Christian Bioethics, 21(3), 262–281 2015
doi:10.1093/cb/cbv009
Advance Access publication September 28, 2015
The Arc of the Moral Universe Is Long, But
it Bends Toward Mercy and Grace: And
Other Delightful Surprises of a Distinctively
Christian Bioethics
RUSSELL DISILVESTRO*
California State University, Sacramento, CA, USA
*Address correspondence to: Russell DiSilvestro, PhD, Department of
Philosophy, California State University, Sacramento, Mendocino Hall 3000, 6000
J Street, Sacramento, CA 95819-6033, USA. E-mail: [email protected]
In this essay I describe some delightful surprises of Christian bioethics
through the lenses of faith, hope, and love. I draw from insights about
what makes Christian belief and practice distinctive from sources such as
the early Christian document, The Epistle to Diognetus, G. K. Chesterton,
and C. S. Lewis. I focus on the three theological virtues with a special eye
for applications to contemporary bioethical issues and contemporary
philosophical objections. Love is a distinctive center of Christian bioethics. Faith is a distinctive knowledge of Christian bioethics. Hope is a
distinctive posture of Christian bioethics.
Keywords: faith, hope, knowledge, love, philosophy
It is commonly the loose and latitudinarian Christians who pay quite indefensible
compliments to Christianity. They talk as if there had never been any piety or pity
until Christianity came, a point on which any mediaeval would have been eager to
correct them. They represent that the remarkable thing about Christianity was that it
was the first to preach simplicity or self-restraint, or inwardness and sincerity. They
will think me very narrow (whatever that means) if I say that the remarkable thing
about Christianity was that it was the first to preach Christianity. Its peculiarity was
that it was peculiar, and simplicity and sincerity are not peculiar, but obvious ideals
for all mankind. Christianity was the answer to a riddle, not the last truism uttered
after a long talk.—G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy ([1908] 1995, 80)
The difference between Christians and the rest of mankind is not a matter of nationality, or language, or customs. Christians do not live in separate cities of their own,
speak any special dialect, nor practice any eccentric way of life. . . . They pass their
lives in whatever township—Greek or foreign—each man’s lot has determined, and
conform to ordinary local usage in their clothing, diet, and other habits. Nevertheless,
© The Author 2015. Published by Oxford University Press, on behalf of The Journal of Christian Bioethics, Inc.
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the organization of their community does exhibit some features that are remarkable,
and even surprising.—Anonymous, Epistle to Diognetus (1968, 144, circa 120–200
A.D., quoted in Smith, 2010, 28–9)
I. INTRODUCTION
President Barack Obama has a short quote emblazoned on his Oval Office
rug and emphasized in several of his speeches: “the arc of the moral universe
is long, but it bends toward justice.” His speeches (and his rug) attribute the
quote to Martin Luther King Jr., and rightly so. But King himself recognized
that the quote predates him; it comes from an 1853 sermon fragment by the
abolitionist Unitarian preacher Theodore Parker (NPR, 2010; Stiehm, 2010):
“I do not pretend to understand the moral universe. The arc is a long one.
My eye reaches but little ways. I cannot calculate the curve and complete the
figure by experience of sight. I can divine it by conscience. And from what
I see I am sure it bends toward justice.”
There are many questions worth asking about this short quote and the
sermon fragment from which it is drawn. But here is a basic one: is the
short quote true? In particular, does the arc of the moral universe bend
toward justice? I have often heard that “justice” is getting what you deserve,
“mercy” is getting less than what you deserve, and “grace” is getting what
you do not deserve.1 Now if the arc of the moral universe bends toward
that—toward getting what we deserve—then we are all in deep trouble
according to Christian teaching—or, for that matter, Platonic teaching
(see Cephalus at the start of the Republic and Socrates at the end of it).
Fortunately, a fuller Christian view—as seen in Psalm 103 and countless
other passages—is that the arc of the moral universe bends toward mercy
and grace, while also working the sort of justice Parker and King and
Obama were thinking of:2
The Lord works righteousness
and justice for all the oppressed.
He made known his ways to Moses,
his deeds to the people of Israel:
The Lord is compassionate and gracious,
slow to anger, abounding in love.
He will not always accuse,
nor will he harbor his anger forever;
he does not treat us as our sins deserve
or repay us according to our iniquities.
For as high as the heavens are above the earth,
so great is his love for those who fear him;
as far as the east is from the west,
so far has he removed our transgressions from us.
As a father has compassion on his children,
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so the Lord has compassion on those who fear him;
for he knows how we are formed,
he remembers that we are dust. (Psalm 103)
Such mercy and grace is a delightful surprise. It is like the surprise of a
prodigal son hobbling back to beg for wage work from a father whose love
he scorned and whose wealth he squandered—and being welcomed by
that father with individual embraces and communal celebrations with all
the rights and privileges of sonship (Luke 15). Such surprises lead Christian
individuals and communities to live in delightfully “surprising” ways—the
Epistle to Diognetus noted in the epigraph above. For example, they show
mercy and grace to each other in nonjudgmental ways—as one of the earliest Christians writes, “mercy triumphs over judgment” ( James 2:13). And
such surprises have open-ended consequences for Christian bioethics. For
example, bioethical debate need not focus on condemning others who do
wrong, but can seek first to bless others whenever possible—without endorsing evil.3 Bioethical deliberation need not revolve around dilemmas of moral
duty, but can focus on reflecting divine mercy to everyone, but especially to
“the least well off” (more on this below). The summum bonum in bioethics need not be justice (especially not in terms of giving people what they
deserve), but can be a form of benevolence overflowing with love and compassion. And so on.
