FOR years I have asked my self, "What is the reality, the purpose in my religion? What is the nature of salvation?" At last I am beginning to get a concept that satisfies me, that unites my knowledge of medicine with my experience of God. Each is striving to achieve "the whole man." Medicine can analyze the problems—physical, surgical, and psychiatric—that cause man's frustration in his attempts to achieve "integrity"; but lacks the motivating power necessary to persuade man to make the necessary changes. The number of doctors who smoke is simple witness to this. Religion, on the other hand, has been frustrated in its purpose because it has never precisely defined its objectives, although it is skilled in human motivation. Think of the number of times you have been urged to "make a decision for Christ" without being told what actions and responsibilities were involved in the "new way of life."
Christianity, for too long, has been seen as a "religion" concerned with the "spiritual" side of man, to the exclusion of his physical, mental, and social aspects. Its goal has been a mystical state of "salvation," unrelated to the health of one's lungs, the state of one's arteries, the quality of one's ideas. Smoking cigarettes, eating too much animal fat and sugar, imbibing alcohol, are considered wrong because these acts are a "sin," not because one can do real damage to oneself thereby. Theology still sees man's goal as a relationship with God apart from his body, his world, and the people in it, rather than as an integrating relationship that causes the harmonious interaction of mind and body, environment and friends. We still picture the spiritual as one of four equivalent and mutually exclusive elements of man—spirit, mind, body, and society—rather than as the transcendent element which integrates and completes the other three.
Faith in Jesus Christ, as I see it, provides the essential motivating power necessary to create men of integrity, men who care for their bodies, their environment, their friends, and their families. It has provided an intuitive knowledge of the actions necessary for health, long before painful human experimentation could provide the rationale for them. It is essentially a synthesis of the motivation of "religion" with the aims of modern medicine.
Paul could not stand without Luke, and each presents a picture of the one complete Man— Physician and Theologian—Jesus Christ.
