Bioethics: a primer for Christians

Bioethics talk is often talk about rights. Such talk is absolutely essential in many contexts. To ignore it is to ignore the just claims of others upon our attention and our care. But for Christians the relation of individual and community is too complex to be dealt with by such language alone, and I therefore begin with a different language.

In baptism we are handed over to God and become members of the Body of Christ. That is language about a community; yet, perhaps paradoxically, the first thing to note about baptism is that it is a deeply individualizing act. Our parents hand us over, often quite literally when sponsors carry us as infants to the font. Deeply bound as we are and always will be to our parents, we do not belong to them. In baptism God sets his hand upon us, calls us by name, and thereby establishes our uniquely individual identity and destiny.

We belong, to the whole extent of our being, only to God, whom we must learn to love even more than we love father or mother. What makes us true individuals therefore is that God calls us by name. Our individuality is not a personal achievement or power, and — most striking of all — it is established only in community with God. We are most ourselves not when we seek to direct and control our destiny but when we recognize and admit that our life is grounded in and sustained by God.

If the first thing to say about baptism is that it establishes our individual identity, we must immediately add that it brings us into the community of the church — with all those whom God has called by name. It is utterly impossible to exist in relation to God apart from such a bond with all others who have been baptized into Christ’s Body. We are called to bear their burdens as they are called to carry ours. Sometimes we are reluctant to shoulder theirs. At least as often, perhaps, we are reluctant to have them shoulder ours, so eager are we to be masterful and independent. That others within the Body should burden us and that we should burden them is right and proper if the life of the Body is one. Nor should such mutual burdensomeness be ultimately destructive, since Jesus has been broken by these burdens once for all.

If baptism is the sacrament of initiation into Christian life, it should inform our understanding of "individualism." We should not suppose that any individual’s dignity can be satisfactorily described by the language of autonomy alone — as if we were most fully human when we acted on our own, chose the course of our "life plan," or were capable and powerful enough to burden no one.

There will still remain — and should remain — a place within the political realm for the language of independent individualism. Christians should recognize that, in a world deeply disturbed by sin, great evil can be done in the name of community. Herbert Butterfield, the distinguished British historian, once suggested — only somewhat with tongue in cheek — that one could adequately explain all the wars fought in human history simply by taking the animosity present within the average church choir at any moment and giving it a history extended over time. Because sin distorts every human relationship, because, in particular, it leads the powerful to abuse and diminish the weak and voiceless in the name of high ideals or the common good, every individual’s dignity must be protected. Because every person is made for God, no one is — to the whole extent of his or her being — simply a member of any human community,

A fuller understanding of our person requires an appreciation — and affirmation — of the created duality of our nature. That is, we are created from dust of the ground — finite beings who are limited by biological necessities and historical location. We are also free spirits, moved by the life-giving Spirit of God, created ultimately for communion with God — and therefore soaring beyond any limited understanding of our person in terms of presently "given" conditions of life. anchor-3:[]

This duality should not become a dualism, as if the person were really only the spirit or only the body. On the contrary, the person simply is the place where freedom and finitude are united. Body and spirit cannot be separated in our understanding of human beings; yet, because of the two-sidedness of our nature, we can look at the person from each of these angles.

Drop me from the top of a fifty-story building, and the law of gravity takes over, just as it does if we drop a stone. We are finite beings, located in space and time, subject to natural necessity. But we are also free, able sometimes to transcend the limits of nature and history. As I fall from that fifty-story building, there are truths about my experience that cannot be captured by an explanation in terms of mass and velocity. Something different happens in my fall than in the rock’s fall, for this falling object is also a subject characterized by self-awareness. I can know myself as a falling object, which means that I can to some degree "distance" myself from that falling object. I cannot simply be equated with it. I am that falling object, yet I am also free from it. Likewise, I am the person constituted by the story of my life. I cannot simply be someone else with a different history. Yet, I can also, at least to some degree, step into another’s story, see the world as it looks to her — and thus be free from the limits of my history. That freedom from nature and history is, finally, our freedom for God. Made for communion with God, we transcend nature and history — not in order that we may become self-creators, but in order that, acknowledging our Creator, we may recognize the true limit to human freedom.

