What does Scripture say about vaccines?

You may listen to this audio of me reading the text or read the text below yourself, whichever method of receiving information works best for you!

The short answer to the question in the title is: nothing at all. Of course, I’m a pastor, so I rarely believe the short answer is enough.

The truth is I am not addressing this topic because I know for certain what you ought to believe about vaccines or Big Pharma, but because some Christians have taken to speaking about vaccines as if there is a Christian or scriptural view. The idea that there is a united Christian position on this as there is on salvation, or the nature of God, or even behavioral matters like sexual purity or loving your neighbor is just false, and so it’s the arguments to the contrary I’d like to address here.

In keeping with my understanding of discipleship, I, once again, will not be telling you what you should think–in this case, whether to be pro-vaccine or anti-vaccine–but instead giving you permission to seek faith and obedience, and question the biblical nature (or lack thereof) of some of the arguments made.

I have encountered three main arguments regarding vaccinations which I’d like to put in perspective here.* Before I address those, however, I’d like to briefly give full disclosure of my own complicated experience with vaccines in the church to help you gauge my own biases and how they might impact my words below.

My father was a doctor, specifically a nephrologist who believed very strongly in immunization and vaccinations, and as his child, I’ve received all of the recommended vaccines. (However, this same father also understood the limitations and sometimes the dangers of medications and understood they were rarely uncomplicated. One of the things I heard him wryly say to a patient more than once was “I can give you medicine for this cold, and you will get better in 14 days, or I can do nothing, and it will take you a whole two weeks.”)

My father was also a missionary, and this means during my childhood, as we traveled the world, I probably got even more immunizations than your average American child. As far as I am aware, I’ve experienced no negative repercussions as a result of these immunizations.

My travels both as a child and later as an adult across the world have allowed me to see the difference between immunized countries and unimmunized countries. I’ve seen things like malaria and scarlet fever and the destruction they can cause in countries where they still flourish, unlike America.

On the other hand, during my formative discipleship years up to and including my mentorship for the first decade as a pastor, I was part of an association and culture where vaccines were regarded with views ranging from skepticism to hostility. Some of the most important mentors in my ministry life were self-proclaimed anti-vaxxers. It’s true that this culture also allowed me freedom to disagree on this point, but these were people I respected, and so I felt both internal and external pressure to rethink some of my vaccination assumptions.

I’ve had at least one close friend who has had permanent complications as a result of vaccinations.

For whatever it’s worth, being 55 also means I’ve had certain experiences that those younger than me never had. For example, I’ve been alive long enough to have received a smallpox vaccine and raised several children before chickenpox even had a vaccine.

So, all in all, after these experiences, I find myself being pro-vaccine with skepticism towards anti-vaccination arguments, but with respect and empathy for those who hold them.

But to reiterate, my intent in this post is not to encourage people to take on my pro-vaccine views, but to clarify what is scriptural and what is not in this area.

Here are the three main arguments I usually hear with my answers to them underneath.

1. I’d rather trust in my God-given immune system than some artificial man-made chemicals.

This argument is often framed, at least implicitly, to suggest that there is a lack of faith in using vaccines because we are not trusting what God has given us, our own immune systems, to fight disease best on their own. There is the idea that natural immunization is preferable to vaccine-induced immunization because the former comes from God and the latter from man. If you feel there is scientific evidence for such an argument, that’s beyond my purview, but if your goal is allegiance to Scripture in this position, then you’ll need to rethink this conclusion. The Bible is very clear, frankly in a way that many other religions are not, that the human body is broken. Sickness and disease are not merely a product of wrong thinking or a lack of faith, and those sects which teach this are far from Christian orthodoxy and often not Christian in theology at all. According to Genesis, the world is cursed as a result of sin; weakness, frailty, and ultimately death of the flesh are very real aspects of that curse.

In reality, trusting that the power of the natural body is always going to be better than man-made solutions has more in common with paganism than Christianity because it assumes a perfection in the natural state which the Bible does not teach. Christians should be among those least inclined to trust our own bodies (or brains, or emotions) because we understand the brokenness of it all. Certainly, there is beauty in our humanity, and the immune system is a wondrous thing, but the need for an immune system at all should remind us that the world is broken and we with it, and so there is no theological reason to believe that trusting in our immune system will be sufficient, and there’s no scriptural promise that it will even be the best available option by itself for pushing back against the curse. We accept this in other areas, such as the need for glasses, or prosthetics, or other medical technology, so if we do choose not to accept the need for vaccines, we need to honestly acknowledge that we arrive at that conclusion based upon other evidence than our theology. Ironically, the same instinct which leads us to question “man-made” answers in a fallen world should also lead us to question a misplaced, over-reliance upon the broken human immune system in that same fallen world.

