Wednesday, March 23

Congenital Heart Disease
and Being Born from Above

Someone once asked Dr. Francis Collins, current science advisor to the President and former Director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the Human Genome Project, “What will happen to religion if they find the ‘death gene ’ that may one day enable people to live forever?” Let me qualify this by saying that was the gist of the question, but it’s probably not verbatim.

Dr. Collins is a Christian and, of course, a medical doctor and scientist.  Here’s a rough approximation of his answer: “Finding such a gene is one thing.   Altering it to enable people to live forever is quite another thing,” the implication being that immortality would not be attainable.  Then he went on to say something more poignant, something like, “I’m not sure that I would want to live in a world where people live forever in their current state of sin.”  

Dr. Collin’s faith sometimes puts him in a quandary between what Scripture says and what science indicates, but in the second quote above he gets to the heart of the issue:   religion – specifically the Christian faith – is not about simply living forever and being free from the curse of death;  it is about redemption/forgiveness/a new way of living/and finally conquering death. None of these can really be separated from the other.

Congenital heart disease occurs in almost 1% of babies, 1/120 according to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia. This makes heart defects the most common birth defect. In most cases, the cause of these problems is unknown, and occasionally a genetic factor is suspected.   

Many of the forms of these heart defects involve holes in various chambers of the heart. Interestingly, the space between the two main arteries out of the heart, the pulmonary artery and the aorta, is actually open before birth. Typically, that opening closes soon after birth. In utero, this is not a problem because the child is receiving its oxygen supply through the blood from the placenta and his or her mother. But, once born, the child must rely upon the normal exchange of oxygen into the bloodstream from the lungs.

Congenital heart disease is another reminder that our world is less-than-perfect.  It’s interesting that God has permitted the world to be sustained in such a way that, at least temporarily, people live instead of dying. All of us, of course, have a congenital defect, which is why everyone (with the rare exception of a few in history) dies. Evidence of the death gene is everywhere we look. It primarily occurs in the form of hiding from God and trying to cover up our sin. When Adam and Eve were warned not to eat of one particular tree (remember, it was only one tree), they were told, “in the day that you eat of it you will surely die.” (Genesis 2:17b). When they first conceived of the idea of sin in their heart, their spirit died, and subsequently the same thing happened with all of their progeny. Hence the running from God and the fig leaf faith….

At the point of the conception of the original sin, Adam and Eve became zombies – spiritually dead and physically alive, for a time. Now everyone would live in the shadow of death.

So that they might see the severity of their sin and their preference for death, God let them witness the death of one of the animals they had named, whose skin they ended up wearing around them to at least temporarily cover their shame.  Their robes of righteousness, would be a divine design not a man-made machination. And many Christians remember the promise in Galatians, “For all of you who are baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Christ.” (Galatians 3:27)

God did not want to just cover up the problem of sin – no matter how beautiful the covering. He wanted to fix the problem from the inside out. When Jesus described the seriousness of this congenital defect, He certainly didn’t understate it: “Out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, fornication’s, thefts, false witness, slanders.” (Matthew 15:19)  It sounds like this is a very serious congenital heart defect.  No surgery or earthly genetic alteration could fix this. We might solve the death thing, but evil is still in the genes.

So Jesus came along and shared with an old man who was closer to death than to birth these words, “Truly, truly, I say unto you, unless one is born from above he cannot see the kingdom of God.” (John 3:5). Being born from water and the Spirit would fix the heart; it would be a new heavenly conception. The incarnation of Christ is unique and far superior to a human birth, but it is also a reminder that those who are given the gift of faith and are baptized have been “born from above.” Death is dead. And we show that in the way we live.