Missing Hippocrates
The New Medicine: Life and Death After Hippocrates,by Nigel M. de S. Cameron (Crossway, 187 pp.; $11.95, paper). Reviewed by Mark A. Home, contributing editor to Legacy Communications and coauthor with George Grant of Unnatural Affections: The Impuritan Ethic of Homosexuality and the Modern Church.
Margaret Mead, the famous anthropologist, once pointed out that the Hippocratic Oath marked “one of the turning points in the history of man,” because “there was made a complete separation between killing and curing. Throughout the primitive world the doctor and the sorcerer tended to be one and the same person.”
Nigel Cameron uses Mead’s observation as the starting point for his discussion of the consequences of modern medicine’s abandonment of the Hippocratic Oath. He contends that “it is a fundamental misreading of the history and nature of medicine to regard it as capable of surviving the revolutionary value-changes which are now in progress.”
When it was first formed in classical Greece, the Hippocratic Oath set down an ethic that was antithetical to the then commonly accepted practices of abortion, infanticide, and suicide (or “euthanasia” as it would be called today). Cameron points out that the oath’s opposition to the prevailing culture of its time does not undermine its relevance for today, but increases it.
The Hippocratic Oath was a manifesto for reform. It defined the physician as one who healed. It is no accident that Hippocratism spread throughout the West at the same time medicine became a recognized profession. It did this by making certain moral principles an essential part of medicine. Thus, Cameron argues it is impossible for medicine to continue as a recognized profession if no one can be sure what medicine is or what doctors do.
At the heart of Hippocratism is a self-maledictory oath—an invocation of the gods to witness the physician’s vow and enforce it by rewarding or punishing him or her. The rise of secularism, says Cameron, has undermined the oath.
The Declaration of Geneva, which was published after the Nazi Holocaust in order to reaffirm Hippocratism, instead replaced the oath with “a pallid affirmation made by the physician in the presence of man alone.” Furthermore, the Declaration replaced the oath’s categorical prohibitions with mostly vague affirmations of “respect” and “honor” that invited revision. Revision was gradually accomplished by considering “the relief of suffering” a duty of physicians—giving rise to the quality-of-life arguments so prevalent today. To prevent any competition with the doctor’s duty to do no harm, relieving suffering is not even mentioned in the Hippocratic Oath.
The decline of Hippocratism has brought about “the progressive marginalization of those who are weakest and most powerless in the clinical situation.” Cameron provides readers with chilling evidence for his claim.
The New Medicine is an outstanding and stirring apologetic for the traditional standards of medicine that is both historically informed and philosophically adept. Cameron exposes the inconsistencies of the quality-of-life model quite ably and presents an alternative vision of medicine in hopes of sparking a recovery of the Hippocratic Oath. He has succeeded in writing a powerful manifesto for Christian medical ethics that needs to be widely read and acted upon.
An Exuberant Mishmash
The Clown in the Belfry: Writings on Faith and Fiction,by Frederick Buechner (HarperSanFrancisco, 171 pp.; $17.00, hardcover). Reviewed by Eugene H. Peterson, the author of many books, including Answering God and A Long Obedience in the Same Direction.
Although it can hardly ever have worked to his advantage either critically or economically to be known as an ordained minister, Frederick Buechner has never downplayed the fact. That has always pleased me; that when he could easily have “passed,” he has chosen to be identified with what is generally considered, in America at least, a vocational underclass.
I have long considered him to be one of our premier pastors, although working without either pulpit or congregation. Or, rather, with a writing desk for a pulpit and readers for a congregation. In his own way, he has carried out this writer/pastor vocation for 30 or so years in 25 books for who-knows-how-many-thousands of readers.
This new collection of essays confirms his importance to us. Fourteen occasional writings make up the book. Addresses, sermons, introductions to other books: a mishmash, as Buechner himself describes it, but an exuberant mishmash.
