{"id":1723,"date":"2012-11-01T14:14:53","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T14:14:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/?p=1723"},"modified":"2020-10-28T20:02:26","modified_gmt":"2020-10-28T20:02:26","slug":"review-essay-fritz-oehlschlaeger-procreative-ethics-philosophical-and-christian-approaches-to-questions-at-the-beginning-of-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/learn.elca.org\/jle\/review-essay-fritz-oehlschlaeger-procreative-ethics-philosophical-and-christian-approaches-to-questions-at-the-beginning-of-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Review Essay: Fritz Oehlschlaeger, Procreative Ethics: Philosophical and Christian Approaches to Questions at the Beginning of Life"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction <\/strong><\/p>\n

[1] Fritz Oehlschlaeger will be a new voice to many who read the Journal of Lutheran Ethics.<\/em> A friend and conversation partner of the present writer, Oehlschlaeger is a lay theologian who deserves to be known for reasons I hope to make clear in the course of this essay. In this recent book, he shows how Christian ethics should be telling us about a fundamental, perhaps fatal, dilemma of our civilization: we seek to solve with money and power problems which in the final analysis are matters of love and justice. Money and power to be sure expand human possibilities; Oehlschlaeger\u2019s book is no Luddite brief against innovation, technology or even the market system. Yet money and power do not and cannot make us more loving or just nor can they reconcile conflicting desires to achieve workable social harmonies in real history. For those ancient vices of envy and greed, the money and the power are never enough. They are never enough because they cannot, given the human condition of finitude, secure the phantasm of absolute sovereignty that tacitly is sought under the conditions of secularism. Blinded to our finitude like the rich fool in the parable of Jesus, the blind building of bigger barns only makes us worse and our problems greater. In the thrall of power and money, we forget our common state of ineradicable vulnerability; we forget that the moral right to life is basic and inviolable: \u201clife is the condition on which all other desires depend\u201d (100). As morally basic (whatever its legal status may be), the right to life ought to lend order and direction to all other desires which may be satisfied or frustrated, restrained or indulged in its light. The moral limit of my own desire is that I may not, inasmuch as I wish likewise to be protected, deprive others of this condition on which all other desires depend.<\/p>\n

[2] The sad fact that human history honors this most basic moral commitment so haphazardly does not vitiate its necessity. How much worse history would be without its moral force at work shaping and directing desire! How much worse the future will be with the erosion of its force, however unintentional, caused by the current practice of abortion. \u201cIf the wrongness of killing lies in a distinctive, exceptionless prohibition against it, we will form our desires in a way that precludes killing.\u201d But relativizing a desire to kill to one inhibition among others that might be chosen across a spectrum of legitimacy \u201cleaves us freer to form desires of sufficient intensity and value (at least to us) to override the wrongness of killing\u201d (101). The victim is social trust, as Oehlschlaeger repeatedly reminds us, which has its sine qua non in the absoluteness of the prohibition of killing. \u201cOne thing that is wrong with killing is that it makes rational discussion impossible. Participants in rational conversation must believe that they are not subject to being killed: if they are in need of being reassured on this matter, then the possibility of such conversation has been lost\u201d (304). By contrast, \u201ccommitment to the irreplaceability of persons will lead us to creative economic thinking \u2013in a very broad sense\u2014that utilitarianism may not, particularly if it is allowed to put the very existence of individual persons into question\u201d (238). Moral deliberation as a process of reasoning together for the common good presupposes such basic and unconditional acceptance of others in their own bodily integrity, as integral living organism. \u201cDoesn\u2019t the process of becoming just involve learning to respond appropriately to others irrespective, or even in spite, of how one might want them to be or think they should be\u2026?\u201d Oehlschlaeger asks. \u201cDoes not our learning to be just depend upon accepting the limits both of others and ourselves and then coming to recognize the achievements or claims of others against the background of common limitations? If human nature comes to be seen as fully alterable, how will one know how to justly recognize another\u2019s due?\u201d (230, emphases added)<\/p>\n

[3] Note well: common human \u201cnature\u201d here is being taken not in the sense of philosophical essentialism (see the critique of Aristotle, 82-5), i.e. as the formal possibility and intrinsic imperative to actualize a specific predetermined essence. Rather, human \u201cnature\u201d here means something much more down to earth, namely, the natural condition of somatic existence with resolute awareness of each individual\u2019s genetic singularity, individual particularity and ineradicable mortality. Oehlschlaeger uses the jargon of \u201cspecies-typical functioning\u201d to establish a natural \u201cbase-line\u201d (e.g., 221-2) by which to differentiate therapy from enhancement. This \u201ctypicality\u201d includes natural aging and eventual death with life-long exposure to that latter threat coming prematurely. Just because of our ontological condition of vulnerability, we both have and need the right to life in a species-typical way.<\/p>\n