I think there are many surprises like this in Christian bioethics. In addressing what is so Christian about Christian bioethics, I originally planned to
contrast seven delightful surprises with the seven deadly sins. But space (and
sloth?) prevented me from executing that larger plan, so I am attempting a
smaller version of it sparked by one of C.S. Lewis’ statements about what
makes Christian ethics distinctive:
According to this longer scheme [of thinking about ethics] there are seven “virtues.” Four of them are called “Cardinal” virtues, and the remaining three are called
“Theological” virtues. The “Cardinal” ones are those which all civilised people recognise: the “Theological” are those which, as a rule, only Christians know about.
(Lewis, [1952] 2015, 77)
As Lewis explains, the four cardinal virtues are prudence, justice, temperance, and fortitude, while the three theological ones are faith, hope, and
charity (love). So I shall describe some delightful surprises of Christian bioethics through the lenses of faith, hope, and love. But I begin with the greatest of these: love.4
II. LOVE—A DISTINCTIVE CENTER OF CHRISTIAN BIOETHICS
The fragment from the Epistle to Diognetus with which I began continues
as follows:
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For instance, though they are residents at home in their own countries, their behavior there is more like transients; they take their full part as citizens, but they also submit to anything and everything, as if they were aliens. For them, any foreign country
is a motherland, and any motherland is a foreign country. Like other men, they marry
and beget children, though they do not expose their infants. Any Christian is free to
share his neighbor’s table, but never his marriage-bed. Though destiny has placed
them here in the flesh, they do not live after the flesh; their days are passed on earth,
but their citizenship is above in the heavens. They obey the prescribed laws, but in
their own private lives they transcend the laws. They show love to all men—and all
men persecute them. (Anonymous, 1968, 144–5)
While there are many surprises worth unpacking in this fragment, I would like
to focus on how the Epistle’s claim that Christians “show love to all men—and
all men persecute them” is relevant to a distinctively Christian bioethics.
I begin with an odd illustrative challenge: although it falls far short of
persecution, many now complain that Christian teachings about love do not
fit well with one another; in particular, God instructs us to love one another
but then seems (to some) to be a terrible prude about sexual love. Far from
being a delightful surprise, some see Christian teaching about love to be
incoherent and oppressive.
In response, imagine aliens from Venus send a spy to earth for an initial
brief watch-and-learn mission. She arrives, undetected, right in the middle
of the opening ceremonies of the 2008 summer Olympics in Beijing. She
instantly becomes fascinated by earthling sports. Especially swimming: while
her planet has nothing like it, earthlings revel in it, with hourly swimming
contests broadcast via satellite around the planet. The alien spends nearly her
entire visit sitting poolside, watching races. The devices that earthlings wear
to swim faster, like goggles, caps, earplugs, and speed-enhancing swimsuits
especially fascinate her. Finally, she is delighted by how earthlings capture
slices of time in photographs to enjoy at later times—like the finish of a very
close swimming race involving Michael Phelps.
Given her alien fascination with sports, with pictures, and with the
special accoutrements of swimmers, she decides to pick up a memento
which (she thinks) is the only logical item that will combine each of these
things in one place: the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue. Imagine our
alien’s surprise when she opens up the magazine. “There are no pictures
of sports here. There is nobody even swimming. The swimwear displayed
is completely different from what I saw in the Olympics, and not obviously designed for helping anyone move faster through the water. What
on earth is going on here?!”
The point of this example is that reality sometimes has a shape and structure that cannot be inferred merely by patching together the parts of what we
learn elsewhere. In this way, God’s instructions on life are like the Swimsuit
Issue. These instructions sometimes seem bizarre to those with a genuine but
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partial exposure to Him, just as the Issue seemed bizarre to the alien with a
genuine but partial exposure to us.5
This thought experiment, of course, does not amount to a robust defense
of Christian teaching on sexual love or love in general—nor does it constitute
a case for seeing either as a delightful surprise. Still, it hints at why we should
not give up traditional Christian teachings on love merely because people
complain that its distinctiveness makes it incoherent or difficult or both.6
A few years ago I agreed to a public debate with a colleague about whether a
Christian theistic approach is the most complete and useful way to think about
ethics. I began by arguing that an approach to morality will be more complete
and useful, in part, to the extent that it adequately answers three questions:
1.
2.
3.
What is the good life? (In other words, where is my true happiness,
fulfillment, and well-being found?)
What is a good person? (In other words, what would it mean for me
to have true inner goodness, rightness, virtuousness, character?)
How can good lives and good persons be developed and maintained?
(In other words, how can I actually become the kind of person I hunger to be and live the kind of life I hunger to live?)
As some readers will instantly recognize, this echoes the writings of the late
Dallas Willard.7 I thus referred to Willard’s claim that Jesus of Nazareth’s
approach to these questions has been uniquely deep and powerful,8 and that
Jesus answers the three questions this way:
1.
2.
3.
You are well-off when you are in an interactive relationship with God
and His kingdom.
A truly good person is one pervaded by love—love for God and love
for others.
You become a truly good person by putting your confidence in Jesus,
by becoming his student or apprentice in living from the kingdom of
God.
In contrast, today a common way of framing the relationship between ethics
and religion is to say that whether or not a particular religion is true, and
whether or not we know it is true, we can have a perfectly complete and
useful way of thinking about ethics. This view also typically says that regardless of what religion you subscribe to, and indeed regardless of whether you
subscribe to any religion at all, you can still have a perfectly complete and
useful way of thinking about ethics.
I think this common way of framing things is mistaken. For one thing, if
a given religion is true, that makes a difference as to what counts as a complete and useful way to think about ethics. If Christianity is true, there are
duties that we have that we would not have if it were false, consequences
of our actions that we need to take into account that we would not need to
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267
take into account if it were false, and virtues that we should cultivate that we
would not need to cultivate if it were false.
