The Birth of Humanity

Occurred on the day we celebrate as Christmas. On that day God revealed to us that we do not in fact travel a path from ashes to ashes, dust to dust, but from eternal life to eternal life.

In his book The Anticipatory Corpse Jeffrey Bishop (MD PhD) offers a brilliant history and analysis of how modern medicine, and modern society, came to understand the human person as a living machine that began dead and inevitably becomes dead. Medical science, and indeed science generally, is bounded on what Marcelo Gleiser (physicist and philosopher of science) calls The Island of Knowledge, an island that can neither see transcendence nor grasp life as anything more than a self-reproducing machine. 

In the eyes of science the human body is a wonderful machine to be sure; one whose fantastic origins through a combination of matter, energy, chance, and natural law are fascinating. And the way it creates the human person who inhabits it is equally wonderful if still not understood process. But vitalism, the idea that there is some mysterious something other than the functioning of the machine has been banished from science and medicine. And indeed, under the assumptions of modernity it would be intolerable in an age of organ transplants, ICU’s, and living wills. 

The power and control we wield over human bodies kept functioning by machines would be unbearable if when we chose (whether as patients or doctors) to die we were also choosing to end something we did not create, do not own, cannot measure and may only have the power to destroy. And so we locate life in some part of the machine and it's particular function; earlier in the heart, and now more commonly in the brain. Complex rationalizations of what constitutes a functioning human machine allow us to both manipulate the moment of “death" to best serve the purposes of medical science and legally identify the moment when organs that once belonged to one person can now belong to someone else.

This death to death story of human life told by biological science and affirmed by medical science is usually just the vague, uneasy background of human existence. A characteristic of the machine, as scientists note, is its ability to both be self-reflective and to focus that capacity on solving the problems immediately posed by the tasks of maintenance and reproduction. We’d all be morose philosophers if the machine that is both our person and personhood didn’t find food and sex so much more interesting, and entertainment an acceptable substitute for both. In a pinch (and here we have the birth of both theology and philosophy) a thinking machine unable to distract itself with food, sex, and entertainment turns its thoughts about death, life, and the meaning of life into complex puzzles to be solved (another form of entertainment) - again avoiding the confrontation with its own inevitable self-destruction.

Alas, in our time the human machine, even with its marvelous abilities in the field of distraction, is proving incapable of facing the environmental challenges posed by the decisions forced by modern medical science on one hand and the despair of a modern economy on the other. Always destined to self-destruct by our ever shortening telomeres, we increasingly choose to either rush the process through suicide, hide from it with drugs, or desperately delay it by ever more complex methods of repair and replacement. (Not that I object to delay. In the foreseeable future I’ll need a new heart valve, and I’m not anxious to pursue the other option.)

Yet there is this other story, one fewer and fewer people in our society have ever heard or truly know. It is the story of how we humans came to live on the Island of Knowledge, and indeed how it came to exist at all. It is the story of the true origin of our personhood, and of its true end. The story in no way denies the story of science. It begins with dividing cells, fetal formation, and ultimately a birth. It ends with a death and a burial. And yes, although the body disappears to make a point about what it means to be a person, there is no hint that it doesn’t ultimately decompose. Wherever it went, Jesus didn’t take it with him, because he was before it was, and is after it is gone.

He’s the story, the true human story, the story that doesn’t begin with the emergence of a self-conscious biological machine, but with the love of God. And which does not end in death, but in the love of God. And Jesus' story is all our stories. He is the true human, the one in whom we can know who and what we really are.

Philosophers and doctors may debate (and there are good reasons to do so) the moments at which the capacity for personhood emerges in the biological machine, and when it becomes impossible to sustain. We will have to make decisions that are impossible on the basis of knowledge we cannot possess. But if they are impossible they need not be unbearable. Because they cannot change this: the origin of each of us, and our end, is the eternal love of the Triune God. And it is with us even now. Who was born on Christmas? We were. We all were.