[4] As the rhetorical questions above indicate, however, a peculiar new and formidable appearance of the ancient temptation of power and money comes on the scene: the biotechnical. Its allure lies in the prospect of transforming human nature, indeed overcoming ontological vulnerability, and thus radically sidestepping the call to overcome ourselves in the direction of love so that we become just people in just societies. \u201cHow will the competing claims of members of different cohorts be adjudicated when there is no longer an assumed background of shared human nature?\u201d (230) Yet that is the biotechnical point: there will then be no need to adjudicate conflicting claims, because \u201cwe\u201d will have by eugenic means totally programmed \u201courselves\u201d to be happy and sociable. We will have reached a \u201ccondition of such abundance\u201d as to make \u201cjustice no longer necessary\u201d (192). It is in response to this ominous and fantastical project, made newly plausible by biotechnology, that our author treats the contentious matter of abortion \u2013\u201cthe issue that most poisons our political life\u201d (12) \u2013 in a new and fresh way.<\/p>\n

[5] \u201cI write as a critic of abortion, but not as one who would advocate making abortion illegal\u201d (47). Oehlschlaeger\u2019s extensive engagement with the literature on issues at the beginning of life reflects both Christian theological and philosophical feminist perspectives which he develops in this work. Regarding the latter, there should be no doubt of Oehlschlaeger\u2019s bona fides. He undertakes the burden of showing that \u201cdesire to protect the fetus from conception can be consistent with support for the aspirations of women\u201d (14). He regularly unmasks \u201cmale ways of thinking that fail to do justice to women\u2019s experience\u201d (38, 80-3). He has pro-lifers ask themselves feminist questions, e.g., whether the ultimate ground of \u201cthe strong separation of gender roles\u201d is \u201cthat war is necessary, inevitable\u201d (53). He suggests that \u201cfeminists are right to attack the enterprise of genetic engineering as male usurpation of reproduction\u201d (179). Oehlschlaeger makes a point of disowning the mere outlawing of abortion as the essential goal of his pro-life position: \u201cwomen\u2019s need for abortion is directly related to the gender inequality that has marked, and has continued to mark, this and nearly every other human society\u201d (14). Many pages later this initial judgment is reiterated in a surprising concession to Peter Singer. Singer \u201csees the broad abortion right to be essential to women\u2019s self-determination;\u201d Oehlschlaeger approves in the sense that this \u201cmay well be the case under the current economic and social order shaping gender relations\u201d (313). Under the current order, outlawing abortion would subjugate women to unwanted pregnancy, thus depriving them of that personal sovereignty which our kind of society valorizes, just as it would also disadvantage them in economic competition with men. The very possibility of rational persuasion about the morality of abortion under these conditions depends on granting abortion as the social equalizer which it is. But for Oehlschlaeger that tells us far more about the endemic injustices of our kind of society than about the morality of terminating unborn human life.<\/p>\n

[6] In tandem with that and writing from the Christian ethical perspective, Oehlschlaeger acknowledges that our convictions about \u2018when life begins\u2019 (a separate question, of course, from the morally basic \u2018right to life\u2019) rest \u201con particular perspectives that are bound to the whole personality and can only shift with a reorientation of the person\u201d (quoting John Noonan, 48). Hence, the author\u2019s purpose is not to muster the state to coerce pregnancy under the present order of things but in the realm of culture \u201cto keep the issue open: to resist the conclusion that it has been settled definitely in favor of the justifiability of abortion on demand\u201d (48). Thus the author argues in the hope of reorienting persons, including forming in them the new orientation of the gospel towards the coming order of God. Philosophically, however, Oehlschlaeger also ventures to this end that the most immediate and perhaps even most efficient steps towards \u201cmeaningful change\u201d will come \u201cby the transformation of men\u2019s attitudes towards children\u201d (14). That would also entail change in attitudes about work and social status. The entire book may well be read as an effort in such transformation of persons within the post-modern, post-Christendom situation of critical pluralism: \u201cChristians should welcome the freedom made possible by post-modernity: the freedom to make their convictions plain without reliance on the force that inevitably distorts them\u201d (6). I will return to the promise and perils of this posture in conclusion.<\/p>\n

