How Historical Thinking Helps Cultivate a Wholistic Culture of Life

I wonder the extent to which we live in a culture of death.  Eric and I were talking this morning and he used that phrase, and it’s sticking with me.  I do believe that Christians are called to cultivate a culture of life, wholistic life.  I recently read an article in the Atlantic on medically assisted death (also known as assisted suicide) in Canada and its expansion.  The author, Elaina Plott Calabro, pointed out many ethical and practical inconsistencies with medically assisted death, while trying to present multiple perspectives.   Arguments for MAID seem to center on patient autonomy, making individual freedom to choose when and how they die the highest good.  Historical thinking can help clarify some of the issues, I think.

This prioritization of autonomy in life and death is a historical development, not necessarily an inherent and obvious good. 

This prioritization of autonomy in life and death is a historical development, not necessarily an inherent and obvious good.  I too love liberty and am deeply grateful for what I experience as a white American woman.  But my own assumptions about the importance of my freedom are also historical.  Briefly, less than 200 years ago many Americans assumed order and hierarchy were goods.  Now, of course, this led to human suffering--chattel slavery is just one example of something that was supported by a notion of hierarchy as good.  However, not all people across time have assumed human choice should be the highest good.

Ancient Hebrews and the early church also seemed to have a different perspective.  The Psalms contain persistent themes of God's command to his people to honor and follow God.  In the New Testament, Paul says he is enslaved to Christ--following Jesus brings freedom, but the freedom is not one of autonomy, it's one of freedom coming from submission.

John M. Perkins, whose life testifies to creating a culture of life for others. He's one of the Ordinary Heroes I discuss in my book, Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice: A History of Christians in Action.

In addition, the arguments for an individual's autonomy may assume the individual is able to act freely.  I used to think this, and I remember that notion being shaken in grad school in a class with Dr. Corey Capers, a wonderful historian and person.  We were discussing race in US history and I was arguing that if a person did not intend to cause harm, then they were not responsible.  Corey was arguing against my subtext, by which I mean my assumption that individuals are always free to choose and are not shaped by their context.  He patiently helped me walk towards a more complicated position, assuming that individuals are responsible, but are also shaped by their contexts.  The article on medically assisted death reveals the contradiction at the heart of the assumption of individual autonomy--that we act as individuals--when it describes the case of a patient who had chosen to die but then reversed course when his family began to visit him.  He did not make that decision in isolation.

I've been pondering a further question, which comes out of the Judeo-Christian tradition's emphasis on life.  Going back to Genesis, Adam's and Eve's sin led to death.  But there was a promise, that Eve's offspring would crush the serpent's head (Genesis 3).  As I read the Psalms nearly every morning, I see in them people crying out to God for life, such as in Psalm 30: "You brought me up from the dead; you restored my life as I was going down to the grave."  As I think about Jesus's work on the cross and his ensuing resurrection, I hear Paul's words of Scripture, "oh death, where is your sting?" (1 Corinthians 15:55-57): oh Death, where is thy sting?  Jesus triumphed over death and brought life.  Now of course, we all must die (unless God just takes us, like Enoch).  Part of being human this side of the fall is being mortal, but the call in Scripture seems to be to life, which embraces us on earth and in heaven.

As I've said before, reading old texts and learning about people in other places and times can help us see our own contexts more clearly.  We are like fish who can, somehow, begin to see the water in which we swim, to use David Foster Wallace's metaphor. 

We are called to seek life.  What does that look like?  Part of it is in kindness, in loving others as we love ourselves.  Part of it, also, as I was reminded by those I studied for Ordinary Heroes of Racial Justice is caring for life from the cradle to the grave, so to speak.  I grew up in a mostly white, Republican, evangelical context that emphasized caring for the unborn and protecting life as people walk towards death at the end of their lives.  But life is more than the beginning and the end: it's the middle, too.  John Perkins and others associated with the CCDA, for instance, call Christians to pursue the whole gospel, which means helping bring God's flourishing in the here and now. 

John Perkins learned this when he moved back to Mississippi, a place which he had fled 13 years earlier because white people in Mississippi could not abide, in 1947, a black man stepping out of his place.  John had become a Christian in California and felt like God was calling him back to Mississippi to preach the Good News to African Americans there.  In California, he had been nurtured both by the Black church and by white fundamentalist Christians, who had taught him to study the Bible exegetically.  He and Vera Mae, his wife, began preaching and teaching.  But they soon realized that people needed to be evangelized and discipled, yes, but they also needed more.  They believed the Gospel was big enough to handle the racism and the poverty that crippled African Americans in Mississippi, but did not see many examples of that being lived out among white or Black churches.  For many Black Christians, the gospel they heard seemed to call them to join the church and hope for more after they died; and for white Christians, Christianity allowed them too--and even encouraged them to-- uphold a system that impoverished African Americans.  In response, John and Vera Mae developed a more expansive, more wholistic, call for the church, urging Christians to not only evangelism and discipleship, but also to the whole gospel, the marrying of proclamation and action.  For Perkins this meant (1) social action--bringing blankets to the cold and food to the hungry, (2) community development--to develop local economies that would enable African Americans to flourish, and (3) to justice--which in Mississippi in the 1960s meant joining the civil rights movement by registering people to vote and supporting don't buy where you can't work campaigns.  People, especially white people who were his neighbors, accused John and Vera Mae of making the gospel political. 

The gospel is political.  By this I mean it disrupts power systems of this world with a new system based not on domination, but on love.  This love is not a vague affirmation of others, but is a self-sacrificial love that seeks their good because God loves each person so much.  This love demands submitting our wills to God, rather than doing what we want.  This love, which is the Gospel, it is big enough to bring life to the unborn, to the dying, and to all of us walking the journey of life in between.