Ethical Method in Christian Bioethics: Mapping the Terrain
The Center for Bioethics and
Human Dignity, 5 August, 2003
Reproduced with permission
Bioethical-and especially
biotechnological-developments are both so urgent and
have come so quickly upon us that there has been
little time for Christian bioethicists to reflect
upon or develop a coherent methodological approach.
However, our answers to particular questions-e.g.,
what should we think and say about nanotechnology or
germ-line genetic intervention or cryopreservation
or any other issue-demand reflection on a prior
methodological question: How should a Christian
go about discerning a reliable answer to such
ethical questions? I would here like to offer a
very preliminary analysis of patterns of ethical
methodology among Christians weighing in on
contemporary biotechnology debates.
Obviously, the question of method comes into play
every time a scholar undertakes any intellectual
project. Unfortunately, fixation on disputes about
method often mars academia, at times making it
impossible for scholars ever to take a substantive
stance about anything. Especially because I have
always understood my work as an ethicist to be in
service to the church, I have avoided extensive
methodological tangles whenever I can. The people in
the pew do not care as much about the ethical method
that is used as they do about the normative moral
guidance that is offered on the issues of the day.
Contemporary biotechnology concerns, however, raise
methodological issues that cannot responsibly be
avoided. When we fail to do such methodological
reflection, but pronounce in an ad hoc fashion on
biotech issues anyway, the flimsiness of our
thinking is quickly
revealed.
1
This is no mere professional
faux pas but
instead a damaging setback for Christians speaking
in the public arena on the most critical issues of
our time. It will quickly marginalize our voices in
a public ethical conversation that we may only have
one chance to participate in before some of these
issues are decided.
Evangelical Bioethics and the
Use of Scripture
The question of bioethical methodology is
especially acute for those working within the
conservative Protestant branch of the Christian
community. The typical evangelical way of
approaching a moral question is to turn to the Bible
for direct citations relevant to the issue at hand.
If we want to know what to think about war,
marriage, homosexuality, drinking, suicide, or
economic ethics, we turn to the Bible for moral
commands that address these issues. Millions of
evangelicals attempt to direct their steps in
precisely this manner.
Much of the time, when we turn to the Bible in
this way we are blessed with all of the insight that
we need. We find that the Bible offers more than
enough direction about what we must think and do-the
problem in such cases is not in knowing
God's will, but in reshaping our hearts and habits
that we might obey it.
But the issue is much more complex when it comes
to issues that the Bible does not directly address.
How are we to discern God's moral will about stem
cell research? Or cloning? Or cybernetics? Or the
mapping of the human genome? Or gene patenting?
These scientific discoveries and technological
applications are not-and could not have
been-addressed in the Bible because they are new
innovations in human life. In such cases, what does
it mean to take a biblical perspective on
these issues, or to develop biblical moral
norms? What should Bible-oriented Christians and
Christian scholars do when they run into moral
issues that the Bible does not and cannot address
with clear moral injunctions?
This is a question that has occupied the
attention of a number of biblical scholars and
Christian ethicists in recent decades. An entire
sub-literature in these two overlapping fields has
developed in order to explore the broad question of
how the Bible should be interpreted by Christians in
shaping the moral life, and the more narrow issue of
how to employ the Scriptures in relation to moral
challenges not addressed in Scripture.2
As far as I can determine in my review of Christian
bioethical literature so far, the "Bible and ethics"
discussion of the past 25 years or so remains
largely unknown among bioethicists. It is not
difficult to understand why this is so, given the
difficulty of keeping up with developments within
bioethics proper. However, this lack of awareness
has perhaps contributed to certain weaknesses in the
bioethics offered by evangelical Christians to this
point. I have observed the following patterns:
Some try to retain the reflexive pattern of
applying biblical injunctions by appealing to
biblical texts that are dubiously interpreted as
speaking directly to the issue at hand.
