Making the Bible Impossible (Part 3)

Recap of previous two posts: The most important and thought-provoking book I’ve read this year is The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture by Christian Smith. In it, the author critiques a particular way of interpreting the Bible, a method he calls “biblicism,” which he sees as widespread in the evangelical world. In fact, he argues that biblicism is so problematic that it impossible to hold to it. In my first post, I summarized Smith’s 10-point definition of biblicism, which must be understood before the rest of his argument makes sense. In the second post, we looked at the main problem Smith sees, pervasive interpretive pluralism (PIP),and why it is particularly problematic for biblicism.

Obviously, different individuals and groups interpret the Bible differently to some extent. Is that really a problem? Smith argues that PIP is such a severe issue that it literally makes biblicism impossible. How does he support this claim? The first part of the question, which we’ll examine now, is whether the differences are so important and pervasive as to constitute a serious problem. The second part is whether there are not already adequate explanations for PIP, explaining it in within the context of biblicism.

Pervasive Interpretive Pluralism—How Serious a Problem?

I'm writing this from Miango, not far from Jos, as we are attending our annual SIM Spiritual Life Conference. The cattle and kids in the photos are just across the fence outside our window.

This year's conference speaker is focusing on the book of Hebrews. In the introduction last night, he mentioned in passing the "warning passages" of Hebrews,¹ which warn the hearers to continue in the faith lest they be condemned. The interpretation of these is controversial because some seem to address believers and imply that they can lose their salvation. The speaker last night told us that he does not believe that believers can lose their salvation, but said that for anyone interested, he had a paper we could read exploring six different interpretations of these warning passages.

This illustrates one of the problems Christian Smith sees with biblicism. It's fine to believe that the Bible is inerrant, he says, but how helpful is that given the extent of uncertainty and disagreement over its interpretation? Can believers lose their salvation or not? One group of scholars says "absolutely, yes, it's in the Bible" and another group says "absolutely not, the Bible clearly says so." If I understand Smith correctly, the issue is not so much the disagreement, but that both sides prove their contradictory positions from the Bible, and "since the Bible says it, that settles it," leaving little room for uncertainty or compromise. So what is the truth about eternal security? I'm not sure whether Smith's view of a better answer would be "we don't know," "that's not the right question," or something else.

Speaking of works like the paper above on six views of the warning passages, Smith says, "The inability of Bible-reading evangelicals to come to anything like a common mind about a host of topics is turned into published scholarly debates conducted under the guise of helpful theological orientation and education." As examples, Smith lists books such as

• Four Views on Hell
• Perspectives on Christian Worship: Five Views
• Four Views of the End Times
• Science and Christianity: Four Views

along with 30 others on subjects including the nature of atonement, baptism, hell, divorce and remarriage, free will, war, women in ministry, and many others.


Looking at the popular level or "folk" evangelicalism, Smith gives examples such as

• A statement by John F. MacArthur Jr. that the Bible is “the only reliable and sufficient worship manual.”
• Bumper stickers like “Vote Responsibly—Vote the Bible!” “God said it, I believe it, that settles it,” and “Confused? Read the Directions” [picture of Bible].
• Books such as
  • Bible Answers for Almost All Your Questions
  • The World According to God: A Biblical View of Culture, Work, Science, Sex, and Everything Else
  • Bible Solutions to Problems of Daily Living
  • A Crown of Glory: A Biblical View of Aging
  • Christian Dress and Adornment—Biblical Perspectives
• Preaching based "on the assumption that a minister can select virtually any passage of scripture and adduce from the text an authoritative, relevant, 'applicable' teaching to be believed and applied by the members of his or her congregation."

Smith finds biblicism and its problems in the charters or statements of faith of mainstream evangelical institutions as well. For example, he cites from the Westminster Confession of Faith, "The whole counsel of God concerning all things necessary for His own glory, man's salvation, faith and life is either expressly set down in Scripture, or by good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture." In other words, there is no part of God's counsel in any of these areas, including the broad area "life," that is not derived directly from the Bible.

