Contemplating Science and Faith

Dear God of wounded hands and searching hearts,

A seventeenth-century Anabaptist farmer in the Palatinate had no telescope, no microscope, no periodic table — yet he understood something that still escapes many of us. He knew that the same God who scattered the stars across the winter sky also knelt beside the wounded stranger on the Jericho road. For him, there was no war between wonder and mercy. They were the same breath.

When the lawyer asked Jesus, "Who is my neighbor?" he was drawing a line — sorting the world into categories the way we so often do with science and faith, as though truth must choose a side. But Jesus answered with a story about a man in a ditch and the unlikely person who stopped. The Samaritan did not debate theology before binding the wounds. He poured oil and wine — the best medicine his world knew — and he did it with his own two hands.

This is the Anabaptist way: faith that rolls up its sleeves. When Mennonite Central Committee sends agronomists to drought-stricken villages, they carry both prayer and soil science. When a church nurse checks blood pressure in the fellowship hall after Sunday worship, she serves with stethoscope and Spirit alike. The God who engineered the human immune system is the same God who wept at Lazarus's tomb.