Sorry for the category this is under. Closest I have.
In the course of our discussions of Medicare, and inconsistent Christian use of the same, I made a passing reference to Medicare use by “hobbyist” midwives. Discussion on this point rapidly developed into its very own sideshow, deteriorating rapidly from the point about government aid into the pros and cons of midwifery.
I am not going to write about midwifery here, but rather try to sketch what our relationship to medical science and alternative medicine ought to be. The paradigm I am about to set out I have held for many years, and have written about in Credenda before. In sum, it is this. People think I am an ardent defender of conventional medical practices in the United States for the same reason that anabaptists thought that John Calvin and the other magisterial reformers were papists, or, at best, inconsistent reformers because they still held on to so many “vestiges” of the historic church. The Roman Catholics, for their part, simply thought of the magisterial reformers as a tad less fruity, perhaps, than the anabaptists out beyond them.
This is an illustration, and only an illustration, but I think it a good one. I have had good Roman Catholic friends, I grew up among saintly anabaptists, and I consider myself an adopted son of the magisterial Reformation. I believe I know the psychologies involved, and I see them at work everywhere in our discussions of medicine.
Orthodox medicine is corrupt and it is corrupt on many levels. Corrupted by money, corrupted by power, corrupted by arrogance, corrupted by politics and red tape, and corrupted by the insane idea that doctors have the right to chop babies up into little pieces if they and the mother agree to do it. When you have doctors whose professional association is okay with that kind of vile practice, it is not surprising that large numbers of tender-hearted people have resorted to curing themselves with roots they found in the meadow. While a case can be made against that kind of random self-treatment, the case cannot be made by those who chased them out into the meadow in the first place. I believe a cogent case can be made against the anabaptist rejection of infant baptism, but it could not have been mounted by Pope Alexander VI. He and others of his ilk were a central part of the problem. Many of the anabaptists had more of the truth than he did.
Among the anabaptists, you don’t have institutional restraints on your lusts, but neither do you have the seventeen wet mattresses of institutional lethargy thrown on top of someone who really wants to follow Jesus. And that is why anabaptists could be very, very good, or very, very bad. Some of the best Christians I have ever known are ranked among them. Some of the craziest things I ever heard came from others in their ranks. Their car is very fast, and when their drivers are very good, they can keep it on the road (while pretending there is no road). But the fast car has no brakes, and when the car leaves the road, my, how the pieces fly!
The magisterial Reformers wanted to keep the institution, and remove the corruptions. This was done with varying degrees of success, and for varying lengths of time. But I am convinced that that is how reformations of all kinds should be undertaken.
So I identify the North American medical establishment with the Renaissance popes. But I am a magisterial reformer — I don’t want to burn the whole thing to the ground and start out with a “first century church.” To someone who has made their final and complete break, it looks like I am defending them root and branch, when I am actually far more severe with them than I am with the “anabaptist” practioners. For example, when I point out that no midwives I ever heard of think that it is okay to kill babies on purpose, this is not just a cute little dodge. Think about it for a minute. We have over a million abortions a year in the United States, and medical doctors are doing them, not midwives. That’s a lot of doctors, discrediting their profession. And after they have soaked their profession in so much blood, how can they complain if others heap contempt on that same profession? They deserve all that contempt, and more. Let’s say, for the sake of discussion, that one hundred babies die every year because of an accident involving a midwife. Compare it to the million every year that doctors kill on purpose. Compare the two numbers and get some perspective.
But the same strictures do not apply to those who want the medical profession reformed from top to bottom, and brought under the Lordship of Jesus Christ. That will include a return to earlier practices that modern medicine has rejected, along with some reforms that were first developed among the anabaptists. But it will not include the anabaptist paradigm, taken as a whole. Reformation is what needs to happen, but it needs to be a magisterial reformation.
Now this really is a qualified and nuanced position. To see it as an attack on “anabaptist” medicine across the board is nothing but party spirit. To see it as a come-what-may defense of conventional medicine is inexplicable. I have nothing negative whatever to say to a midwife who has delivered 500 babies safely over the course of twenty years, and who has the high respect of every OB/GYN in the three surrounding counties. Why would I? And I have nothing positive to say about MDs who get ordinary kids through an ordinary school day by doping them up to the eyebrows, who reject the Hippocratic rejection of abortion, and who have embraced sodomy as a normal sexual practice.
What I would ask the responsible “anabaptist” practitioners to do is exactly what I seek to do myself. If I identify with the “institutional church,” and I want to be an honest man, then I have to be willing to help police our own ranks. But when I have done this repeatedly, and the fact that I have done it is invisible to others outside, this is simply an indication that the outside criticism has become ideological. It is like someone saying that they wish John Calvin would someday bring himself to write about the abuses of the papacy, instead of picking on the anabaptists all the time.