But isn't it true that evangelicals agree on all the essentials of the faith, and disagree only on less important, peripheral matters? Smith says that not, and goes into some detail about the disagreements over what the Bible says about several specific issues, "because many biblicists seem accustomed to easily ignoring or dismissing the 'biblical' convictions of others who read the Bible differently than they happen to, or to minimizing those disparities by suggesting that they are only slight variations on what are commonly shared Bible-based interpretations and convictions. Yet the differences cannot be ignored, dismissed, or minimized. They are real and concern important matters."

The examples discussed in the book's next eight pages include church polity or governance; free will and predestination; the fourth commandment (keeping the Sabbath); the morality of slavery (as argued in the 19th century); gender difference and equality; wealth, prosperity, poverty, and blessing; war, peace and nonviolence; charismatic gifts; atonement and justification; God-honoring worship; and general Christian relation to culture. In each case, there is a wide disparity of interpretations among evangelicals of what the Bible actually says or what "good and necessary consequence may be deduced from Scripture."

We could easily think of other topics such as abortion, divorce, the fate of those who reject the gospel or have not heard it, and homosexuality—Smith has just chosen a few examples to give us an idea of the scope of the problem. In Africa, the list would also include polygamy. Some of these topics will appear unimportant to any given person or group, but I doubt that anyone would claim that most are unimportant details of doctrine or Christian living. Many have very practical implications about how we should live our lives.

I think that Smith has established the point that PIP exists and is a serious problem. We all agree on the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus and most of us probably accept the Nicene creed. We doubtless agree on the importance of love, forgiveness, faith, faithfulness, prayer, seeking God's will, and many other core issues, but when it comes to many other areas where guidelines have been drawn from the Bible, there seems to be no agreement. So, if this pluralism is a problem, can it be absorbed or explained away within the bounds of biblicism? That will be the next topic.

¹ Such as "It is impossible for those who have once been enlightened, who have tasted the heavenly gift, who have shared in the Holy Spirit, who have tasted the goodness of the word of God and powers of the coming age, if they fall away, to be brought back to repentance, because to their loss they are crucifying the Son of God all over again and subjecting him to public disgrace" (Hebrews 6:4-6)

The Bible Made Impossible? (Part 2)

The most important and thought-provoking book I’ve read this year is The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture by Christian Smith. In it, the author critiques a particular way of interpreting the Bible, a method he calls “biblicism,” which he sees as widespread in the evangelical world. In fact, he argues that biblicism is so problematic that it impossible to hold to it. In my previous post, I summarized Smith’s 10-point definition of biblicism and proposed that it can be summarized as the combined beliefs that the Bible is

• Reliable and consistent: The Bible is inspired by God, without error, and therefore speaks with a single voice on any subject.
• Sufficient: The Bible contains all we need to know about all areas of Christian belief and practice for all time. 
• Understandable: Given some common sense about how to read, and maybe some background on the Bible, we can with careful and prayerful study come to a true understanding of a Bible passage including its meaning for faith and action. Then we can take the truths we learn about different topics, sort and sift them, and come to a comprehensive understanding of any and every topic. 

So what’s the problem? Consider that these claims, in combination, imply that sincere Christians who study the Bible carefully should come to basic agreement in most areas. If the Bible is reliable, consistent, clear, universal, and covers all we need to know, then we should all agree, right? The problem, says Smith, is that Bible-believing, born-again, Bible-studying Christians disagree on nearly everything imaginable, except that Jesus is Lord, risen from the dead, and our Savior. This situation is what Smith calls “pervasive interpretive pluralism.” He points out that it is useless to believe in the authority and inerrancy of the Bible on a given topic when Christians cannot even agree on what it teaches about that topic. What does the Bible teach about war and violence—pacifism, just war, or something else? What does it teach about economics, does it support distribution of wealth, free enterprise, or what? What about predestination and free-will? Baptism? Miracles and prophecy in the present age? The list is long. The main point of the book is that this pervasive interpretive pluralism (PIP) cannot be explained within the biblicist viewpoint, thus biblicism is fatally flawed.

There are several important points about what Smith is not saying here. Many arguments of Smith’s critics stem from the failure to understand these points.

1. Smith is not questioning the authority or reliability of the Bible based on the fact that there are disagreements over how to interpret it.
2. He is definitely not attacking biblicism simply because it leads to disagreements, as though other methods of interpretation avoid this problem.
3. He is not talking about “matters of conscience” in which Christians agree to disagree.

