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Christian Bioethics, 20(3), 319329 2014

doi:10.1093/cb/cbu024

Christian Morality in a Post-Christian


MedicalSystem
Jeffrey P.Bishop*
Saint Louis University, St. Louis, Missouri, USA
*Address correspondence to: Jeffrey P.Bishop, MD, PhD, Albert Gnaegi Center
for Health Care Ethics, Saint Louis University, Salus Center, 3545 Lafayette Ave.,
Suite 527, St. Louis, MO 63104, USA. E-mail: jbisho12@slu.edu.

In the early 1970s, Ihad my tonsils removed at the age of six in a small rural
Catholic hospital; it was a town where everyone knew everyone and where
everyone knew not only who went to church and to what church he or she
went, but who did not go to any church. I remember vividly the habited
nuns sweeping in and out of my room, tinkering with various tubes that
connected to my body. Nuns were a novelty to me, a Protestant. Iremember
that every time Iswallowed there was such pain, like someone was running
a wire brush down the back of my throat. Ican feel it to this day. Iremember
one nun in particular; she brought in the ice cream, which Ieyed with great
delight, but at the same time with such fear for the pain it would inflict on
my throat. Ican remember Sister insisting with great verve that Ishould eat it
and that Ishould enjoy it, which at the time seemed impossible. Iate it; Idid
not enjoy it until the last bite. Iremember Fr. Mike, the wheelchair-bound
Catholic priest who suffered from post-polio syndrome, wheeling in to see
me. He was both a kindly pastoral presence and a bit scary for a child, seeing
his limbs withered away from polio. Ieven remember walking by the room
with the iron lung that Fr. Mike used at night to assist his breathing. Iremember my doctor, a Lutheran, coming to see me and working seamlessly with
the sisters and with Fr. Mike. That era of a Christian medicine is gone.1
The point of this reminiscence is not to romanticize a bygone era, but to
show that, in the not-so-distant past, there was no rift between religion and
medicine, or more specifically between Christianity and medicine. My training (as a medical student and then as a resident) occurred in large, urban,
state of the art medical centers, where any religious ideas were tolerated at
best and ridiculed at worst. The regnant myth2 seemed to be that medicine
once lived in the darkness of religious ignorance, and that today medicine
is conceived in science and born of technology. It has left behind our premodern, religious myths. Yet, there is one other point I want to make as
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an addition to this remembrance. Inside that context of a highly Christian


medicine, not only are certain kinds of care possible, other uses of medicine
were foreclosed. There is one other claim Iwant to make while introducing
and engaging the essays in this issue of Christian Bioethics. Not only do the
structures of care shape the therapeutic practices and the medicine delivered,
they also structure the kinds of knowledge that medical science generates.
There can be little doubt that medicines ancestry includes religion, especially if you take the long view (Ferngren, 2009). Christianity thrived in the
Roman Empire, both the Eastern and Western portions, in part because it did
not flee from death and disease. Its practitioners, following the command of
Matthew 28 and in witness to Matthew 25, clothed the poor, fed the hungry, visited the prisoner and the sick and suffering. Christianity captured the
imagination of non-Christians because it offered care in the face of all human
frailty, especially the frailty of the body. Care of the body, what we call health
care today, was just one of the ways that Christians cared for the least of these;
care for the sick and frail body was just one among many charitable actions
to which Christians are called. While it is certainly true that pagan medicine
existed prior to Christian medicine, medicine was not just appropriated and
dressed up in choir robes; it was in fact transformed (Kee, 1988). In other
words, Christianity also shaped the creation of new knowledge, not just its
deployment. Put differently yet again, a medicineboth in its knowledge
and in its deploymentwas transformed when it began to grow out of right
worship of the Holy, Divine, Immortal, and Life-giving Trinity. That means, as
Ishall briefly argue, that insofar as medical practice and medical science have
embraced a life-world very different from a Christian life-world, medicine
becomes more and more pagan, and more akin to magic than to miracle.
Thus, today, we find Christians that experience an immense disorientation
when engaging the medical system, just as Iexperienced in my training. The
essays in this special issue of Christian Bioethics give voice to the disorientation felt by patients or their families when they encountered a medical system
that has separated itself from its theological parentage. The authors describe
personal narratives where, upon entering into the health care system, they
found themselves a bit lost and bewildered. Each essay brings into relief the
way in which the authors hope for reorientation for medicine. Yet, as we
might expect, each essay also leaves us with more questions than answers.
Ruth and Mark McConnell describe their experience in the Canadian
health care system. Their daughter, Bethany Joy, was diagnosed in utero
with several abnormalities and irregularities after it became clear that she
had Intrauterine Growth Retardation,3 and she was found to have an intracranial brain hemorrhage and hydrocephalus. They were offered amniocentesis,
which would only be diagnostic, but they refused this option, given that the
diagnosis would not have affected their decision. After her birth, Bethany Joy
was diagnosed with a rare chromosomal abnormality, a deletion on the short
arm of Chromosome3.

