Abstract
In a time when old groupings are breaking up, when people are on the move or fleeing conflict and settling elsewhere, when many people are multilingual and are competent in several cultural settings, doing mission has become an ever greater challenge than simple cross-cultural communication. How does one engage in mission on the run? How does one conduct missiological research in ephemeral community that is here today and gone tomorrow? How does one train new missionaries for work in a field that will certainly morph into something else before they get there? Changing times call for new perspectives on mission. This article is based on the twentieth Louis J. Luzbetak, SVD, Lecture on Mission and Culture, given at Catholic Theological Union, Chicago. October 7, 2019 (available online at https://learn.ctu.edu/2019-luzbetak-lecture/).
How shall we prepare missionaries to work in the interstices of language and culture in this postcolonial globalizing century? 1 How shall we train missionaries, not just to navigate through nebulous networks, but to minister with quirky groups that pop in and out of existence as if they were elusive quarks hiding in quantum fields. How shall we train missionaries to enlarge their vision, to shift their gaze to the historical and geographic contexts of the sick and the poor who need health and opportunity?
Applied anthropology as a model for disciplinary reflection
Noted anthropologist Louis J. Luzbetak, SVD, thought that missiology fit best within the subdiscipline called applied anthropology. In his terms, “Applied anthropology can be said to utilize anthropological knowledge and skill for practical human needs. It does this in much the way the science of medicine utilizes for the purpose of health and illness the knowledge and skill of physiologists, biologists, chemists, geneticists, and other scientists.” 2 His allusion is appropriate, since medical anthropology is the largest area of applied anthropology, with its own niche between applied and academic anthropology, not unlike missionary anthropology. So, following Fr. Luzbetak’s method, also his admonition that missiology must continually update itself, I want to briefly trace the history of medical anthropology as a model for understanding where we are in missiology.
Medical anthropology in the era of the 1950s and 1960s
Medical anthropology emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. 3 The assumption of the times was that the West has the expertise and technology to help undeveloped countries, but it needs anthropology to breach barriers of language and culture. In a word, we have the answer, but culture is the problem, in the sense that translation and teaching in language are required to get the message across.
The 1950s and 1960s were the era of Western optimism that came after World War II. The framework began even before the war ended, at the Bretton Woods Conference, held in 1944, where forty-four nations hammered out a vision of the way that Europe and Japan would be reconstructed once the war ended. This conference led to the establishment of the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the United Nations itself with its subdivisions, including the World Health Organization (WHO).
In the rapid decolonization of Asia and Africa in the context of the Cold War, the project called Development emerged. This was a context ripe for a particular type of applied anthropology: Anthropologists could be the experts who would guide development through the stumbling blocks and pitfalls of language and culture.
The United Nations set the goals with its statement on human rights and through agencies such as WHO. Willing medical anthropologists were enlisted to pave the way for such improvements as clean water, sanitation, and the eradication of communicable diseases, such as typhoid, measles, smallpox, and malaria. In fact, anthropologists were supported by the United Nations and by the US government to help accomplish these goals to increase chances of “program success” in improving public health. 4 The problem was how to implement “superior” medical knowledge and practices in other countries in the face of cultural and linguistic obstacles. The key assumptions: culture is the problem; Western medicine is the solution; anthropologists will overcome the obstacles of language and culture.
Medical Anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s
The next era, the 1970s and 1980s, saw the Cold War heat up, with small wars serving as proxies for the great powers. The International Monetary Fund and World Bank emerged as major players in global economics, particularly in terms of national loans, subsequent indebtedness, and then structural adjustment programs designed to trap countries in dependency. 5
While the West pushed on with optimism, this was also the time when the new nations discovered that they had jumped out of the frying pan and into the fire. The nations had apparently been liberated from colonialism and were now ready to follow the Western model of economic development, but they found that political independence was a charade because they were still economically dependent on their former colonizers.
By the 1980s it was becoming clear that, while there were a few successes, many development projects were failures. With clearly superior knowledge and practices available, it seems that the people still resisted adoption. In this new era (1970s and 1980s), anthropologists and others began to assume that the people are the problem.
Anthropologists concluded that the problem may be more complex, sophisticated, and deep-seated than imagined, so they began to look for other influences that might affect people’s decisions. For example, some anthropologists began seeing people as “victims of progress.” 6 From another angle, anthropologist Oscar Lewis invented the “culture of poverty” as a way of explaining why the War on Poverty programs were not working. 7 This was the era of the overdetermination of culture as a cause, the reification of culture as an agent controlling the people.
