Reclaiming the Body (The Christian Practice of Everyday Life)

Joel Shuman, M.D. Volck Brian

Description

We live in an age of incredible medical technology, and with it, a great emphasis on health and well-being. We fully entrust the care of our bodies to the medical profession, often taking its solutions and judgments as gospel. But what role, if any, should our Christian faith play in all this? In Reclaiming the Body, a physician and a theologian take a critical look at some of the assumptions we draw from the medical profession and explore what theology has to say about medicine, our bodies, our health, and the Body of Christ. The authors deal with such issues as suffering, caring for the sick, children and reproductive technologies, medicine and the poor, our obsession with physical perfection, and death and dying.

Sujets

• Philosophie et théologie
• Christian theology

Informations

• Publié par: Baker Publishing Group
• Date de parution: 01 février 2006
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781441231796
• Langue: English

Extrait

© 2006 by Joel Shuman and Brian Volck
Published by Brazos Press
a division of Baker Publishing Group
P.O. Box 6287, Grand Rapids, MI 49516-6287
www.brazospress.com
Ebook edition created 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means for example, electronic, photocopy, recording without the prior written permission of the publisher. The only exception is brief quotations in printed reviews.
ISBN 978-1-4412-3179-6
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is on file at the Library of Congress, Washington, DC.
Scripture marked NRSV is taken from the New Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1989, Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture marked RSV is taken from the Revised Standard Version of the Bible, copyright 1952 [2nd edition, 1971] by the Division of Christian Education of the National Council of the Churches of Christ in the United States of America. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Scripture marked KJV is taken from the King James Version of the Bible.
The internet addresses, email addresses, and phone numbers in this book are accurate at the time of publication. They are provided as a resource. Baker Publishing Group does not endorse them or vouch for their content or permanence.
Contents

Cover
Title Page
Copyright Page
Introduction
1. Doctors and Christians
2. Naming the Power of Medicine
3. Life as a Body
4. The Shape of What’s Given
5. What Are Children For?
6. A Body without Borders
7. Perfection Money Can’t Buy
8. Frailty and Grief, Overcome by Hope and Love
Conclusion
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
Series Page
Introduction

