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Embryos: people like you and me

My friends Edd and Simon have made some good points in criticism of my earlier post citing Christian feminist Frederica Matthewes-Green which made me realise I owe a more careful explanation of why I think that embryos should be treated as human beings to whom our general belief that we should not arbitrarily end human life applies. That was the presupposition of the post, which I shall try and defend here.

Conception is the beginning of something. Before conception, sperm and eggs do not become anything else. They just are what they are. So their meeting at conception changes them, and begins something. The only really relevant question is, what begins? Is it the beginning of human life as we commonly recognise it in one another (in which case its arbitrary ending could not be justified), or only the beginning of something which will subsequently become human life? (Even if it were the latter, it would still not be at all clear that it would be acceptable to destroy something that if left undisturbed would become human life.)

Can you believe you are right, without being arrogant?

What we suffer from to-day is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself, but undoubting about the truth; this has been exactly reversed. Nowadays the part of a man that a man does assert is exactly the part he ought not to assert himself. The part he doubts is exactly the part he ought not to doubt -- the Divine Reason.

GK Chesteron Orthodoxy, ch. 3, "The Suicide of Thought"

Imagination and embryos

Frederica Matthewes-Green, "Stem Cells and Starry Nights" in Again Magazine November 2001:

Now you must think of something very small: in a cold, dark place there are miniature children suspended in frost, snow babies, unmoving and unbreathing. They are everywhere, in ice orphanages across the country, and there are many of them, a couple of hundred thousand, myriad as the stars in the sky. But there is something smaller still. It is the individual cells that these sleeping bodies contain. Left intact and implanted in a womb, they would grow into a little boy or girl. Tweezered out by scientists they will grow, but only into tissue, like the stuffing inside a doll. Such a thing seems nightmarish, Frankensteinish, and the impulse is to say once again that our ability to do such things has outdistanced our ability to weigh whether we should. But there is unexplored hope here, the experts plead. Look at these people, young men in wheelchairs, old men shaking, children weak in their mother's arms. A few of these cells might grow and restore what has been lost. It might restore full health.

The cost? Nothing, really. Most of these sleeping snow babies are doomed never to wake. Their parents intentionally created far more embryos than they could use. Occasionally a couple asks to adopt an abandoned embryo by implantation, but far less than enough to rescue them all. Many of them would die in the rough process of implantation anyway. Yet if the parts were disassembled and tended they might improve another's life. To what can we liken such a plea? Is it like taking the corneas of an accident victim and using them to give a blind person sight? Or is it like harvesting skin from a Jewish corpse and using it to make a lampshade?

We try again to picture the tiny embryos and to feel sympathy for their condition. It doesn't come naturally. They don't look like babies. They look like blobs–what you can see, anyway, which is little larger than a pinpoint. They aren't warm and cuddly, but still and cold. This suspended existence looks like nothing in human experience–like nothing worth preserving. Why not just let them go, so they can be useful?

Herein lies the lie. Useful. Imagine a human being whose sole purpose is to be food for another human being. Did God ever create such a thing? Every human life is precious, unique, in ways only God knows–he has formed our hidden parts in secret, with care. Every one of us is an end, not a means. No one was made to be a lampshade. No one was made to supply body parts for another person that he still has need of for himself.

(I found this quote in Edith Humphrey's article on embryonic stem cell research, accessible here.)

What makes a church Anglican?

Sounds like a seriously boring topic...? Yesterday at Wycliffe I was in a focus day on Fresh Expressions of church led by a nice man called Steve Croft who is in charge of Fresh Expressions. If you haven't heard of this, the idea is basically about trying to start churches which meet people where they are rather than simply doing stuff in order to get people to come along to an existing church on a Sunday morning. So, to use some examples from yesterday, a parent and toddler church instead of a parent and toddler group to get people to come along on Sunday morning. Or a skater church for young people. Or a coffee shop church - and so on. Lots more info on the website.

I guess I tend to assume that this is a Good Thing because I became a Christian in a church/congregation like this. It's called Eternity (website being reformatted at the moment) and is a plant of an Anglican church in Warfield, near Bracknell. The pragmatic side of me says: this is a way to get more people to become Christians so we should do it.

But there was quite a bit of discussion in the focus day on this question. A number seemed quite concerned that this would undermine Anglican identity since these new kinds of church bore little relation to the way 'we' tend to do things: don't necessarily worship on Sundays, don't use standard liturgy, don't operate within a parish and so on. Others were concerned about the 'homogenous' principle, i.e. the churches grow best when they are trying to reach a particular group of people rather than build a community for all and sundry.

I have some sympathy for these concerns. The church is supposed to be a place where people come together from every age, nation, class, language and so on. It is meant to reconcile enemies and unite people who would otherwise have nothing in common. And to be Anglican it needs to have some kind of continuity with and relationship to other Anglican churches.

