Presented as a ‘Planning Event’ of the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Chicago, 29th March, 1989
Ladies and Gentlemen. On 1st January 1988, so you informed me, the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America came into existence. It is the result of a merger of three antecedent Churches. With 5.6 million members, it is the fourth largest Christian Church in the US. This Church and its Bishop have convoked a conference which you have labelled as a ‘planning event.’ I am one of half a dozen outsiders who have been invited to comment on the context in which the new Church’s mission must respond.
I was asked to address something called ‘resources and institutions.’ I take up this challenge by making you reflect on a characteristic of twentieth-century institutions: their ability to generate entities that can be defined as basic needs and which, in turn, define resources that are perceived as being scarce. To illustrate my point I suggest that you look at the institutional relationship of the Church to a new kind of entity called ‘life,’ a notion variously referred to as ‘a life,’ ‘American lives,’ ‘human life on earth’ and by some as ‘gaya, the life of the biosphere.’ These words are now frequently used in public discussion and refer to a new kind of social construct: an entity no one dares to think away. Analyzing this discourse I am led to the conclusion that entitative life, the subject of this new discourse, is spoken about as something precious, endangered, scarce. It is further spoken about as something amenable to institutional management, something which calls for the training of ever-new specialists from lab scientists to therapists and professional caretakers. Several Christian Churches claim an eminent responsibility as guardians of ‘life,’ or as specialists in its definition. On the other hand, ‘life on Earth’ plays the crucial role in the new mythology and philosophy of eco-sciences and is discussed as the ultimate resource to be protected. Life is an eminent example of an assumption that is convenient for the expansion of institutional control over resources which, by going unexamined, has taken on the features of a certainty.
I will present five historical observations to support my thesis. I will give to each of these the form of a mini-syllabus. This organization of my material in the form of conceptual units that could serve as outlines for a lecture or seminar makes it easier for you to conduct the discussion for which you have invited me. It also suggests the lines for a historical and theological research project. The Lutheran Church to which we owe the leadership in the field of Biblical studies might take the lead in exploring the relationship between life in the Bible and what the term is used to mean now.
Philip Hefner asked me for a forceful presentation to generate theological response and issue-oriented discussion of concrete subjects. So I begin by stating a thesis:
‘Human life’ is a recent social construct, something which we now take so much for granted that we dare not seriously question it. I propose that the Church exorcize references to the new substantive life from its own discourse.
Life constitutes an essential referent in current ecological, medical, legal, political and ethical discourse. Consistently those who use it forget that the notion has a history; it is a Western notion, ultimately the result of a perversion of the Christian message. And it is also a highly contemporary notion, with confusing connotations that obliterate the power of the word to denote anything precise. Thinking in terms of ‘a life’ and ‘human life’ vaguely connotes something of extreme importance and tends to abolish all limits that decency and common sense have so far imposed on the exercise of professional tutelage.
As currently used, the English words ‘life’ and ‘a life’ feed the most powerful idol which the Church has had to face in the course of her history. More than the ideology of empire or feudal order, more than nationalism or progress, more than gnosticism or enlightenment, the acceptance of substantive life as a God-given reality lends itself to a new corruption of the Christian faith. What I fear is this: that the Churches, due to a lack of firm rooting in Biblical language, engage the myth-making power which they possess as late twentieth century institutions to foster, consecrate and sanctify the abstract secular notion of ‘life.’ Carrying out this profoundly ‘religious’ and equally non-Christian enterprise, they thereby make it possible that this spectral entity progressively replace the notion of ‘person’ in which the humanism of Western individualism is anchored. ‘A Life’ is amenable to management, to improvement and to evaluation in terms of available resources in a way which is unthinkable when we speak of ‘a person.’
I am turning the idea of management into a key problem of the encounter between Church and World. I do so because it is through management that those certainties are shaped and confirmed for the sake of which our late twentieth century society is organized. I want to call your attention to the dangers rather than to the opportunities of the Church co-sponsoring these realities in collaboration with other institutions.
