Introduction: Overhearing Strange Voices Next Door

The unlikely proximity of the two traditions presented in this issue—Calvinist and Reformed Protestantism on the one hand and contemporary bioethics on the other—spawns from this editor’s twenty-year struggle to get the voices and vocabularies of strangers in proximity to one another. As a young Christian, I was persuaded of the core beliefs of Reformed Christianity. However, through my training first in philosophy and then in medicine and biomedical ethics, I was constantly searching for a way to learn the vocabulary and language of the medical academy and bioethics while also articulating a distinct Reformed Christian voice. Along this twenty-year path, only occasionally were intersections visible in academic bioethics (Allen Verhey being one such voice). What I longed for was a robust engagement of my theological tradition with matters of relevance to bioethics, which would actually be heard in academic bioethics. What I found in the books and journals I was reading was precious little. And when I would disclose to my “secular” colleagues anything close to my faith’s true colors, a strange mix of silence and confused stares would return. The articles in this volume represent attempts to robustly examine themes in Calvinist and Reformed Protestantism in close proximity to the vocabulary and problems of contemporary bioethics. What do I mean by “in close proximity”?

Any astute reader of MacIntyre should know the folly of trying to understand a tradition in the terms and vocabulary of another alien tradition. For instance, that one could translate or interpret the concepts and vocabulary of Calvinist and Reformed Christian doctrines like Total Depravity, Unconditional Election, Limited Atonement, Irresistible Grace, and Perseverance of the Saints—the so-called TULIP doctrines of Calvinism—using the conceptual tools of agency, liberty, personhood, autonomy, and the like from the modern bioethics lexicon is a recipe for disaster. If MacIntyre is right, traditions are the kinds of things that must be encountered on their own terms within the conceptual apparatus and practices in which that tradition is lived out in particular historical communities.

Many self-declared Calvinists would argue that the normative vocabularies of contemporary bioethics are themselves so loaded with toxic metaphysical freight—presuppositions of a naturalistic or functionally deistic worldview—that any attempt to assess the normative implications of a theological tradition from within the “tradition” of academic bioethics would first require critical examination of the very presuppositions of academic bioethics. Any Reader’s Digest shorthand for resurrecting the relevance of Calvinism and Reformed Traditions within the vocabulary of bioethics orthodoxy may seem foolish to the “wisdom” of that orthodoxy.

But “in close proximity” does not mean “to translate.” Even in his biting and sober critique of modernity and the possibilities of translation across traditions, MacIntyre leaves open a possibility for a kind of encounter.

The possibility to which every tradition is always open, as I argued earlier, is that the time and place may come, when and where those who live their lives in and through the language-in-use which give expression to it may encounter another alien tradition with its own very different language-in-use and may discover that while in some area of greater or lesser importance they cannot comprehend it within the terms of reference set by their own beliefs, their own history, and their own language-in-use, it provides a standpoint from which once they have acquired its language-in-use as a second first language, the limitations, incoherences, and poverty of resources of their own beliefs can be identified, characterized, and explained in a way not possible from within their own tradition. (MacIntyre, 1988, 387–8)

In this issue the authors assert that the time and place have come for those who live their lives in and through academic bioethics (the language-in-use) to encounter the alien Calvinist and Reformed Traditions. Such an encounter with the other, even if it does not translate well, or does not “resonate” with bioethics discourse, may nevertheless play some perspective-adjusting role for modern bioethics about its own “limitations and incoherences.” It is like overhearing the crazy neighbors whose insanity evokes authentic introspection.

Of course, the metaphor itself would need elaboration. Within Calvinist and Reformed clans, there are many disputes about what it means to be Calvinist, and what constitutes “Reformed.” (In this sense, it is more like overhearing a lively, sometimes dysfunctional, family reunion at your crazy neighbor’s.) Do you lead with the rationality of the Westminster Catechism’s declaration—“Man’s chief end is to glorify God and enjoy him forever”—or the more winsome (and therapeutic) opening answer from the Heidelberg Catechism’s “my only comfort in life and in death is that I am not my own ….” To go further into the theological weeds, debates continue over what constitutes the tradition—hyper-reformed, truly reformed, neo-Calvinist, supralapsarian, infralapsarian, and so forth. These longstanding in-house theological factions and spats spill over into the practice of and the piety of respective sub-traditions.

