Supplementing the Title “Great Physician” in Christian Prayers for Healing
Drew Craddock, Baylor University
Christians often invoke the title Great Physician when praying about a serious illness, petitioning Christ to heal the body in a miraculous way that surpasses the limited medical skill of mortal healthcare practitioners. Catholic theologian Janet Soskice claims that this practice emerged in times of widespread plague due to church leaders’ interpretations of the Lukan parable of the Good Samaritan.[1] Appeals to Christ as Great Physician are found throughout the Christian tradition, especially in connection to the rite of anointing of the sick as well as the ongoing treatment of the body and soul. This paper will contend that the present language of Great Physician ought to be supplemented because it has resulted in Christians making medically inappropriate decisions due to a stunted imagination of Christ’s healing role.
Christians in the United States tend to view immediate bodily restoration as the preeminent sign of divine healing, a deviation from both scripture and church tradition. In support of this claim, I will draw upon empirical research suggesting that misconceptions of Christ’s role have led to Christians disproportionately opting for extreme life-prolonging measures when faced with imminent death. [2] This is due to the belief that such interventions provide God with the requisite time to heal them.,[3] In this, many Christians have come to limit the role of the Great Physician to mere bodily restoration. Because naming the various ways God relates to humanity has been vital to the life of the Christian church since its inception, including language of the Great Physician, the current concerning connotations of the title and its impact on clinical decision-making suggest the appropriateness of modifying our language.
Second, the paper will make a theological move, arguing that modern appeals to the Great Physician are in danger of missing the scriptural and traditional understanding that God’s loving prescription may include suffering and purgation as cures for the soul. I will engage C.S. Lewis, who points to the multifaceted nature of the holistic healing of Christ, noting that the removal of habitual vice and the infusion of virtue is a lengthy process that often includes the pain of giving up the deleterious patterns of life we cling to.[4] With this view in mind, I will propose that language for Christ’s healing work should invoke the field of pharmacology, where a medication’s interaction with the patient is usually multifarious.
In the third part of the paper, I will retrieve the rationale for a pharmacological Christ from an unlikely ally, the areligious philosopher Jacques Derrida. In writing on Plato’s Timaeus, Derrida notes that the Greek term pharmakon designates a remedy that is both poison and cure.[5] Derrida’s analysis conforms to the scriptural witness and the writings of the church, suggesting that, in the process of a person being conformed to Christ, suffering can lead to the inculcation of virtue and that the delight of true healing may entail the agony of stripping vice away. Consequently, I will conclude that the ways Christians have experienced both affliction and bliss in the lifelong process of coming to health can be understood through a new, supplementary epithet for Christ: The Great Pharmacologist.
[1] See Janet Soskice, Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 203-204.
[2] Andrea C. Phelps et al., “Religious Coping and Use of Intensive Life-Prolonging Care Near Death in Patients with Advanced Cancer,” JAMA 301, no. 11 (March 18, 2009): 1140–47, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2009.341.
[3] Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande notably castigates such procedures as the medical equivalent of offering lottery tickets, in this case at outrageous prices with damaging side effects in Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 171.
[4] The work I draw on is C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: HarperCollins, 2015).
[5] Jacques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy (São Paulo: Iluminuras, 2005).
Christians in the United States tend to view immediate bodily restoration as the preeminent sign of divine healing, a deviation from both scripture and church tradition. In support of this claim, I will draw upon empirical research suggesting that misconceptions of Christ’s role have led to Christians disproportionately opting for extreme life-prolonging measures when faced with imminent death. [2] This is due to the belief that such interventions provide God with the requisite time to heal them.,[3] In this, many Christians have come to limit the role of the Great Physician to mere bodily restoration. Because naming the various ways God relates to humanity has been vital to the life of the Christian church since its inception, including language of the Great Physician, the current concerning connotations of the title and its impact on clinical decision-making suggest the appropriateness of modifying our language.
Second, the paper will make a theological move, arguing that modern appeals to the Great Physician are in danger of missing the scriptural and traditional understanding that God’s loving prescription may include suffering and purgation as cures for the soul. I will engage C.S. Lewis, who points to the multifaceted nature of the holistic healing of Christ, noting that the removal of habitual vice and the infusion of virtue is a lengthy process that often includes the pain of giving up the deleterious patterns of life we cling to.[4] With this view in mind, I will propose that language for Christ’s healing work should invoke the field of pharmacology, where a medication’s interaction with the patient is usually multifarious.
In the third part of the paper, I will retrieve the rationale for a pharmacological Christ from an unlikely ally, the areligious philosopher Jacques Derrida. In writing on Plato’s Timaeus, Derrida notes that the Greek term pharmakon designates a remedy that is both poison and cure.[5] Derrida’s analysis conforms to the scriptural witness and the writings of the church, suggesting that, in the process of a person being conformed to Christ, suffering can lead to the inculcation of virtue and that the delight of true healing may entail the agony of stripping vice away. Consequently, I will conclude that the ways Christians have experienced both affliction and bliss in the lifelong process of coming to health can be understood through a new, supplementary epithet for Christ: The Great Pharmacologist.
[1] See Janet Soskice, Naming God: Addressing the Divine in Philosophy, Theology and Scripture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023), 203-204.
[2] Andrea C. Phelps et al., “Religious Coping and Use of Intensive Life-Prolonging Care Near Death in Patients with Advanced Cancer,” JAMA 301, no. 11 (March 18, 2009): 1140–47, https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2009.341.
[3] Harvard surgeon Atul Gawande notably castigates such procedures as the medical equivalent of offering lottery tickets, in this case at outrageous prices with damaging side effects in Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2014), 171.
[4] The work I draw on is C. S. Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (London: HarperCollins, 2015).
[5] Jacques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy (São Paulo: Iluminuras, 2005).