The difficulty of addressing you on this particular subject appears in every sentence of the mail about this conference which I have been sent during the last seven months. Let me illustrate by caricature. In the first paragraph of the first letter you speak about a Church which ‘came into existence’ not on Pentecost, but on January 1st. You inform us that this Church resulted not from the will of God but from a merger of three antecedent institutions. This Church has a bishop, but one surrounded by an executive staff, a team which organizes itself for planning. With touching innocence the Vatican-like agencies of the eighties present themselves in managerial terms. Now, I am not challenging the necessity of competent accounting, banking, window cleaning and fund raising. I am not even questioning public relations, statistics and lobbying. And I welcome calling a spade what it is. But the innocence with which Church people apply to their community metaphors taken from corporations deserves some attention. Let me tell you a story.
One of my great teachers was Jacques Maritain, philosopher, neo-thomist, mystical poet and, at the time of the story, a colleague of Einstein at the Institute of Advanced Studies in Princeton. It was 1957, the second year after my transfer from a slum parish in New York to educational administration in Puerto Rico. I had become deeply involved in the newly established manpower qualification planning board of the island’s Government. I was deeply upset by the philosophical ambiguities into which planning, not of the Church, but of something called qualified manpower was leading me. Dictionaries did not help me: ‘planning’ does not appear in the pre-war supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary though it was launched within the same couple of years by Hitler, Stalin and Roosevelt. So on my next visit to the mainland I went to see Professor Maritain, who had earlier guided my studies on the history of the practice and theory of virtue in the Christian West. How could I fit ‘planning’ into the traditional system of responsible habits within which I had learned to think? I had great difficulty in explaining to the old man the meaning of the term that I was using: planning was not accounting, nor was it legislation, nor a kind of scheduling of trains. We took tea on his veranda. It was to be my last visit with him. I was delighted to look at his beautiful face, close to death, transparent, like one of the patriarchs in a Gothic stained glass window. The cup in his hand was shaking. Then, finally, he put it down, looking disturbed, and said: ‘Is not planning, which you talk about, a sin, a new species within the vices which grow out of presumption?’ He made me understand that in thinking about humans as resources that can be managed, a new certitude about human nature would be brought into existence surreptitiously.
Today it would seem silly to examine the notion of planning within the context of Christian virtues. Planning long ago acquired the public status of an accepted and well-tested technique. Today, it has become quite unthinkable to question the epistemic status of notions like ‘management,’ ‘control,’ ‘communication,’ ‘professionalism’ and other related ideas. With the semblance of understanding, speakers recklessly apply these concepts to almost anything in any way the speaker chooses. For instance, once ‘manpower’ has become the object of research, planning, development, investment and improvement, the ghost of manpower takes on the features of a compact reality. Even children learn to think in terms of human resources. Their popular games inculcate policies, programs, decision-making. Throughout life the concept of scarce resources in need of management acquires the guise of a-historical certainty. The ominous power of modern institutions consists in their ability to create and to name the social reality which the institutions’ experts need as the substance they manage.
The power of management to name norms of health, education, psychic balance, development and other modern idols is no less important than its power to actually create the social context within which a default in regard to these ‘values’ is experienced as a need which in turn translates into an entitlement. This point is of particular importance within the tradition of the Lutheran Church, with its intense awareness of the Church’s duty to announce the Word of God. The evangelical critique of the universe of bureaucratic terminology which penetrates and colors everyday conversation and consciousness seems to me a God-given task implied in one’s witness to the Word of God.
The day-by-day experience of a managed existence leads us all to take a world of fictitious substances for granted. It leads us to speak about these managed phantoms with new words like ‘progress’ in health care, universal education, global consciousness, social development; with words that suggest something ‘better,’ ‘scientific,’ ‘modern,’ ‘advanced,’ ‘beneficial to the poor.’ The verbal amoebas by which we designate the management-bred phantoms thus connote self-important enlightenment, social concern and rationality without however denoting anything which we could ourselves taste, smell or experience. In this semantic desert full of muddled echoes we need a Linus blanket, some prestigious fetish that we can drag around to feel like decent defenders of sacred values. Social justice at home, development overseas and world peace appear in retrospect as such fetishes; the new fetish is Life. There is something apocalyptic to search for life under a microscope (Mt.24,26).