In this new era, what were the central questions in medical anthropology? In 1981 the Society for Medical Anthropology listed the following: “What are the dynamics of maintenance and change common to all curing systems? How are people recruited as practitioners and patients in curing systems, and how are the roles learned, carried out, and changed? What is the relationship between health beliefs and health behavior? How does the curing system relate to other systems in a culture? What is the relationship between the pattern of life and the pattern of disease?” 8 The statement itself remains a standard structural-functionalist approach, more nuanced than the earlier era, but there was still “the tacit assumption that medical systems are more or less homogenous, unchanging, and single.” 9
Why did the people fail to adopt Western medicine? Failure was thought to be due to the backwardness or the waywardness of the people. They were backward because their traditional culture had been eroded by colonialism, and now they were stuck in a self-perpetuating poverty. They were wayward if they had adopted any revolutionary or Marxist ideas that made them resistant to capitalistic development efforts. The concept of underdevelopment arose as a subtle way to accuse the people of failing to develop. The solution: the people are the problem, so anthropologists need to find ways to overcome their resistance.
Medical anthropology in the 1990s and 2000s
Finally by the 1990s, thanks in part to the postmodern turn that had occurred in academia, scholars shifted their gaze to consider whether the global political and economic system was the problem. That is, not the culture, not the people, but “we” are the problem. This conclusion led to the emergence of a “critical biocultural approach” in medical anthropology.
The critical biocultural approach first expanded the context. 10 The research gaze was lifted beyond the local context and culture to include governments, businesses, and other institutionalized forms of knowledge and technology in order to understand the problem of disease. In this era of global flows, as Tom Leatherman and Alan Goodman say, we must work “to understand how nations, communities, populations, and even viral pathways are inextricably inter-connected at regional, national, and global levels.” 11 Thus, Ebola, the Zika virus, SARS, HIV-AIDS—and COVID-19—are all global threats, and they cannot be understood in, or even confined to, their own local contexts.
Second, the critical biocultural approach directs anthropologists to interrogate inequality (Gramsci hegemonies). No research project should proceed without asking how “power relations . . . structure inequalities in society.” 12 That is, the current poor health of some human populations must include the historical and global context of economic exploitation and political domination. Unequal access to health care is not just an unfortunate accident; it is caused by forces at work in the global context. “Critical” implies “an explicit recognition that health disparities emerge from social inequalities, and that efforts to specify the source and nature of those inequalities is a critical task of medical anthropology.” 13
Third, the critical biocultural approach directs the researcher to always question knowledge (Foucault genealogies). The anthropologist must shift his or her gaze 180 degrees to see that Western medicine itself is a cultural and social system with links to larger economic and political structures. All of this must be questioned from a new perspective, beginning with an admission that Western medicine is only one of many that deal with health and sickness.
Fourth, the critical biocultural approach directs the medical anthropologist to tease out both structure and agency (Bourdieu practices and habitus). The anthropologist must keep a balance between individual choice among limited options (i.e., agency) and the system that limits those options (i.e., structure). The anthropologist must foreground the choices that people really have and how people exercise compliance, resistance, and reinvention.
Finally, in the critical biocultural approach to medical anthropology, the anthropologist seeks different perspectives because culture is not uniform. Culture is contingent, that is, dependent on the materials (concepts, philosophies) at hand. Culture is constructed from these materials, an ongoing project in life. And culture is contested because different people in the same society have different perspectives on what has happened and what should happen next. Not all experiences are the same.
In this reading, medical anthropology began in an era where the assumption was that culture is the problem. Limited success with development programs shifted the gaze of anthropologists to where they assumed that the people are the problem. Then ontological and epistemological turns forced anthropologists to switch the capture mode and take a selfie in order to mull over the possibility that we are the problem.