There are many ways to illustrate this, but let me pick just one illustration
that I think makes the point in a straightforward way. In the twelfth chapter
of Mark’s gospel, there is a story about a teacher who asks Jesus a question:
One of the teachers of the law came and heard them debating. Noticing that Jesus
had given them a good answer, he asked him, “Of all the commandments, which
is the most important?” “The most important one,” answered Jesus, “is this: ‘Hear,
O Israel, the Lord our God, the Lord is one. Love the Lord your God with all your
heart and with all your soul and with all your mind and with all your strength.’ The
second is this: ‘Love your neighbor as yourself.’ There is no commandment greater
than these.” “Well said, teacher,” the man replied. “You are right in saying that God
is one and there is no other but him. To love him with all your heart, with all your
understanding and with all your strength, and to love your neighbor as yourself is
more important than all burnt offerings and sacrifices.” When Jesus saw that he had
answered wisely, he said to him, “You are not far from the kingdom of God.” (Mark
12:28–3; see also a similar discussion in Matthew 22:34–40 and Luke 10:25–37)
So, then, if we were to boil this down to just two duties (or commands, or
goals) for living the moral life, they would be, first, to love God with all that
is in you, and second, to love your neighbor as you love yourself.
I take it as noncontroversial that any nonreligious approach to ethics is
not going to tell us that we have a duty to love God with all that is in us.
A nonreligious approach to ethics is going to ignore that duty, and even say
that it is not a duty. So even if a nonreligious approach says, “yes, you have
a duty to love your neighbor as you love yourself,” it is still going to be only
giving us one out of two. It is going to be incomplete.
But this incompleteness is not merely numerical. It is not like simple subtraction, where your system has one less rule than mine (mine has 2, yours
has 1; mine has 100, yours has 99). It is not even like simple division, where
one system has half the rules of the other (mine has 2, yours has 1; mine has
100, yours has 50). If Christianity is true, missing the “love God” command
is not merely incomplete, but radically incomplete.9 If Christianity is true,
and you say “I am a follower of morality, but I do not think the love of God
is important,” that is like saying “I am a follower of Aristotle’s approach to
morality, but I do not think the virtues are important.” Or “I am a follower
of Kant’s approach to morality, but I do not think the categorical imperative
is important.” Or “I am a follower Mill’s approach to morality, but I do not
think the principle of utility is important.” These statements are more humorous than coherent because they deny the core of what they claim to follow.
The point can be made another way. There is a view in the history of
philosophy known as solipsism. This name comes from the Latin words
solus ipse meaning “I alone exist.” Solipsism is a radical sort of skepticism
about other people, other minds, and/or other things. Now imagine what
happens if a solipsist picks up a few bits and pieces of Kant’s ethics, which
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emphasizes respecting persons. The solipsist thinks “sure, I must respect persons. But I am the only person who exists. So I must respect myself. See,
I have found a perfectly complete and useful system of ethics.” Our solipsist
will not fare much better if she reads Aristotle, and learns that she must cultivate the virtues—for of course, she will think only of cultivating her own
virtues. Or if she reads Mill, and learns that she must promote the happiness
of all beings who can suffer—of course, she thinks that she is the only one
who can feel pleasure or pain. The metaphysical views of the solipsist—that
she alone exists—affects how much she can get out of moral philosophy.
Secular ethics is a kind of solipsism. Of course, it does not say “I alone
exist.” Instead, it says “we alone exist.” Secular ethics is a kind of socialized
solipsism. When it says we must be concerned about respecting persons, it
ignores respecting the three persons of the holy Trinity. When it says we
must be concerned about promoting pleasure or happiness, it ignores pleasing God or promoting the divine happiness. When it says we must be concerned about virtues, it neglects those virtues that tie in to living well in the
kingdom of God.10
I said above that nonreligious approaches may recognize a duty to love your
neighbor as you love yourself. But often, this is not quite true. Nonreligious
approaches often water down this duty considerably. “Love your neighbor
as you love yourself” turns to “Love your neighbor,” which turns to “Benefit
your neighbor,” which turns to “Do not harm your neighbor,” which turns to
“Do not harm your neighbor just for the fun of it,” and so on. What started
out as a robust, generous, fruitful, creative duty has gradually become merely
the sort of minimalist duty to keep us from destroying each other. While not
destroying each other is important, it is hardly as complete as loving your
neighbor as you love yourself.
This is all I have to say here about the completeness of Christian ethics. But
how useful is it? Well, it is useful in telling you what your duties are, what
consequences to take into account, and what virtues to cultivate. These are
things that you would often not figure out on your own unless God had told
you them, or else had told someone else to tell you them.
But consider another dimension of usefulness. John Hare, in his book The
Moral Gap (1997), argues that Immanuel Kant was right to say that morality
was too difficult for human beings except with God’s assistance. Hare argues
that many moral philosophers these days take the human moral situation to
involve three main ingredients: first, the demand of morality on each of us
to think and to act in a particular way; second, the fact that we are unable
on our own to think and to act this way; and third, the suggestion of some
“at least possible being” who makes and meets the moral demand, and who
is thus the ultimate source of its authority. Now “the moral gap” is “the gap
between the moral demand on us and our natural capacities to live by it”
(Hare, 1997, 1); it is the distance we find between what we can think and do
and what we should think and do.
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The traditional Christian view, of course, is that the being assumed by
morality’s third ingredient actually exists and that, for those of us who
believe in Him, He actively intervenes to change our moral inability (the
second ingredient) so that our capacities, with His assistance, become
adequate to the moral demand (the first ingredient). But current threeingredient moral theories that abandon the traditional Christian view, and
then put nothing comparable in its place, have a much harder time bridging this gap.11
Consider two examples (though not from Hare) of secular shortfalls
related to loving others. First, the atheist author Douglas Coupland wrote
Life After God in 1994, and at the end of the book he makes a remarkable
confession:
Now—here is my secret: I tell it to you with an openness of heart that I doubt I shall
ever achieve again, so I pray that you are in a quiet room as you hear these words.
