This is perhaps one of the most important categories to get right when thinking about Christianity and medical ethics. How one’s worldview defines what it means to be a person determines how persons ought to live life and how persons ought to be treated.
I remember a young man shared that he had heard a pastor on the radio claim that human cloning is biblically wrong because any human clone would not have a soul. This is an honest question and the pastor, I have no doubt, is being earnest as he is thinking through this very complicated issue.
Without getting into the details, while there are good biblical reasons to push back against human cloning, this pastor’s argument is very confused and arguably not biblical in the sense we are speaking of here. Why?
Because it is a misunderstanding of what the Bible means by person, what it means to be created in the image of God, and what the Bible means by soul (not to mention a misunderstanding of the biology and science involved). Fortunately, there are many resources and scholars in Christian bioethics, whose passion is to help believers learn and apply these categories to life and work.