Paul Farmer: The “critical biocultural approach”
I share the story here of a medical anthropologist who has based his work on the third premise— we are the problem—as an example of where that understanding might take us. Paul Farmer has a PhD in anthropology from Harvard University, as well as an MD from Harvard Medical School. He currently is a professor both of medicine and of medical anthropology at Harvard Medical School. His geographic area is Haiti, and his specialty is infectious diseases. Farmer began to spend time in Haiti on a fellowship and was appalled at the level of poverty that he saw. He initially worked in a hospital where even the Haitian medical personnel tended to say that “the people are the problem.” 14 They thought that the people were incapable of compliance with medical regimens and instructions about cleanliness because they tended to attribute the rampant tuberculosis epidemic to voodoo. Farmer undertook his own study to discover whether what the patient thought was even relevant to treatment. That is, to see whether the culture or resistant people were the problem, or something else.
From the patients themselves, Farmer learned that “to give medicines without food was tantamount to lave men, siye até (washing one’s hands and then wiping them dry in the dirt).” 15 So he constructed an experiment. He formed two groups: to one he gave medicines and instructions, to the other he gave medicines, instructions, nutritional supplements, regular visits by a medical worker, and an honorarium for travel expenses. “By June 1991, forty-six of the patients receiving the ‘enhanced package’ were free of all symptoms . . . ; [but in the second group] the cure rate was barely half that of the first group, based on clinical, laboratory, and radiographic evaluation.” 16
Farmer was unwilling to consider disease in the singular or in the local. For example, it was evident that the cholera outbreak that came after an earthquake in Haiti was just waiting to happen because of the vulnerability of the infrastructure in this land of poverty, and because cholera did not operate alone.
In medical anthropology, Farmer is one of the founders of the notion of syndemics. 17 That is, epidemics are not singular but feed off of one another (synergy + epidemics). Thus, the problem in Haiti was not the cholera epidemic; it was the synergism between cholera and tuberculosis in a context of extreme poverty. 18 Treating one without the other was not going to accomplish the healing of the people, which is the aim of medicine. 19 Nor would treating the mind without the body accomplish making the people whole, which is mission’s aim.
Expanding the context, Farmer refused as well to separate the situation in Haiti from the history of geopolitics in the Western Hemisphere, nor from the present economic and political trap in which the rich have caught the poor. 20 This is another strand in the twisted rope of syndemics. Farmer says: “In examining tuberculosis in Haiti, for example, our analysis must be historically deep—not merely deep enough to recall an event such as that which deprived most of my patients of their land, but deep enough to remember that modern-day Haitians are descendants of a people enslaved in order to provide our ancestors with cheap sugar, coffee, and cotton. Our analysis must be geographically broad. In this increasingly interconnected world . . . we must understand that what happens to poor people is never divorced from the actions of the powerful.” 21
Farmer has introduced another term into the medical anthropology literature: “structural violence.” Some of us know it under the term “systemic evil,” but of course the evil is in the system because some rich and powerful people inserted the evil into the system to benefit themselves at the expense of the poor. Farmer saw “a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideology, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were.” 22
Sounding like a missionary, Farmer claims that “when children living in poverty die of measles, gastroenteritis, and malnutrition, and yet no party is judged guilty of a human rights violation, liberation theology finds fault with the entire notion of human rights as defined within liberal democracies. . . . We look at the lives of the poor and are sure, just as they are, that something is terribly wrong. They are targets of structural violence.” 23
As Farmer worked in Haiti, he also had a religious awakening. He noted that “the fact that any sort of religious faith was so disdained at Harvard and so important to the poor—not just in Haiti but elsewhere, too—made me even more convinced that faith must be something good.” 24 Drawing on his Catholic upbringing, Farmer began to network in medical anthropology and in the church. In 1987 he formed Partners in Health, a nonprofit organization dedicated to fighting infectious diseases by working local and thinking global. His work in Haiti led people to where “they were no longer merely asking if infant diarrhea was caused by germs but asking whether the germs were caused by dirty water. And didn’t dirty water come from the neglect of feckless, greedy governments?” 25 And wasn’t that greedy government (the Baby Doc regime, followed by a military junta) controlled by the US State Department? Farmer saw that the cause of social suffering is not nature, not “individual” choice, but rather social structures, economics, and politics, supported by a religious ideology that justifies the inequality. 26
Farmer’s perspective and style of research and practice have brought him into alignment with Gustavo Gutiérrez, so much so that Orbis Books published a volume of articles by the two in conversation with each other. 27 In the end, Farmer recognizes that he benefits from “white privilege.” Most people end the discussion with: “White privilege? Bad thing. Better get rid of it.” Instead, Farmer deploys his white privilege to benefit the poor: “I can travel freely throughout the world, I can start projects,” 28 and, he implies, I can put my “white privilege” to use in the service of the poor. 29
Stages in the growth of missiology
Missiology in the 1950s and 1960s
Without much elaboration, I think that we missiologists can see ourselves in the mirror of medical anthropology. Did we go through a similar stage in the 1950s and 1960s? Yes, missiology also went through an era when we thought culture was the problem. It was a necessary stage, since prior to Eugene Nida, Louis Luzbetak, Alan Tippett, and others, little attention had been paid by missionaries to what anthropology could teach us about how to understand culture and language in order to communicate the gospel. 30 This was the heyday of post–World War II missions, when new “mission fields” were opened up. Advances in descriptive linguistics helped grow the SIL/Wycliffe Bible translation project. In that context, missiologists, particularly Christian anthropologists and linguists, accomplished that mission. That stage is now past. As I said at the beginning, everyone should know that we still need to take time to learn language and culture.
