Last updated on September 18, 2019
Bioethics refers to determining right and wrong values, attitudes, and behaviors with regard to medical care or biological research on human subjects. Most people will run into bioethical issues at one point or another in a very personal manner, when a loved one is dying, or they are facing infertility, or wonder about the ethics of one course of treatment versus another. Beyond that, we all must tackle the broader social issues of racial/ethnic health disparities and federal tax funding of questionable research like human cloning. I could go on. In light of all that, asking why the Church should care about bioethics is the same thing as asking why a person should love his neighbor. Or why a father should love his son? Why ask why? In matters of love and mercy, asking “why?” is not usually very helpful. And yet, in this case, it’s a common question, so I will offer a couple of reasons.
Love Is the Thing
The Church cares about bioethics because of love. It might be said that we should love God and one another because God commands it, but is our love really just a matter of obedience to the law? For us, it’s more than that. Christians love their neighbors because God is love, and His very Spirit lives within us. The persons of the Trinity dwell in a perfect state of loving fellowship with one another. God likewise loves the world. We love each other because we are first the objects of divine love and are being transformed by this love into loving people, the kind of people who love one another. Empowered by your union with God in Christ, you go forth and demonstrate His love to the world – and that starts with the people He has placed in your path. This demonstration of love does not merit God’s favor but is a result of having received his favor already (1 John 4:7-12).
So it’s about love. There’s a comic where someone says, “I do love humanity; it’s just people I can’t stand.” Anyone can love hypothetically. What is challenging is when you have to forgive someone for crushing you or someone treats you in a way that is less than perfectly loving. In the Church, we talk a lot about love but it’s not just a theory. Love has a human face; the Savior is a man, God-in-the-flesh. And more specifically a crucified man. It is impossible to grasp the concept of love without coming to terms with Jesus of Nazareth and His ultimate self-giving act and the implications it has for our values and actions. Being united to Christ, we become His representatives to the particular men and women we encounter, with all of their rough edges and ours.
So, the first major piece of my answer to why the Church cares about bioethics is love. We are the agents of God’s love, first being the objects of God’s love. This perhaps explains why we as individuals should care about bioethics but why should the Church care about bioethics? Isn’t the Church just supposed to preach the gospel?
The gospel is the message that Jesus has reconciled sinners to God by His death on the cross and vindicated them by His resurrection. But it’s not not just correct information about God that we dispense. It’s a message that actually transforms people. It’s a cosmic regime change. We go from being God’s enemies to being His adopted sons in Christ. That’s reality. The mission of the church is indeed to proclaim the gospel, to preach and administer the sacraments, but that is not supposed to be a collection of abstract, high-sounding concepts. The Church is wordy, yes, but Church Words, that is to say God’s Words, are not just hot air. They have creative power to heal and make alive.
Unfortunately, however, there is a type of hyper-spiritualism in some quarters of Christianity that says, or at least implies, that all that is important for the Church to do is save the soul/spirit. The lived reality of being in Christ is hardly considered at all. Pie in the sky when you die. This is a skewed picture of the Christian hope. Scripture is not so cloudy as that. The Bible instead describes eternal life as the redemption of creation and our place in it, of an existence where we rule over a new heaven and earth in our bodies. Christ still bore his scars post-resurrection which may suggest that what we do in this lifetime actually has some meaning for the next. This is not to say that there will be suffering or sadness beyond, but that the body and what happens to it actually matters for us in ways that are important.
The Bible describes eternal life as the redemption of creation and our place in it, of an existence where we rule over a new heaven and earth in our bodies.
Alternatively, there are churches that have adopted a “social” gospel that focus most of their attention on correcting the wrongs of this world and have blurred the gospel itself. For some, this is presented as a false choice: either you preach the gospel for personal salvation or you minister to relieve human suffering. Maybe it should not be an either/or. The heart and center of our faith is Christ crucified and arisen. Add nothing to that. He saves us in time and for eternity. But the first disciples preached forgiveness and healed the sick, like the Savior Himself. There is the common phrase: “Your faith has made you well / Your faith has saved you.” That’s usually two sides of the same coin in the Gospels. The apostles cared about the concerns of the body as well as the soul and we do too. How do you address one without the other?
Human Dignity
And that leads me to my second major point: Human beings have inherent dignity that deserves and demands protection. This is perhaps less obvious to people today. Imagine being a parent of a small child. Your little one appears behind you and asks: “Daddy/Mommy, can I kill this?” How would you answer that question? It depends on what this is. If it’s a termite burrowing into the deck, then yes, it may be killed. If it is the neighbor boy, then the answer is obviously no.[1] You don’t know how to treat a thing unless you know what it is. Our society needs to be reminded of the inherent dignity possessed by all members of the human family simply because they are humans. This is important, as important as love. And it requires that we identify who the members of the human family are which is why there is so much debate about folks on the margins or the unborn or those who are brain damaged, etc. These people, and all others, deserve our respect and protection purely for being human.
Human beings are special because we are the objects of God’s love in a way unlike anything else in creation. Some folks, like ethicist Peter Singer, object to this. They say that privileging humans this way is being “speciesist.” Inventing a term that resembles “racist” is just an attempt to demonize those who hold to the traditional belief that human beings are exceptional in the world, that they have more moral value than other living things. I bump into this problem all the time when I ask my classes, “If you had to choose one, whom would you save from drowning: a stranger or your dog?” That’s a tough one! We love our pets! Hopefully we can agree that every man, woman, and child is a holy and glorious creature for whom the Son of God became flesh and shed His innocent blood to forgive and save. As C.S. Lewis so powerfully says in The Weight of Glory, there are no mere mortals, no ordinary human beings. Next to the Blessed Sacrament, the holiest thing you will encounter in this temporal order is the human person next to you on the bus or in the workplace or at home.
The field of bioethics is complex and ever-changing. Every individual church leader cannot be expected to become an expert in every possible good thing there is. That said, the Church cares about bioethics because the Church is a community formed by God’s love to become the agent of His love in the world, to preach the crucified and risen Jesus, and because every human being is precious to our Creator and Redeemer. What more reason is there?
[1] I believe I got this illustration from a video of Scott Klusendorf.