My secret is that I need God—that I am sick and can no longer make it alone. I need
God to help me give, because I no longer seem capable of giving; to help me be
kind, as I no longer seem capable of kindness; to help me love, as I seem beyond
being able to love. (Coupland, 1994, 359)
Second, the atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell claims loving our enemies
is too difficult: “The Christian principle, ‘Love your enemies’ is good. . . .
There is nothing to be said against it except that it is too difficult for most
of us to practice sincerely” (Russell, 1945, 359). Dallas Willard observes that
Russell “was, of course, right as he understood it, for he was thinking of
himself and others remaining what they were inwardly and nevertheless
trying to love their enemies as occasion arose. Of course, they would fail,
at least most of the time” (Willard 1998, 183). But Russell’s mistake, says
Willard, was making
his aim keeping the law rather than becoming the kind of person whose deeds naturally conform to the law. Jesus knew the human heart better than Bertrand Russell
did. Thus he concludes his exposition of the kingdom kind of goodness by contrasting the ordinary way human beings love, loving those who love them, with God’s
agape love. This is a love that reaches everyone we deal with . . . It is the very core of
what we are or can become in his fellowship, not something we do. Then the deeds
of love, including loving our enemies, are what that agape love does in us and what
we do as the new persons we have become. (Willard, 1998, 183–4)
The fragment from the Epistle to Diognetus quoted at the start of this section illustrates how loving enemies has actually been practiced, sincerely,
by Christian communities—to the surprise of a watching world. Distinctively
Christian bioethics, in this century and in others, can draw on the manysplendored thing of divine love, including love toward enemies—after all,
we were once God’s enemies when he sent his Son to rescue us!—from the
bench to the bedside to the lectern and beyond.
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III. FAITH: A DISTINCTIVE KNOWLEDGE IN CHRISTIAN BIOETHICS
Lewis ([1970] 2014) once wrote that
one of the things that distinguishes man from the other animals is that he wants to
know things, wants to find out what reality is like, simply for the sake of knowing. .
. . If Christianity is untrue, then no honest man will want to believe it, however helpful it might be: if it is true, every honest man will want to believe it, even if it gives
him no help at all. (108–9)
Is knowledge important for a distinctively Christian bioethics? Yes indeed.
And it is a surprise—a delightful surprise—to discover that knowledge and
faith are friends, and that the “faith once for all delivered to the saints” ( Jude
1:3) is a friend to every kind of genuine knowledge.
One of Dallas Willard’s consistent themes was the friendship between faith
and knowledge. As he introduced his book Knowing Christ Today (2009),
This book is about knowledge and about claims to knowledge in relationship to
life and Christian faith. It is concerned, more precisely, with the trivialization of faith
apart from knowledge and with the disastrous effects of a repositioning of faith in
Jesus Christ, and of life as his students, outside the category of knowledge. (2009, 1;
emphasis in the original, here and elsewhere below)
This epistemological project has practical implications for individuals in
Christian bioethics. In this section I highlight parts of the project and then
draw out some implications using a framework by Henry Blamires in his
excellent but under-appreciated book The Christian Mind (1963).
Willard’s central claim is that “A life of steadfast discipleship to Jesus Christ
can be supported only upon assured knowledge of how things are, of the
realities in terms of which that life is lived.” His two desires are to help all
serious people, whether Christians or not, understand “the indispensable role
of knowledge in faith and life” and “that there is a body of uniquely Christian
knowledge, one that is available to all who would appropriately seek it and
receive it” (Willard, 2009, 7, italics in original). He is aware that such thoughts
are controversial:
thinking of Christian faith as grounded in knowledge, and in some parts to be
knowledge, is to bring oneself into conflict with some of the most basic assumptions
of modern thought and to threaten the foundations of a painfully achieved compromise in social order, one that excludes religion from the domain of knowledge in
order to exclude it in other respects. (32)
But why is this controversial, rather than welcomed as a delightful surprise?
One reason is that knowledge itself—whether propositional or personal—is
never presumptuous or pushy:
Like all knowledge of any complexity and depth, that [distinctively Christian] body
of knowledge does not jump down one’s throat, and no one can force it upon
another. It has to be welcomed to be possessed. And because, in this case, it is
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essentially a knowledge of persons, it has the special characteristics and makes the
special demands upon the knower peculiar to that kind of knowledge. But it is available, and available as knowledge, to those of normal human abilities who seek it
in ways suited to its subject matter. When understood and accepted as knowledge,
it is objectively testable—again, in ways suitable to its subject matter—and it lays a
foundation for action and character that is unequaled for human good. (7–8)
Another reason why this is controversial, rather than welcomed as a delightful surprise, is that even religious people (even many Christians) “now tend
to be uneasy or suspicious about knowledge; they no longer see it as a
friend, but, more likely, as an enemy.” So Willard begins with some clarifications of the connections between knowledge and the rest of life, “to show
the way in which knowledge is a friend of faith, essential to faith and to our
relationship with God in the spiritual life” (10).
Knowledge is different from belief, commitment, or profession, although
these things often go together (15–7). We have knowledge of something
“when we are representing it . . . as it actually is, on an appropriate basis of
thought and experience,” but such knowledge need not involve certainty. We
can believe things we do not know, because belief “has no necessary tie to
truth, good method, or evidence” but “is a matter of . . . a readiness to act,
in appropriate circumstances, as if what is believed were so.” Commitment
need not involve knowledge or belief, since it is “simply a matter of choosing and implementing a course of action” (a lost hiker in the woods must
commit to a trail not because she knows/believes that to be the right way
but because she knows/believes she must do something). And profession of
something (knowledge, belief, commitment) need not involve genuine possession of the thing professed.