One example of this tendency is seen with regard
to the issue of abortion. It would certainly be a
welcome thing if the Bible contained the kind of
explicit ban on abortion that is found in the Didache. But alas there is none to be found.
Therefore, most evangelicals build an anti-abortion
case by citing texts such as Psalm 22: 9-10, 51:5,
139:13-16; Jeremiah 1:5; and Luke 1:41-44. These
passages celebrate the very origins of life in the
womb and acknowledge life as a divine creation. They
affirm the awesome goodness of God and God's
creation. They indicate that God has a purpose for
every human life and makes plans for his people even
before they are born. These texts are certainly
relevant to abortion; however, they do not address
the issue directly, a fact routinely pointed out by
those who reject the pro-life position. Working from
these citations is probably not the best way to make
the case against abortion.3
By extension, the problem is all the more acute when
Scripture is stretched to apply to issues even more
remote from biblical times, such as genetic
engineering and cloning.
Either because the effort to apply biblical texts
to issues about which the Bible is silent is deemed
not to work, or as a supplement to such efforts,
evangelicals sometimes deal with this problem
by importing some other way of resolving the
moral issue, often without acknowledging having done
so. On issues such as abortion or
homosexuality, for example, conservative Protestants
will sometimes employ the natural law tradition to
buttress their biblical claims. This is a rich and
fruitful tradition that offers considerable
resources for contemporary Christian bioethics. But
it is also a complex tradition, which has found its
home in the Roman Catholic Church rather than within
Protestantism, which historically has tended to view
it with suspicion. It is methodologically incoherent
to graft the conclusions drawn from Catholic natural
law theory into evangelical ethical arguments,
especially if stripped of the philosophical,
theological, and ecclesiological context within
which natural law theory generally functions.4
But even this move is better than what sometimes
occurs. Lacking clear biblical authorities, and
abandoning alternative ethical methods, Christians
may actually arrive at their positions through
gut instinct, political loyalties,
self-interest, or some other altogether dubious
basis for a Christian moral conviction.
We just "know" the right position on an issue
because it is the way "our kind of people," or our
employers, or our opinion leaders, or our instincts,
direct us. Everyone must acknowledge the power of
such factors in their decision-making, but we
certainly cannot settle for this assortment of
factors as an ethical methodology.
Difficulties with deriving moral norms directly from
biblical texts actually reveal a vulnerability in
evangelical ethical method that transcends
bioethical issues and that has been noticed by
observers outside of our tradition for many years.
Any Christian moral tradition that hopes to remain
at all relevant to contemporary society must devise
a way of addressing a whole range of moral issues
that the Bible does not directly mention. Lacking
such, we are vulnerable to the misuse of Scripture
and/or the importation of alien methods, ideologies,
or influences to fill the gap. More radically, a
failure to find a way to address the gap between
"then" and "now" may lead some thoughtful
evangelicals to finally reject the validity of a
biblically-oriented approach to morality in favor of
models drawn from other Christian or non-Christian
moral traditions. Rather than creating or exhausting
this vulnerability, the field of bioethics has
simply revealed it with acute clarity. Thus, to
sharpen our approach to bioethical methodology will
not only help improve our bioethics but also our
general ethical method-and our everyday moral
decision-making.
The Turn to Principles and
Theological Motifs
My preliminary survey of substantive bioethical
reflection from inside the Christian community (and
sometimes from religiously committed thinkers in
other faith-traditions) reveals that the
methodological challenge I have sketched is being
met more adequately through a turn to moral
principles and a rendering of broader theological
motifs grounded in particular ways of reading
central scriptural narratives.
The lack of direct biblical moral injunctions
requires those who are interested in what Scripture
says to read the Bible in a different way. Rather
than looking for what is not there, scholars are
forced back from the moral injunction level to other
types of scriptural moral resources. Let me
illustrate what I mean by adapting a chart
concerning ethical methodology that appears in the
book Kingdom Ethics, a book that I
co-authored with Glen Stassen of Fuller Seminary.
