Dear Faculty,

How should Christian doctors and nurses navigate the ethical dilemmas in the industry such as abortion, euthanasia or biomedical engineering?

– Theophilus

Dear Theophilus,

This is a very important question regarding Christianity and medical ethics. As a Christian working in healthcare, you have a high calling to be the hands and feet of Jesus, the great physician, to the sick and vulnerable. Yet the landscape of healthcare today is complex and ever evolving due to the rapid development of new medical technologies and the legal complications.

These come in a society involved in the never-ending struggle to discern where one person’s rights begin and another’s ends. There are no easy answers, but rather some wisdom to be shared for growing to be the kind of person that is faithful to the calling of Christ in healthcare.

Primarily, we need to be grounded in categories that guide Christian theology about life, health and ethics. In other words, we need to think biblically. This is not simply a matter of knowing the right Scripture to apply to specific situations or getting the Greek or Hebrew just right (although that’s part of it).

Consider for a second how you would approach someone asking for the biblical position on stem cell research or cloning? Clearly, there is no passage that mentions those technologies by name, and the historical context in which the authors of Scripture were writing could have never dreamed of such technologies.

Is there no Christian theology about these and other issues in bioethics? Not at all. To think biblically is a matter of interpreting life in the categories and realities framed by the overarching story of the Bible under the authority of Christ as he leads us by his Holy Spirit in the community of believers (i.e. the Church).