Our Brave New World<\/strong><\/p>\n

[7] The precocious fashion in contemporary moral philosophy is to construct little stories dramatizing supposed ethical dilemmas or impasses which the philosopher then gets to analyze for us, no doubt, to our enlightenment. For famous example, Judith Jarvis Thomson told the unlikely story of the \u201cUnconscious Violinist\u201d to liken an unwanted pregnancy to being taken hostage. It seems that the Society of Music Lovers has found that you alone of all people have the right blood type to save a beloved violinist, comatose due to renal failure. So they kidnap and drug you, then plug you into his circulatory system. Now awakening, you learn that to unplug you from the violinist would mean his death. But \u201cRelax,\u201d says the Authority Figure, \u201chis recuperation is projected in just nine months. Then you can be freed\u201d (118). Thomson\u2019s allegory, calculated to elicit our outrage on behalf of the kidnapped, elicited a flurry of expansions and elaborations among moral philosophers, all following her lead to justify elective abortion morally (104-69). But \u201ctoo often we fail to assess the kinds of narrative choices these stories embody,\u201d Oehlschlaeger observes in the course of dissecting such literarily amateurish ventures, \u201cor to recognize their rhetorical purposes\u201d (108). Such episodes deflect attention away from the cultural and economic order in which the practice of abortion is embedded and which it expresses. Indeed they are constructed, consciously or not, to conceal that order and the sacrifices it requires of us. Thus Oehlschlaeger shows that at the heart of Thomson\u2019s allegory is a false analogy, concealing a presumption: \u201cUnlike the violinist, the fetus has no chance to be just; its sole dependence on another is at once both ordinary and unelected. To abort it is to kill it, in a way that is not true of unplugging the violinist\u201d (or the Society of Music Lovers) who does (do) have a moral choice, a choice to be just, namely, \u201cto let himself die\u201d (to let him die) sadly but naturally rather than unjustly exploit another in order to secure his own life (their favorite violinist\u2019s life, 123). The presumption hidden in the allegory is that being an adult at full powers is normative, that such powerful adults have a socially contextless and unnatural right to extend life at any moral cost, so long as they or their allies have the power to pay for it. What a picture of our affluent false consciousness, the ready rationalization of our power and privilege! As a result, the moral demand of love, as in Jesus\u2019 parable of the Good Samaritan, is rebuked. Adults have the right to be \u201cbad Samaritans\u201d (well, even worse, hostage takers). We never get to see in this parable the most ordinary action of moral life, Christian and otherwise, in daily \u201cgiving death\u201d (i.e., frustrating some desires \u2013cf. Romans 8:20– for the sake of others).<\/p>\n

[8] In such analyses, Oehlschlaeger unleashes the skills of an accomplished literary critic on \u201cthe imagined examples of philosophers to suggest that their narratives also frequently need to be scrutinized as works of fiction\u201d (325) \u2013 a designation I italicize, because in the realm of philosophy into which this author treads, \u201cfiction\u201d is a polite way of saying \u201cartificial and tendentious.\u201d As mentioned, such atomistic portraits are created to conceal the function of the current practice of abortion in the late capitalist machinery. In the detailed analyses of this book, a veritable host of progressive moral defenses of abortion or abortion rights (Dworkin, Boonin, Rachel, Steffen, Muller) and their defenses in turn in pragmatist-utilitarian philosophy (Stout) are examined, dissected, weighed and found wanting.<\/p>\n

[9] Yet, as already alluded, this book is no ordinary \u201cpro-life\u201d brief. It works to position the practice of abortion, now sliding into eugenics and flirting with the possibility of infanticide, in the spiritual world and subjectivity of which it is part. Can we see ourselves, for example, as a nation \u201ccommitting itself to a policy of limitless economic expansion in a world of very unequal powers\u2026. [which] would be required, as a minimum, to ensure the dependable, steady flow of inexpensive energy sources; to encourage vast concentrations of corporate power in the name of efficiency\u2026; to convert every available citizen into an economic subject first, at whatever cost to their other roles or identities, and to displace a whole variety of costs \u2013monetary, human, natural\u2014from present to future, i.e., to incur great levels of debt because the imperative of growth is now\u201d (192-3)? Can we see ourselves therefore committed to militarism abroad (134, 139, 291) and the progressive social atomization of the domestic population (193)? Can we in the knowledge class see ourselves as part of an elite grab for social control (197, 212, 218, 224-5, 227), anticipated but not hitherto paralleled on account of the enormous new power made available by the rise of biotechnology? Backing up this self-portrait, can we see at bottom of all this our own very bleak view of the creation: \u201cEach of us is a replaceable \u2018object of care,\u2019 a death waiting to happen in a nihilistic world where the best we can do is to continually transfer care from one lost object to another not yet taken\u201d (338-9)? Can we own up to the same elitist logic which led Heinrich Himmler to design the factory-efficient death camps after visiting a gruesome \u201caction\u201d behind the Russian front: \u201cOnce the decision to do harm is taken\u2026 one ought to do that as painlessly as possible\u2026\u201d (110).<\/p>\n