Questions of what makes a perspective truly Calvinist or Reformed are themselves part of the intratradition debate, to which we cannot do justice but can illustrate throughout the following pages. Some astute readers might not find what is written here distinctively Calvinistic according to their standards, hearing tones that echo a more global Reformed tone of a Leslie Newbigin. Others may find elements of a more hard-hitting, puritanical, or fundamentalist streak of Calvinism reminiscent of Cornelius Van Til that make some within the Reformed family squirm. In each essay, we hope readers from outside the Calvinist and Reformed clan will be able to hear a bit more clearly a sample of the kind of voices they can expect from their crazy neighbors. For those inside that clan, we hope to revitalize the rigor and relevance of the intratradition discourse about what living Christianly from a Reformed or Calvinist perspective in bioethics might look like in the decades ahead.

After a second introductory note by Ryan Nash, the issue opens with an essay by Tilburt and Humeniuk that attempts to counter perceptions of Calvinists as toxic ogres within American bioethics and asserts a positive direction of what Reformed (and specifically neo-Calvinist) traditions could offer the field. Allen Verhey examines the thesis that Calvin’s theology might be able to rescue the vocabulary of modern bioethics by engaging Jeff Bishop’s recent provocative critique in The Anticipatory Corpse (Bishop, 2011). Verhey takes up themes in Calvin’s theology, including the sovereignty of God and an epistemology that links faith with knowledge and non-foundationalist tenets that counter Enlightenment assumptions. He explores the implications of this for the ruins of contemporary bioethics.

Kimbell Kornu examines how the metaphysics of beauty set forth by the eighteenth-century American Calvinist, Jonathan Edwards, might contribute to a metaethics of medicine and ties these themes to other prominent themes in Reformed theology. In a counterargument to Kornu, Carlton attempts to show how Kornu’s thesis is either antithetical to Calvinism or purely a kind of “papering over” the post-Scholastic rationalism of all Western Christianity. Franklin E. Payne offers a critique of how the “sola scriptura” tenet of the Reformed tradition, manifested particularly in the Westminster “clan,” requires bioethics to rest on a biblical metaphysics about who human beings are and also how that metaphysics can speak to modern assumptions about sexual ethics (a la the Seventh Commandment) and mental health. Madison Perry explores whether Calvin’s view of human nature might reorient dated and entrenched debates about addiction by exploring the multifaceted nature of sin and motivation through a more theologically robust and empirically accurate approach. D. Robert Maddox explores how themes of the reformed tradition related to God’s sovereign “ruling, reconciling, and redeeming” of his cosmos “to make all things new” applies to contemporary medicine. In the penultimate essay, Ball examines how Calvin’s political philosophy about “trust” in the Institutes plays out in case law related to biospecimens.

The closing essay by Ryan Nash presents a more sober and critical assessment of what Calvinism might offer bioethics and expands on themes raised by Carlton. Nash explores the limitations of a discursive, propositional approach to theology that characterizes Calvinism and Reformed traditions and discusses the traps and limitations of such an approach from within the distinctive tradition of Orthodox Christianity. Whether Nash and Carlton’s assessments deal a damning blow to a damaged Christian tradition or suffer themselves from a stunted view of what Reformed and Calvinist tradition might mean will be left to the reader to decide.

Such an undertaking, imperfect and incomplete as it is, would not have been possible without the vigorous encouragement of Christian Bioethics’ senior editor, H. Tristram Engelhardt. Consistent with the journal’s mission, we hope readers will see an opportunity for overhearing the strange voices next door, and move toward a “nonecumenical” deepened appreciation for the value and limits of a particular Christian tradition in the mixed-up world of twenty-first-century bioethics.

REFERENCE