New book 'Faith in the Time of Plague' curates theological reflections from Europe's worst plagues
Two professors at Westminster Theological Seminary, Stephen Coleman and Todd Rester, have spent most of the past year culling archives and translating plague writings in hopes that churches and leaders would glean some wisdom about worship and ministry during pandemics. The following is the Foreword excerpted from their curated new book, Faith in the Time of Plague: Selected Writings from the Reformation and Post-Reformation, published by Westminster Seminary Press in 2021.
The cover of Faith in the Time of Plague.
(EXCERPT) The father of modern medicine, Sir William Osler, wrote that “Humanity has but three great enemies: fever, famine, and war; of these by far the greatest, by far the most terrible, is fever.” I write this Foreword in the first week of January 2021, after 11 months of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic.
As a physician-scientist who founded and runs the Mayo Clinic’s Vaccine Research Group, I have studied RNA respiratory viruses for the last 35 years. For the last 11 months it has been nearly the entire focus of my time—usually 12–16 hours per day, six days a week—as we have worked in the laboratory to understand immune response to this virus and attempted to build a novel COVID-19 vaccine platform. I have completed over 1,200 national and international interviews on the pandemic and given more talks than I can now count.
To be educated is to be prepared. Such a statement presupposes context and places value on the past. While the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic was a shock, it should not have been a surprise. Thus far, I have survived four pandemics: the 1957 Asian flu, the 1968 Hong Kong flu, the 2009 H1N1 flu, and (so far!) the 2020 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. My previous roles as President of both the Armed Forces Epidemiological Board and the Defense Health Board, and as a member of the National Vaccine Advisory Committee, the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices of the CDC, and the FDA’s Vaccines and Related Biologic Products Advisory Committee, as well as my participation in many national and international tabletop exercises on infectious disease threats and pandemics, meant that nothing about what has happened in 2020 was particularly novel (other than the pathogen involved), nor unexpected to me or others in the world of infectious disease epidemiology. And yet the majority of the world, and the church, was unprepared. It need not have been.
To date, the SARS-CoV-2 virus has infected 100 million people worldwide, hospitalized tens of millions, and taken nearly 2 million lives. It has cost the United States over $16 trillion and disrupted virtually every aspect of life as we know it. And yet these effects pale in comparison to what generations past faced. In this book, Faith in the Time of Plague, Stephen M. Coleman and Todd M. Rester present much-needed new and revised translations along with republications of key treatises, letters and writings from those Reformed theologians who came before us, who lived and ministered during times of plague. Like us, they wrestled with making sense of the events surrounding and slowly overtaking them. It is in this vein that I have gotten to know these men and their scholarly work. In November 2020 I completed a 60-page paper for a course at Westminster on the intersections of Reformation history, Reformed faith and plague during the 16th–17th centuries in England. Once I’d taught myself to read Late Middle English, I spent weeks locating, reading and synthesizing extant primary sources from this same time period. What a delight it is now to discover through this book rich literature from that era that has never been translated into English!
Faith in the Time of Plague provides us access to some of these key sources, and we collectively owe a debt of gratitude to Drs. Coleman and Rester for doing so. In particular, the translations of Voetius, Hoornbeeck and Zanchi’s writings will be relished by those who have found them previously inaccessible. Close study of these works reveals that the tremendous medical, social, ethical, political and religious changes that occurred across the 16th and 17th centuries led to theological changes in thinking that can guide us through the very same issues in our churches and communities hundreds of years later.
Some brief context is important. In studying these works it’s important to note that the word “plague” derives from the Latin word plaga, meaning “blow” or “stripe”—a reference to the idea of God’s “strike” or “blow” against humans due to their sin. It’s also important to recognize that the bubonic plagues (“black death”), which spread in successive waves throughout the Reformation time period, occurred hundreds of years before the germ theory of disease had been discovered and accepted. Prevalent belief among physicians and clergy of the day was the Galenic notion of plague as caused by poisonous vapors, or “noxious airs,” as they called it. While many physicians, apothecaries and public officials bravely stayed and fought these plagues, often losing their lives, it was the clergy, perhaps best exemplified in Martin Luther’s letter to Reformed leader and pastor Johann Hess, that formed the core of public health responses to the pandemic.