Making Invisibles Present
Why is Buechner so important to us? Mainly, I think, because he specializes in saints. “Only saints,” he says, “really interest me as a writer. There is so much life in them. They are so in touch with, so transparent to, the mystery of things that you never know what to expect from them.” In an age when most writers, it seems, are trying to show how evil or trivial or boring men and women can be, he has taken on the task of rendering the ancient and holy human capacity for becoming a saint and showing us how it works.
Everyone knows that we can, and often do, live badly. Not everyone knows that we can live holy. Buechner makes an end run around the formidable stereotype that blocks our imaginations, the idea that “sainthood is something people achieve, that you get to be holy more or less the way you get to be an Eagle Scout” and shows us the real thing. Bebb, Godric, and Brendan are his best-known renditions of the saint, but as these essays reveal, nearly every word he writes is a hint or guess that gives witness to the saint as life-giver: “a human being with the same sorts of hang-ups and abysses as the rest of us, but if a saint touches your life, you become alive in a new way.”
His primary means for doing this is by linking faith and fiction. Faith and fiction are analagous activities. Both involve “making things up.” In the world of faith, it is God who makes things up; in the world of fiction, we make things up. And the “making” in both cases is done with words. God speaks a world into being, writers write a world into being. “In the beginning was the word.”
I don’t mean to equate faith and fiction, and Buechner certainly doesn’t. But what we find in Buechner is an honoring both ways: honoring faith, honoring fiction; entering the world of faith with awe and respect, exploring, developing, laughing, and celebrating; entering the world of fiction searching, questioning, naming, playing, and praying. Words bring worlds into being. Words make invisibles present to us, in ways that make it possible for us to participate in them.
Somewhere along the way in our culture, fiction and faith got split off from one another. There was a time when all the great works of the imagination were written or painted by men and women of faith. They wrote and sang and painted and built to the glory of God.
But by the time we arrived on the scene, the world that God makes out of word and the world that we make out of words were split off from one another. Faith and fiction, which at one time were at ease with one another, working as they did with a common sense of invisibles being brought into being by word/words, in our day are standoffish, suspicious of the credentials and intentions of the other.
But not in Buechner. Buechner is as at home in writing a novel as a sermon. His imagination is as vigorous in one as in the other. And his craft is great.
Habits Of The Hearts Of Institutions
The Good Society,by Robert N. Bellah, Richard Madsen, William M. Sullivan, Ann Swidler, and Steven M. Tipton (Vintage, 347 pp.; $13.00, paper). Reviewed by Stanley J. Grenz, professor of theology at Carey/Regent College in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and the author of The Millennial Maze and 20th Century Theology, coauthored with Roger Olson (both IVP).
Western society is in the throes of a transition. We are jettisoning the past for what is as yet an unknown future. Modernity is receding as we now enter an era that many thinkers label, for want of a better term, “postmodernity,” Evangelicals are not immune to these momentous changes.
Perhaps the foremost voice among the contemporary harbingers of the new era is the University of California at Berkeley sociologist Robert Bellah. Bellah was catapulted into the academic limelight in the early 1970s when he penned, first, a widely discussed article and, then, a book, The Broken Covenant, where he proposed the concept of “civil religion” as a helpful way of understanding the American phenomenon. After the furor died, Bellah seemed to go into hibernation for a decade, only to reemerge with a group of four associates as the author of one of the most significant treatises of the 1980s, Habits of the Heart.
In their earlier work, Bellah and associates directed their critique against the orientation toward individualism and self-fulfillment that characterizes modern life, which, in their view, makes it difficult for people to sustain commitments both in intimate relationships and in the public sphere. The Good Society moves the cultural critique a step further, focusing on institutions—that is, on “the patterned ways Americans have developed for living together.” Bellah et al. are convinced that we cannot begin to address the daunting problems we face—whether the depletion of the ozone layer or the sense of meaninglessness in our personal lives—unless we greatly improve our capacity to think about our institutions, especially those of economic system (chap. 3), government (chap. 4), education (chap. 5), and church (chap. 6).
