Christians and Healthcare

One of the more disturbing blog posts I’ve read lately would have to be J. P. Moreland’s Star Parker and Michael Moore on Jesus’ View of Healthcare. Growing up in southern California my first theological heroes were the philosophy professors at Talbot and their intellectual rigor in defending and expounding the faith. I remember reading Moreland’s Love Your God with All Your Mind and how it changed my life. It was during my undergraduate days that I became a predestinarian and began switching my theological (and apologetical) alliance, becoming more of a Van Tilian. My official disenchantment with Moreland was when he spoke at a theological lectureship at Moody and his lecture was titled “Why I am Not a Calvinist.” After filling up 45 minutes with recycled arguments as to how Calvinists worship a mean, cold, and vindictive God with plenty of fallacious appeals to emotion my appreciation of Moreland’s theological and biblical contributions diminished. Then came out this post - “ A careful study of Jesus and New Testament teaching proves beyond reasonable doubt that he took the state to be the guardian of negative rights, not the provider of positive ones.” What? What study of Jesus and the New Testament teaching have you been doing Dr. Moreland? Such an utter disregard for Two Kingdoms and the intent of the Gospels makes his case exegetically vacuous and theologically untenable. From my reading of the Gospels and the rest of the New Testament, the Lord’s defense of political policies appear to be kept to a minimum. Perhaps Jesus is Dr. Moreland’s most esteemed political philosopher…he is not mine. If he were mine, I would be significantly reducing the importance and matchless significance of the Gospel of Jesus Christ. With Darryl Hart I confess “…the basic teachings of Christianity are virtually useless for resolving America’s political disputes, thus significantly reducing, if not eliminating, the dilemma of how to relate Christianity and American politics” (A Secular Faith, 11). I do strongly believe in universal healthcare because in a free liberal society where we are all trying to uphold the principles of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness healthcare seems to be a pretty essential ingredient. My belief in universal healthcare stems from my belief that the government’s primary responsibility is for the protection and betterment of the commonweal and only secondarily for the private individual. If you are rich I believe the government’s job is to take a good chunk of your money and tax it. This belief is not necessarily deduced from my reading of Scripture because I strongly do not believe the Bible ever speaks to how one should vote in a democratic republic. I believe in a consistent ethic of life, which for the most part evangelicals have completely disregarded. If a young teenage mother goes through with her pregnancy and delivers her child, a large constituency of evangelicals return the favor by promoting a culture of plutocracy and denial of basic human rights such as medical attention. I am not a naïve and liberal maniac. I certainly am not holding out for some utopian socialist ideal where we can all live in peace and harmony and work five hour shifts and hold hands as we usher in the millennium. What I am promoting is a decent humane healthcare system for arguably the richest nation in the world. Is that too much to ask? I don’t think so. Just ask Canada, France, Sweden, Austria, Belgium, Germany, The UK, Australia, Japan, New Zealand, just to name a few. At the end of the day I don’t really care that Michel Moore thinks Jesus would support universal healthcare and neither should anyone else. He is a publicity whore who will say anything to make headlines including apparently using the name of Jesus to sell his product. What is truly beyond a reasonable doubt is that Jesus would support the universal propagation of his Gospel. This can happen in a free republic like the United States or in communist China.