But at the same time I guess I want to defend the idea of Fresh Expressions for a number of reasons. The first thing that occurs to me is that actually most 'normal' churches actually operate on a homogenous principle anyway - they just don't realise it! So a parish church which is trying to reach the parish around it is in fact already trying to reach a group of people who already have something in common - namely, that they live in the same place. And almost invariably, these churches do not in fact bring people together from all manner of background - they tend to represent people of similar ages, class, nationality and so on (obviously there are exceptions).

The day reminded me of something else: being Anglican is not about sharing the same liturgy. You often hear it said, "The great thing about the Anglican church used to be that you could go anywhere in the country (or even anywhere in the world) and everyone would be using the same readings and the same liturgy" and so on. Anglicanism was meant to be somehow uniform.

I think that's terrible! It rejects the whole insight of the missionary movement that Christian faith needs to be contextualised and expressed in a relevant way to people - otherwise you are absolutising and exporting a strand of English culture (from several centuries ago!), not the gospel. And in fact, all mission is cross-cultural to at least some extent (especially in today's post-Christian/Christendom situation).

But most importantly, this insight is right at the heart of what it is to be Anglican. That is, the idea of contextualising the gospel is not some faddish contemporary novelty. It is written into the heart of the theological heritage of Anglicanism, it is what being Anglican is all about. The Book of Common Prayer was an attempt to express the gospel in a relevant way for sixteenth and seventeenth century England. Public worship was no longer to be conducted in Latin but in the language everyone spoke. It was never expected that this liturgy itself would become the eternal touchstone of authentic Anglican expression: the key was that Christian worship should be comprehensible to those who attended it.

My conclusion is therefore obvious: Fresh Expressions are trying to do the same thing today. It is important that they operate with the accountability and support of the wider Anglican church - and ultimately, they should play their part within the church more widely as we would expect any church to do: contributing financially to the diocese where appropriate, meeting with other churches for worship and fellowship, raising up and sending out missionary leaders. But these expressions of being part of the wider church are not dependent on Sunday morning, operating within a geographical parish, and using the same liturgy as everyone else!

great story

Don't really know which category to put this under... but I thought it was just a great story.

Ruth Gledhill tells of security guard coming to faith at Primates' meeting in Tanzania.

I just hope that this story is based on more reliable sources than some of her stuff ;-)

almost forgot

Gaby and I now know where we will be moving come June. We will be going to live in Cricklewood in north west London to work for a church: St Gabriel's. Gaby is going to be a part-time youth worker and I will be the curate. We are very excited about going there and really looking forward to getting stuck into the community and hopefully joining in with whatever God is up to.

I probably should also say some nice things about how much we're looking forward to working for the vicar and what a great bishop they have, because they both know about this blog... ;-)

Some blogs

Instead of finishing my essay on pastoral theology I have found a good website: Virtual Theology. You can download podcasts and handouts and stuff and it's all quite appropriately lighthearted. Most of the posts are pretty old but Marcionism and Gnosticism haven't changed much since then.

I also discovered that the Bishop of Bristol (Mike Hill) has got a blog. I don't know if bishops' blogs are any more enlightened than us mortal folk but some of his posts looked quite interesting.

Scrap Trident

Trident is the UK's nuclear weapons system. Currently we have 200 warheads - each of which has eight times the power of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima. It cost £12 and a half BILLION to procure and costs about a billion a year to maintain. The government is currently considering whether to replace Trident and it looks set to decide to do so - at a cost of possibly as much as £25 billion.

Much to the frustration of my beloved Dad (hi Dad!), I believe in unilateral nuclear disarmament. This is for two simple reasons, given here in extremely brief form.

1. The use of nuclear weapons is intrinsically evil. Using a nuclear weapon would be wrong, because it could never be used in a way which was both proportional to the desired ends and discriminating in its consequences. The use of nuclear weapons tends not towards the legitimate ends of conventional warfare (the conquest of the enemy in the name of justice) but towards the enemy's sheer destruction. The end does not justify the means.
2. Deterrance is a myth. Many grant that using nukes would be wrong, but argue that they are necessary as a deterrent against other nations a) attacking us and b) developing their own nukes. Whether this argument is pragmatically true (i.e. whether it really deters other countries) is hotly debated. But even if correct factually, it is incorrect morally. In order to be a genuine deterrent, one must ultimately be genuinely prepared to use the weapon - which would clearly fall afoul of objection #1. If one will not use the weapon, then there is no deterrent.

I am not a pacifist. I believe that sometimes it is right for a government to go to war in order to secure justice. There is a case for maintaining reasonable conventional military capability (although even then there is a case to be made that standing armies make war more likely). But nuclear weaponry is not that.

The best exposition I have come across of this moral conundrum and the myth of deterrence can be found in Yes Prime Minister, series One episode One! (Summary here.) It shows hilariously how you could never possibly use Trident - in which case, its use as a deterrent is totally non-existent.