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Not only did the McConnells have to make prenatal decisions, Bethany
Joy had ups and downs over the ensuing thirteen months of her life, requiring them to make hard decisions along the way. The McConnells had to
decide how aggressive to be with the medical therapies that would assist
Bethany Joy in living, from feeding tubes to ICU care to ventilator support.
At her last hospitalization, Bethany Joy developed septicemia, and again
the McConnells were left with another choice to make: either aggressively
treat the infection or to let it go untreated, which would result in Bethany
Joys death. The McConnells asked the doctors a question: was Bethany Joy
struggling to live or was she struggling to die? Doctors are notoriously bad
at predicting when a patient will die, though most physicians can recognize
when a person is actively dying (Kaufman, 2005, 20735). The doctors caring
for Bethany Joy did not seem to want to offer substantive guidance. It was
as if they did not want to take responsibility for the decision or engage with
our ethical decision-making or faith perspective. Once again we were left on
our own, isolated and disoriented. This was a parental decision, not one for
medical staff (T. M.McConnell and R.A. McConnell, 2014, 383-4).
The disorientation that the McConnells felt with the lack of information
about Bethany Joys exceedingly rare chromosomal abnormality was compounded by the secular pluralism that reigned in the Canadian system.
Certainly, on the one hand, the pluralism of the Canadian healthcare system
gave a wide berth to the McConnells moral values, allowing their own personal values to inform the care provided to Bethany Joy. In fact, the doctors
acted in exemplary fashion in that they did not impose their own moral
standards on the McConnells. On the other hand, the McConnells experienced a good amount of disorientation in the lack of substantive guidance,
and it is difficult to separate out the substantive medical guidance from
substantive moral guidance. In other words, despite the benefits of pluralism, the McConnells still felt as if they were lost in a foreign land, unable
to make decisions because there was so little substantive guidance from the
healthcareteam.
To remedy the situation, the McConnells offer a dialogical model, drawing
on the work of Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin. The dialogical model
seeks to find ways for attenuating seemingly insoluble and incommensurable positions by encountering the moral other as a person. The McConnells
claim that a dialogical model would allow doctors to become better informed
on the metaphysical moral substance held by patients and families, creating
a bond between families, patients, and the healthcare team. Perhaps the dialogical model could prevent the kind of disorientation they felt in the largely
pluralistic setting of the Canadian system.
However, such a solution leaves many questions open. The healthcare
system claims a kind of pluralism where everyone feels at home. It claims
a kind of neutrality where all metaphysical moral views can inform decisions about seemingly neutral medical facts. Yet, the question remains: can

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metaphysical moral values be merely attached to supposedly nonmetaphysical and nonmoral science and technologies? While the McConnells themselves did not have the question posed to them, virtually every woman in
technologically advanced cultures is presented with the option for screening
for chromosomal abnormalities and other congenital conditions, precisely
because the system holds that these children are expendable. These tests are
not developed to help prepare a family psychologically for what is coming,
but open a set of possibilities that within a Christian life-world would never
have been conceived. Ihave elsewhere argued, with a colleague, that we see
the way that a secular metaphysical moral life-world animated the search for
screening tools for neural tube defects in the 1970s. The test itself was not
just a triumph of amoral scientific knowledge but was created because forces
in the NIH wanted to reduce costly medical and social services in Britain for
the families of children with neural tube defects (Gagen and Bishop, 2007).
The knowledge, however, cannot so easily be disconnected from the values that animate its creation without a lot of conceptual work, prayer, and
thoughtfulness.
These tests are designed precisely because the system thinks it is legitimate to terminate these pregnancies in order to prevent a child, like Bethany
Joy, from being born. That the system permits a family to choose whether
or not to test does not mean that the knowledge and the technology that
creates the conditions for the possibility of this knowledge is simply neutral.
While it is true that a dialogical model, where family and physician engage
each others life-world in a mutually respectful dialogue, could allow a familys moral commitments to be better understood by the practitioners in a
healthcare system, a dialogical model could also open the possibility that the
family could become convinced that terminating a pregnancy or stopping
aggressive medical therapies too soon is not only medically advisable, but
also morally legitimate. In other words, the logic that creates these technologies becomes even more explicit in dialogue, such that the seductive logic
of termination becomes a reality where it had not been before. Of course,
Iam not saying that Christians cannot or do not resist this logic, but that in
a time of trial, the dialogical model opens up a possibility that may become
hard to resist.
The second essay by Philip C.Burcham addresses the way in which an
entire system can shift in what it emphasizes morally. Burcham and many
of his family members carry a variant form of a gene that results in brittle
bones. While Burchams exact genetic variation is not known, the disorder
is characterized generally as a form of Osteogenesis Imperfecta (OI), in
which its carriers are prone to more bone fractures. Burcham describes an
experience with his newborn daughter. His daughter did well and showed
no signs of OI until she was ten months old, when she sustained her first
fracture. At that time, they were referred to a specialist, who they thought
specialized in bone diseasessomeone who might be able to prevent future