5
Each human being makes moral judgments regularly.
Deciding what I/we should do about X, right now,
requires a moral judgment in a particular case or
situation. Unless we make all of our moral judgments
idiosyncratically, however, particular decisions are
usually rooted in some structure of moral norms.
Moving one level down to rules, we find one element
of this structure. A moral rule is a concrete
action-guide that applies not just to one immediate
case but to all relevantly similar cases. relevantly
similar cases. It tells us concretely what to
do or not to do. "You shall not lie." "You shall not
commit adultery." "You shall not murder." One
increasingly pressing need in the bioethics
community is to discern whether moral rules related
to biotechnology can be developed. If so, we will
then have a basis for judgments that we should make
about particular biotech applications in individual
life or in society.6
But rules themselves are not freestanding. While
legalists often function as if rules provide their
own warrant, underneath sound moral rules are
broader moral principles. Though the distinction
between rules and principles is not always easy to
draw, principles are one level more general and
deeper than rules: they do not tell us concretely
and specifically what to do. They provide a basis
for the rules that we do develop, and any
well-founded rule spells out direct applications of
more general principles. So the rule against
lying to a patient is grounded in principles such as
respect for persons, for patient autonomy, and for
truthfulness itself. Rules against adultery are
grounded in respect for marital covenants and for
the sanctity of the institution of the family. Rules
against killing are grounded in respect for human
life and bodily integrity, among other principles.
There is yet a deeper level, which I refer to as
the "basic convictions" level. It is quite popular
in evangelical circles today to label this the
"worldview" level. Whatever it is called, it has to
do with our most fundamental beliefs about ultimate
matters and/or our fundamental basis for making
moral decisions. When framed theologically, these
are the answers we give to such fundamental
questions as where we come from, who we are, what is
wrong with us, how what is wrong can be addressed
(if it can), and where we and the world are going.
In other words, here we have doctrines of creation,
humanity, sin, salvation, ethics, and eschatology.
General ethical theories include utilitarianism,
Kantian deontology, virtue theory, natural law
theory, and others. Sometimes such theories have
themselves been explicitly grounded in some kind of
theological approach; other times they have been
presented on a stand-alone basis.
If it is possible to identify a rock-bottom
foundation for all moral reasoning, it is found
here. To the extent that moral rules and principles
are rationally grounded and coherently related to
one's life and worldview, they seem to work in the
way I am outlining. Basic worldview/theological
convictions or general ethical theories generate key
moral principles, which then lead to concrete moral
rules, and finally to judgments in immediate
situations and particular cases. Or, working with
the same model but from the other direction, one
could say that particular judgments can reveal a
person's functioning moral rules. These rules, when
examined, often give evidence of a set of principles
that undergird them.7
And these principles are ultimately grounded in a
person's foundational convictions or worldview,
whether consciously articulated or not.
The Bible itself gives evidence of this
four-level structure of moral norms. It contains
numerous particular judgments, often embedded in
historical narratives or commentary upon them. It
offers a raft of moral commands and rules of varying
strength, most frequently in Old Testament legal
materials but in the New Testament as well. Sifting
through these moral rules and commands, one can
sometimes find statements of overarching moral
principles, such as justice and neighbor-love (cf.
Mt. 22:36-40). And in the scriptures, all moral
norms for God's people are ultimately grounded in
the character and will of a good and sovereign God.
