Historically, Christians Have Responded to Disasters Because of Bethlehem!

Photo by Jorge Fernández Salas on Unsplash

By Don Boys, Ph.D.

Genuine Christians are known for their love for people, all people; however, love is not revealed by songs, statements, and slogans but by acts of kindness, help, sacrifice, etc. The Bible often refers to love, and that love was finally put on display to the world when God became man in Bethlehem, lived and preached for about 33 years then willingly died on a cross for each person’s sin. His love and deity were demonstrated with a victorious resurrection.

The world was never the same after that.

Following Christ’s ascension, Christians were visual examples of God’s love demonstrated by how they lived, gave, served, and preached during good and difficult times. The world has experienced one disaster after another and each time, Christians have been there to help as is obvious today in African nations ravaged by famine, war, and natural disasters. And now we see Ukraine where civilians are hungry, cold, and hurting. We have seen many Christian groups active in Florida and other southern states following catastrophic storms.

Weather-related and other natural disasters in recent years have supported the fact that Christians are very giving, loving people willing to serve, sacrifice, and suffer to help those in need, whatever the religious, political, or racial factors of the sufferers. Not having a bureaucracy to slow their responses, Christian groups are usually the first on the scene and the last to leave.

That’s the way it should be even though the main message of the groups is personal salvation, they also have a passion to help others. Disasters in far-flung cities and nations have seen numerous acts of kindness to help people get through disasters and improve their political, social, religious, and day-to-day lives.

The first world pandemic (thought to be smallpox) was the “Antonine Plague” of 165-180 which killed about five million people. Soon after, in 249, the so-called “Plague of Cyprian” broke out during a very troubled time that lasted until well into 271. It killed 5,000 people per day in Rome.

Rodney Stark wrote in The Rise of Christianity, “Christians stayed in the afflicted cities when pagan leaders, including physicians, fled.” As the first symptom appeared, victims often were thrown into the streets, where the dead and dying lay in piles.

St. Dionysius of Alexandria witnessed the pagan reaction to the plague: “At the first onset of the disease, they pushed the sufferers away and fled from their dearest, throwing them into the roads before they were dead and treating unburied corpses as dirt, hoping thereby to avert the spread and contagion of the fatal disease; but do what they might, they found it difficult to escape.”

The early Christian leader continued, “Most of our brother Christians showed unbounded love and loyalty, never sparing themselves and thinking only of one another. Heedless of danger, they took charge of the sick, attending to their every need and ministering to them in Christ, and with them departed this life serenely happy; for they were infected by others with the disease, drawing on themselves the sickness of their neighbors and cheerfully accepting their pains. Many, in nursing and curing others, transferred their death to themselves and died in their stead.”