Missiology in the 1970s and 1980s
In the 1970s and 1980s, as in medical anthropology, missiology concluded that the people are the problem. Popular missiology added the concept “resistant” to our vocabulary. Not only was it necessary to learn language and culture, it seemed that, despite our best efforts, people were stubborn, resistant, even militant in opposition to the gospel. All of these words contribute to scapegoating the people as the problem.
The 1970s and 1980s saw the rise of metrics in missiology, with the identification of certain people or regions or religions as “resistant” for one reason or another. 31 Luis Bush named the home of most Muslims and Hindus in the world as the “resistant belt” during the 1989 Lausanne II Conference, in Manilla. 32 There followed the declaration of “the 10/40 Window,” which was adopted by the Joshua Project with maps that include titles such as “The Poor and the Lost.” 33 Perhaps they have never read the Gospel according to Luke? Jesus came to help the poor, but it is the rich who are lost.
There are many theories about why some people or cultures seem to be more resistant to the gospel than others, but it always comes down to the conclusion that the people are the problem and that the missionary has to find a way to get to the individuals and separate them from their culture. Usually the mental gymnastics involve equating the other person’s culture with “the world,” 34 avoiding, of course, identifying the missionary’s own culture with “the world.”
Missiology in the 1990s and 2000s
Have we gone through the critical phase that I have identified for medical anthropology? No, we are in it, but not through it. For example, in this third era, Don Richardson has claimed that Islam is resistant because Islam has no “redemptive analogies.” 35 We are aware of the importance of critique and reflexivity, but we have not yet completed our passage through this stage. It is time for missiologists to ask: If certain people or cultures seem resistant to the gospel, why is that? Is it something internal or inherent in the culture or in the people, or is it due to something in the bad experience that people have had with missionaries and others from so-called Christian nations?
Have we adopted a critical posture? Or, instead, are we still defensive about our colonial ties? 36 Have we thoroughly examined our assumptions about power, perspective, reality, voice, and representation? Have we considered what it means to be Christian in a particular culture? 37 Or are we perhaps in danger of hearing the Master say, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbor’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye? Or how can you say to your neighbor, ‘Friend, let me take out the speck in your eye,’ when you yourself do not see the log in your own eye?” (Luke 6:41–42).
How shall we prepare missionaries?
The teaching of anthropology in seminaries and mission training programs is widespread but thin in many places. Students do not arrive with social science research training, nor do they arrive with the critical skills necessary in today’s academic world. 38 Traditionally, the posture of the teacher of mission has been to emphasize content. That is, to prepare people for mission in villages or cities, prepare them to do mission using the now-decrepit categories of band, tribe, kingdom, and state, and to generalize about animism. All of these teachings are content-laden.
This style of teaching is based on several assumptions. First, that the world does not change very fast and so teaching content from the past will serve well in the future. Second, the teacher has had enough experience in the research and practice of mission to prepare the student for every eventuality. Third, the student will enter into a mission niche and stay there the rest of his or her life. All three of these assumptions are woefully inadequate and misleading for today’s world.
In fact, the world is changing so fast that even yesterday’s lessons might not apply today. There is a lot of buzz right now about globalization, migration, diaspora, transnationalism, and hybridity. This is good because the world that presents itself to today’s missionaries is not the world of the Bible, nor the world of the immediate post–World War II era. Discerning the times is important, and I have argued elsewhere that missiologists do not yet have these times figured out. 39 Anthropologists are still doing research in these areas, and new work is still coming out. 40 If anthropologists are still trying to figure out what migration, diaspora, and transnational dynamics are about, is it enough for us to just declare that diaspora is a great way to do mission? Sloganeering is not the same as doing research.