In a literature and medicine course one of us teaches to fourth-year medical students, classes begin with a writing prompt relevant to the book or story to be discussed. Like their teachers, our students punctuate more pedestrian efforts with moments of penetrating insight, however unintentional. One prompt, now discarded, asked them to describe how and with whom they hoped to die. Almost without exception, their essays were the antithesis of what they’d witnessed in the hospital. Death takes them placidly, painlessly, and almost by surprise, without time for suffering or unwanted reflection, though beloved friends and family happen by in time to receive touching farewells. Intrusive technological fixes are nowhere to be found, and bodies never falter before the mind or perhaps more importantly the will. Able-bodied octogenarians pass an idyllic afternoon of tennis, terrific sex, and fine wine, then sleep between soft sheets, to be discovered next morning, smiling and dead. Like pornography, it’s thoroughly utopian and cliché-ridden.
Before the rise of biomedical science, Westerners imagined death differently. The thought of dying without careful preparation terrified the average Christian. Something more than personal comfort or pain was at stake: the fate of the soul itself. By way of literary illustration, consider Hamlet’s father’s ghost, demanding revenge upon Claudius, not only for stealing his throne through murder, but for doing so as he slept:
Cut off even in the blossoms of my sin,
Unhous’led, disappointed, unanel’d,
No reck’ning made, but sent to my account
With all my imperfections on my head.
O, horrible! O, horrible, most horrible! (act 1, scene 5)
Later, with perfect opportunity to slay Claudius alone in prayer, Prince Hamlet reconsiders, sheathing his sword for a more opportune moment:
When he is drunk asleep, or in his rage,
Or in th’ incestuous pleasure of his bed,
At game a-swearing, or about some act
That has no relish of salvation in’t. (act 3, scene 3)
Somewhere between Shakespeare and the medical school class of 2005, the mental furnishings of death changed. Now is not the time to review the history of this shift or examine sixteenth-century theological debates over extreme unction, sacramental confession, and judgment. We’re more interested in the medical students who are, we suspect, not much different from other North Americans on the fashionable side of forty. Unlike their nonmedical colleagues, however, these students are quite familiar with the machinery of hospitalized death, which makes their studied silence about technology eerie. Are we reading too much into their death fantasies to see a devil’s bargain with their technologized profession? Medicine and its machines will keep their arteries clean, joints limber, and genitalia perky until that inevitable moment of decline, then suddenly step back, keeping a respectful distance while the vigorous pass mildly away. Religious conviction, or its more consumer-friendly cousin, “spirituality,” rarely makes a show in these dreamy deaths. A single student marveled at the prospect of “finally leaving my body,” a startling comment for someone entering a profession dedicated to body maintenance and repair. We suspect no one in the class noted how far from the Nicene Creed’s “resurrection of the body” his statement fell, but shared religious conviction is too much to suppose in a pluralistic society, and theological language as distinguished from statements of “personal belief” is no more welcome in medical schools than are seminars in chiropractic.
This book is an attempt to reframe that relationship, to ask if theology as lived in the church has something to offer anyone who has had or will have an encounter with the medical establishment. What if, for instance, the things we say in church about God, the body, or our relationships and responsibilities to each other have real consequences beyond church doors? What if they were more than mere whistling in the dark, private comforts in a heartless world?
We are not interested in current fads regarding spirituality and belief as health-and-wellness techniques. One of us has already coauthored a book critiquing this phenomenon. [1] Rather than trying to cram religion into a pigeonhole left momentarily vacant by the medical industry, we ask what theology has to say about medicine, our bodies, and our health. This is not an exercise in medicine-bashing (one of us is a physician!) but rather an opportunity to view the turf medicine typically claims for itself from a new vantage, that of a people who are called to be different. It does not surprise us that many doctors dismiss such critiques as ill informed and benighted: physicians have a clear stake in maintaining medical prestige. What astonishes us is how often people of faith, and particularly clergy, accept such brush-offs. When George Bernard Shaw wrote, “All professions are conspiracies against the laity,” the target of his barb was medicine, not religion. [2]
Perhaps we would do better by saying more about what this book is not. This is not a standard book of medical ethics seen from a Christian perspective. We will not be considering individual medical dilemmas abortion, euthanasia, stem cell research, and so forth examining them philosophically and arriving at recommended responses. In fact, as we argue in chapter 6, this individualized approach gets things exactly wrong. Nor are we endorsing an alternative Christian medical establishment, complete with hospitals, machines, and friendly staff all operating under the official fish-symbol seal of approval. We return instead to the theological traditions of the church in order to reimagine the relationship between Christians and the enterprise named medicine. Thus, our approach, when we turn to practical matters, will be necessarily more suggestive than prescriptive, although to those who assume the medical industry “gets it right,” our stories and illustrations will seem annoyingly out of bounds. In any case, those hoping to find a five-year plan for the re-Christianizing of medicine must look elsewhere.
But, before we get to the stories we offer as alternatives to the constricted way most of us now imagine medicine and health, we attempt to lay some groundwork, drawing on the central theological convictions of historical Christian tradition. By theology, we mean the ways in which those communities gathered to follow and participate in the life of Christ have understood God’s identity, action, and powerful presence among God’s people. By ecclesiology, we mean the ways in which those gathered peoples have understood how to be church, to be gathered by Christ in order to live differently and more fully. In a world more comfortable with individual “seekers” pursuing private “spiritualities,” such communal understandings may seem peculiar at first, even unnatural. Given the propensity for humans to envision themselves each as the psychic center of the universe, community may well be unnatural, but it is the way the church hands on to us the traditions it received from those who came before. The word tradition comes from a Latin root (tradere) meaning “to hand over.” The word treason has the same origin. We have a choice: to receive and pass along what has been carefully handed down from generation to generation to us, or to hand it over to those who care nothing for the past or the people we are. Twenty-first-century Westerners have been taught to see tradition as confining and undemocratic. In G. K. Chesterton’s words, however, tradition is “democracy extended over time,” a practice that recognizes that we, in our particular moment in history, cannot claim a monopoly on truth.
We approach our subject in what might appear to be traditional medical fashion, by describing what we take to be the current illness: most North American Christians approach medicine without much consideration of its relation to their theological convictions. We then explore the pathogen we take to be responsible for the current illness: what the New Testament calls the “po