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fractures. However, the doctor to whom they were referred was in fact a
geneticist. Burcham and his wife asked why they were seeing him; the geneticist responded: We want to make sure you dont have another one of
those! pointing to their daughter (Burcham, 2014,364).
The point of Burchams essay is that genetic medicine could be seen as
part of the scientific endeavor to search for ways of alleviating fractures, in
his particular case, or to improve the lives of people with genetic disorders,
generally. Burcham, a practicing pharmacologist, states that understanding
the genetics could serve as a springboard for the creation of new therapies to
alleviate the effects of the disorder. Instead, with the rise of utilitarianism in
Australia and financial pressures pushing cost savings for the social welfare
system, genetics research seeks the easiest and cheapest solution for genetically inherited disorders and diseases, prevention of the disease by preventing the birth of those with the disease. AChristian concern to care for the
frailties of the body opens different research agendas, whereas a utilitarian
concern for cost savings creates a different research agenda altogether. This
idea also leaves open the possibility that Judaism, or Islam, or any other religious life-world could give rise to different research agendas. While Burcham
does not say it, he implies that knowledge is not neutral.
Burcham also describes the theological foundations for pharmacological
research. In scripture, we find the use of herbs to remedy sickness. Burcham
describes several theologians throughout different eras of Christian history,
in which use of medicines is celebrated as a use of God-gracious gifts. While
Burcham does not make this claim explicit, it is clear that to the Christian,
the natural world is conceived as gift, and that means that not only does
Christianity seek to know the world for its uses, but it understands it as
gift. This understanding might also shape how nature can be used by the
Christian. In other words, to the Christian creation is a gift and not a resource.
A Christian life-world creates a kind of medical knowledge different from
that created by the hegemony of utilitarianism. Burcham goes on to claim that
once the flower of pharmacology has been cut from its roots in Christianity,
the various pharmaceutical development programs begin to grow in very
different directions. Secularizing forces have driven pharmaceutical development into lucrative areas, leading to the neglect of developing drugs for
orphan diseases. Utilitarian forces strive to keep costs down by eliminating costly patients from coming into existence. Put differently, secularism
and utilitarianism have not only moral commitments, but also metaphysical
commitments with their own understanding of nature as mere resourceas
opposed to giftand with its immanent own immanent tel. In other words,
rather than genetic testing leading to novelty in drug development aimed at
alleviating the suffering of those with genetic ailments, the whole secular
utilitarian society sees people with genetic anomalies as costs and therefore
as consuming too many resources. Thus, they are dispensable, driving pharmaceutical innovators into other domains.