2. In the battle for worldviews, I choose faith over science.

Even if you agree with me above, you might be inclined to argue that, while we can’t trust the immune system implicitly, it’s certainly better than trusting in man-made science. The argument here seems to be that man-made science is inherently an affront to God, a denial of His existence, or at least His Preeminence, and such a worldview will always then give us foolish answers as coming from someone who denies God. This view argues that science has always been a challenge and threat to the worldview of Christianity. In order to take a stand against a secularist humanistic worldview, we need to turn aside from our trust in science. First, I’ll just remind you of the obvious that unless you are more isolated than your average monk and less inclined to avail yourself of technology than the most stringent Amish, you are already trusting in science for a great many technological advances which push back against the curse. More importantly though, you should know that this argument of enmity between science and Christianity is possibly the strongest remaining legacy of the otherwise largely fading new atheism. It is anti-theists like Dawkins and Hitchens who suggested that one must choose between science and Christianity: that one could not possibly believe in both. It is a strange and sad thing that evangelicals decided largely to agree rather than take issue with this idea. The truth is that history is replete with scientists who were effective scientists precisely because they believed in a God of order behind an otherwise random-seeming world. The narrative which pits these two worldviews against each other is a false one. In fact, there even seems to be a resurgence today in a desire to see how each worldview actually supports and benefits the other. There is no scriptural or theological reason to view a scientific pursuit of truth as intrinsically in opposition to a faith-based pursuit of truth. The arguments for this are increasingly plentiful, and I’ll list a few resources for your consideration below.** It is, of course, true that sometimes science is used to promote social agendas which are at odds with Christianity, but this should not be used as evidence of Science’s fatal flaw anymore than people who used Scripture to support slavery (or any number of other abhorrent social ideas of a time) should be seen as evidence of Christianity’s fundamental unsoundness. When the data is read correctly without agenda, both pursue truth and therefore will both arrive at the same places. In the general realms of germ theory and vaccines, I don’t see evidence of opposition to a Christian worldview, and much within both which support each other. There is room within the Christian worldview to believe Big Pharma’s agenda has corrupted the science behind vaccines or not, but in either case, your evidence of this must come from outside Christian theology, and so you must not look with contempt upon your brother or sister’s faith who sees the notion of vaccines differently than you do.

3. Christian Freedom includes the freedom to choose for myself what happens to my body.

It may be that you are in the camp which argues for choice in vaccines. You may see this as a conservative argument asking for fewer mandates and requirements from the government. Even if vaccines are good for others, why should you be required to put something in your body which you are not entirely comfortable with? Vaccine proponents argue that vaccines are not just a decision you make for yourself but for the common welfare. Those in favor of mandates argue that your bodily autonomy is limited by the risk to the life of another.

I personally have mixed feelings about vaccine mandates, but the question on the table for us is whether bodily autonomy is a scriptural concept. There is, to be sure, in Scripture a dignity of the human body and a recognition that no one should be able to forcibly own your body. Murder, physical harm, and rape are, of course, some of the strictest prohibitions in the Old Testament Law. Interestingly though, there is also an exhortation in Scripture to hold many of our rights loosely for the sake of others. While you have a right to defend your body, and no one has a right to abuse it, you are also encouraged to voluntarily surrender your bodily autonomy for the sake of others when appropriate.

Paul tells husbands, for example, in Ephesians, to love their wives as their own bodies, while being willing to surrender their own lives for their wives.

The most interesting thing about this argument is that some of the same people who defend the sacred right to bodily autonomy as taking precedence over the communal good of the life of another switch sides when the body at question is a pregnant mother and the life being protected is an unborn child. I frankly agree with this pro-life argument, that bodily autonomy is less sacred than life itself, but then could not the same argument be made on behalf of vaccines, where our bodily autonomy is secondary to the life of an immunocompromised individual?

In my church, we have people like me who are pro-vaccine and people like my mentor who are antivax. We have lots of people in the middle who are cautious about vaccines and mandates and even pick and choose which vaccines they trust and which they don’t.

My only goal here is to give you freedom to question some of the arguments which are incorrectly framed as Christian or scriptural in nature. They may still be correct, but if you decide so, let it be based upon other evidence and reason. In this, as in all things, let the questions drive you to Christ: Embrace the freedom He brings, the obligation to walk by faith, the challenge to do what is most loving for others, and the good stewardship of your own body at the same time. To paraphrase Paul, whether you vaccinate or not, do so unto the Lord.

*Although it may be that pro-vaccine people also use scripture as a cudgel for their particular position, it is the anti-vaccine arguments along these lines which I personally run into. So, while the arguments hold true for both sides, it is the anti-vaxxer arguments I will mostly be addressing.

**Tom Holland’s Dominion, and Rodney Stark’s, The Triumph of Christianity are great resources for this argument.

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