And yet we know that knowledge really matters: “Knowledge, but not
mere belief or commitment, confers on its possessor an authority or right—
even a responsibility—to act, to direct action, to establish and supervise
policy, and to teach” (Willlard, 2009, 17). This is why we want car mechanics
and heart surgeons who know what they are doing, not merely those who
believe or commit or profess to fix your car or your heart. But Willard shows
that precisely the same thing was true of the characters in biblical and church
history (they had, and valued, knowledge), and especially so when they performed acts of faith:
We can never understand the life of faith seen in scripture and in serious Christian
living unless we drop the idea of faith as a “blind leap” and understand that faith is
commitment to action, often beyond our natural abilities, based upon knowledge of
God and God’s ways. (20)
After explaining why the New Testament firmly supports this connection
between faith and knowledge, Willard summarizes the historical struggle for
the Western mind from late medieval and early modern Europe, resulting in
“where we stand today:”
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Religion, and the Christian tradition in particular—because it was the form of religion that occupied the ground in Europe and North America—lost in the public
mind its standing as a body of knowledge about what is real and what is right.
It could no longer presume in society at large to direct action, to formulate and
supervise policy, and to teach its principles as knowledge of how things really
are (24).
As Willard tells the story, it was not merely non-Christians that brought this
about, but it was “Christian leaders and institutions of one stripe or another”
(liberals and conservatives, for example) who “abandoned knowledge to the
secular mind and even promulgated the idea that if you knew something,
you could not have faith in it” (25).
One pervasive result of ubiquitous relevance for bioethics today is the
already-mentioned “painfully achieved compromise in social order,” and on
this Willard is worth quoting at some length:
In the United States that social order is most visible in the phrase “separation of church
and state.” There is, of course, a perfectly good and indispensable sense in which that
language has application and should be zealously upheld. That is the sense of the First
Amendment to the Constitution of the United States. But in general usage today, what
it really means is that what religion teaches is not a matter of knowledge of reality. It
is, rather, only a matter of what certain human groups have accepted as a part of their
historical identity, and what (it is assumed) they are all too glad to force upon other
groups and individuals as opportunity offers. If it were seriously imagined that the
teachings of Christianity or other religions constituted a vital and irreplaceable knowledge of reality, there would be no more talk of the separation of church and state than
there is of the separation of chemistry or economics and state. (32)
The remainder of Knowing Christ Today is an exploration of how faith and
knowledge go together, how Christian knowledge (of God’s reality and
goodness and works in the world, even today) is possible, and how such
Christian knowledge provides a secure foundation for discipleship, pluralism,
tolerance, and many other good things. While knowledge by itself is never
enough (Paul was right that “knowledge . . . puffs up” [I Corinthians 8:1]),
Willard aims to apply Augustine’s formula of “faith seeking understanding:”
Faith, indeed, is not the same thing as knowledge, and it arises in many ways, often
independently of knowledge. But it is possible, and a very good thing, to have
knowledge of the same things we have faith in. Knowledge strengthens faith, sometimes by allowing us to grasp an item of faith in such a way that it also becomes an
item of knowledge. Knowledge also can and often has laid a foundation for faith.
We do often believe things because we have come to know them, and that is an
ideal condition of belief. On the other hand, faith commonly acts as a framework
and guide for the development and use of knowledge. Neither is complete without
the other. (34)
One immediate application of this to Christian bioethics is that Christians in
bioethics can (and should) strive to know whatever can be known (whether
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it be distinctively Christian or not) about bioethics. We also can and should
present what we know as knowledge with a calm and gracious spirit. These
are no easy tasks. But after reading Willard, I think they are not just options,
but duties. Why? Because knowledge carries with it both rights and responsibilities. It is hard not to see Christian bioethicists as being addressed by
Willard’s last chapter on “Pastors as Teachers of the Nations:”
Who is to bring the knowledge that will answer the great life questions that perplex
humanity? Who is to teach the world—the “nations,” people of all kinds—the knowledge that belongs to Christ and his people? In any subject matter the responsibility
to teach falls upon those who have the corresponding knowledge. With respect to
Christian knowledge, the primary responsibility to teach falls upon those who selfidentify as spokespeople for Christ and who perhaps have some leadership position
or role in Christian organizations. I shall use the word “pastors” for such people, but
the word is here to be taken very broadly; it refers not just to those who hold a position with that title—though it is especially for them. (Willard, 2009, 193)
Instead of discussing from this point on what a particular Christian bioethicst should teach (since that may vary from person to person depending
on what he or she knows), in what follows I will address how a typical
Christian bioethicist should think. I structure my remarks around five ideas
from Henry Blamires, a student of Lewis and author of The Christian Mind:
How Should a Christian Think? This book is the origin of the phrase “thinking Christianly,” and the second half of the book is titled “The Marks of the
Christian Mind.” I here note five of those marks (Blamires lists six) as jumping-off-points for how a Christian can (and should, and often does) think
distinctively about bioethics.
One mark of the Christian mind is its supernatural orientation. I think
Christian bioethicists can and should employ what Thomas Morris calls “theological realism:”
The Judeo-Christian religious tradition is not just a domain of poetry, imagery, mystical transport, moral directive, and noncognitive, existential self-understanding. . . .
