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Constructing and Reconstructing the Human Body
- The Thomist: A Speculative Quarterly Review
- The Catholic University of America Press
- Volume 51, Number 3, July 1987
- pp. 501-520
- 10.1353/tho.1987.0019
- Article
- Additional Information
- Purchase/rental options available:
CONSTRUCTING AND RECONSTRUCTING THE HUMAN BODY Scriptural Anthropology T:ODAY BIOETHICAL ISSUES are much discussed by heologians. Yet they make little use of the Bible in olving these problems. Why? Is it because these bioethical issues are so new it seems unlikely the Bible has much to say about them? Rather it is because many suppose that scholars have shown the Bible's moral teaching to be so historically conditioned that it cannot be normative for" modern man" but only paranetic, i.e. it exhorts and motivates us to do good and avoid evil but provides no concrete norms of good and evil still valid today. Such norms must be supplied by philosophical ethics and the empirical sciences. Hence, in moral argument we should avoid Biblical" proof-texting." 1 The recent development of " canon criticism " provides, I believe , a way out of this impasse.2 The doctrine of Biblical inspiration means that although the Council of Trent declared the Bible inspired "in all its parts ",3 yet this guarantee of inerrancy applies not to these parts taken in "proof-texting" iso1 For a collection of current essays on this subjects see Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick, S.J., eds. The Use of Scripture mMoral Theology (Readings in Moral Theology, No. 4) (New York: Paulist Press, 1984) and Robert J. Daly, S.J., et al. Christian Biblical Ethics from Biblical Revelation to Contemporary Christian Praxis, Method and Content (New York: Paulist Press, 1984) for a more systematic argument. For my own position see, "The Development of Doctrine about Sin, Conversion, and the Following of Christ" in Moral Theology Today: Certitudes and Doubts (St. Louis: Pope John Center, 1984) p. 46-64. 2 See Brevard S. Childs, The New Testament as Canon (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1984), pp. 3-47. 3 Council of Trent, Session IV, DS 1504, Vatican II, Dei Verbum, n. 11. 501 502 BENEDICT M. ASHLEY, O.P. lation nor merely in their context within a given book of the Bible, but in their ultimate context within the total Canon. Consequently, seriously to view the Bible from the perspective of a " historicist " rather than a " classical world view " (as Bernard Lonergan urged us to do 4) we must not leave the concrete moral teaching of the Scripture on the shelf of the pa.st. Instead let's use a hermeneutic by which God's Word revealed in history truly illuminates today's problems. Scripture and the Construction of the Human Person Today we are concerned about problems of artificial human reproduction and of genetic engineering. Does the Bible cast any light on these puzzles? To ask about reconstructing humans, we must first ask how God constructed them. Through much of its history Catholic theology read the Bible through the eyes of Platonism because this seemed to make the Gospel intelligible and credible to the Greco-Roman world. Perhaps it was this Platonic theology that Lonergan was thinking about when he spoke of " the classical worldview " with its neglect of human historicity. Platonism helped theology defend the "primacy of the spiritual" and especially the dignity and immortality of the human spirit. But it also favored a non-biblical dualism which identified the true human person with the soul and considered the body as its tomb.5 If we shelve this Platonic theology and seek a less dualistic, more historicist anthropology, we discover the first chapters of Genesis wonderfully provide such an anthropology as the basis of a moral Instruction or Torah.6 This Torah forms the cove4 Bernard Lonergan, "The Transition from a Classicist World-View to Historical Mindedness" (1966) in Second Collection, ed. by W. F. K. Ryan and B. J. Tyrrell (London: Darton, Longmans, Todd, 1974), pp. 1-9. 5 For an extensive discussion of this history see my Theologies of the Body: Humanist and Christian (Braintree, Mass.: Pope John Center, 1985), pp. 101250 . 6 Isaac M. Kikawanda and Arthur Quinn, Before Abraham Was (Nashville, Tenn.: Abngidon Press, 1985) , discounting the Documentary Hypothesis not from a conservative but from an advanced literary point of view, have pro- CONSTRUCTING/RECONSTRUCTING THE HUMAN BODY 503 nant foundation of both Old and New Testament around which the whole Canon takes...