Understanding our nature in this way, we learn something about how we should evaluate medical "progress." It cannot be acceptable simply to oppose the forward thrust of scientific medicine. That zealous desire to know, to probe the secrets of nature, to combat disease — all that is an expression of our created freedom from the limits of the "given," the freedom by which we step forth as God’s representatives in the world. But a moral vision shaped by this Christian understanding of the person will also be prepared to say no to some exercises of human freedom. The never-ending project of human self-creation runs up against the limit that is God. It will always be hard to state in advance the precise boundaries that ought to limit our freedom, but we must be prepared to look for them. We must be prepared to acknowledge that there may be suffering we are free to end but ought not, that there are children who might be produced through technological means but ought not, that there is valuable knowledge that might be gained through use of unconsenting research subjects but ought not.

In short, an ethic shaped by Christian vision will, in its general form, be what moralists term "deontological." Such an ethic does not evaluate actions only in terms of progress, only in terms of beneficial goals that might be achieved. It encourages us to exercise our freedom in search of such goals — but always within certain limits. It reminds us that others can be wronged even when they are not harmed. The only freedom worth having, a freedom that does not finally trivialize our choices, is a freedom that acknowledges its limits and does not seek to be godlike. That freedom, a truly human freedom, will acknowledge the duality of our nature and the limits to which it gives rise.

Suppose a child is born who, throughout his life, will be profoundly retarded. Or suppose an elderly woman has now become severely demented. How shall we describe such human beings? We might say, as many will today, that, although they may be living human beings, they are not persons. But we might also say — and, I think, should say — that they are severely disabled persons, the weakest among us.

It has gradually become common in our society to define person-hood in terms of certain capacities. To be a person one must anchor-5:[] be conscious, self-aware, productive. The class of persons will widen or narrow depending on how many such criteria we include in our definition of person-hood. But, in any case, the class of human beings will be wider than that of persons. Not all living human beings will qualify as persons on such a view — and, we must note, it is persons who are now regarded as bearers of rights, persons who can have interests that ought to be protected.

One might argue that such a viewpoint follows from the duality of our created nature. If the body dies, we no longer think that the living person is present. Why not reach the same conclusion if the spirit seems to have died — or never to have been present? If a human being lacks the capacities that make self-transcendence possible, why not conclude that here also the living person is not present?

The logic of this suggestion is not, however, as neat as it seems. For one thing, the duality of our nature is such that we have no access to the free spirit apart from its incarnation in the body. The living body is therefore the locus of personal presence. More important, our personal histories — precisely as histories of embodied spirits — do not require the exercise of "personal" capacities throughout. Our personal histories begin in dependence — first within our mother’s womb and, then, as newborns. Often our life also ends in the dependence of old age and the loss of capacities we once had. Person-hood is not something we "have" at some point in this history. Rather, as embodied spirits or inspirited bodies, we are persons throughout the whole of that life. One whom we might baptize, one for whom we might still pray, one for whom the Spirit of Christ may still intercede "with sighs too deep for words" (Rom. 8:26) — such a one cannot be for us less than a person. Dependence is part of the story of a person’s life.

Those human beings who permanently lack certain empowering cognitive capacities — as well as all human beings in stages of life where those powers are absent — are simply the weakest and most needy members of our community. We can care for them and about anchor-6:[] them only by acknowledging the living bodily presence that they have among us — seeking to discern in their faces the hidden spirit, the call to community that their bodily presence constitutes, and the face of Christ.

