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October 11, 2007
Wise Blood
"Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," according to Hazel Motes, the preacher escaping from his fundamentalist upbringing in Wise Blood. He starts the Church Without Christ, trying to escape from the Christ who haunts him and the whole South. In his sermon to the crowd leaving the Theater, as he stands on the hood of his car, he proclaims that there was no Fall, no Redemption, nor any need for any of that.
The medical profession, and its willing victims, has adapted Hazel’s sentiments. No one with a scalpel, or access to medicines, or stents and CABG and joint replacements, or vitamins and minerals, or a certain exercise routine, needs justification. Flannery wrote to Cecil Dawkins in 1958: “The Liberal approach is that man has never fallen, never incurred guilt, and is ultimately perfectible by his own unaided efforts. Therefore, evil in this light is a problem of better housing, sanitation, health, etc. and all mysteries will eventually be cleared up. Judgement is out of place because man is not responsible.”
It is an unreal world in which we live. We have convinced ourselves that only what we see and can prove is real. But worse, we ignore very obvious evidence that our efforts have little effect on the suffering we combat. One of the most glaring examples is CABG. From the beginning known to be life-saving for very few subgroups of coronary artery disease, repeatedly demonstrated to be over-utilized by any criteria, the procedure continues to be done on millions, ignoring what is a known reality and promoting the fantasy that has been created.
The reality which medicine ignores ultimately amounts to a denial of Jesus. If Jesus came in the flesh, and was who he said he was, the Anointed of God and God in the flesh, the very image of the Father, then we cannot ignore his impact on the world. If Jesus was raised from the dead, than nothing is the same. Everything in the world has to be seen through that fact. We cannot pretend for the sake of good science, good medicine, that there is no resurrection, that there is no spirit, that things just happen according to mechanical laws. The world is intrinsically personal, in that all things cohere in the person of Jesus.
O'Connor | By Robert Maddox | 04:14 PM