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The question before us is whether Christian witness can reclaim the upper
hand from secular and utilitarian society, the prerogative both in the creation of new knowledge, and in the use of that knowledge. Whereas the
McConnells seem optimistic that medicinenow informed by consumerist and utilitarian principlescan be sewn back together with Christianitys
moral commitments through a more dialogical model of encounter, Burcham
seems rather more pessimistic. Is it possible to mend the relationship between
secularized medicine and Christian moral commitments? Or must we choose
between two stark alternatives? On the one hand, we have a secularized
medicine, which hides its own metaphysical moral commitments with its different understanding of nature as resource ordered to usefulness in political
society; on the other hand, we have a Christian medicine, where the research
agendas and routine medical care originate from the gratuity of God in creation, ordered to the compassionate care of frail bodies.
In the third essay in this issue, Paul Tyson describes his radical disorientation with the birth of his first child. Tyson explores the extent to which
the medical system severely circumscribes Christian belief and practice. He
recounts the death of two of his children from a rare genetic disorder, Type
ISpinal Muscular Atrophy (SMA), in which the spinal nerves begin to degenerate after birth, including the nerves that govern respiration. These children are particularly prone to lung infections. While these infections can be
treated, SMA cannot be treated, and in time the acute and chronic changes
in lung function will result in the death of the child. Tyson seamlessly moves
back and forth between narrative description and theological reflection,
claiming that he suffered two wounds.
The first woundthe wound of faithcame from his Evangelical and
Reformed Church community, after the birth of Daniel, his first born. Tyson
and his wife faithfully approached the elders of their Protestant church community, seeking anointing for Daniel and prayers for healing as prescribed
in the Epistle of James, the brother of the Lord. That community too quickly
abandoned all hope for miracle in deference to a medical culture that foreclosed on that as a possibility. Tyson notes that his local parish and the
Western Church generally suffer from a willed deafness to the dissonance
which arises when the church largely accepts the functional and methodological atheism of modern medical care whilst still seeking to claim fealty to
the inherently miraculous dynamis of the church (Tyson, 2014, 331). Tyson
and his wife gave birth to three healthy and unaffected daughters. After the
birth of their fourth daughter, Lucy, the wound inflicted by their Church community deepened. Lucy was also born with SMA. Again, approaching their
parish elders, they were once again rebuffed and demeaned for not accepting the reality proclaimed by their doctor that there was no hope for Lucy.
But what is a miracle if not Gods radical intervention into lives? Why not
pray for a miracle? Why did their elders not pray for a miracle? Tysons local
church community had uncritically accepted the medical worlds conception

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of disease and treatment such that it could abandon a central feature of


Christs ministry and the ministry of his Church as described in the Epistle
of James.4
Tyson recognizes the subtle power that exists in the secularizing discourses
of modern medicine and he notes that these discourses, when embraced by
the Church, are pernicious and harmful. The wound of faith, as described
by Tyson, is not due to faith per se, but due to the fact that the Church in
the West has lost its faith, abandoned it to the secularized medicine that
sees creation as merely material mechanism, that can be ordered to some
ends, but not to others; and these ends are merely immanent. The orthodox
Christian teaching that sees all of creation as gift, ordered to the salvation of
all, also includes the possibility of a miracle enacted by the same grace given
in Creation, ordered to Gods ends for creation and all of humanity.
That instrumental knowledge of medicine created the second wound that
Tyson and his family suffered. The wound of medicine came from a medical
system that could not imagine the possibility of miracle. The power of the
doctor ensconced in the medical system was overwhelming. Tysonnotes:
Dr. Brown was very concerned that we should not prolong Lucys suffering, so she
seemed to assume that a detached (clinical) and realistic (hopeless) outlook for Lucy
was more humane and caring than our attached (non-medical) and hopeful (unrealistic) outlook. And as the medical expert a figure of power and authority who
determined what the medical system would give and withhold from us we were
not on an equal negotiating footing with her if we wanted something she had determined not to give us. That is, when we had meetings with her, there was a strong
and continuous pressure for us to get on the same page and in the same book as
she was on and in. (Tyson, 2014, 340)

The normalizing discourses of medical professionals within the Australian


healthcare system created its own wound even as it strove to help the Tysons.
Tyson goes on to show how the socially constructed realities of the medical system have become naturalized within the medical system. That is to
say, the clinical and the realistic take shape within a whole set of beliefs
about the structure of reality and the structure of nature. Put differently, the
world as seen by the medical system is not merely a natural world that a few
medical scientists happened upon, but a world that is constructed to include
certain kinds of possibilities and to exclude other kinds of possibilities.
Because of the hegemony of the medical system, the West, including many
forms of Western Christianity, have closed off our imagination for what is
possible with our God. One can imagine a medicine that organizes itself such
that cures can emerge through the manipulation of the body, or through the
administration of medicines, and still leave open the possibility for the miraculous, where the therapeutic model of biopsychosocial medicine does not
take upon itself to bring parents to the clinical reality foreclosing on Divine
intervention. For the most part, the modern secular system allows one to