Rather, Smith is saying that (a) biblicism by its own principles implies that capable interpreters should converge on a single, authoritative, biblical teaching about any topic; (b) we do not see this agreement or convergence; therefore (c) something must be wrong with the principles of biblicism. He is not saying that every part of biblicism is wrong because of PIP, only that it cannot stand as an integrated whole. Don’t other schools of interpretation also lead to differences? Yes, but then, their logic does not necessarily predict agreement as biblicism does.

Though differences in interpretation are not unique to biblicism, they are particularly toxic within biblicist contexts. Because biblicists believe that the Bible is clear, consistent, and universal, disagreements tend to be seen as deviations from the one, inerrant truth. Because they believe that the Bible addresses every issue of faith and life with a single voice, every issue becomes a potential test of standing firm for the truth. Biblicists, those who hold to this constellation of beliefs, can’t just say “Well, the Bible isn’t clear on that,” “The Bible seems to say this in one case, but something different at another time,” or “The Bible seems to give some clues about that, but not enough for us to draw firm conclusions.” Thus, the differences of interpretation are magnified, leading to divisions, contention, and ultimately to the highly divided state of the evangelical church in America today.

What do you think? Is Smith onto something or making a mountain out of a molehill? Do evangelicals handle their differences well or do biblistic beliefs cause us to be overly dogmatic and divisive? Can we hold to a full, if nuanced, version of biblicism and still hold our beliefs lightly enough for unity? Leave your comments below!

In the next post, we’ll consider whether PIP is as big a problem as Smith thinks it is.

The Bible Made Impossible? (Part 1)

The most important and thought-provoking book I’ve read this year is The Bible Made Impossible: Why Biblicism Is Not a Truly Evangelical Reading of Scripture by Christian Smith¹ (available in hardback and Kindle versions). In it, the author critiques a particular way of interpreting the Bible, a method he calls “biblicism,” which he sees as widespread in the evangelical world. In fact, he argues that biblicism is so problematic that it impossible to hold to it.

 

So, what is biblicism? Smith defines it as “a theory about the Bible that emphasizes together its exclusive authority, infallibility, perspicuity [being clear, easily understood], self-sufficiency, internal consistency, self-evident meaning, and universal applicability.” Expanding these points, he says it is a constellation of beliefs about the Bible including these (from pages 4–5, with some rewording):

1. The Bible is inspired by God and is inerrant.
2. “The Bible represents all God’s communication to and will for humanity.”
3. Complete coverage: God’s will about everything relevant to Christian belief and life is contained in the Bible.
4. The Bible is plain and can be understood by all (“democratic perspicuity”): “Any reasonably intelligent person can read the Bible in his or her own language and correctly understand the plain meaning of the text.”
5. “Commonsense hermeneutics: The best way to understand biblical texts is by reading them in their explicit, plain, most obvious, literal sense, as the author intended them at face value, which may or may not involve taking into account their literary, cultural, and historical contexts.”
6. We can understand the meaning of any biblical text from the Bible alone, without relying on “creeds, confessions, historical church traditions, or other forms of larger theological hermeneutical frameworks.” We can derive our entire theology from the Bible alone.
7. Internal harmony: All related passages of the Bible on any given subject fit together almost like puzzle pieces into a unified, consistent teaching about right and wrong beliefs and behaviors.
8. Universal applicability: What the Bible’s authors taught God’s people at any point in history remains universally valid for all time, unless explicitly revoked by subsequent scriptural teaching.
9. Inductive method: We can learn all we need to know about Christian belief and practice by sitting down with the Bible and, through careful study, piecing together its clear truths.
10. All the above beliefs lead to the Handbook Model: The Bible teaches doctrine and morals with every affirmation that it makes, giving us something like a handbook for Christian belief and living, a collection of divine, inerrant teachings on all kinds of subjects—including science, economics, health, politics, and romance.