There are people who are pro-life: some oppose abortion, others vivisection, capital punishment or war. Their opponents want the choice to interrupt pregnancy or life-saving treatment. As Will Campbell said to me three years ago: ‘life is tearing the Church apart.’ And yet, no one dares to oppose the use of this verbal amoeba in public controversy. Least of all churchmen. Some burn incense to life. Others have become specialists in peddling pseudo-biblical pieties about the ‘value’ of life. While Medicine manages life from sperm to worm, Churches have acquired a new social standing by framing these medical activities within the semblance of an ethical discourse. Bio-ethics provides a new and prestigious job market which gives preference to unemployed clerics with university degrees. I am therefore fully aware of the difficulty I face when I choose life as my exemplary instance of a notion which takes on spectral but unquestioned existence through an institutional commitment to new domains of management. And I am also aware of an added hazard: I present this example to a Church which resulted from a merger last January 1st, and whose executives are anxious to know what the world expects from their institution.
I can tell you: the Christian West has given birth to a radically different kind of human condition, unlike anything that has ever existed or that could have come into existence without the Church’s millennial midwifery. Only within the matrix which Jacques Ellul calls the ‘technological system’ has this new type of human condition come to full fruition. A new role opens for mythmaking, moralizing, legitimizing institutions, a role which cannot quite be understood in terms of old religions, but which some churches rush in to fill.
The new technological society is singularly incapable of generating myths to which people can form deep and rich attachments. Yet, for its rudimentary maintenance it needs agencies which create legitimate fetishes to which epistemic sentimentality can attach itself. At no previous time was there a similar demand for agencies capable of rendering such a service. And the major Christian Churches — traditionally legitimate, intellectually prestigious, well managed, independently financed — appear as apt centers to be entrusted with this task. The Gorbachev epoch is not one in which the Church faces Jacobins. Rather, a new kind of conspiracy threatens: not with the triumphalism of a Constantinian empire, but with powers that promote welfare, development and justice as the means of maintaining order and peace.
I was not taught to believe that the Church finds its vocation by listening to the world. The Lutheran Church is not only populous and rich; not only one of the important agencies defining moral issues in public life and speaking out for ethical responsibility in American politics; not only one of the key institutions providing social coherence, along with orchestras, democratic clubs, alumni associations and the Daughters of the American Revolution. I cannot but believe that it is also and, above all, one of the major vessels to which a distinctive theological tradition has been entrusted. All American Christians are in some way dependent on the Lutheran Church safeguarding Gospel words in a world full of pop-science junk terms. The clear discrimination between the Life and a life is today an essential and paradigmatic part of this task. But, how can we demand that the Church anathematize an idol at the very moment when she has lost her ability to define the terms she uses to announce her own message? How to demand that the Church sail against the very current into which she steered the West?
The comparison between the Church and an ocean-going sailing vessel goes back to patristic times. It antedates the invention of the central rudder and the ominous connotations of control which this image suggests. The unwieldy vessel now sails through utterly strange waters, those which medieval maps show at the edge of the world, where the oceans burn, and heavens rain sulphur. I can think of no better picture to evoke for you what it means to be the crew of a Church in the 1990s, when the elements through which generations have sailed have almost disappeared: ozone and climate, genetic variety and hereditary immunities, forests and whales — that is, more importantly, the cedars that give the Salomonic Temple its sensual quality, the monster in whose belly Jonas, like Christ, spent three days.
It is in these regions of dissimilitude that you find yourselves huddled together for a week of prayerful reflection, carrying on board the Good News which the Lord announces to Martha when he says to her ‘I am Life.’ He does not say, ‘I am a life.’ He says, ‘I am Life,’ tout court. Hypostatic life has its historical roots in the revelation that one human person, Jesus, is also God. This one Life is the substance of Martha’s faith, and of ours. We hope to receive this Life as a gift, and we hope to share it. We know that this Life was given to us on the Cross, and that we cannot seek it except on the via crucis. To be merely alive does not yet mean having this Life. This Life is gratuitous, beyond and above having been born and living. But, as Augustine and Luther constantly stress, it is a gift without which being alive would be as dust.