[10] Our practice of abortion, for Oehlschlaeger, is part and parcel of this \u201csacrificial system\u201d just sketched. Within it the moral justifications of abortion by the philosophers and their theological camp followers function to \u201csacralize the natural and social investment, the \u2018earnest\u2019 expended on each of us in advance\u2026 The killing of fetal life works\u2026 to impart value to other kinds of choices: getting on with one\u2019s life\u2026 redeeming one\u2019s existence. These are now elevated to the condition of sacred responsibilities by the fact that abortion has made them possible\u201d (63-4, i.e., in contrast to \u201cwomen\u2019s lives being \u2018wrecked\u2019 and \u2018wasted\u2019 by child-bearing and rearing\u201d 65). Thus today\u2019s parent says to the child: Look how valuable an investment you are, since we did not abort you like others, but chose you, indeed designed you and enhanced you at great cost! The powerful ideology (in the Marxian sense of masking the real economy of things) erected on this elitist base is paradoxically egalitarianism in economic and social pursuit. \u201cTo abort is to kill, reluctantly, for the sovereign, to exercise responsibility earnestly in the pursuit, and the currency, of equality\u201d (65) \u2013 where \u201cequality\u201d means not the achievement of social solidarity of real existing individuals but equalization, the leveling of all real difference, to make us replaceable parts in the ever-more efficient machine, where, however, some will be \u201cmore equal than others,\u201d i.e., the Designers who will decide the conditions of equality for the rest. Such sacrifice for the sake of \u201cequality\u201d is predicated upon the \u201cimportant, largely concealed fact of political life under pro-choice \u2013that is, that I have not been welcomed into the polity as the being I am most uniquely, for my genetic inheritance partly constitutes that, and it was not enough to give me a claim against being killed\u201d (73).<\/p>\n

[11] By the same token, these elitist dynamics of egalitarian ideology cannot consistently stop at merely human equalization but press on against the conceits of \u201cspeciesism: the unjustifiable preference for one\u2019s own species\u201d (317). The real target here is the hitherto existing family, with its procreative reproduction by \u201cnatural lottery.\u201d Oehlschlaeger takes up Peter Singer\u2019s cogent if noxious argument that there is no principled difference between our practice of abortion and its extension to infanticide (except the emotional investment in a baby by its natural parents), and his further suggestion that such emotional attachments formed in biological parenting are at the root of our prejudicial speciesism. Drawing out the implications of Singer\u2019s argument, Oehlschlaeger muses that enlightened policy ought then to be \u201cdirected at breaking down parents\u2019 preferential and exclusivist regard for their own children, at least when they are sub-optimal. Such regard might be the appropriate object of rational therapy\u2026 [overcoming the parents\u2019] purely emotional response that ought not to be allowed to exclude the [sub-optimal] child\u2019s replacement\u201d (317). This discounting of emotion as a source of moral insight, of course, comports with the radical Cartesianism of the entire project (311) in fostering the subjectivity of a putatively sovereign self which reigns imperturbably over the body and its passions.<\/p>\n

[12] But the slide down the slope from abortion to infanticide is no longer anything to fear. In Singer\u2019s words, \u201conce we are old enough to comprehend the policy, we are too old to be threatened by it\u201d (303). Singer\u2019s own argument is a straightforward call to intellectual clarity and moral honesty about what we are already doing, revealing of the \u201csacrificial system\u201d of late capitalism: 1) there is no moral difference between abortion and infanticide, 2) since in deciding to have a child, parents in any case decide against having other possible children, and 3) these latter choices should be guided by the utilitarian directive to bring about the greater good (308-9). Ergo, eugenic selections are already being made, which selections should be calculated to bring about the greatest good for the greatest number. Let us then be brave enough to be the sovereign selves that already we are in process of becoming.<\/p>\n