I think we can make these more manageable by simplifying them into three broader beliefs about the Bible, i.e. that it is:

• Reliable and consistent: The Bible is inspired by God, without error, and therefore speaks with a single voice on any subject. (1, 7)
• Sufficient: The Bible contains all we need to know about all areas of Christian belief and practice for all time. (2, 3, 6, 8)
• Understandable: Given some common sense about how to read, and maybe some background on the Bible, we can with careful and prayerful study come to a true understanding of a Bible passage including its meaning for faith and action. Then we can take the truths we learn about different topics, sort and sift them, and come to a comprehensive understanding of any and every topic. (4, 5, 9)

This all sounds rather ordinary in my neck of the evangelical woods. Of course, a bit of tweaking is needed: we understand that not every part of Scripture is as clear as every other part; we need to take into account symbolism, parables, poetry etc.; and we know that even sincere Christians may disagree on some minor points. Overall, though, these three summary points probably seem for many of us to represent our beliefs fairly well.

 

What do you think? Does biblicism in Smith’s terms reflect your understanding of how to interpret the Bible and use it to determine what we believe and how we act? Any parts you don’t agree with? (No fair reading the book before you answer!) In the next post, we’ll consider the major problem Smith sees with biblicism.

 

1 Christian Smith is the William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology and Director of the Center for the Study of Religion and Society, and the Center for Social Research at the University of Notre Dame. He is the author of many books, including What is a Person?: Rethinking Humanity, Social Life, and the Moral Good from the Person Up (Chicago 201); Passing the Plate: Why American Christians Do Not Give Away More Money (OUP 2008); Soul Searching: the Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (OUP 2005), Winner of the 2005 "Distinguished Book Award" from Christianity Today; and Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture (OUP 2003).

Kindle Books for Free Borrowing through Kindle Owners’ Lending Library

Amazon has announced a new service for its Prime members, allowing them to borrow selected Kindle e-books at no charge, one at a time. I am guessing that you can do this even if you do not own a physical Kindle and are using instead a Kindle reader for PC, Mac, Android etc. It looks like you have to actually own a Kindle. The problem is that there is not a very handy way to identify the books you can borrow, so you have to browse through the lists. If you go to http://amzn.to/AmazonLibrary (where the navigation breadcrumb list will show “Books › Prime Eligible › Kindle Edition”) you can use the side menus to browse by author or subject, and you can limit the search by number of stars.

Since there are thousands of titles to search through, I thought I would contribute some of my discoveries for those who may have similar tastes and want to save the time of searching all the books. I list several books here and will put more in subsequent blog posts.

Once again, note that these are books available for free loan for Amazon customers who belong to the Prime program, in which you pay an annual fee ($80??) to receive free 2-day shipping on many products and, recently added, free streamed digital content (movies, I think, but I have not investigated since the bandwidth would be prohibitive here in Nigeria).

Freedom’s Stand by Jeanette Windle (4.6 stars, 34 reviews)

Jamil renounced a life of jihad when he encountered the life-changing message of Jesus Christ, but villagers and authorities in the hills of Afghanistan respond with skepticism . . . and even violence. Relief worker Amy Mallory is shocked by the changes in her organization—changes with dire implications for the women and children under her care. And concern for her former assistant, Jamil, weighs heavily on her heart. Former Special Forces veteran Steve Wilson faces off against the riots and corruption of Kabul’s upcoming election. He's looking for something that will give his life purpose but is confident that he won’t find it in Afghanistan.

---

My first thought from the blurb above was that perhaps the book was just Christian pulp fiction, but the comments seem to indicate that it is much richer than that, so I’d be interested in reading it. NB: This is the sequel to Veiled Freedom, which is not currently available for free rental, so you might want to read that book first.

Catching Moondrops by Jennifer Erin Valent (4.8 stars, 33 reviews)

It's the summer of 1938, and in the rural town of Calloway, Virginia, something is brewing --- something that 18-year-old Jessilyn Lassiter has felt before. Amidst romance in the air and the brilliant colors of summer sunsets, Jessilyn and her best friend Gemma know racial tension is on the rise. Six years ago, that tension exploded with burning crosses and white-robed Klansmen. Their hate-filled, public displays were reduced to a simmer since then, but the two best friends --- one white, one black --- knew it was about to bubble over again. When a black doctor sets up shop in Calloway's "colored" district, he fans the flames of the Klansmen's hatred, setting in motion a series of events that will change the people of Calloway and leave two mothers grieving for their sons. … I could write endlessly about the clever dialogue, colorful imagery and unique voice. And I certainly can't leave out the depth and attitude of the characters, the compelling plot, or the way the book takes you on an emotional roller coaster ride. Yet none of this does justice to the novel or its gifted author. Jennifer Erin Valent possesses writing talent that will surely have her name on bestseller lists for years to come.

