Christian Politics and the Question of Personhood.
Posted by DLW in Uncategorized at 10:03 am | 
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Gracias a Haysoos Politicas and Rick Bennett, there is a wonderful link to Vanguard Church’s collection of articles on many hot political issues and a collection of Christian organizations from across the spectrum. Vanguard’s spectrum has sparked a long debate on what it means to be in the Christian center. Bob at Vanguard has his reasons, but he does push the boundary of the legitimacy of the spectrum concept.
What is more important than sorting us into different boxes and settling on who is in the center is for more Christians, of a variety of political philosophical persuasions, to provide more constructive leadership to encourage Christians to deliberate on how they are politically active. We need not to gloss over the oft-sordid nature of politics, but to affirm that our involvement with it is inevitably going to be part of our public witness to others.
Bob includes a link to Christianity Today’s recent article on when human personhood begins. The article begins with an example of someone born with a birth-defect with very low autonomy that Peter-Singer-types would want to non-electively abort. They then segway into the issue of personhood and how there is no scientific agreement over when human life attains personhood. They also bring up how even though most evangelicals believe personhood begins at conception, a limited range of belief about personhood does exist among Christians. I guess that means they are not prolife fundamentalists. They bring up the fact that most fertilized zygotes(70%) do not successfuly implant themselves in the womb. However, their focus is on the views of Robert D. Orr, director of ethics at the University of Vermont College of Medicine. Orr has a scholarly essay entitled “Stem-Cell Research: Magical Promise vs. Moral Peril.” where he, and his coauthor, argue for recognizing a unique human individual at the earliest stages of life. From what I’ve read in excerpts, Orr deals with a good part of the literature on the matter, but is providing an argument for why we should treat the newly-formed zygote as a human being, rather than providing a statement of scientific fact. I’m not terribly impressed. A lot of their arguments seems to be based on strawmen or statements like, “These arguments….are feeble attempts to deny the basic fact understood and accepted by scientists for many generations: humanhood begins with the union of 23 chromosomes from the ovum with 23 chromosomes from the sperm.” No citation is given for this basic fact and no time is given to the opposing arguments.
CT goes on to share about the convictions of ordained minister and professor of ethics, Amy Hall, that In Vitro Fertilization is wrong as it undermines a respect for life and the belief that life begins at conception. She shares about the experiences of her friends who, after watching the embryo under the microscope, concluded that life must not begin at conception. She characterizes the practice of IVF to watch the fertilization of eggs and sperm and then freeze the zygotes and discard the lower quality ones as rationalistic and impersonal practice.
The question one can pose is why is it wrong for us to change our beliefs about whether or not we are human beings at conception? Why must these changes be impugned as only reflecting the desire to use embryos for medical research(and why do we seemingly off the bat dismiss the potential good that could come from such embryo-based research)? Why must this view be associated with leading to the view that we should define personhood based on capacities associated with the neo-cortex of our brains?
I agree that the key issue is our possession of the imago-dei. I think that the imago-dei and our potentiality to develop should be our criterion for personhood, since we are future-oriented beings. Yet, I do not associate the imago dei with having human dna, being biologically alive and with the potential to develop. Instead, I associate it with how we recognize ourselves in the other. I find the treatment of soul in the writings of Christos Yannaras helpful in this regard. He points out that most people’s understanding of the term soul is more platonic than Biblical. He points out how the soul signifies the way in which life is manifested in a person, the whole person. As such, we are best to recognize the imago-dei in the unborn by how we recognize ourselves in the unborn. To have human dna is not enough. All of our cells have human dna and are biologically alive, but only around the 48th day of pregnancy does the fetus take on the recognizable shape of a human being.
dlw
The 31st of March, 2005 at 5:22 pm
“As such, we are best to recognize the imago-dei in the unborn by how we recognize ourselves in the unborn. To have human dna is not enough. All of our cells have human dna and are biologically alive, but only around the 48th day of pregnancy does the fetus take on the recognizable shape of a human being.
dlw”
Maybe you want to clarify, but are you contending that our size or shape is what bestows humanity upon us?