The Sovereign Self<\/strong><\/p>\n

[13] The \u201cbiomedical imperative\u201d to \u201celiminate suffering and expand the realm of human choice\u2026, to relieve the human condition of subjection to the whims of fortune and the bonds of necessity,\u201d evokes a sovereign self. This sovereign self exercises in turn \u201cvigilant control over our bodies.\u201d The human body becomes \u201cthe object of one\u2019s choices\u201d (5), as if we were \u201cCartesian angels manipulating a machine\u201d (16). The background narrative is Hobbes\u2019 tale of humans as \u2018rising beasts, not fallen angels.\u2019 The state of nature is the chaos of multiple aspirations for security in a world of scarcity; here \u201clife is a necessity that demands what is necessary for its continuance\u201d to be met and limited only \u201cby counter-necessities\u201d (122-3). Aspiration to sovereignty, however, is contradicted by the ineradicable fact of mortality; kings perish and thrones fall. The Leviathan is a mortal god. Contemporary egalitarian ideology does not disown the Hobbesian problematic but democratizes it. To continue with the sovereign self despite this contradiction of the mortality of ineradicably somatic existence, one must somehow overcome death: \u201cour profoundest dilemma as creatures fully cognizant of mortality is that involving our continuity beyond death.\u201d<\/p>\n

[14] Contemporary issues of procreative ethics are located by Oehlschlaeger at just this juncture where the self seeking sovereignty must somehow overcome the fatal dissolution of its project. \u201cThe simplest, most straightforward approach to that problem would be to shape our children fully in our own images\u201d (320), as cloning technology actually makes thinkable. Short of that, already our current practice of \u201cabortion is one of a series of technologies \u2013the crudest, if you will\u2014whose goal is becoming increasingly transparent: the comprehensive shaping, control, and selection of the kinds of human life we will allow to be\u201d (52), as we heard above. The \u201csituating of abortion choice among other consumer choices\u201d (50), the \u201creplaceablity\u201d of fetuses (314) argued by philosophers morally to justify abortion as a choice alongside other choices actually made in entertaining pregnancy, the parental expectation of return on investment (62) \u2013 all this amounts to the \u201ccommodification of children\u201d (21). This is a process now underway, bridging a transition from the crudity of abortion to the sophistication of cloned babies, in this way insuring the sovereign self\u2019s virtual immortality.<\/p>\n

[15] This analysis leads Oehlschlaeger in the direction of Foucault\u2019s notion (54) of the \u201cbiopolitical\u201d nature of the contemporary state (i.e., that the modern nation state is primarily about \u201cdistinguishing who can be killed and who cannot\u201d 91): an economic and military order which systematically sacrifices magnitudes of unborn children (and others) to sustain privilege (gender privilege as well as other privileges) in the name of economic necessity which must, in the process, progressively departicularize (= equalize) all persons for purposes of economic efficiency, reducing them into interchangeable cogs in the machine. The irony of this ideology of a coming world of the equality among sovereign selves is massive: the aspirational sovereign self disembodies itself, sheds all historical particularity, levels everything in the name of egalitarianism only itself to be reduced from person to part.<\/p>\n

The Narrative Self<\/strong><\/p>\n

[16] In contrast to this sovereign self of late modernity, Oehlschlaeger draws a picture of the narrative self stemming from the Biblical tradition: \u201cunique, embodied beings, each of whom lives out an unrepeatable history experienced from a point-of-view never fully commensurate with that of others\u2026\u201d (13); \u201cthe destiny of being on the road between an unchosen conception and an ineluctable death as the uniquely historical beings we are, here once for all only\u201d (70). While the formulations here are sometimes Heideggerian (e.g., 323), the narrative self which Oehlschlaeger depicts is in its fullness the Biblical self, so to speak, \u2018being towards death-and-resurrection.\u2019 \u201cDeath remains the enemy, but, through the cross, it can come to be seen as a kind of gift, the condition of a love that sees the other truly as an other\u2026 so that Christian parents can come to understand their work and joy is not to rear images of themselves but to be, with their children, images of God\u201d (347). If this is not existentialism, it is also not, to repeat, essentialism: \u201c[n]ow curiously, I share the condition of uniqueness with all others\u201d (73). Here what we share with others is the fact of each individual\u2019s uniqueness, each one\u2019s particularity as a unique historical formation; thus we are persons seeking authentic community, not accidental instantiations of the genera Homo sapiens which ought not to deviate from the formal norm (as if this latter idea were somehow more real or authentic than actual individuals!). Such affirmation of the narrative self involves Oehlschlaeger with the Leibnizian idea \u201cthat all events in a person\u2019s life are internally related to all the others, such that implicit in a fetus are all the experiences of the adult, and this is due to God\u2019s eternal \u2018foreknowledge\u2019 of everything that is to happen\u201d (citing Dombrowski and Deltete, who are attacking Leibniz in order to depersonalize the fetus, 87).<\/p>\n

