Death and Christianity

Abstract

Jeffrey P. Bishop’s The Anticipatory Corpse has challenged the very foundations of medicine by claiming that the dead body is epistemically normative in contemporary medicine. Founding medicine upon the corpse results in a number of uncanny practices commonplace in medicine today. The normative corpse affects everything from ICU care, the care of permanent vegetative state patients, the push for legalized physician-assisted suicide, and brain death procedures to spiritual techniques employed to control the patient’s dying process. Contemporary medicine cannot save itself from creating nihilistic practices for the care of the dying since contemporary medicine is founded upon nihilism. Bishop concludes by asking: “Might it be that only theology can save medicine?” This issue of Christian Bioethics brings together several voices attempting to answer this question. The essays here provide diverse perspectives on how theology might provide a remedy to a philosophically-poisoned medicine. They include reflections on Augustine and Nietzsche, the Psalms and Heidegger, Maximus the Confessor and Watson the Supercomputer. The issue closes with Bishop weaving together wisdom from all four essays in the process of offering his own answer.