I [take for granted] theological realism, the cognitive stance presupposed by the classical theistic concern to direct our thoughts as well as our lives aright. It has been the
intent of theologians throughout most of the history of the Christian faith to describe
correctly, within our limits, certain important facts about God, human beings, and
the rest of creation given in revelation and fundamental to the articulation of any
distinctively Christian world view. In particular, reflective Christians throughout the
centuries have understood their faith as providing key insights into, and resources
for, the construction of a comprehensive metaphysics. (Morris, 1988, 3)
I believe that the distinctive contributions of Christian theology to bioethical
questions can and should take at least two forms: supplying moral norms
(as Morris puts it, “moral directive”) and describing facts about the world (as
Morris puts it, “the construction of a comprehensive metaphysics”). Consider
the following illustration. The Christian and the secular moralist might both
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agree to the moral norm “respect persons.” Yet just as the scribe asked Jesus
“who is my neighbor?”, contemporary bioethicists ask, “who is a person?”
Christian metaphysics tells us who is a person. It tells us that persons include
God, indeed the three persons of the holy Trinity; that persons include angels,
whether holy or fallen; that persons include living human organisms, of all
stages of development or decay; that persons include dead and disembodied
humans, waiting for their resurrection bodies. Combining some of these, it
tells us that the concept of a person must be understood in such a way to
make coherent the entire career of the second person of the Trinity, including his preincarnate state, his fetal state, his infant, childhood, adolescent,
and adult states, and his states of being crucified, dead, buried, resurrected,
ascended, and glorified.
Two more marks of the Christian mind, according to Blamires, are its
conception of truth and its acceptance of authority. I see these as related,
for although I think truth can come from various sources, it is ultimately
unified by the authority of God (as revealed in and through, of course,
such things as sacred scripture, the body of believers, and our personal
experience).
Since truth can come from various sources, a distinctively Christian bioethics can and should be collaborative—for example, between Christians
trained in disciplines like theology, philosophy, molecular biology, and biblical exegesis. Since truth is ultimately unified, a distinctively Christian bioethics can and should resist the tendency to over-emphasize one good thing so
that it squashes out others. Chesterton made this point in Orthodoxy:
When a religious scheme is shattered . . . it is not merely the vices that are let loose.
The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are
let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible
damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues
have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering
alone. (Chesterton, [1908] 1995, 24)
Chesterton makes this point by considering the virtues of pity, truthfulness,
and humility. He claimed the modern world (writing in 1908) was divided
up into groups that tended to emphasize just one of these virtues in such a
way that the virtue it emphasized squashed or strangled the other virtues.
I believe this problem is still with us today. Many issues illustrate it, but
here is one: those who favor destructive research on human embryos often
emphasize compassion and pity for people suffering from debilitating diseases. Of course these virtues are important (as I emphasized in my introduction to the present essay). But it is not compatible with justice (!) to end
some innocent human lives in order to save others—to sacrifice our children
to save our parents (or ourselves).12
Interestingly, the ellipsis I inserted at the start of Chesterton’s quote conceals
a parenthetical phrase: “(as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation).”
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275
But the problem of fragmented virtues is arguably solved not by reversing
the Reformation but by heeding the apostle Paul’s encouragement:
Therefore, as God’s chosen people, holy and dearly loved, clothe yourselves with
compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience. Bear with each other and
forgive whatever grievances you may have against one another. Forgive as the Lord
forgave you. And over all these virtues put on love, which binds them all together in
perfect unity. (Colossans 3:12–14; emphasis mine)
Two other marks of the Christian mind according to Blamires are its awareness of evil and its concern for the person. I see these two as related as well.
The main opponents of a distinctively Christian bioethics are not “liberals”
(or for that matter “conservatives”). The main opponents of Christian bioethics are the lust of the flesh, the lust of the eyes, and the boastful pride of life;
indeed, the world, the flesh, and the devil. Paul recognized that our conflict
was not against merely human rulers, and his words are relevant to distinctively Christian bioethicists:
Finally, be strong in the Lord and in his mighty power. Put on the full armor of God
so that you can take your stand against the devil’s schemes. For our struggle is not
against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the
powers of this dark world and against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly
realms. (Ephesians 6:10–12)
Such awareness of evil encounters objections that are positively Orwellian—
like the following quotes from George Orwell’s critical review of Lewis’ That
Hideous Strength:
One could recommend this book unreservedly if Mr. Lewis had succeeded in keeping it all on a single level. Unfortunately, the supernatural keeps breaking in, and
it does so in rather confusing, undisciplined ways . . . Mr. Lewis appears to believe
in the existence of such [evil] spirits, and of benevolent ones as well. He is entitled
to his beliefs, but they weaken his story, not only because they offend the average
reader’s sense of probability but because in effect they decide the issue in advance.
When one is told that God and the Devil are in conflict one always knows which
side is going to win. The whole drama of the struggle against evil lies in the fact that
one does not have supernatural aid. (Orwell, [1945] 1998, 351)
Orwell’s remarks remind me of what happened when a question of the
apostles in Acts 1:6—“Lord, dost thou at this time restore the kingdom
unto Israel?”—meets the critical commentary of John Calvin—“There are
as many errors in this question as words” (Commentary on Acts 1:6, 184750). While I am no Calvin, and Orwell is no apostle, let me try on the role
of the former in response to the latter for a moment. The supernatural,
almost by definition, need not follow “natural” laws and hence may break
in, in rather confusing, undisciplined ways. The average reader’s sense of
probability probably includes good and evil spirits, and their presence in
a story hardly decides the issue in advance (see: Job, Judas). Finally, the
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drama of the struggle against evil remains in a story qua story even when
the reader knows exactly which side is going to win (see Animal Farm
[Orwell, 1945] and Nineteen Eighty-Four [Orwell, 1949]).
In any event, because of the evil we face, both within ourselves and
within the surrounding world, it is all the more important to have mercy on,
and pity for, those who might oppose us in public debates about bioethical
issues—in short, to have concern for the person.
Concern for the person means at least two things: being concerned for
the least well off, and being concerned for the eternal welfare of everyone.