The task I set for myself in this paper was to
begin to discover how Christians (especially
evangelical or "biblical" Christians) should go
about discerning reliable answers to the moral
questions raised by biotechnology, by offering a
preliminary analysis of patterns of ethical
methodology among Christians weighing in on
contemporary biotechnology debates. I find that
while some Christians are attempting the impossible
by "applying" biblical moral injunctions to
contemporary issues not addressed by them, more
sophisticated thinkers are doing what must be done
if one would bring an ancient sacred text to bear on
brand-new moral problems: pushing deeper to the
level of moral principle, and beyond that to
foundational biblical motifs that for centuries have
shaped the way believers understand God, the world,
and the human condition. The ultimate kinds of
questions and challenges humanity is facing today
are perhaps inevitably evoking in biblically
literate scholars a return to Christianity's
ultimate primordial texts. It is perhaps, then, not
such a disadvantage that biotechnology issues cannot
be found in any biblical lexicon or word study book,
as this silence forces us back to a profound
wrestling with the most fundamental moral and
theological affirmations of biblical faith.
NOTES
1 A
point very nicely made by Nigel Cameron early in the
development of a renewed Christian bioethics. See
"The Christian Stake in
Bioethics," in John F. Kilner et al.
eds., Bioethics and the Future of Medicine
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), ch. 1.
2 Some
of the key works, in the order of their publication:
David H. Kelsey, The Uses of Scripture in
Recent Theology (Philadelphia: Fortress
Press, 1975); Thomas W. Ogletree, The Use of
the Bible in Christian Ethics (Philadelphia:
Fortress Press, 1983); Robert K. Johnston, ed.,
The Use of the Bible in Theology: Evangelical
Options (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1985);
Bruce C. Birch and Larry L. Rasmussen, Bible
and Ethics in the Christian Life, rev. ed.
(Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1989); Stephen E.
Fowl and L. Gregory Jones, Reading in
Communion: Scripture and Ethics in Christian Life
(Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1991); Luke Timothy
Johnson, Scripture and Discernment: Decision
Making in the Church (Nashville: Abingdon,
1996); Jeffrey S. Siker, Scripture and Ethics:
Twentieth Century Portraits (New York and
Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997); Paul
Jersild, Spirit Ethics: Scripture and the
Moral Life (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2000)-here
the author includes a chapter on genetic ethics to
test his method; Charles H. Cosgrove, Appealing to Scripture in Moral Debate: Five
Hermeneutical Rules (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,
2002).
3 This
claim is explored further, and (we hope) a sound
biblical argument against abortion offered, in Glen
H. Stassen and David P. Gushee, Kingdom
Ethics: Following Jesus in Contemporary Context
(Downers Grove, IL: Intervarsity Press, 2003), ch.
10. For a somewhat different view, see Francis J.
Beckwith, Politically Correct Death: Answering
Arguments for Abortion Rights (Grand Rapids:
Baker, 1993).
4 I am
not claiming that Protestants cannot employ natural
law theory with theological/ethical integrity, or
that it is an approach that somehow belongs to the
Catholic tradition alone. Catholics themselves make
no such claim. My argument is simply that
evangelical Protestants, in particular, tend to be
unschooled in natural law theory and therefore must
be cautious in importing its conclusions-especially
if they are unwilling to accept its premises. For a
broad discussion and defense of natural law, see J.
Budziszewski, Written on the Heart: The Case
for Natural Law (Downers Grove: Intervarsity
Press, 1997).
5 Kingdom Ethics, ch. 5.
6
Beauchamp and Childress rightly point out that such
rules take a variety of forms: they can be
substantive, authority, or procedure rules
(Principles, pp. 13-14). They can also specify
standard and accepted practices that embody any or
all of these types of moral rules.
7"Inductivist"
moral theorists argue that judgments in particular
cases do not reveal already functioning moral rules
and broader principles, but instead that such rules
and principles are actually derivative
generalizations from insights gained in struggling
with particularly important cases. See Principles, pp. 391-397. While I believe that
both sources of moral insight are significant, I am
unwilling to weaken the role of actual principles
and rules too much, either at a normative level or a
metaethical one.
Copyright 2003 by The Center
for Bioethics and Human Dignity
The contents of this article do
not necessarily reflect the opinions of CBHD, its
staff, board or supporters