If we are not caught up with the times, we had better hurry up, because the world is changing again, and if we are barely prepared for an era of critical missiology, we certainly will not be prepared for the world of 2020 and beyond.
Globalization is slowing down; the globe is taking a step back from what seemed like limitless expansion. Instead of infinite inflation, we have entered a period of contraction. While we have been constructing mission models to deal with the effortless transportation of people, things, and ideas, we have missed this new dynamic.
There is, and has been for the last four or five years, a resurgence of nationalism, racism, populism, and jingoism, in the United States and in the world at large. Today neither people nor goods nor ideas are able to travel as easily or unencumbered by restrictions as they were five years ago. While some missiologists are still trying to figure out how to be in mission in a globalizing world, the world has down-shifted into an era of “slowbalization.” 41
Slowbalization is the slowing down and even the reversal of globalization. Witness the reassertion of the importance of national borders, coupled with a reemerging sense of national identity to the point of chauvinism. Notice the increased restrictions on migration, 42 the use of tariffs to slow down trade, and the increasing restrictions on the use of the internet both in China 43 and in Europe. 44 Finally, take note of the destabilization of multinational organizations such as NAFTA, the Paris Accords, and even NATO and the European Union, the latter now dealing with the first of what may be many “brexits.”
Who is doing this? The United States and England under their present regimes; but the list goes on: Denmark, Sweden, Finland, Romania, the Czech Republic, Austria, Switzerland, Italy, and Russia. 45 China under President Xi is cracking down on minorities, on the one hand, and, on the other, establishing a strictly Chinese set of trade routes called “The Belt and Road Initiative” that will create new partnerships while excluding others from trade.
There is the mission field: The countries that are moving toward nativism, populism, and the inevitable jingoism. In this third stage of reflexive missiology, we should be as concerned about our own sending agencies, our sending churches, and our sending countries as we are about the receiving ones.
How is slowbalization affecting our missionaries in countries requiring “creative access”? Are things better in China for Christians, or worse? Will the diaspora that we count on be as ready a mission force as we were promised? 46 How has the rise of populism and nativism affected the American church and its mission-sending efforts? The world is always changing.
The problem is that teaching content always puts the teacher behind the curve. I have eight years of experience in the Pacific Islands, but not since 2014 have I been in Papua New Guinea. Can I prepare missionaries with all the content that they would need to go to the Pacific Islands? No, I cannot. There must be another way.
Another problem is that the missionaries we send out with one job description will almost certainly change jobs even in the first five years. Recent research shows that, in general, “graduates used to have 1.5 jobs in the first five years after graduation, they now almost double that number.” 47 Prospective missionaries trained in content must constantly be retrained or fall out of service. There must be another way.
Teaching research methods
There is another way. If I cannot prepare my students for every eventuality in the culture where they are going to be in mission, then I can reduce the content and train people in critical analytic skills, both in ethnography and in historical analysis. That is, teach them how to do research so that they can figure it out for themselves.
For example, one form of doing ethnography is called ethnoscience. In a now-famous research project, my former colleague James P. Spradley began to study people in Seattle who had been repeatedly jailed for public drunkenness. 48 The officials who deal with them—the police, judges, and pastors—all have names for them: drunks, alcoholics, public nuisances. But Spradley quickly dismissed the outsider’s viewpoint and began to talk with these people in person. He found that they had a subculture of their own, that they had their world figured out, categorized, and somewhat predictable, just like any culture does.
Among other things, Spradley was able to elicit taxonomies of types of bulls, types of flops, and ways to boost a jug. Good research requires the ethnographic practice of giving multiple interviews with the same people and hanging around to overhear conversations. This is where many of our students make a mistake. They sit at their desk and make up a questionnaire or interview schedule, then they go out and ask one set of questions in language that is foreign to the respondent. Then they try to analyze these data. There is no depth in such an approach. Spradley asks the first set of questions to get people talking. Then he takes the responses, intentionally assumes that he does not already understand them, and then extracts certain words and phrases as a basis for constructing the next set of questions.