Christ’s relentless love for the least well off is well known. But Packer’s
Knowing God has sharp words about this that bear repeating:
It is our shame and disgrace today that so many Christians—I will be more
specific: so many of the soundest and most orthodox Christians—go through
this world in the spirit of the priest and the Levite in our Lord’s parable, seeing
human needs all around them, but (after a pious wish, and perhaps a prayer, that
God might meet those needs) averting their eyes and passing by on the other
side. That is not the Christian spirit. Nor is it the spirit of those Christians—alas,
they are many—whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middleclass Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the
submiddle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian, to get on
by themselves…The Christian spirit does not shine out in the Christian snob. For
the Christian spirit is the spirit of those who, like their Master, live their whole
lives on the principle of making themselves poor—spending and being spent—to
enrich their fellow humans, giving time, trouble, care and concern, to do good
to others—and not just their own friends—in whatever way there seems need.
(Packer, 1973, 63–4)
Being concerned for the eternal welfare of people is a natural upshot of the
fact that we will all live forever. Instead of saying more about this under the
virtue of faith, I note that this provides a natural segue to our final “theological” virtue relevant to Christian bioethics: hope.
IV. HOPE: A DISTINCTIVE POSTURE OF CHRISTIAN BIOETHICS
It turns out that hope was already discussed throughout the introduction of
this article, since statements about the arc of the moral universe bending
toward justice (or mercy and grace) are, among other things, primarily statements about hope. But in order for such statements to be more than rhetoric
(like “hope and change”) or empty (like “a pious hope”) we need to think
often of who and what our hope should be placed in.
The final bit of the Epistle to Diognetus’ fragment I wish to quote is this:
They [Christians] are misunderstood, and condemned; yet by suffering death they are
quickened into life. They are poor, yet making many rich; lacking all things, yet having
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all things in abundance. . . . They repay [curses] with blessings, and abuse with courtesy.
For the good they do, they suffer stripes as evildoers. (Anonymous, 1968, 145)
Hope, among other things, involves a sober awareness that human death is
not the end of human life—“by suffering death they are quickened into life.”
Nor is death the worst of all evils. Separation and rebellion from God is far
worse than death. And union and partnership with God are sometimes even
accelerated by death.
Our awareness of such things helps us to have perspective when being
“misunderstood” and “condemned” and cursed; suffering “abuse” and
“stripes” as evildoers precisely for doing good. We picture both ourselves
and our fellow humans within the broader frame of eternal life—the eternal life that Christ offers everyone, the eternal life that waits for each of
us beyond death, the eternal life that each of us continues to direct every
moment even now.
One objection to new life-prolonging technologies is that humans
are mortal, with a finite lifespan, and should learn to embrace that fact
rather than flee from it. Although I believe there is something right
about this objection, I also believe it is flawed. A better reason to take a
cautious view of life-prolonging technologies is that humans are immortal, with an infinite lifespan ahead, and should learn to embrace that
fact rather than flee from it. A distinctively Christian bioethics here
involves reflecting on the everlasting future of human persons rather
than simply ignoring it when designing and funding projects to expand
human longevity.
All this is of the first importance for thinking about the comparative values
of things as we do our bioethical work in whatever corner of the globe we
are called to exercise faithfulness in a few things. As Lewis puts the point in
another context,
Christianity asserts that every individual human being is going to live forever.
. . . If individuals live only seventy years, then a state, or a nation, or a civilization,
which may last for a thousand years, is more important than an individual. But if
Christianity is true, then the individual is not only more important but incomparably
more important, for he is everlasting and the life of a state or a civilization, compared
with his, is only a moment. (Lewis [1952] 2015, 74–5)
Since I have already written elsewhere about the topic of personal immortality in bioethics (DiSilvestro, 2012), I will not belabor this point any
further but will close this article by emphasizing why it is a delightful surprise. Christian bioethics should not forget this distinction in its midst and
how it connects up with the mercy and grace of God. In a famous scene,
a young man once approached John Wesley with questions stemming
from his tormented unbelief: “All is dark; my thoughts are lost, but I hear
that you preach to a great number of people every night and morning.
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Pray, what would you do with them? Whither would you lead them? What
religion do you preach? What is it good for?” The response Wesley gave
is worth constantly returning to as we do distinctively Christian bioethics
(Wesley, 1995; quoted in Smith, 2009, 1):
You ask, what would I do with them? I would make them virtuous and happy, easy
in themselves, and useful to others. Whither would I lead them? To heaven, to God
the judge, the lover of all, and to Jesus the mediator of the New Covenant. What
religion do I preach? The religion of love. The law of kindness brought to light by
the gospel. What is this good for? To make all who receive it enjoy God and themselves, to make them like God, lovers of all, contented in their lives, and crying out
at their death, in calm assurance, “O grave where is thy victory! Thanks be to God,
who giveth me victory, through my Lord Jesus Christ.”
NOTES
1. This quote, in talking about what we deserve, is talking especially about punishment. I recall
hearing this ever since my undergraduate student days in the late 1990s. Google currently attributes the
quote to journalist/author/blogger Kathleeen Falsani, especially her book Sin Boldly. But she introduces
it without claiming origination: “as I understand it . . . ” (Falsani, 2008, 14). I suspect she, like me, is not
sure of the quote’s real origin.
2. Obama and King and Parker are likely thinking about some type of social justice here—something roughly like “respecting the legitimate claims or rights of the least fortunate members of society,
making sure that they get treated with the equality and dignity that they deserve rather than getting
overlooked or even trampled on.” When “justice” is taken that way, of course, one might be sympathetic
with the idea that the carpet quote is more than just a pious hope, and that societies—often under the
influence of the gospel—can eventually reduce the amount of slavery, infanticide, child abuse, and
various and sundry other social injustices of which the human race is capable. But there are older and
richer meanings of “justice” standing behind such social meanings, from Greek philosophers like Plato to
Biblical prophets like Amos. Justice is relevant to things both larger and smaller than human society, since
it concerns individual moral agents and their relationship to whatever cosmic or divine order of things
there may be. While there are no doubt specifically Christian ways of thinking about the many-splendored
thing we call “justice,” I shall follow the pattern of omission that I began in the title and shall largely avoid
saying more about justice in this essay.
