The coronavirus pandemic and the resulting restrictions of free assembly and travel raise the question: How do Christians deal with such crises? In 1527, Dr. Martin Luther addressed similar concerns in his letter “
Whether One May Flee From A Deadly Plague.”
In a nutshell, Luther found that elusive middle ground between panic and foolhardiness. Luther was aware some people were tempting God by refusing medicine or sensible precautions. He compares them to people who see their neighbor’s house on fire and do not help put it out, saying, “God, if he wills, can extinguish it without water. It’s probably his judgment.” Luther excoriates such senselessness as the mirror image of the hysteria that leads people to abandon their neighbors in time of grave need.
He encouraged people who were ill or infected to self-quarantine until they were completely well (this was unusual advice in his day). He chastised as murderers those who knew they were sick and yet exposed others to their illness. He said we should be gentle with and pray for those who are afraid and flee their civic duties. He encouraged the use of medicines and physicians, and recommended that public hospitals be established to treat this and other epidemics (they were few and far between in the sixteenth century). He wrote that public cemeteries outside of the town center (rare in his day) should be established in order to respect the dead and avoid infections from corpses. In all of this, he was far ahead of his time and would have sounded overly cautious to sixteenth-century ears.