[17] Notwithstanding the complexities of divine foreknowledge, it is clear that if the events of our lives are not internally related, the alternative is that these events are only externally related, fortuitous really, \u201cone damn thing after another\u201d (89) out of which perhaps a good existentialist might \u201cmake meaning,\u201d as we say nowadays. Strictly speaking, as a result, we cannot speak of personal identity spanning time (88) in a coherent narrative, but only of the temporary existential connections constructed by the project(s) of the sovereign self \u2013 who may in the ultimate expression of sovereignty simply reinvent his or her visible mask as conditions require, forgetting what one has been (as notoriously, the Yale literary critic and former Nazi, Paul De Man, forgot his past). In the latter case, no fetus is the beginning of a particular, irreplaceable person; any one fetus can be replaced by any other, the more so as fetal life is subject to biotechnical design. However less \u201cstrictly\u201d than Leibniz a contemporary Christian theologian might take divine foreknowledge, he or she will hold with him that \u201cthe continuity of self into the future depends not on us but on the God who sustains the world.\u201d The events of a person\u2019s life therefore are believed to be somehow internally related, unfolding God\u2019s providential purpose by turning good out of evil, since \u201ceven the hairs on our heads are numbered.\u201d<\/p>\n

[18] More theologically than Leibniz, Oehlschlaeger affirms that \u201cGod\u2019s future has come forward in Christ and thus, at baptism, the Christian begins to live proleptically in a future that is at least partially known through Jesus\u2019 cross and resurrection\u201d (89). Thus our \u201cgiving death\u201d along life\u2019s way in new lives of self-giving service is grounded and articulated in God\u2019s own self-giving, which master narrative works to make coherent wholes out of the scattered fragments of meaning in life, including the not infrequent betrayals of the new self in Christ: \u201cBecause I have been formed to be a person who does not want to kill, I also do not want to let others die when I can prevent that with little risk to myself\u2026 what simultaneously nags at me and enables my response [to others who are threatened] is the Christian story\u2019s drawing me into community with those everywhere [and preventing my escape into irresponsibility]\u2026 by the story of God\u2019s choosing to die (freely and unnecessarily) for me, and the sure knowledge that I can be forgiven for not regarding myself as wholly responsible for the lives of others.\u201d Otherwise, \u201cI would surely seek to justify myself by referring responsibility away from myself\u2026\u201d (130). Well said. Yet if the Christian so believes in God for him- or herself, then \u201cGod\u2019s love for the world\u201d (Bonhoeffer) holds not only for the Christian who is blessed to know and trust this, but for all who have been claimed and won at the Cross. So the baptized Christian would have to hold as true for all others what she or he holds for self: that God has known me \u201cfrom my mother\u2019s womb.\u201d Every human life is internally related by God\u2019s love for it in Christ, which promises to connect all the dots, in the pattern of Jesus\u2019 cross and resurrection, to create each unique human individual and weave it, together with all others, into the coming of the Beloved Community.<\/p>\n

Birth Pangs of the Beloved Community<\/strong><\/p>\n

[19] Thus we come to the enormous contemporary difficulty of the biblical and Christian view of the narrative self: the ownership of pain and suffering which it entails, what ancestors in faith used to call \u201cbearing the cross.\u201d This ownership of the particular suffering body which one is given at and from conception puts the Christian view radically at odds with the \u201cbiomedical imperative\u201d of the sovereign self to abolish pain, even at the cost of virtually abolishing bodily existence, as we have seen. Echoing John Paul II\u2019s critique of the sovereign self\u2019s \u201cculture of death,\u201d Oehlschlaeger writes: \u201cSuffering becomes simply a problem to be solved, a scandal that ought not exist, rather than a mystery that must be confronted and lived through in mutual dependence\u201d (20). Rather than the sovereign self\u2019s desperate (i.e., from the Christian perspective, hopeless) reliance on technology to solve our problems, the narrative self\u2019s embrace of suffering unleashes the ethical and social creativity to put technology to better use, i.e. for building communities of love and justice composed of particular individuals. \u201cSuffering itself, the struggle against limits, serves as an important motivation for the creativity that discovers new possibilities for human flourishing\u201d in personal virtue and social justice (262). As per the Leibniz introduced earlier, Oehlschlaeger therefore finds himself defending the created goodness of what Leibniz (too paradoxically) called \u201cnatural evil:\u201d i.e., the \u201cevil\u201d that is natural to any conceivable creaturely existence, the \u201cevil\u201d of non-perfection, non-divinity. Hence \u201cthere are kinds of suffering we should work to eradicate\u2026 but there are other kinds of suffering that we ought not to lessen. I want to protect my child from touching the hot burner on the stove, but when he does touch it, the suffering it causes will him teach him a series of important lessons\u2026\u201d (261). We need just this distinction between natural and moral evil, in other words, to see what evils are wrong and to be resisted or endured, overcome or protested or even accepted in the strange action-passion of self-giving (262). Recalling the opening paragraphs of this essay, we suffer the limit of God\u2019s good commandment: Thou shalt not kill!, in order to find new and better ways to live together.<\/p>\n

