Out of Order: A Biblical Case for Refusing Vaccines
As a normative principle, it is proper that we should ever begin:
“To the law and to the testimony: if they speak not according to this word, it is because there is no light in them” (Isaiah 8:20 KJV).
This is what I find most distressing, that people are not consulting the Scriptures for clarity about how to respond to plague and to the idea of forced vaccines. For we hear people say things like, "Love, Love," but I do not believe they are truly consulting Biblical love, which is always obedience to God's revealed will: “This is love, that we walk according to His commandments” (2 John 1:6 NKJV). If I may be permitted an interpretive paraphrase:
“Not everyone who says to Me, ‘LOVE, LOVE,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. Many will say to Me in that day, ‘LOVE, LOVE, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name [and healed many diseases]?’ And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice LOVELESSNESS!’” (Matthew 7:21-23, adapted from the NKJV)
In other words, the pressure that people place on others in the name of “Love” is not necessarily love. The beating of the religious drum about vaccines may just be lawlessness and even lovelessness. As Scripture states:
“Love suffers long and is kind; love does not envy; love does not parade itself, is not puffed up; does not behave rudely, does not seek its own, is not provoked, thinks no evil; does not rejoice in iniquity, but rejoices in the truth; bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things” (1 Corinthians 13:4-7 NKJV).
Notice that the foregoing says nothing about vaccines, neither receiving nor imposing them. It says nothing about their efficacy, their safety, or anything of that nature. In fact, love does not seek to force its own way on others. Therefore, if people truly loved, then they could not force them to do something that violates their conscience, it would not think evil of those who refuse vaccines, and would endure their choice to not receive vaccination. Accuse someone for being unloving in not taking a vaccine, then one violates love by thinking evil of them.
But this does not really get beyond the general, polarized nature of much current debate. I believe we should look to the Scriptures more specifically for how we think about disease and its treatment. For example, in the long history of the Scriptures, despite plague and peril, never has worship been stopped or been called to stop. Despite legal decrees against worship by kings, for example, worship still never ceased (e.g. Daniel 6:8-10). Note that in Daniel 6:10 it states:
"Now when Daniel knew that the writing was signed, he went home. And in his upper room, with his windows open toward Jerusalem, he knelt down on his knees three times that day, and prayed and gave thanks before his God, as was his custom since early days" (Daniel 6:10 NKJV).
In other words, despite the threat of death, Daniel prayed all the more consistently. And it even appears that Daniel's action to pray was in some measure an intentional repudiation of the “legal” closure of public (and private) worship, which not incidentally had a 100% chance of death, a consequence he was legally bound to suffer due to his engaging even in private worship.
But concerning plague more specifically:
"So Moses said to Aaron, "Take a censer and put fire in it from the altar, put incense on it, and take it quickly to the congregation and make atonement for them; for wrath has gone out from the LORD. The plague has begun." Then Aaron took it as Moses commanded, and ran into the midst of the assembly; and already the plague had begun among the people. So he put in the incense and made atonement for the people. And he stood between the dead and the living; so the plague was stopped. Now those who died in the plague were fourteen thousand seven hundred, besides those who died in the Korah incident. So Aaron returned to Moses at the door of the tabernacle of meeting, for the plague had stopped." (Numbers 16:46-50 NKJV)
Note that he not only did not cease worship, but he also went among the people with the plague.
The same is found in the time of David:
"So the LORD sent a plague upon Israel, and seventy thousand men of Israel fell. ... Then David lifted his eyes and saw the angel of the LORD standing between earth and heaven, having in his hand a drawn sword stretched out over Jerusalem. So David and the elders, clothed in sackcloth, fell on their faces. ... Then David said to Ornan, "Grant me the place of this threshing floor, that I may build an altar on it to the LORD. You shall grant it to me at the full price, that the plague may be withdrawn from the people." ... And David built there an altar to the LORD, and offered burnt offerings and peace offerings, and called on the LORD; and He answered him from heaven by fire on the altar of burnt offering. So the LORD commanded the angel, and he returned his sword to its sheath." (1 Chronicles 21:14, 16, 22, 26-27 NKJV)
Worship appears to be all the more essential during plague.