As with some other books on the free lending list, this is a sequel so don’t be surprised if it feels as if you are missing some history if you read it on its own.

Untouchable by Scott O'Connor (4.5 stars, 48 reviews)

It is the autumn of 1999. A year has passed since Lucy Darby's unexpected death, leaving her husband David and son Whitley to mend the gaping hole in their lives. David, a trauma-site cleanup technician, spends his nights expunging the violent remains of strangers, helping their families to move on, though he is unable to do the same. Whitley – an 11 year-old social pariah known simply as The Kid – hasn't spoken since his mother's death. Instead, he communicates through a growing collection of notebooks, living in a safer world of his own silent imagining.

Those Who Save Us by Jenna Blum (4.4 stars, 268 reviews)

Family secrets of Nazi Germany are at the core of this powerful first novel told in two narratives that alternate between New Heidelberg, Minnesota, in the present, and the small town of Weimar near Buchenwald during World War II. Trudy is a professor of German history in Minnesota, where she's teaching a seminar on women's roles in Nazi Germany and conducting interviews with Germans about how they're dealing with what they did during the war. But her mother, Anna, won't talk about it, not even to her own daughter. Trudy knows, she remembers, that Anna was mistress to a big Nazi camp officer. Why did she do it? Was he Trudy's father? The interviews are a plot contrivance to introduce a range of attitudes, from blatant racism to crippling survivor guilt. But the characters, then and now, are drawn with rare complexity, including a brave, gloomy, unlucky rescuer and a wheeler-dealer survivor. Anna's story is a gripping mystery in a page-turner that raises universal questions of shame, guilt, and personal responsibility. Hazel Rochman

Did “2800 B.C. Assyrian Tablet” complain about decline of civilization?

“The Earth is degenerating today. Bribery and corruption abound. Children no longer obey their parents, every man wants to write a book, and it is evident that the end of the world is fast approaching.” From an Assyrian tablet, written circa 2800 BC.

 

This quote is going around – I just saw it on Facebook. Of course, it’s an attempt to show how people of every age think that they are living in the worst times, perhaps the last times, with their morals and civilization degenerating.

 

The quote got me intrigued. First, was it an actual quote from the third millennium BC? Second, what does it tell us about the idea of the end of the world?

 

The quote appears to be a hoax or urban legend though with a longish history. Bartleby's Quotes gives two versions from sources in the mid 20th century but comments "Both of the above quotations would seem to be spurious." The quote has also been attributed to Socrates.

According to the Wikipedia article on the history of Sumer, writing of speech like this quote isn't recorded before about 2600 B.C. Also, the idea of people writing books would not fit in 2800 B.C.  Furthermore, the Assyrian kingdom, according to the omniscient Wikipedia, didn’t begin until around five hundred years after the supposed date of the supposed tablet. So it’s pretty apparent that the quote is a hoax, or more charitably, a myth with lasting value.

 

But all that doesn't matter much, since people have certainly said such things in the past, and the world hasn't ended. Or has it? In our literal, modernist view, we take these predictions or worries as referring to the end of the physical earth or universe. But we know that such cosmic language is used for historical, local events, as we see in the Bible. If you're an inhabitant of some town and the Assyrians come through killing, burning, raping, and enslaving, then that is the end of the world, period. If your entire civilization becomes weak and is conquered or disappears, that is the end of the world.

 

It's true that the physical world has not ended, but that's small comfort for the millions of people whose cities or entire civilizations have disappeared. See Jared Diamond's Collapse for a few examples and their causes.

 

The practical point of all this is that we should not, perhaps, be too flippant about dire predictions. Our own civilization has not survived nearly as long as some others which are now gone and forgotten, and why should we expect to be an exception? We certainly can list plenty of scenarios which would represent “the end of the world” for millions or billions of people, and I think it befits us to live “in the fear of God” rather than in hubris.