Further ethnographic techniques, particularly card sorting, 49 lead to an insider’s understanding of the domain “tramp.” Spradley discovered the meaning of “bindlestiff,” “airedale,” and “ding,” which are different kinds of tramps. 50 In another domain, it turns out that “making a flop” involves finding a place to get a meal and perhaps spend the night, but there are different kinds of flops, and for some of them you have to take an “earbanging,” while others require a “nose dive.” 51
The point is that we still need good ethnography that reveals an insider’s view of his or her culture, just as we still need good history that reveals the insider’s view of events in the past. 52 And not just one insider, but the varied views of multiple actors. Such an approach empties us of preconceptions, insofar as that is possible, and forces us to listen. We give up the hubris of thinking that we know and replace it with the humility of serious listening.
Teaching data analysis
What other kinds of critical analytic skills? I have enumerated them above. First, expand the context. Once you have a handle on the local culture and language, look around and ask who else has a stake in these people and these events. Spradley was aware that neither politicians nor judges nor the police looked at things the same way that tramps did. To understand tramps, it was necessary to place them in a larger context.
Second, interrogate inequality. That larger context includes people with privilege and power over the tramps. What kinds of inequality are tolerated by larger society? To have a viewpoint is one thing; to be able to force that viewpoint on others because of differential access to power is another.
Third, always question knowledge. Who is pretending to have knowledge? Does someone sitting in the Oval Office in Washington really know something about the homeless sleeping in doorways in Seattle, or in Los Angeles? 53 For what purpose does one pretend to have knowledge?
Fourth, consider both structure and agency. Everyone faces limitations that are part of the structure of society, reinforced by ideology or religion and guarded by a legal system, including a criminal justice system. In a sense, life is a constant negotiation between the controls of structure and the desires of individual agents. People are never simply at the mercy of agency (i.e., “victims”) or in complete command of their choices (i.e., people who just make “bad choices”). People negotiate within the limited choices they have. For example, Spradley notes that there are many ways to beat a drunk charge, and the tramps know them and with which judges and under what circumstances those ways might work. 54
Fifth, discover different perspectives—among mission teams and among the people. Long gone are the days when we could confidently say, “The Koreans do this” or “The Kikuyu do that” or even “The SVDs do this,” as if monolithic cultures existed with determinative power.
Teaching method means that a missionary sister will be able to constantly build up the changing contexts within which she is in mission. She is equipped to do the work of ethnography and history and theology herself. She changes as the culture and cultural context changes, and she changes with the people negotiating their way through constantly new worlds.
Conclusion
There are challenges in the contextualization of the gospel with people who are on the move (migration) or settled far from home (diaspora), people who are able to exhibit multiple identities (hybridity) supported by appropriate languages (multilingualism), all within a single church or denomination (multiculturalism). However, the young and agile missionary trained in research will be able to meet these challenges. The additional challenge lies in the larger picture. Why are people in poverty, why are people enduring migration, and why do people end up living in diaspora? Mission myopia might say, “These poor people got themselves in trouble, so we must preach because they are the poor and the lost.” It’s not that simple, and slogans will not help.
Paul Farmer, for example, claims that “an understanding of poverty must be linked to efforts to end it.” Gustavo Gutiérrez agrees: “To speak of the poor, thus, without opposing the poverty that kills them, is a major obstacle to announcing the gospel.” St. James and St. John both agree. (See James 2:14–17 and 1 John 4:20–21.)
I conclude by reworking an old story from Luke 10. A Samaritan travels down the road from Jerusalem and encounters a man beaten and robbed. You know the story, and you know what the good missionary brother should do. But what if the next day the Samaritan finds another man beaten and robbed on the same road; and the next day, and the next day? Should the good missionary just keep picking up damaged individuals and bringing them to the inn for treatment? Or should he become curious enough to uncover the reasons that beaten people keep showing up on the Jericho road? Perhaps he should keep treating the symptoms with no questions asked? Perhaps he should go back to seminary to find the answer? I don’t think so!
If he helps heal one body, that is an act of mercy. However, if every day the Samaritan comes across another man stripped and beaten and left for dead, then takes action to discover the cause of this recurring disaster, and then works with authorities to find the persons responsible and enables their prosecution—that is an act of justice. Which one, do you think, was a neighbor to the men who fell into the hands of robbers?
Footnotes
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Notes
Author biography