The Church-medieval bubonic plague-Renaissance & the Age of Reason-science-cancer-Pentecostalism-Holy Spirit

This is a long post but worth the read!

I’m currently reading a book by Tony Campolo entitled, “Following Jesus Without Embarrassing God.” In chapter 12, “How to Think About God without Being Brainwashed by Modern Philosophies” Campolo writes, “The scholars responsible for social commentary tell us in the postmodern era science will no longer be king. More & more, our modern society will come to believe that there are different kinds of truth, and that perhaps the most important of them don’t really lend themselves to the judgments of reason & empirical investigation.”

Campolo then explains what he calls “the demise of modernity.”
“The social philosopher Jeremy Rifkin offers us a scenario for the demise of modernity that I find very interesting. Rifkin argues that we are giving up on science because it has failed to provide us with a cure for cancer, just as the medieval people lost confidence in the church when it failed to deliver them from the bubonic plagues.

In medieval time, the Church held sway over society; all ideas & discoveries had to pass religious tests before they were accepted by the general public. What the Church declared unacceptable was squeezed out of the halls of academia. But the Church lost its absolute hold over the people of Europe, largely in response to the bubonic plagues. When the plagues hit Europe, people turned to the Church for help. The Church readily made promises that, if people would just rely on their faith, do homage to their religious institutions, and make offerings to God, they would be spared. The people heeded the advice of their clerics. They made novenas. They went on pilgrimages. They sacrificed their worldly goods in accord with the directives of their spiritual leaders. But the plagues hit them anyway.

When the horrors of the plagues eventually passed away, the Church’s authority was left greatly diminished. The church seemed to have survived the onslaught but, in reality, came out of the ordeal deeply wounded. It still elicited reverence, but people began to look elsewhere for answers to questions & solutions to their problems. That opened the door for reason & science, and the Renaissance and the Age of Reason were at hand.

Science today has become too haughty. Humble science has become Scientism. It has taken on religious character and, in its own way, has become a religion. The devotees of science too often have made it the basis for determining, in absolute terms, what is true & what is false. That which does not yield to its methods of investigation is discarded as meaningless superstition or having only aesthetic value.

This reign of reason & science as the ultimate arbiter of truth has been seriously challenged of late by another plague: cancer. One out of three of us will be touched by it, and there seems to be a high likelihood that things will only get worse in the short run, if indeed they ever do get better. In the face of the threat of cancer, we called on science to help us. We were told by our research scientists that, if we just threw enough money their way, they would find a cure for the scourge. They lead us to believe that, if we believed in them & did our obeisance (expressing deep respect or deferential courtesy), than they would find the cause of cancer & deliver us from this dreaded disease.

Not only did we hear them out, but for more than half a century we gave them the best we had. Yet, while there have been many advances & a lot of new treatments found, the gurus of the scientific world have yet to utter the words we long to hear: “We’ve found a cure for cancer!”

And when faced with the limitations of science, people increasingly turn elsewhere for help. There are many who are convinced that one of the main reasons for the incredible growth of Pentecostalism in America is that, now that the “experts” have declared that they have no cure for cancer, people are searching for some good news from faith healers.

As science has failed, panic-stricken people have turned, not only to the kinds of cures that they believe will come from faith in the work of the Holy Spirit, but also to the New Age cures. Everything from tapping into the magical powers of crystals to the techniques of transcendental meditation are being tried. In desperation, they are looking outside the realms of reason & science.

Whatever the cause may be, science has lost its hammerlock on the public consciousness. There is a growing awareness that there may be another kind of truth that lies outside the canons of logical empiricism that has long dominated our thinking. Talk about miracles is no longer laughed out of the courts of sophisticated discussion. The evidences of public acceptance of the miraculous are all around us. A television series on angels is a blockbuster on the Nielsen rating scale. Pollsters make it clear that religious skepticism is increasingly beating a hasty retreat. Those who run for public office know that it helps their public images if they declare themselves to be people of faith. Teen challenge-a Pentecostal-based ministry to drug addicts-has a cure rate that is more than triple that of any other treatment system presently in place, and it’s workers readily talk about casting out demons as part of the therapy they offer. It is easy to find people with PhD. degrees who unashamedly talk about living in the context of spiritual warfare, wherein they claim to be struggling against “the principalities and powers” of Satan. More of us than not believe in miracles that defy any kind of scientific explanation. To those scientific rationalists who claim that such things don’t fit into their world-view, or Weltanschauung (as they call it), there is an increasingly common response that God is greater than their Weltanschauung. Many of us hold fast to the biblical claim that God is able to do abundantly more than any of us, with all of our scientific categories, could ever hope or think.”

We need the Power of the Holy Spirit working through us!