This Life is personal to the point of being one person, both revealed and promised in John 19. This life is something profoundly other than the life which appears as a substantive in the headlines of US newspapers. And at first sight, the two have nothing in common. On one side, the word says: Emmanuel, God-man, Incarnation. On the other, the term is used to impute substance to a process for which the physician assumes responsibility, which technologies prolong and atomic armaments protect; which has standing in court, can be wrongfully given; a process about whose destruction, without due procedure or beyond the needs of national defense or industrial growth, so-called pro-life organizations are incensed.
However, on closer inspection, life as a property, as a value, a national resource, a right, is a Western notion which shares its Christian ancestry with other key verities defining secular society. The notion of an entitative human life which can be professionally and legally protected has been tortuously construed through a legal-medical-religious-scientific discourse whose roots go far back into theology. The emotional and conceptual connotations of life in the Hindu, Buddhist or Islamic traditions are utterly distinct from those evident in the current discourse on this subject in Western democracies. This is a primary reason why the demystification of life is a service in which theologically-trained historians ought to engage.
Politically, pro-life movements are sponsored mainly by Christian denominations. And these organizations have played a major role in the social construction of the idol of which I speak. This is a second reason why I look to the Church to clarify the notion. The Christian Churches now face an ugly temptation: to cooperate in the social creation of a fetish which, in a theological perspective, is the perversion of revealed Life into an idol.
Christian theology starts where iconoclasm has done its job. If as an institution you put your resources into an interpretation of the Gospel that tries to shun epistemic sentimentality, the ‘history of life’ belongs on your agenda. And those who engage in this history might well keep five points in mind.
First, life, as a substantive notion, makes its appearance around 1801.
Biblical scholars are well aware of the limited correspondence between the Hebrew word for blood, dam, and the Greek term we would render as soul, namely, psyché. Neither comes anywhere near the meaning of the substantive, life. The concept of life does not exist in Greco-Roman antiquity: bios means the course of a destiny and zoe something close to the brilliance of aliveness. In Hebrew, the concept is utterly theo-centric, an implication of God’s breath.
Life as a substantive notion appears 2000 years later, along with the science that purports to study it. The term ‘biology’ was coined early in the nineteenth century by Jean-Baptiste Lamarck. He was reacting to the Baroque progress in botany and zoology which tended to reduce these two disciplines to the status of mere classification. By inventing a new term, he also named a new field of study, ‘the science of life.’
Lamarck’s genius confronted the tradition of distinct vegetable and animal ensoulment, along with the consequent division of nature into three kingdoms: mineral, vegetable and animal. He postulated the existence of life that distinguishes living beings from inorganic matter, not by visible structure but by organization. Since Lamarck, biology searches for the ‘stimulating cause of organization’ and its localization in tissues, cells, protoplasm, the genetic code or morphogenetic fields. ‘What is life?’ is, therefore, not a perennial question but the pop-science counterfoil to scientific research reports on a mixed bag of phenomena such as reproduction, physiology, heredity, organization, evolution and, more recently, feedback and morphogenesis. Life appears during the Napoleonic wars as a postulate which is meant to lead the new biologists beyond the competing descriptive studies of mechanists, vitalists and materialists. Then, as morphological, physiological and genetic studies became more precise towards the middle of the nineteenth century, life and its evolution become the hazy and unintended by-products reflecting in ordinary discourse an increasingly abstract and formal kind of scientific terminology. With the possible exception of the earliest two generations of nineteenth century biologists, obiter dicta based upon the substantive notion of life are not, and never have been, part of the argument of biology as a science. It is therefore surprising to observe with what solemnity biologists have recently been asked by church executives to pool their competence with that of theologians in the study of issues related to post-Lamarckian life.
Second, the loss of contingency, the death of nature and the appearance of life are but distinct aspects of the same new consciousness.
A thread which runs back to Anaxagoras (500–428 B.C.) links a number of otherwise profoundly distinct philosophical systems: the theme of nature’s aliveness. This idea of nature’s sensitive responsiveness found its constant expression well into the sixteenth century in animistic and idealistic, gnostic and hylomorphic versions. In these variations, nature is experienced as the matrix from which all things are born. In the long period between Augustine and Scotus this birthing power of nature was rooted in the world’s being contingent on the incessant creative will of God. By the thirteenth century, and especially in the Franciscan school of theology, the world’s being is seen as contingent not merely on God’s creation, but also on the graceful sharing of His own being, His life. Whatever is brought from possibility, de potentia, into the necessity of its own existence thrives by its miraculous sharing in God’s own intimacy, for which there is no better word than — His Life.
