)

The few billion dollars that religion spends on good works in the United States is insignificant compared to the nearly trillion dollars that we as a society spend on health care through Medicare and Medicaid.
I’ll conclude with an observation about Mother Teresa’s charity, a modern throwback to medieval Christian hospitals. Speaking about her stance against condoms, which replaced science with Catholic prudery and removed a barrier against sexually transmitted diseases like HIV, one source said, “More people died as a result of dangerous Church beliefs than Mother Teresa could ever have hoped to save.”
Related posts:

Do you know what they call alternative medicine
that’s been proven to work?
Medicine.
— Tim Minchin, “Storm”

There was a time when religion ruled the world.
It is known as The Dark Ages.
— Ruth Hurmence Green

Image credit: MilitaryHealth, flickr, CC