We again do not seem to see any indication that worship ought to be stopped during Solomon's day:
“When there is famine in the land, pestilence or blight or mildew, locusts or grasshoppers; when their enemy besieges them in the land of their cities; whatever plague or whatever sickness there is; whatever prayer, whatever supplication is made by anyone, or by all Your people Israel, when each one knows the plague of his own heart, and spreads out his hands toward this temple: then hear in heaven Your dwelling place, and forgive, and act, and give to everyone according to all his ways, whose heart You know (for You alone know the hearts of all the sons of men), that they may fear You all the days that they live in the land which You gave to our fathers.” (1 Kings 8:37-40 NKJV)
Nothing indicates that the Temple be closed or worship be suspended. Even Christ Himself, at the end of Mark’s Gospel, a passage referred to by Irenaeus in the 2nd Century and therefore undoubtedly original, states:
“And these signs will follow those who believe: In My name they will cast out demons; they will speak with new tongues; they will take up serpents; and if they drink anything deadly, it will by no means hurt them; they will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover” (Mark 16:17-18 NKJV).
Again we see that in the presence of illness the faithful do not flee, nor take up naturalistic defense measures. They in fact enter into the space where people are ill. And they are not armed with aspirin and antibiotics. Of course, I'm not condemning those things, but again we see that “safety” and “security” are not part of the clarion call of the Gospel. Even to be a Christian for the first three centuries of the Church was to intentionally place oneself and one’s loved ones in explicit danger. For baptism means we fundamentally relinquish and give up ownership of our life to God's will. I see nowhere in Scripture anything that accords with the willing ceasing of worship by those who are ostensibly well and not presenting any symptoms of disease (Leviticus 13-14 gives principles for quarantining).
Concerning more specifically the taking of medications, my reading of the Bible shows that there is always an order: First, get sick, and then, Second, receive treatment. I never see: First get medical treatment, in order to Second, avoid the threat of disease. We do see a principle of cleansing away dirt, quarantining the sick, and the application of healing arts on the sick or injured, but we never see the indication that one ought to have their immune system modified preemptively. This seems to give a pass to medicines and antibiotics, since they are meant to respond to a present infection, but it does not seem to support the use of vaccines as preemptive modifications of the immune system. I imagine that in freedom a person might be welcomed to receive a vaccine, but to force it upon a person begins to say something about God's design for the immune system and the order of nature. That move rather places trust in the strength of man's ingenuity above that of God's infinitely wise design of the immune system, which in the treatment of disease always works in response to illness, never through a preemptive modification of the immune system.
People whose prime motivating commitment/hope is to this world, they must end up experiencing great mental and emotional perplexity over anyone not choosing like they choose, and so anxiety manifests towards those who don't agree with them on these issues. This is really a worldview issue we are facing. The this-worldly goal of “safety” and “security” frames and invisibly controls their thinking process, and so because they are controlled by this they want (read: demand) others to operate within the same framework. Control is the watchword. The crazed nature of their position is almost impossible for them to see, for it is the very assumptive matrix producing their thoughts and attitudes regarding the abstainers’ insubordination to their (self-) righteous demands, and so on the surface they cling to a rhetoric of public service.
As I’ve read through some well argued cases against those vaccines that contain fetal tissue, I have been very appreciative of their thoughtful and effective rebuttals. They have shown the inconsistency of thought found in those pseudo-religious who produce “squishy” answers to this issue. My only concern, however, is not with their arguments or their position contra using aborted fetal cells, nor their calling out the equivocation that people use to make it seem like they didn't use fetal cells when in reality they did. My only concern is that it seems the argument against certain vaccines due to their production being in some way associated with aborted fetal cells is not carrying the moral force it deserves. This is not a specific criticism of that position, but a more general criticism that the arguments need to dig deeper, penetrating into a vision of what it means to be a human being made in God's image.