With the scientific revolution, contingency-rooted thought fades, and a mechanistic model comes to dominate perception. Caroline Merchant argues that the resulting ‘death of nature’ has been the most far-reaching event in changing men’s vision and perception of the universe. But it also raised the nagging question: how to explain the existence of living forms in a dead cosmos? The notion of substantive life thus appears not as a direct answer to this question, but as a kind of mindless shibboleth to fill a void.
Third, the ideology of possessive individualism has shaped the way life could be talked about as a property.
Since the nineteenth century, the legal construction of society increasingly reflects a new philosophical radicalism in the perception of the self. The result is a break with the ethics which had informed Western history since Greek antiquity, clearly expressed by the shift of concern from the good to values. Society is now organized on the utilitarian assumption that man is born needy, and needed values are by definition scarce. The possession of life in axiology is then interpreted as the supreme value. Homo œconomicus becomes the referent for ethical reflection. Living is equated with a struggle for survival or, more radically, with a competition for life. For over a century now it has become customary to speak about the ‘conservation of life’ as the ultimate motive of human action and social organization. Today, some bio-ethicists go even further. While up to now the law implied that a person was alive, they demand that we recognize that there is a deep difference between having a life and merely being alive. The proven ability to exercise this act of possession or appropriation is turned into the criterion for ‘personhood’ and for the existence of a legal subject.
During this same period, homo œconomicus was surreptitiously taken as the emblem and analog for all living beings. A mechanistic anthropomorphism has gained currency. Bacteria are imagined to mimic ‘economic’ behavior and to engage in internecine competition for the scarce oxygen available in their environment. A cosmic struggle among ever more complex forms of life has become the anthropic foundational myth of the scientific age.
Fourth, the factitious nature of life appears with special poignancy in ecological discussion.
Ecology can mean the study of correlations between living forms and their habitat. The term is also and increasingly used for a philosophical way of correlating all knowable phenomena. It then signifies thinking in terms of a cybernetic system which, in real time, is both model and reality: a process which observes and defines, regulates and sustains itself. Within this style of thinking, life comes to be equated with the system: it is the abstract fetish that both overshadows and simultaneously constitutes it.
Epistemic sentimentality has its roots in this conceptual collapse of the borderline between cosmic process and substance, and the mythical embodiment of both in the fetish of life. Being conceived as a sytem, the cosmos is imagined in analogy to an entity which can be rationally analyzed and managed. Simultaneously, this very same abstract mechanism is romantically identified with life and spoken about in hushed tones as something mysterious, polymorphic, weak, demanding tender protection. In a new kind of reading, Genesis now tells how Adam and Eve were entrusted with life and the further improvement of its quality. This new Adam is potter and nurse of the Golem.
Fifth, the pop-science fetish ‘a’ life tends to void the legal notion of person.
This process is well illustrated in the relationship between medical practice, juridical proceedings and bio-ethical discourse. Physicians in the Hippocratic tradition were bound to restore the balance (health) of their patient’s constitution, and forbidden to use their skills to deal with death. They had to accept nature’s power to dissolve the healing contract between the patient and his physician. When the Hippocratic signs indicated to the physician that the patient had entered into agony, the ‘atrium between life and death,’ he had to withdraw from what was now a deathbed. Quickening — which means coming alive — in the womb and the onset of agony — a personal struggle to die — defined the extreme boundaries between which a subject of medical care could be conceived. This now rapidly changes. Physicians are taught to consider themselves responsible for lives from the moment the egg is fertilized through the time of organ harvest. In the early twentieth century, the physician came to be perceived as society’s appointed tutor of any person who, having been placed in the patient role, lost some of his own competence. Now he becomes the socially responsible manager not of a patient, but of a life. According to one of the most reputable bio-ethicists, science has endowed society with the ability to distinguish between a life which is that of a human person and that which corresponds to ‘a human non-person.’ The latter creature lacks the quality or ‘capacity required to play a role in the moral community.’ The new discipline of bio-ethics mediates between pop science and law by creating the semblance of a moral discourse that roots ‘personhood’ in the qualitative evaluation of the fetish, life.