Photo: ancient Mesopotamian ziggurat in Iraq; by Wikipedia user Hardnfast. Used under Creative Commons license.

Chickenpox parties via mail?

Some stories have come out in the past couple of days about someone selling chickenpox-infected lollipops through the mail for the benefit of parents who are afraid to immunize their children but want to give them “natural” infection.  (All references are at the end of this post.)

Apparently, the parents are so fearful of commercial vaccines, which use a weakened but still-living virus, that they are willing to use a crude, “wild-type” vaccination instead. Never mind that there is a fairly high rate of complications and a mortality rate in healthy children of about 2 deaths per 100,000 cases. If that many deaths were associated with a chickenpox vaccine, there would be an uproar, but apparently it's acceptable (or more likely, not understood) as long as it's “natural.”

 

I'm sure that nearly all the parents involved in this practice have simply not thought through all the implications. Virtually all parents would do almost anything for the well being of their children, and these are no exceptions. Their intentions are pure, I'm sure, but nature unfortunately doesn't care about intentions.

 

I've seen at least two children with severe chickenpox. One was a leukemia patient in remission and apparently with normal immune status at the time. She almost died but, perhaps due to outstanding ICU care at UCLA, she survived. The other patient was a Nigerian girl who was normal until she got chickenpox. She suffered a skin reaction over much of the body, becoming much like a burn victim. She died.

 

What about consequences to other children, especially those who cannot be immunized because their immune systems are depressed by cancer, HIV, or drugs? Chickenpox is highly contagious: “Household transmission rates are 80-90%. Second cases within the household are often more severe.” Chickenpox is not always just a minor illness. Uncommonly, there are serious complications even among otherwise normal children. (See the list below from CHOP, comparing the complications of the disease vs. the vaccine.) Worse, “among children with leukemia, the mortality rate of varicella is 7%.” It’s even worse if a pregnant woman is exposed at just the wrong time, in a window that gives the baby the virus but not the mother’s antibodies. “Neonatal varicella mortality rates can reach 30%.”

 

I assume that these parents are taking the greatest precautions to isolate their artificially-infected children from all other children, starting from the time of inoculation until they are non-infectious, but is that possible for all children, 100% of the time? Do they treat their children as carriers of a potentially fatal viral infection, or are they thinking of the mostly-benign course of disease in their own children without reckoning with the potential for contagion? In fact, if they think it’s beneficial to expose children to chickenpox, could they be just a little less than perfectly sure to isolate their kids?

 

What if one of these children plays with another unimmunized child whose father has had leukemia, or whose mother is pregnant? Besides this being unethical (think “Golden Rule” here, OK?), it seems to me that I would at least be inviting a civil lawsuit if not a negligent homicide charge if my child’s intentionally-caused chickenpox caused harm to someone else.

 

The whole thing makes me angry. Not at the parents—I can only feel sorry for them, having been made so fearful of vaccines that they will take these risks because they want to protect their children. Rather, it’s against the people making fame and fortune by selling fear. How do they justify this kind of thing?

 

References:

“American parents caught selling chickenpox-infected lollipops,” Telegraph, http://tgr.ph/rFT7Ik

 

Los Angeles Times, http://bit.ly/uRCd35. Notes that the chickenpox virus might not even survive the mailing, so technically not effective. And buying a virus from someone on Facebook? Maybe not a good idea.

 

Varicella on Emedicine, http://bit.ly/tAXX3c

In otherwise healthy children aged 1-14 years, the mortality rate is estimated at 2 deaths per 100,000 cases. The case-fatality rate in the general population is 6.7 cases per 100,000 population.

Among children with leukemia, the mortality rate of varicella is 7%.