3. An anonymous reviewer helpfully reminded me that more can and should be said here, since
Christians have always both judged right from wrong (even preaching against evil) and prayed for mercy
and repentence for the wrongdoer. So my remarks in the text should be read as a matter of emphasis,
priority, and frequency. Christians are those who both start orphanages and preach abstinence before
marriage, and we dare not let either friends or foes frame our work as entirely one or the other.
4.One reviewer wondered whether it is possible to understand Christian faith, hope, and love
without repentance. I think this contextual question is difficult, but the answer is both “yes” and “no.” Yes,
one can understand, at least partially, these virtues and their attractiveness, even before one repents. But
no, one cannot understand, adequately and experientially, these virtues without responding to the grand
invitation, “repent, for the kingdom of God is at hand.”
5.Fortunate readers may recognize that I am adapting here a delightful alien example from
Chapter 6 (“The Paradoxes of Christianity”) of Chesterton’s Orthodoxy ([1908] 1995). I also picked Venus
as a gesture toward Lewis’ Perelandra ([1944] 1996), in which a Venutian female must decide whether
to obey a divine instruction that seemed (to her, at any rate) curious and pointless. Of course, I trust no
one will construe my example as an endorsement of the Swimsuit Issue! My advice on that is to consult
Matthew 5:27–30 and 1 Corinthians 6:18–20.
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6.In addition to the writers discussed below, one may wish to consult how Christian accounts
of love overlap yet differ from secular accounts of love in Lewis, The Four Loves ([1960] 1971). See also
Adams, Finite and Infinite Goods (2002), especially Part II, “Loving the Good”.
7. See especially his Knowing Christ Today (2009).
8. As Willard put it (1998, 13), “I think we finally have to say that Jesus’ enduring relevance is based on
his historically proven ability to speak to, to heal and empower the individual human condition. He matters
because of what he brought and what he still brings to ordinary human beings, living their ordinary lives
and coping daily with their surroundings. He promises wholeness for their lives. In sharing our weakness
he gives us strength and imparts through his companionship a life that has the quality of eternity. . . . To be
the light of life, and to deliver God’s life to women and men where they are and as they are, is the secret of
the enduring relevance of Jesus. Suddenly they are flying right-side up, in a world that makes sense.”
9. The main point pressed in this paragraph is the serious incompleteness of a system whose central
organizing goal has been removed—much like an archery course in which the bull’s-eyes (or the innermost circles, or indeed all the concentric circles) have been artificially cut out of the paper targets. But—to
continue the archery metaphor—the robustness of Christian ethics on this point (of love of God) also
informs the skillful shooting of the moral arrow. To illustrate what is missing from secular ethics and why it
really matters on this element, consider that the love of God gets its practical structure from (among other
things) an obedient friendship with the triune God (“you are my friends if you obey what I command”),
from the sacrificial model of Jesus (“greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his life for his
friends”), and from the mixed motives of initial reciprocity and generous response (“we love God because
he first loved us”). It will not do merely to take an ordinary secular conception of love (perhaps some
dedivinized forms of eros, philia, storge, or agape), and to merely “aim that” at God. (Of course, God can
and does meet any person where she is, no matter how feeble her first steps of love toward Him are.)
10. Perhaps a quick bioethics example can help illustrate this: when approaching the end of life, a
Christian will want to best prepare herself for meeting God face to face (and will want to best prepare
those she loves to do the same). The virtues one needs when preparing to die well are not merely prudentially managing one’s pain and suffering, or courageously getting through that pain and suffering. Nor
merely the backward-looking virtues of settling accounts and repairing relationships with one’s friends
and foes (and family—which straddles both friends and foes!). Those all do matter, of course, but what
about the self-examination needed to prudentially avoid postmortem pains, to courageously prepare for
meeting one’s Maker, and to repair the relational strains with one’s truest Friend and Father in heaven?
11. Of course, as I argued with the love of God earlier (and will argue with the love of enemies in
a moment), the duties themselves can change when moving from secular to Christian ethics. (Thanks to
an anonymous reviewer for pushing me on this point.) The combination of the moral gap and the moral
list of duties (the moral menu?) might be represented alphabetically: a letter on the list represents a duty
our system recognizes; the case of the letter (uppercase or lowercase) represents the demandingness
of the duty; the italics of the letter represents our actual (not just perceived) ability to follow the duty
without God’s special help in Christ (italics = we can do it only with His help). So, then. Secular: a, b, c, D.
Christian: a, b, C, D, e, f, G . . . 12. One anonymous reviewer urged me to elaborate on how justice is implicated in destructive
human embryo research, or else suggest a different virtue or principle (besides justice) to explain the
wrongness or sinfulness of this type of research. Since I have written a bit on this topic elsewhere
(DiSilvestro, 2010), let me just suggest that one type of justice is giving individuals the respectful treatment they deserve; embryos are individuals who deserve to not be destructively experimented on;
hence such research is unjust. Even John Stuart Mill’s account of the harm principle can be seen as
relevant here (Tollefsen, 2015). While I agree with some natural law arguments in favor of such positions—as elaborated, for example, by George and Tollefsen (2008)—I also think it no accident that the
gradual opposition to (and elimination of) things like infanticide (which had been tolerated by Plato
and Aristotle) reached critical mass only after Christian teaching became accepted and ascendant.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thanks to two anonymous reviewers at Christian Bioethics for helpful comments on an earlier version of this article.
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