[20] Needless to say, this counsel strikes even otherwise sympathetic denizens of our brave new world as utopian. It is certainly reflective of an eschatological faith which defers its own reward to the resurrection in order to invite to the feast those who cannot now repay. But in just this way it really touches the present reality in and as the community of faith: \u201cthe church must be a community capable of acknowledging and bearing suffering so as to be an alternative to the impossible secular project of banishing all suffering \u2013 a project too easily given, in its worship of efficiency, to banishing those who suffer\u201d (286). The primary domain in which Oehlschlaeger envisions the practice of such Christian discipleship is the family. \u201cThe free gift of self from parent to child will be, for many, the realest analogy \u2013and pointer to\u2014God\u2019s free gift of himself in Christ\u201d (21). Especially under modern conditions of prolonged life-spans, the \u201cjoining of man and woman must now be thought within the context of prolonged commitment to nurturance and education of children \u2013 these being no less \u2018natural\u2019 and embodied actions than the joining itself\u201d (34), for \u201cmarriage is not something whose terms can be invented\u2026 it requires the sacrifice of autonomy. They have become \u2018one flesh,\u2019 quite literally, in their children\u201d (38). Indeed, parents \u201chave always been vulnerable in their children\u2026 one is now at least as endangered and as vulnerable in the life of another as one is in one\u2019s own\u201d (41). Just so, in the joining of marriage, as in the procreation of children, the person is reoriented, the sovereign self is decentered. To \u201clearn to open themselves to increasing vulnerability in one another and their children without anxiously seeking to protect or shape their children\u2019s identities\u201d is to learn love (42) \u2013 agapic love which corrects and purifies eros. (How much more the case in adoptive parents, I might add, where your child is not genetically your own; here you either refuse to acknowledge the child fully, or you learn in a much more radical way your charge to be a steward of a little life that is precisely not an extension of your own being.) This focus on the primary community of the Christian family protects Oehlschlaeger from the criticism of utopianism, though it does not protect him, as I shall note in conclusion, from the potential criticism of a Christopher Lasch: that \u2018the haven from the heartless world\u2019 has already been penetrated by the monster of the brave new world and is increasingly absorbed by it. In the latter case, the family needs political defense and legal protection.<\/p>\n

[21] In any case, as the new subjectivity of faith in divine promise narrated in Christ is at odds with \u201cthe things that are,\u201d we are led to a very different relation to the secular state than we have seen with the sovereign self: \u201cTo be a critic of abortion, then, might be simply to insist that I want to be received into society just as I am and that I cannot be just as I am so long as the state accords me protected status only insofar as I assent to its definitions of who can be killed and when\u201d (91). The cost of such resistance is \u201clearning to give our deaths\u201d (347), just as ancient martyrs knew. So the church must not only be an alternative community of care, a colony of God\u2019s future within the official world of the contemporary secular state; that could end up as little more than chaplaincy, reinforcing this status quo. To resist, the community of the self narrated in Christ must also become again the church of \u201cChristian liberty.\u201d<\/p>\n