Such measures included separating the healthy from the ill, hygienic measures like fumigation, quarantine and the limiting of large gatherings of people (yes, including church services), the development and funding of sick hospitals and other provisions. In one case, at the urging of a young Reformed pastor, the entire village of Eyam, England sealed itself off from all others in a magnanimous attempt to prevent further spread of the plague. This stands in sharp contrast with the current challenge of public health efforts to convince people to maintain social distancing and observe proper mask use. Plagues are just one of many points at which Christianity has provided the foundation and often the motivation for scientific solutions. Indeed, as others have pointed out, the doctrines of Scripture provide the very possibility of science. Paul Slack noted that from 1486 through the 1600s, the majority of books and publications in England dealing with the plague were, in fact, written by divines.
Yet the primary motivation of these 16th and 17th century Reformed and reformational theologians was not medical or even public health per se; rather, it was to ask and to answer great questions that transcended immediate concerns: What is the meaning of plagues? Are we “stricken” by God? Punished for our sins? Why do the righteous die along side the wicked? In addition, important questions were asked of the clergy by the clergy: Shall pastors flee the plague? What were the limits and the requirements of love of neighbor and of Christian charity? Were there special requirements for the shepherds of God’s flock during times of plague? Each generation must answer these age-old questions, guided and informed by Scripture and the wisdom of the church fathers. This is the value of this outstanding book: access to writings by Reformed theologians living, pastoring, writing and shepherding in the midst of devastating plagues to give us guidance today. Their writings illustrate a singularly important presupposition—that neither theology nor science can proceed without an epistemology and without an understanding that this world is contingent.
This is perhaps even more important in our time when effective and evidence-based mitigation measures have been put at odds with political and syncretic religious ideologies. In the context of the church, appropriate distancing, wearing a mask and proper hygiene should not be political statements; rather they are expressions of Christian charity and love for neighbor. We can do no better than to peer intently through the lens of history to learn how the towering figures of the Reformers reasoned and behaved as they were guided by transcendent truth. Through them we see a movement from the moralism so prevalent in our day to a Christo centric, salvific remedy borne of a right reading of Scripture.
“It turns out that theology, along with medicine and science, is legitimately interested in answers about the transcendent questions surrounding issues like plagues and pandemics! ”
It is for this reason, acutely pertinent to our “right now,” that this book matters—and matters greatly. I wish it could be required reading for every pastor, every theologian, every church member, every public health official and every physician. It turns out that theology, along with medicine and science, is legitimately interested in answers about the transcendent questions surrounding issues like plagues and pandemics! In fact, as others have pointed out, no scientist, no physician and no public health official is absent an underlying philosophical or religious motivation for their understanding and recommendations regarding plagues and pandemics. As the writings in this book illustrate, all streams of thought do not share moral or theological equivalence. For the modern mind it is likely to be shocking, as I admit it was often for me as I read this book, to see the profound depth of reasoning and the acuity of argument derived from Scripture and synthesized into patterns of thought and action. Doing so leads the reader from despair over current events into a profound doxology for our Creator and for his promise to his elect:
And we know that for those who love God all things work together for good, for those who are called according to his purpose. For those whom he foreknew he also predestined to be conformed to the image of his Son, in order that he might be the firstborn among many brothers. And those whom he predestined he also called, and those whom he called he also justified, and those whom he justified he also glorified. (Romans 8:28–30, ESV)
The plagues of the 16th and 17th centuries and our own modern plagues and pandemics are all part of the unfolding eschatological drama that we see in Scripture. Plagues have purposes beyond our full comprehension. They neither surprise God, nor are they bereft of value to his elect. Todd Rester well understands the depth of this truth when he writes:
Plague and disease deeply shaped the ministries of pastors and the congregational life of the early modern churches. A faithful pastor in this context needed a solid theology of God’s providence, the dignity of every human being, especially of the sick and the infirm, a deep love of neighbor, a strong commitment to the duties of pastoral vocation, and a robust Christian prudence to navigate the physical and spiritual needs of his family, congregation, and community.
We would do well to understand that indeed there is nothing new under the sun, and to marvel afresh that Scripture and the writings of those who went before us (including those in this book) rightly understood— even without the scientific knowledge we take for granted today—how to respond in God-honoring ways to the plagues of their day, for the benefit of all. May we be equally as intentional and God-honoring, guided by Scriptural doctrines, as they were then, in responding to the crises that confront us today.
Gregory A. Poland is a physician, scientist, author, provocateur, poet, theologian, motivational speaker, and health and fitness advocate. He is the Mary Lowell Leary professor of medicine at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, as well as the director of the Mayo Clinic's Vaccine Research Group. He is also the editor-in-chief of the medical journal Vaccine.