Too Holy for Medicine (You). Not Too Holy for a Rolex (Me).
“Real believers don’t take medicine.” Where does the rule stop?
A mother and her two sons, aged 23 and 19, stand at the grave of their father. He was 64, and he had been told that real believers do not take medicine. The Spider, the church member who asks the questions in Dossiers 68 and 69, says what he thinks of the teaching that told him so.
About five minutes. The full dossier has the sources, the corrections made to the brief, and the prompt that made the page. The full case on healing is in Dossier 44.
A mother and her two sons, aged 23 and 19, stand at the grave of their father. He was 64.
He had been in good health, with one manageable problem: high blood pressure. He had access to excellent medical care. He had held a senior post in government service and retired early to spend more time with his family. He found the slower pace hard, and was drawn to a modern church.
He had been raised in a creedal church and baptised as an infant. He was told this was all void, and that he had to “find God again.” He was given books that said the world would end in the year 2000. It did not. He was baptised again.
He was told that real believers do not take medicine. He stopped treating his blood pressure. It killed him years before his time.
He acted in good faith on what he was taught. Nothing here is a criticism of him.
This was not a victimless teaching.
The question. Does the New Testament anywhere tell Christians to refuse medicine? If medicine is a test of faith, why are clothes, cooked food, cars and watches not? And who answers when a teaching like this kills someone?
Two · Fair to the other side
What the other side would say
Those who teach healing without medicine usually believe they are honouring God. They point to “I am the LORD that healeth thee” (Exodus 15:26), to the healings in the Gospels and Acts, to James 5:14–15, and to King Asa, who “sought not to the LORD, but to the physicians” (2 Chronicles 16:12). The Spider agrees that God heals, that Christians should pray for the sick, and that trusting a doctor instead of God is a real sin.
The answer, in one line. Asa was faulted for leaving God out, not for seeing a doctor. Dossier 44 reads the passage in full.
Three
Where does it say that?
It does not. The New Testament mentions medicine in passing, as normal.
“Use a little wine for thy stomach’s sake and thine often infirmities.”1 Timothy 5:23Paul to Timothy, about a recurring illness.
“Luke, the beloved physician.”Colossians 4:14The author of more than a quarter of the New Testament, called by his trade.
“Bound up his wounds, pouring in oil and wine … Go, and do thou likewise.”Luke 10:34, 37The Good Samaritan’s first aid, held up as the example.
“They that be whole need not a physician, but they that are sick.”Matthew 9:12Jesus uses the physician as a picture of himself.
“Behold, I will heal thee” … “Take a lump of figs.”2 Kings 20:5, 7God promised to heal Hezekiah, and his prophet still ordered the remedy.
Not one verse
Not one verse tells a Christian to refuse medicine. Several assume they will use it.
Four · The sharpest point
The selective rule
If using what God provides through human skill shows a lack of faith, so do clothes, cooked food, shoes, spectacles, air-conditioning, cars and watches. The teachers who forbid medicine use all of them, often the expensive versions. None of that counts as unbelief. Only the one provision that keeps the congregation alive does.
Luther made the same point in 1527: by that reasoning a man could refuse food, drink, clothing and shelter too, which he called suicide.
The selective rule
Clothes, cooked food, shoes, cars and watches are fine. Only the pills are unbelief.
Why does the rule stop at the pharmacy door, and never reach the car park?
Five · Interactive
Where does the rule stop?
Mark each of the twelve as the rule would have it. Nothing you choose leaves this page.
Six
Tempting God, and forbidding what he made
Satan quoted God’s promise of protection and told Jesus to jump from the temple. Jesus had the promise and would not jump: “Thou shalt not tempt the Lord thy God” (Matthew 4:7). Refusing treatment so that God must heal sets God the same test. The Baptist commentator John Gill said so of this verse, and Luther said it of those who refused medicine.
Tempting God
Jesus had the promise and still would not jump. Refusing treatment so God must heal is the same test.
Paul warned of teachers who forbid what “God hath created to be received with thanksgiving” (1 Timothy 4:1–5). He was speaking of food and marriage, not medicine, and the commentators read it that way. But the principle holds: a teacher who forbids what God made, and calls the forbidding true faith, is the kind Paul warned about. Paul also calls such rules “the commandments and doctrines of men” and links them with “neglecting of the body” (Colossians 2:22–23).
Seven
The Church built the hospitals, and the chain that led here
Basil of Caesarea built a complex for the sick, with physicians, in the early 370s. Arthur Margoschis built and named St Luke’s Hospital at Nazareth in 1892 (Dossier 07). Ida Scudder opened the one-bed clinic in 1900 that became the Christian Medical College, Vellore.
The Church built the hospitals
The churches he was told were void built hospitals. The new teaching told him not to use one.
Each step asked him to trust the new teachers over his upbringing, his doctors and his own judgement, and each was called a deeper faith. The last one was fatal. A prediction that fails is the test Scripture gives: “thou shalt not be afraid of him” (Deuteronomy 18:22). Why was a teaching that failed on the end of the world still trusted on life and death?
Eight · Who paid
Not a victimless crime
The teachers did not pay. A widow and two young men did, and will keep paying. When a teaching like this fails, it blames the sick man’s faith; Scripture refuses that verdict (16, 42). Jesus said of anyone who causes a believer to stumble that “it were better for him that a millstone were hanged about his neck” (Matthew 18:6). James warns that teachers “shall receive the greater condemnation” (James 3:1). “Ye shall know them by their fruits” (Matthew 7:16). This fruit has a grave. See also 82 · A Tale of Two Eldest Sons.
Not a victimless crime
The teachers were not at the grave.
Nine · Closing
Stand fast
“Stand fast therefore in the liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free, and be not entangled again with the yoke of bondage” (Galatians 5:1). Christ did not free anyone from the law of Moses so that a pastor could bind them with a rule against blood-pressure tablets. Pray for healing. Ask the elders to pray and anoint (James 5:14). And take the medicine, with thanks to the God who made it possible.
Not medical adviceNothing here is medical advice. If you are ill, see a doctor, and pray as well.
From the Spider
Do not let anyone put you under a yoke Christ never laid on you.
Want the evidence?
The full dossier has the sources, Luther and Gill on tempting God, the history of the first hospitals, the corrections made to the brief, and the prompt.