At the heart of Christian belief lies a suffering, crucified God. Yet, in recent years some have argued that Christian emphasis upon a suffering Jesus is dangerous, that it gives rise to an ideology that encourages those who suffer oppression simply to accept that suffering. There are more things wrong with this argument than I can take up here, but it is not surprising that such arguments should arise in a culture devoted to self-realization. In such a setting, the cross must always be counter-cultural.

Suffering is not a good thing, not something one ought to seek for oneself or others. But it is an evil out of which the God revealed in the crucified and risen Jesus can bring good. We must therefore always be of two minds about it. We should try to care for those who suffer, but we should not imagine that suffering can be eliminated from human life or that it can have no point or purpose in our lives. Nor should we suppose that suffering must be eliminated by any means that is available to us, for a good end does not justify any and every means.

Unless we are thus of two minds, understanding suffering as an evil which can, nonetheless, have meaning and purpose, medicine is likely to go awry. It seeks health — but not Health. The doctor is a caregiver, but not, we must remind ourselves, a savior. Ultimately, all of medicine is no more than the attempt to provide care for suffering human beings. That care, however, cannot by itself offer the Health and Wholeness we truly need and desire. If we respect the moral limits that ought to bind us, we will not always be able to give people what they desire. We may not be able to give the infertile couple a child, the elderly man an old age free of dependence, the young woman freedom from the child she has conceived, parents the healthy and "normal" child they had wanted, the terminally ill patient a painless death. But we can and should assure them that the story of Jesus is true — that the negative and destructive powers of the universe are not the ultimate powers whom we worship.

Part of the pain of human life is that we sometimes cannot and at other times ought not do for others what they fervently desire. Believing in the incarnation, that in Jesus God has stood with us as one of us, Christians must try to learn to stand with and beside those who suffer physically or emotionally. But that same understanding of incarnation also teaches us that to make elimination of suffering our highest priority would be to conclude mistakenly that it can have no point or purpose in our lives. We should not act as if we believe that the negative, destructive powers of the universe are finally victorious. Those who worship a crucified and risen Lord cannot give themselves over to such a vision of life.

In chapters 14-16 of 2 Chronicles we read of Asa, one of the kings of Judah. His reign, not surprisingly, was a mix of good and bad, but, in the eyes of the Chronicler, it ended badly. Rather than trusting Israel’s God to bless his political aims, Asa used the temple treasure to forge an alliance with Syria in his time of need. For that he was denounced by the prophet Hanani.

A few years later Asa became severely ill; "yet," writes the Chronicler, "even in his disease he did not seek the Lord, but sought help from physicians" (2 Chron. 16:12). Shortly thereafter Asa died. The Chronicler’s point — in both the political and medical examples — is clear, but it is also difficult to understand. Its clarity lies in the anchor-8:[] starkness with which we are required to ask whether the measures we take to secure ourselves — politically, medically, or in other ways — bespeak a lack of trust and confidence in God. Its difficulty, however, lies in the suggestion that God’s defending and healing work is always immediate, never mediated through the work of human agents.

The warning alerts us not to ask of medicine more than it can offer. Through doctors, God often treats our diseases and, sometimes perhaps, treats even our more general feeling that, although we have no identifiable disease, we are not well, are not whole. But doctors are not saviors, and the best doctors know that, even if they only think of themselves as cooperating with the powers of nature. They may heal our diseases but increase thereby our sense of invulnerability — a healing that would be disastrous for our spiritual Health. They may be unable to heal our diseases, but, accepting suffering and dependence as part of our personal history, we may be drawn closer to God. Thus there is no perfect correspondence between health and Health.

We need not, I think, fear that seeking medical help necessarily demonstrates lack of trust or faith on our part. Rather, it indicates only that we trust God to care for us mediately — through the love and concern of others. But at the same time we should not suppose that medical caregivers can finally provide the wholeness that we need. They stand beside us, but they have not voluntarily shared our fate. They are lordly and awesome in their technical prowess, but they are not the Lord whom death could not hold.