MrCLM
The 31st of March, 2005 at 7:14 pm
I am contending that the first feasible way for us to recognize the imago dei in the other after conception is with their form. Having human dna and being biologically alive is not sufficient since that is true for all of our cells and we do not recognize our cells as human beings.
The human fetus first resembles a human form at 48 days after conception.
dlw
The 31st of March, 2005 at 7:24 pm
You are not God. So you will never be smart enough to know when life begins. When does the soul enter? Why not honor all life, from the womb to hospital, damaged or not?
I am sure you believe we were evolved from an ameba. If that is the case then all life should be sacred, no matter how insignificant it is.
The 31st of March, 2005 at 9:47 pm
DLW,
Thanks for interacting with my blog’s attempt to identify the Left, Center, and Right of Christian Politics in America.
I hope I have not come across as trying to defend the categories I admitedly arbitrarily chose! But it has gotten some people to think who they are listening to and whether or not they listen to other voices in the “political spectrum.”
When it comes to the imago Dei, I don’t think I understand what you’re driving at. My recent blog post, The Purpose Driven Life—Did Rick Warren Get it Right?, I believe, gets closer to the biblical idea of the Image of God in humanity (be sure to read the “comments” section as well).
It seems that the biblical idea of the imago Dei has very little to do with the physical human form.
The 31st of March, 2005 at 10:16 pm
When does the soul come into being? can you answer that?
If we evolved, then would not even the tiniest forms of life then be sacred since they could possibly evolve into humanity, with a soul?
The 31st of March, 2005 at 11:38 pm
So it is our shape that God uses to convey imago dei into humanity?
MrCLM
The 1st of April, 2005 at 12:17 am
Emergent Socio-Anthropology: the Dignity of Man
No century in history has spoken more about the dignity of man than the twentieth. Yet no century in history has threatened the dignity of man more, both in theory and in practice.
Threatened in theory because the three thinkers, who have had the most influence on the twentieth century – Darwin, Marx, and Freud – all reduced man to something soulless: either an accidentally evolved clever ape, a cog in the economic State machine, or a suppressed sex maniac.
Threatened it in practice because of the twentieth century’s most dramatic invention, genocide: the deliberate murder of more than one hundred million innocent people, more than the entire population of the world for most of man’s history. And not just by Hitler, Stalin, and Mao. In “free” America, well over a million beings a year continue to be slaughtered in the womb.
The cause of this human carnage should be obvious to any Christian or Jew or Muslim. Once “God is dead” to any society or ideology, so is his image in man. “The abolition of man” (the title of a prophetic book by C.S. Lewis) follows from the abolition of God. For God is the source of all life, and when any culture says No to God, it is No to life and becomes what Pope John Paul II has dared to call a “culture of death.”
The defense of man is thus bound up with the defense of God. They are inseparable. “If anyone says ‘I love God,’ and hates his brother, he is a liar” (I Jn 4:20).
For the same reason, if anyone says “I love man” and hates God, he is a liar. For a great building will not stand without a strong foundation. Everyone in our culture affirms “the dignity of man”, but what is its foundation? What prevents its collapse?
The 2nd of April, 2005 at 8:09 am
God has not told us that we are human beings at conception. There would not be historically so much legitimate disagreement on the matter if God had done so.
One can ask why God has not done this, but I believe my position is consistent with Xtn tradition.
I don´t have the energy or frame of mind to answer more at that point as I just arrived in Stockholm with only an hour of sleep under my belt.
dlw
The 4th of April, 2005 at 3:12 pm
thankyou Bob for directing me to this post. I enjoyed it very much, but think that it does not contradict my point that we can define when we initially become human beings by when we recognize ourselves in the other, with the first way we do that “naturally” being by the human form.
dlw
The 4th of April, 2005 at 3:15 pm
Chris, we first recognize the imago-dei, which cannot be pinned down to any specific feature but reflects the totality of our being, with the human form. To have human dna is not sufficient and to have potential is necessary, but not sufficient.
dlw