Comorbidities in the Body of Christ
COVID-19 has given us another metaphor for talking about the problems that plague us
Earlier this year I compared the current condition of evangelicalism to someone pulling all the junk out of the deep recesses of their house and strewing it on the lawn for all to see. This borrows (vaguely) from Peter's description of the Christian community as a house (1 Peter 2:5). Already in the early months of this year, evangelicalism’s very public house cleaning was well underway, as many lamented the church’s failures in racial reconciliation, sexual and spiritual abuse, political compromise, and more.
These conversations have only intensified as the year has progressed.
On the plus side, COVID-19 has given us another metaphor for talking about the problems that plague us: comorbidities.
Co·mor·bid·i·ty (kōmôrˈbidədē/)
noun
plural noun: comorbidities
the simultaneous presence of two chronic diseases or conditions in a patient.
Evangelicals spend tons of energy trying to diagnose the single root problem with our movement. Depending on where you get your news or who you follow on Twitter, the rot at the root of evangelicalism is either secularism or fundamentalism; white supremacy or cultural Marxism; cultural accommodation to the LGBT agenda or deep homophobia and patriarchy; the feminization of the church or toxic masculinity in the church; the creeping influence of collectivist identity or rampant individualism. Those are just the ones that pop to mind.
The symptoms are serious. Jerry Falwell, Jr. resigned as president of Liberty University when news broke of a long-time affair that involved both himself and his wife and a former pool boy. New evidence has emerged about Ravi Zacharias' alleged sexual predation. A poll from Ligonier ministries suggests that nearly a third of evangelicals believe Jesus was a good teacher but not divine. One researcher claims that racism is more deeply ingrained in white Christians. It’s natural and important that we ask ourselves, What's going on? What’s wrong with us?
There are patterns to the diagnoses. Conservatives seem mostly concerned about communicable diseases—they assume the Body (of Christ) is essentially sound and will be compromised only if it catches something from an outsider. That is, secular culture and its influence on the church is to blame. Progressives seem mostly concerned about hereditary diseases—they assume the Body is compromised already by sins of our fathers passed down, by nature and nurture, to the present. That is, there’s something inherent in evangelicalism that is broken and has been for a long time.
As fun as the endless bickering about these things may be for some, it’s worth asking: What if we have multiple ailments and our fixation on identifying the main one prevents us from seeking life-saving treatment for any of them?
More to the point, what if the different parts of our big, diverse Body are susceptible to different diseases so that the way we make sense of our comorbidities is to realize that different Christians in different parts of the country and who have different social commitments and experiences are more likely to contract particular spiritual diseases—but that all of us are equally liable to compromise?
A good physician treats all the ailments instead of stubbornly insisting that the abscessed tooth and the eczema on the legs must surely be symptoms of the same, single cause.
We see the work of a Good Physician in Revelation, where the Body of Christ (singular) in Asia Minor has seven parts spread across seven cities. Jesus speaks to all seven and asks them to hear “what the Spirit says” to each of them individually. To each church the Spirit addresses a specific diagnosis for what ails them uniquely:
Ephesus has forgotten its first love.
Smyrna suffers persecution.
Pergamum is tempted by a couple of Gentile false teachers.
Thyatira is led astray by a different Gentile false teacher.
Sardis is asleep.
Philadelphia is tempted by Jewish false teachers.
Laodicea is doing very little at all.
Jesus doesn’t make generic proclamations about the single root problem with the church in (modern day) Turkey. He diagnoses the local illnesses and calls local leaders to address them.
There’s comfort in looking for the single root cause of our illness. Because usually the disease we identify as the most important is one we think we don’t have. The problem is racism, but I’m an anti-racist. The problem is secular social theories, but I’m a careful defender of the faith. And so on.
But there’s real danger in this tendency of ours, because it brings us all dangerously close to those who were “confident of their own righteousness and looked down on everyone else,” leading one of them to pray, in public, “‘God, I thank you that I am not like other people—robbers, evildoers, adulterers—or even like this tax collector” (Luke 18: 9, 11). There’s no healing for that person. Instead, the patient who “went home justified before God” was the one who admitted his own disease: “God, have mercy on me, a sinner” (18:14, 13).
American evangelicalism has more than one illness. Some of them are body-wide. Some afflict different parts of the body differently. I propose we spend more time listening to what the Spirit has to say in our church and worry less about “the” church, at least for the time being. The foot can easily rot while pointing out a cancer in the hand. The whole body dies when the parts refuse to take their own diseases seriously.
There's lots of pressure to engage the national conversation, especially in an election year. But the national conversation forces us to generalize and take sides. Wisdom is found not in attending to the generalizations but in paying close attention to the particular needs in the room where you are. I pray we all have the courage to hear what the Spirit says to each of our churches.