Connection Between Worship and Bioethics Explored at Lecture Series

By Greg Wiebe

Worship and bioethics don’t seem like they would have much in common. But according to Joel Shuman, who teaches Christian ethics and bioethics at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, PA, they are not as distinct as one might think.

Shuman, the speaker at this year’s Canadian Mennonite University (CMU) J. J. Thiessen Lectures, provided a glimpse into the ongoing conversation between worship and medical ethics with a series of lectures titled “To Live is to Worship: Bioethics and the Body of Christ.”

In fact, to say that worship and bioethics are connected assumes falsely that the two are separate to begin with. The subtitle to his opening lecture was, after all, “Why Worship Is Bioethics and Vice-Versa.” By this, Shuman meant that as bodily creatures we are always engaged in some form of worship—whether of the Triune God or other gods. To be so engaged, he said, involves the constant orientation of our body toward its God/god and goods. It is because this orienting consistently involves making judgements over the body and its goods that it can be said to encompass the task of bioethics.

In his first lecture, Shuman started with the eschatological tension between the “already” and the “not yet.” In other words, he said, there is a certain sense in which the victory of Christ has meant the coming of an age in which we can experience the physical health of a redeemed Creation in the present life. Yet, he observed, there is also a sense that the fullness of that health will not come until the final consummation of history—and until then we best concern ourselves with appropriate preparation.

In the embrace of the “already-not yet,” Shuman affirmed both views of the possibility of health, begging the question his lectures sought to ask—namely, what does worship of the triune God have to say about the opportunities afforded by the technology of modern medicine? Or, as he put it, “how far may we go in our struggle against suffering, sickness, and death?”

Drawing upon the work of St. Basil the Great, Shuman noted some of the dangers that besets the church in its utilization of modern medicine. For example, where modern medicine and bioethics tend to focus on the individual, Christians know their health depends on participation within the church community. As a result, he said, medicine holds the possibility of corrupting the church’s worship of God—although it shouldn’t be rejected for this potentiality. Instead, Shuman stated, the church must ask how medicine might participate faithfully in the goodness of God’s Creation, remembering that it is God alone who heals.

In the second lecture, Shuman discussed the significance of naming medicine among what is referred to in the New Testament as the Principalities and Powers. He said it might be helpful to think of the Powers as those things that give shape to and orient our lives. As created by God, they were originally good and intended to shape our lives in worship toward God. However, he said, they are fallen and now tend to orient humanity toward the worship of itself.

Naming medicine among the Powers, Shuman argued that the Church must resist the temptation to worship doctors and their magic as saviours, and instead should participate in God’s redemption of the fallen powers by bringing medicine into the service of the Christian community—using it for its created purpose in witnessing to God’s activity in the world.

In the third lecture, Shuman went on to challenge the dominant paradigm of thinking of the human body as a machine. Drawing on the work of farmer-theologian-poet Wendell Berry, he suggested that it is more helpful to think of the body as a landscape, which implies a certain particularity and belovedness that is lacking in the concept of body-as-machine. This, he suggested, means that medicine is less a question of restoring bodies to technological definitions of health, and more about caring for particular people in the development of their lives within communion.

Appropriately for lectures concerning medicine and worship, Shuman’s last lecture was a discussion of death. In it, he named the American obsession with escaping death as one of the archetypal examples of humanity’s estrangement from God. This estrangement, he said, tends to come in the form of the attempt to escape contingency and secure ourselves against a dependence upon God. He invoked the practise of the Christian funeral as a way to remind us of our dependence on God—it does this by reminding us that we came out of the earth, by the earth we sustain ourselves and, in death, it is to the earth we return—even in our deaths we are entirely bound up with God and God’s Creation. Yet, it is the promise of the resurrection, of which we remind ourselves at funerals, that turns the finality of death into hope.

Shuman closed his final lecture with these thoughts: “This, finally, is at the centre of what it means to be Christian: to be sick as a Christian, to suffer as a Christian, to be present as a Christian to those who are sick or suffering, and, finally, to approach death as a Christian.” Being a Christian, he said, also means knowing “that we belong, in sickness and in health, in flourishing and in suffering, and finally in death to the earth, to each other, and to God.”

Through his presentations, Shuman provided renewed resources by which to contemplate the use of medicine in the lives and deaths of Christians—resources that can orient us properly towards God, so we can make appropriate judgements on such matters and be a faithful witness to the medical community and the wider world.

Greg is a 2006 graduate of CMU

Posted October 30, 2006

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