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believe in whatever spiritual or moral framework one wants, so long as


those beliefs are not too crazy and as long as one eventually gets on board
with that reality as articulated by the system. Such is the hubris of modern
medicine, situated within the Modern West, that it and only it can be our
savior. In Tysons case, just as medicine boxes up the world according to the
dictates of modern rationality, Tysons local parish became complicit in not
only accepting the secularized instrumental rationality of modern medicine,
but they also tried to limit the action of our God, delimiting God according
to that instrumental rationality.
The Christian Church, particularly in the West, must come to realize the
idolatry produced by the dictates of the instrumental rationality of the Modern
West and its drive to effectively control the material world and to lose all
hope when that world seems to fail. Tyson reminds us of the paradoxes that
must necessarily be in place lest we subject God to our rationality.
In the realm of faith, again, contrary to the modern will to epistemic mastery, we
cannot gain mastery over God by our theology. Our conceptual knowledge of God
is always an icon rather than God Himself, and the icons of even correct doctrine
become idols when God is not seen through and beyond our icons. That God is
sovereign, that God answers the prayer of faith, that God does not perform for us,
that God is impassible, that God suffers these are all true and nothing of true faith
is to be gained by wiping out the contradictions of one by making it conform to a
coherent system of determinate doctrine defined by the other. (Tyson, 2014, 348-9)

The modern instrumental knowledge, bent on efficient and effective control of the material of the body, too quickly forecloses on the reality that
Christians know exists beyond that rationality. That efficient and instrumental
rationality is so seductive that even Christians want to let it govern. It seems
that we in the West have let medicine become ouridol.
The paradoxes of Christian faitha God Who became fully human without diminishment of His Divinity; a triune God Who is one in being, but
three Persons, all equally and fully Goddoes not submit Himself to the
intellectual simple-mindedness of Western instrumental knowledge. In short,
the power of efficient and instrumental reason at the heart of modern medicine, while it can mediate Gods grace, can too easily become an idol to
which the living God must submit Himself or be thrown out of modern
Western medicine, and worse by the Western churches that have succumbed
to its seduction. Tysons prayerful stance in his conclusion offers us a different kind ofhope.
In his study of the relationship between medicine, miracle, and magic
in New Testament times, Howard Clarke Kee notes that each of these was
utilized to achieve and sustain human welfare. Tracing the relationships of
Christian practice in the context of a Jewish and Roman culture, Kee points
out that what distinguished these modes of healing were the assumptions
upon which each operated. In magic, the basic assumption is that there is

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an inexorable network of forces which the initiated can exploit for personal
benefit, or block for personal protection (Kee, 1988, 127). There was no
need to study the specifics of the powers, but the goal was merely to control them pragmatically. To the Christian mind, not knowing the source of
the powers was highly problematic. There seemed to be no limit on magic.
Pagan medicine, however, originated in the study of the natural and cosmic
order and seemed ready to acknowledge its limits in the face human finitude
(Kee, 1988, 126). Miracle originated in another order, the Divine order of
God (Kee, 1988, 127). There was for the Christian no sense that this power
could be harnessed according to the patients will, but the patient was to
enter into supplication, acknowledging that Gods power is governed only
by His Divine will. The Christian could never use magic, because the source
of the power is suspect. The Christian could however use medicine and hope
for miracle, because in early Christianity, the demarcation between the realm
of nature and the realm of grace had not developed in the way that it had in
the West. Creation is already graced, and as such the line between medicine
and miracle, under the sovereignty of God, is blurred.
It is perhaps for this reason that Christians have always held medicine in
high esteem. The natural order is already graced by God. If medicine was
utilized prayerfully and with an understanding of the gratuity of the created
order, and in devotion and obedience to God, it was thought to be legitimate. If, however, medicine was used simply to control the material of the
body, it was thought to be merely the manipulation of mechanism ordered
by my own will. In this sense, even medicine operating according to the
natural order could be for the Christian more akin to magic than to legitimate
Christian care. It seems that this understanding of medicine is what animated
St. Basils Long Rule No. 55, where medicine is brought under Christian rule
(St. Basil the Great, 1962). The use of medicine must always be ordered
according to Gods will for salvation.
There are several questions that emerge from these insights. Has Western
medicine become more akin to magic in that it employs all the powers,
whatever their sources, in order to control the world according to ones
own will? There is yet another question that haunts the heirs of Western
Christianity: can we (or should we) distinguish the created realm from the
realm of grace? Has the instrumental reason of the West once again become
pagan in that its appeal to natural forces seems to be separated from any
relationship to the Divineorder?
Moreover, modern medicine and medical science operate on a set of originary values: simplicity, elegance, and the drive to control. Simplicity and elegance derive from Ockhams razor, and assume, without much confirmatory
evidence, that the natural order of the body is simple and elegant rather than
complex and chaotic. What we claim to be true about the body, the knowledge gained with these two premises, might shape not only what we claim
as true, but the kinds of things we can do with that knowledge. In addition,