A Community Vision
Bellah believes that institutions not only facilitate relations between the self and the world, but more importantly, they mediate to us our ultimate moral and religious commitments. Hence, institutions are far from being morally neutral. We must evaluate the value assumptions lying behind them. In this way, Bellah and associates desire to spark a public discussion of institutions and to strengthen those institutions that nurture such discussion.
The Boundaries Of The Living
The Living, by Annie Dillard (HarperCollins, 397 pp.; $22.50, hardcover). Reviewed by Donald W. McCullough, contributing editor for CHRISTIANITY TODAY and the author of The Power of Realistic Thinking (IVP).
When a fellow church member asked why she should be interested in Annie Dillard’s first novel, I had an easy answer: “It’s about life, death, and God.” Dillard uses her extraordinary writing skills to tell a story of the settlers who carved farms and towns out of the Douglas-fir forests along Bellingham Bay (northwestern edge of Washington State) during the latter decades of the nineteenth century. Her characters, vivid and unusual enough to please a Charles Dickens, cling precariously to life in the wilderness. In addition to farming and logging and fishing and birthing, they spend a good deal of time burying.
Death surrounds “the land of the living” as its near boundary. Every manner of demise gets reported with matter-of-fact briskness, as if to suggest that dying is nothing out of the ordinary. Dillard describes the accidents and illnesses starkly, almost harshly (“It was in May that the Sharp family met with an accident; they drowned, except for John Ireland.”), but returns to them again and again, evoking a sense of the frailty and consequent tragedy of life.
The omnipresence of death, of course, raises the question of God, the Boundary beyond the boundary. The characters in The Living do not doubt the existence of God; they know their lives are held in divine, if unpredictable, hands. But they do seem perplexed by God’s apparent indifference. The Almighty Silence leaves little choice but to “go on.”
In the presence of death, the living either lose or find the reasons to “go on.” John Ireland Sharp responds to evil and death by retreating into his own world of despair. Clare Fishburn, threatened by death from an evil man, discovers an intense awareness of the goodness of creation.
One of the reasons to go on is other people. But the fragile bonds of human community don’t really offer much protection. In a reflective moment, Clare notes that “the earth rolls down and the people die; their survivors derive solace from clinging, not to the rocks, not to the cliffs, not to the trees, but to each other. It was singular. Loose people clung in families, holding on for dear life. Grasping at straws! One would think people would beg to be tied to trees.”
But people, against the evidence, continue to cling to each other, and the web of relationships—family and friends and partners in work—provide a way for the living to go on.
Annie Dillard’s The Living is entertaining but certainly not escapist. She has created a fictional world that invites us to ponder our own living. The veil separating life and death may be less transparent now than in frontier America, but it is no less thin.
Readers who anticipate finding in this book a precise description of the good society are courting disappointment. The authors contend that there is no formula for such a society. Instead, they argue that a good society is an open quest in which its members actively participate. Rather than a blueprint, therefore, The Good Society is a call for “a widening of democratic participation” in the creation of institutions—of new ways of social interaction—that will facilitate the common good, both in the U.S. and in the world.
The authors seek to spark what the political scientist Robert Dahl calls “the third democratic transformation,” which will move us beyond the focus on individual rights and the radical individualism of modernity to a community vision of society. The alternative, Bellah and associates fear, is the further bureaucratization of life, in which technicians assume increasing control over our affairs.
Of interest to evangelicals is the role of the church in the public discussion Bellah advocates. The authors challenge us to ask whether organized religion can offer an alternative to the current destructive individualizing tendencies or whether it is merely one more instance of the problem. They argue that religious communities not only offer recognition and membership—qualities in short supply today—they also “help us grapple with the ultimate problem of meaning.”
Above all, the task of the church is to proclaim and embody the answer to the universal human search for transcendent meaning that has been revealed to us through Jesus Christ. Only when we recover this vision of who we are—namely, the community of the people of God called to embody the dynamic of love that characterizes the triune God himself—can we hope to have a positive impact on the society in the midst of which we are to bear our witness.
