Today’s quarantine restrictions complement centuries of Christian response to epidemics. The church has always urged the faithful to take every sensible precaution in defense of human life, while continuing to serve God and neighbor. When the plague came to Wittenberg in 1527, other pastors asked Martin Luther if it was proper for a Christian to flee. His response is worth reading today:

If the people in a city were to show themselves bold in their faith when a neighbor’s need so demands, and cautious when no emergency exists, and if everyone would help ward off contagion as best he can, then the death toll would indeed be moderate. But if some are too panicky and desert their neighbors in their plight, and if some are so foolish as not to take precautions but aggravate the contagion, then the devil has a heyday and many will die.

Of course it was wrong to abandon the sick and dying, and Luther himself remained in town to help. Yet he insisted that refusing to make use of “intelligence and medicine” was “not trusting God but tempting him.”

Perhaps Reno, a convert to Catholicism, thinks Luther a doubtful authority. In that case he should look to St. Thomas More, who knew better than most that some things are worse than death: he accepted martyrdom before dishonoring his God, his church, or his own conscience. Yet he also knew, from “more than many” examples in Scripture, that “God hath given us our bodies here to keep, and will that we maintain them to do him service.” Even while awaiting execution in prison, More recognized that “when God sendeth the tempest, he will that the shipmen shall get them to their tackling, and do the best they can for themself, that the seas eat them not up.” In an age of epidemics, More practiced what he preached. As a student, he prudently left Oxford to slow the spread of a plague; but years later, as a royal official, he remained in town to personally direct the city’s quarantine efforts.

Luther and More lived in an era often blighted by pestilence and death, and they both urged Christians to love one another through collective efforts to slow contagion. But they also recognized the tremendous spiritual power of the “remembrance of death” in a time of crisis. Both men were the product of a culture fixated on the “art of dying.” The deathbed manuals of their time instructed the faithful that “whoever thinks always of death does a good work,” and that “every discerning life is a meditation on death.” Reno’s ostensibly theological take on the current outbreak contrasts very unfavorably with this rich tradition. He is so quick to chastise our sudden preoccupation with mortality that he cannot appreciate it for what it is: a chance to contemplate death in community. This may be the first time in generations that the wealthiest nations of the world have experienced a true memento mori—a reminder of life’s transience and fragility.

Ironically, by encouraging us to carry on with business as usual, Reno sends us back into the arms of the very materialism he claims to reject. In the West today, we organize both our working lives and our leisure hours around consumption. We live as if youth, health, and wealth are the default settings of life. Most Christians through the centuries have not had that luxury. Millions today, who worship in the developing world or under the yoke of persecution, have never had it. Why is that when we make the slightest adaptation to our historically unique status quo, canceling concerts and dinner parties to protect the vulnerable, Reno cries foul? What worldview is he really defending?

All human beings tend to mistake the coarse, changeable world of everyday experience for the unchanging and eternal. But twenty-first century Americans may be uniquely susceptible to the illusion that our way of life is a permanent program. We are now confronting a crisis that should shatter that illusion; at least for a time. God willing, this too shall pass—the sick will be treated, parents will return to work, children will reappear in the schoolyards. But the social cost of that recovery may well be enormous and unprecedented.

Few Christians would ask for this cup, but we must drink it—to serve God by serving our neighbors, and to grow closer to God through the contemplation of death. Solzhenitsyn’s mission was not simply to expose the moral bankruptcy of the Soviet regime and the horrors of the Gulag. He was also determined to show how even the most inhuman captivity, the most unjust suffering can move us “in the direction of deepening the soul.” Quarantine is no Gulag, but it is a costly act of service that meets the urgent human needs of our neighbors. That service may involve going to work—at a hospital or a testing center—or staying home. But make no mistake: these sacrifices are not a surrender to death. They are a sacrifice to the God who gives life.