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the third value of contemporary medicine derives from a Baconian sense of


control of nature, of the body. Bacon justifies knowledgefor our purposes,
medical knowledgeboth epistemologically as well as ethically. We know
we are justified in our conclusions if we can use our knowledge to control
the body; we know we are justified in our use of that knowledge if we are
doing so to relieve the human estate. Modern medicine is a Baconian project
(McKenny, 1997). In other words, Christians may be in the same sort of position as the early Christians, who had to discern what aspects of pagan medicine it could use and what knowledge was legitimate knowledge. We may be
in a position where we must understand the powers that generate modern
medical knowledge, and not just the uses to which we can put medicine.
I take contemporary author Frederica Mathewes-Green to mean something
like this when she says that, as Christians, we do not merely want to create
laws in society that prohibit abortions; rather, we want to create a life-world
in which the thought of abortion is just not conceivable (Mathewes-Green,
1992). We want a world where not only medical practice, but also medical
innovation is animated by a metaphysical moral life-world informed by the
Word madeFlesh.
Each essay in this issue of Christian Bioethics tells a very personal story
where each of the authors finds himself disoriented in the modern medical
setting. One hears the anguish in the essay by McConnell and McConnell,
and also in Tysons essay. One also hears the outrage in Burchams and in
Tysons essays, an outrage born in the rupture created by the marginalization
of Christian metaphysical moral commitments by modern Western, secular,
utilitarian, and instrumental rationality. Each author finds hope, even if the
source for hope is informed by the diagnosis hemakes.
Christian hope is founded in the Resurrection. With the Resurrection of
Christ our God, the whole world shines as an Icon of the Divine. All of
creation is graced with the Resurrection. That means that we are enabled,
through grace and with the eyes of our Christian faith, to see that grace
abounds and that it can break through even the most instrumentally nearsighted systems, like Western medicine. Yet, at the same time, we Christians
must not forget that there are seductive and pernicious elements in medicine, elements that can and do corrode Christian faith and morals. In
short, the disorientation we feel inside the life-worlds created by Western,
instrumentalized medicine can only be remedied through the reorientation
of right worship, where we literally face Liturgical East, the Orient. The
grace of Divine Liturgy can even save us from the seduction offered by a
Western medicinea medicine that is more akin to magic than to miracle.
In being thus oriented, we might be able to see what can be picked up
from the ruins of Western medicine and used to rebuild a Christian system
of medicine.

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Notes

1. It should be noted that this hospital was an example of ecumenism, within a more Roman
Catholic context. It is also true that such ecumenism led to the wider cultural concern for diversity. While
certainly diversity can give birth to broader horizons, it can also lead to the loss of ones identity. After all,
if you keep opening the banks of a river more and more widely, you eventually end up with a swamp.

2. Using the word myth here only demeans the word myth.

3. Intrauterine Growth Retardation is a descriptive term of a syndrome. The fetus grows to a level
but fails to progress. There can be any number of causes and it is suggestive of some underlying pathology that has disrupted the normal growth pattern of the fetus.

4. The Epistle of James 5: 1316 encourages Christians to seek from their Presbyters prayer and
anointing with oil. The Presbyters prayers offered in faith have the power to make whole. The passage
also makes it clear that it is the Lord that raises the person up and not the Presbyters themselves.

References
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Gagen, W. J. and J. P.Bishop. 2007. Ethics, justification and the prevention of spina bifida.
Journal of Medical Ethics 33:5017.
Kaufman, S. R. 2005. And a Time to Die: How American Hospitals Shape the End of Life.
Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Kee, H. C. 1988. Medicine, Miracle and Magic in New Testament Times. Cambridge: Cambridge
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Mathewes-Green, F. 1992. Abortion: Womens rights and wrongs. Frederica [On-line]. http://
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McConnell, T. M. and R. A.McConnell. 2014. The need for dialogical encounter: An account
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Christian Bioethics 20:37689.
McKenny, G. P. 1997. To Relieve the Human Condition: Bioethics, Technology, and the Body.
Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
St. Basil the Great. 1962. Question 55. In The Long Rules, ed. M. M. Wagner, 3307. Washington,
DC: Catholic University of America Press.
Tyson, P. 2014. The wounds of faith and medicine, and the balm of paradox. Christian
Bioethics 20:33058.

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