Gentle Reader,
Zoom fatigue is real. I’m grateful for the technology that enables me to connect with people I would otherwise not be able to, but it’s been three weeks of meeting after meeting. I feel very done.
That said, I’d like a mute button for real lilfe.
Whether I’d use it on myself or others is undecided.
Kate says: city.
Go.
Have humans always had immune systems?
I wonder.
Genesis 1 and 2 aren’t scientific accounts. The point of the creation narratives is not how God created, or even that God created. The point is God is, and that God is specifically The I Am (which, to me, is just a fabulous response to Moses’ question in Exodus 3). This is the foundational theological principle around which God’s first people, the physical descendants of Abraham, orient themselves. And it is the foundational theological principle around which the spiritual descendants of Abraham, those who are “adopted in” to Israel, orient ourselves.
So. There’s a lot that Genesis 1 and 2 leave out. And honestly, what’s left out doesn’t matter to me. If God made the world in 7 seconds, 7 literal days, or 7 gajillion years, great. Those facts, or lack of those facts, don’t take away from the central fact of God’s existence. Genesis 1 and 2 are poems, hymns, words of praise to the Great God who is not contained by creation, but is Lord over each and every atom, and all the little parts inside the atoms.
The world of Genesis 1 and 2 is one that is operating in perfect harmony, as God designed. Whether this world lasted for a week or for a thousand years, I don’t know. But I do know that all was well. There was no fear, no suffering, no death.
As such, I don’t think the first humans had immune systems.
Disease is not baked into creation’s clay, out of which humanity was formed.
I think immune systems are a mark of God’s grace, arising in the bodies of the first humans and those who followed in response to the decay that was introduced to the world the moment teeth bit through the flesh of the fruit. A mark of grace, yes. But also imperfect. This is obvious. I live with this obviousness every single day. My immune system is weak. It doesn’t fight off microscopic attackers as it theoretically should.
People get sick. They get injured. They die.
Our immune systems are not magic shields. To say, “I don’t need _____ medicine” or “I won’t use ______ treatment” because “God gave me an immune system” is both faulty logic and theology. It also implicitly shames those of us whose bodies are more fragile. (Although, to be clear, all bodies are fragile). There is a message threaded into the words that flow from faulty logic and theology: “If you trusted God, you wouldn’t need that medicine or use that treatment.”
“For what is the self-complacent man but a slave to his own self-praise.”
– Augustine of Hippo, City of God
Stop.