Varicella during pregnancy can cause various adverse outcomes for mother and infant, depending on the stage of pregnancy. Neonatal varicella mortality rates can reach 30%

 

CHOP (Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia) parent pack, http://bit.ly/s4CXU1

Of 1,000 people with chickenpox:

• About 100 will require medical attention
• About two will be hospitalized 
• About 50 will suffer from infected blisters; in some cases the bacterial infection is caused by group A streptococcus (GAS). When GAS enters the bloodstream, it can lead to a mild infection or, less commonly, a more severe situation such as necrotizing fasciitis, also known as "flesh-eating bacteria," or streptococcal toxic shock syndrome (STSS). Necrotizing fasciitis destroys muscles, fat, and skin tissue. STSS causes a rapid drop in blood pressure and organ failure. About 1,500 people die from GAS in the U.S. every year; some of these as a complication from chickenpox.
• Other complications from chickenpox can include dehydration from vomiting or diarrhea, pneumonia, or swelling of the brain (known as encephalitis).

 

Before the vaccine about 50 children died each year from chickenpox infection or its complications; many of these were previously healthy children.

 

The vaccine

Of 1,000 children who get the vaccine:

• 700 to 900 will never get chickenpox; of the remaining 100 to 300 who may get chickenpox, the disease is typically less severe.
• About 200 will have redness or soreness where the shot was given 
• Less than 50 will experience a mild rash up to one month after immunization 
• 100 to 200 will have fever, about one of whom will experience a seizure related to the fever

Our time with Emmanuel

Emmanuel left us this week to go to a more permanent home, with Pastor and Mrs. Jege, who care for the boys at the SIM/ECWA City Ministries Care Center in Gyero, about 40 minutes from here along a barely passable road. Ema had stayed with us for seven weeks. A lot of people ask us whether he improved in that time. Yes, but the changes were very subtle.

In the last week or two, Ema just started to play a bit. I handed him a toy dinosaur and instead of immediately dropping it, he first tried to eat it (maybe it looked like chicken!) then turned it over in his hand, examining it for a while. A couple of times we got into an exchange of flicked & throwing a carton top across the table at mealtime, to Barb’s dismay. Once, when he was up in the middle of the night, I handed him my cell phone with the flashlight on, and he seemed to try moving it around a bit. Finally, he gradually started picking things up, more or less at random, and throwing them. Sometimes it was when he seemed grumpy, but sometimes for fun? My slippers ended up in the toilet one day when someone left the door open!

Most of the time, Ema just wandered around or sat in a chair. He might just sit or stand still, he might be doing his repetitive hand motions, or he might make noises for hours. One of his noises may be a groan but doesn’t seem to be very distressed; it sounds like a car trying to start with a low battery. Another noise was his laughter, easier to tolerate though even that could get to be a bit much after a while. It did seem to me that he liked to hear the birds singing and sometimes enjoyed music.

Sometimes he would get on and off my lap over and over. Once I counted and found that he did this 50 times in an hour. He also learned to bring me his cup when he wanted water. I didn’t usually give him much at a time, since he might throw it somewhere after drinking a bit, so he would come to me over and over to get more. Actually, it was probably sometimes more a game to him than because of thirst.

Though he never learned to go toward the bathroom when he needed to, he did learn to use the toilet when we put him on it. He did this so quickly that he must have had prior experience and just needed to be oriented to our western-style toilet. He never did get used to our brushing his teeth—it always took two of us to do it. I did learn how to restrain him a bit better by the end, but still got scratched and pinched—never bitten!—and it was traumatic for him. The funny thing was that within a minute of finishing, he would seem to forget all about it.

The need to brush his teeth was emphasized by the dental work he ended up needing. While Dr. Maxfield had thought he could work under sedation with ketamine, it turned out that it barely slowed Ema down, so he needed full general anesthesia. He had to have 3 teeth extracted, including both lower front incisors, and had seven fillings. Dr. Maxfield did confirm that Ema was 15-16 years old based on his teeth, though he still looks more like a 6 year old.

One thing I will miss is the times we would go out to the bench swing at 5 in the evening and enjoy a little quiet time. I would try to read my Kindle and Ema would either get on and off my lap or go wandering around a little bit. I’m sure he really did enjoy that time outside the house in some way.

The other thing I will remember and miss most is the times when he would be happy for some reason (we never knew why, though sometimes it was music), and would sit and laugh on my lap and enjoy being tickled, kissed and cuddled. I just hope that he will get a lot of that one-on-one time in his new home, and also that he will be protected from the bullying that is so common among school age kids, even more in Nigeria than in the US.