What I am trying to get at is that this issue, as a cultural phenomenon, is not about vaccines directly, but about forced vaccination. It is a political question posing as (or cloaked in) a health question. From their perspective, they are seeking to exercise power over people's consciences in order to save lives and make “calculated sacrifices” for the “greater good.” To disagree with them (according to them) is to have a wicked, seared conscience, one which needs political force to move it in the “right” direction. So it sounds to them like on our side we are misleadingly using a technicality so as to get away from the force of the collective benevolent will, by using casuistry.
Thus, as we proclaim the wrongness of the use of fetal cells, it does not touch the emotional force of why they want to force the vaccine on us. So they can't hear our argument because their position is, in their minds, a higher stakes one: human survival. It seems to me that they are wondering: How on earth can you be quibbling about these few fetal cells (that are saving lives) while all of humanity stands in imminent peril? To them it sounds like we are refusing to run into a burning building to save those trapped inside because the fire-fighting equipment was made in a sweatshop. To them this is a monstrous moral error and a total loss of all perspective. They're wanting to scream at us: But the building is on fire and they're all being burned alive!
That's why I think an answer has to meet them where their energy is rooted. Which is why I am suggesting that vaccines in and of themselves need to be questioned, not in terms of their safety or effectiveness, but in what they may say about God's design of the human being. This is thus not an anti-vaxxer position rooted merely in the negative side-effects they may or may not cause. For just as it is unethical to use cells from an aborted baby, even though it may save lives, the mere fact of medical efficacy is not a self-justifying argument. I may be going out on a limb here, but it seems to me that vaccines violate the fundamental order of nature in that they by-pass the normal infection-response process of the immune system. In short, it is unnatural biohacking.
This frankly Biblical position sounds to me like it could take the discussion out of the apparent quibbling over those “very few fetal cells from decades past” to address what it means to be human, and what it means to be forced to violate God’s design of human nature. Rather than a case that seems to indirectly evade the vaccine question on a technicality, we could thus say quite directly that we have a fundamental personal reason to religiously object to being forced to take any vaccine. In other words, taking vaccines may always violate God's design for the human immune system, and so God’s design becomes a legitimate personal reason to decline, refuse, and remain permanently exempt from forced vaccination. The decision to vaccinate in this way can never step outside of the sphere of personal freedom. From this vantage, and instead of getting caught in the weeds of whether or not there are fetal cells, we can turn around and counterclaim that our opponents are fundamentally misunderstanding what it means to be human.
That is probably more extreme than most would be willing to consider, for it seems vaccines have saved many lives. I don't dispute that. But, I'm not sure that saving lives is the only relevant criteria when we consider these things, which is what the whole argument against using fetal cells hinges on in the first place: the idea that simply because it saves lives doesn't mean we can use aborted fetal tissue. And so, to conclude we submit to God’s greater wisdom:
“For You formed my inward parts; You covered me in my mother's womb. I will praise You, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made; Marvelous are Your works, And that my soul knows very well. My frame was not hidden from You, When I was made in secret, And skillfully wrought in the lowest parts of the earth. Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book they all were written, The days fashioned for me, When as yet there were none of them.” (Psalm 139:13-16 NKJV)
-The Reformed Ninja
A Brief Summary:
1. Vaccines are not treatments for the sick.
2. The Biblical pattern is to treat the sick.
3 Therefore, vaccines cannot be made on Biblical grounds into a necessary medical intervention.
4. Vaccines artificially modify the body’s immune system, thereby formally expressing doubt in God’s design of the immune system.
5. This is distinct from antibiotics and symptom-treating medicines, for they are not in principle violating the order of nature (which is to treat the ill) or permanently altering the immune-system, but are directed rather at treating present conditions.
6. Therefore, it is justified to specifically reject vaccines on religious grounds for violating the order of nature, for violating God's ordered design for the immune system to respond to present disease.