[22] Supporters of the current practice of abortion with their tacit Enlightenment commitments to the sole sovereignty of the secular state (as in, \u201cDon\u2019t impose your religion on me!\u201d) suppose that \u201cto hold a belief is to work for its institution as law and thereby to force it on others\u201d (59). They do not know nor can they imagine \u201cChristian liberty,\u201d the Pauline \u201cfreedom for which Christ has set us free\u201d (Gal. 5:1). This is not their kind of freedom, the freedom to be a \u201cbad Samaritan,\u201d the concocted freedom of consumer choice in reality much manipulated by moneyed purveyors of bread and circuses. It is the freedom in Christ to \u201cbear one another\u2019s burdens\u201d and to \u201creturn good for evil,\u201d as in, concretely, bearing and nurturing unplanned, unwanted, even forced conception. Such Christian liberty does not imply, Oehlschlaeger hastens to add, that the victim of rape or incest returns \u201cevil for evil\u201d if she chooses to abort; rather \u201cshe defends herself against the evil perpetrated against her.\u201d At the same time, \u201cthe Gospel makes possible an appeal to her freedom precisely by precluding any possibility of judgment by others,\u201d by instead enveloping her in the caring community of the church. On the other hand, the church that fails to defend the victim, but also fails to appeal to the victim\u2019s own agency in Christ the Crucified who forgave his executioners reveals its own captivation by the brave new world of the sovereign self: \u201ca sure sign that we do not believe the Gospel, that we do not really believe that good can come from evil or that the future is open or that there is any wisdom on such matters than the world\u2019s\u201d (59).<\/p>\n

A Critical Question in Conclusion<\/strong><\/p>\n

[23] Oehschlaeger is deeply indebted to Stanley Hauerwas, as will be evident to perceptive readers. In the way that Oehlschlaeger appropriates Hauerwas, we should all be his debtors. Yet in this insightful (and for his argumentative posture, I would add, crucial) appeal to Christian liberty, Oehlschlaeger also reveals his debts to Lutheranism. Just here, however, some genuine difficulties arise touching upon the coherence of his proposal. Can he really concede the right to self-defense, as he does in the discussion above of abortion by a victim of rape or incest? In the course of this book, he has given us no other rationale for \u201cdefense\u201d than as the ideological masking of Hobbes\u2019 alleged necessity of self-preservation, not really then a Christian possibility at all. Likewise, is the appeal to Christian liberty in fact not subversive (to the point of civil disobedience, itself a form of non-violent coercion) of the kind of sovereignty in terms of which Oehlschlaeger has so insightfully decoded our brave new world of abortion on the way to eugenics, infanticide and cloning? Hobbes certainly thought so! Suppressing Christian liberty (which the Enlightenment called \u201centhusiasm\u201d) was one of the main responsibilities of Hobbes\u2019 secular sovereign. We are perhaps closer to the catacombs than Oehlschlaeger seems to allow, if in fact the juggernaut of the sovereign self with its brave new world is what this book portrays them to be.<\/p>\n

[24] Pray God, there are alternatives. Radical Orthodoxy loves to assimilate Locke to Hobbes, but in fact Locke may be read, especially in his political philosophy, as restoring a new place for Christian liberty under the banner of \u201ctoleration\u201d (not the vulgar pluralism of today\u2019s popular culture but exactly the kind of vigorously critical pluralism which Oehlschlaeger assumes in the argumentative posture of this book). In that case, it is possible to think of \u201cdefense,\u201d not as the ideological rationalization of Hobbesian aggression, but as a public act of love, as the justice which in a sinful world forcibly intervenes to protect an innocent in danger of life, whether from natural disaster or the aggression of another, even sacrificially to intervene, potentially at the cost of life or limb. That is actually how Luther\u2019s argument from person to public official worked: in both, it is the same self-giving Christian love at work, personally bearing all things, publically risking all things, yet in each case for the sake of others. Wouldn\u2019t this approach to theological ethics limn the legality of abortion in a somewhat different light than laissez-faire abortion on demand? Limiting the question of \u201cdefense,\u201d itself little probed as just mentioned, to the limit cases of rape and incest tacitly ignores the vast majority of \u201cconvenience\u201d or \u201cbad Samaritan\u201d abortions. Leaving these acts to private and wholly subjective determinations of personal sovereignty in turn masks all sorts of unjust social conditions, not only those of gender inequality, which cry out for prophetic discernment and rebuke. On the other hand, why shouldn\u2019t the state be summoned in principle and in some proportionate way to defend unborn life against the callous disregard for its individuality which Oehlschlaeger has so powerfully vindicated in the pages of this book? As there in fact may be \u201cjust war\u201d \u2013more a police action to restore the political work for peace than what traditionally we call \u201cwar\u201d\u2014are there not also justifiable abortions? Likewise, as there are in fact unjust wars against which Christians should conscientiously object, with all that entails, might not Christians work politically to change the policy of the state so that it works to inhibit, if not prevent unjust abortions? Indeed, as citizens in, but not subjects of, this brave new world, should they not already now conscientiously object?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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