Sir Humphrey: "With Trident we could obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe."
Jim Hacker: "I don't want to obliterate the whole of Eastern Europe."
Sir Humphrey: "It's a deterrent."
Jim Hacker: "It's a bluff. I probably wouldn't use it."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes, but they don't know that you probably wouldn't."
Jim Hacker: "They probably do."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes, they probably know that you probably wouldn't. But they can't certainly know."
Jim Hacker: "They probably certainly know that I probably wouldn't."
Sir Humphrey: "Yes, but even though they probably certainly know that you probably wouldn't, they don't certainly know that, although you probably wouldn't, there is no probability that you certainly would."

If you probably certainly agree and would like to take action or you would like to find out more, please do take a look here (CND site). There is also a great deal of useful information and discussion here (PDF download).

Against indifference

Around Wycliffe when we are discussing various issues such as abortion, the morning-after pill, divorce, IVF and so on, I have heard people say a number of things along the following lines:

It's not up to clergy to tell people what to do in their private lives. We can pray for them and offer them emotional support, even provide them with information, but may not tell them what to do.

These issues are not black and white. They are very complicated and we should therefore be wary of giving black and white answers to people who are in a very vulnerable position.

We do not live in an ideal world. In a fallen world, we must often choose between the lesser of two evils.

I am always a little suspicious of these kinds of expressions because I think that the church should be a little bit more than the local branch of Samaritans - much as I esteem the Samaritans.

We might divide the comments I hear into two main categories: comments about the role of the clergy, and comments about the complexity of the cases.

First let's think about the role of the clergy. At Wycliffe we debate all kinds of extraordinarily complex things. Last week we had a lecture covering some very obscure linguistic and epistemological philosophy in an attempt to discover how to read a book which we had all managed to read already. The lecture came to no clear conclusions and we left with no new practical insights as to how precisely we should read the Bible any differently to the way we were already reading it. We might read all kinds of books about the metaphysics of Trinitarian perichoresis and their implications for the Oxford one-way system. We consider the historicity of the book of Genesis based on the number of humps the camels had in those days and we ponder the mysteries of Octo-Isaiah and how amazing it is that so many people called Isaiah were all able to get together and write one book. We engage in theological reflection about the movie Shrek and we are discuss whether we are hoovering up Jesus when we use a vacuum cleaner after communion. In other words we think about a lot of very complicated things which are extremely unimportant. It seems that it is perfectly ok to expend an enormous amount of energy discussing things which in the long run don't matter a tiny bit but when we get too close to the bone and talk about real-life stuff, we must suddenly back off for fear of telling people what to do with their 'private' lives.

Actually this notion of a private life which is somehow cut off from Christianity is a rather odd one when you think about it. If I understand Jesus correctly, the whole of life matters to God and not just the religious bits. There is no private sphere of life where God takes a back seat and lets you do what you want.

The role of the minister is to proclaim the good news of this very same Jesus Christ: God is interested in your life. And this good news will have certain things to say about 'private' morality. It might tell you not to get remarried. It might tell you that having children is not a right and that certain ways of 'producing' children go outside the way that God has given. It might tell men and women that if you chose to have sex, you also chose to have a baby. And as clergy it will sometimes - perhaps often - be our role to explain this to people. Certainly this does not mean forcing our opinions on people. We have no coercive power to enforce the demands of the gospel. Ours is the authority of the Word, not the Sword. But the authority of the Word might mean reminding them of the costly sacrifice demanded by the gospel. No-one ever said that laying down your entire life in order to follow Jesus would be simple or easy. It means you can't always have what you want.

The second difficulty I mentioned is the complexity of the situations faced. This worries me even more because I detect behind it a pietist refusal to engage in the hard work of actually thinking about stuff. It throws up its hands in horror at how complicated real life is and therefore backs away from the concrete and the real. This is about as obscurantist as young-earth creationism.

I referred above to the extremely complex but essentially unimportant things with which it is socially acceptable to occupy our time at theological college. The complexity of the subject matter does not stop us from reaching certain conclusions about it. I wonder if it might be good to study equally complex but actually important things and coming to conclusions about them too.

However, the idea that they are "very important" is itself up for grabs. I wonder if I detect behind some of these comments the idea that, somehow, it doesn't really matter. In which case, they are actually trying to smuggle in a conclusion about the subject matter without actually engaging in a proper discussion of it.

Take the example of IVF. If a certain view about the status of the embryo is correct, then IVF is quite literally a life and death matter. Innocent human lives will be destroyed in the process of conventional IVF treatment. So to say at the outset that the matter is too complex is not good enough. It suggests either that one must have already reached a conclusion (namely that embryos are not alive and therefore it doesn't matter if they are destroyed) or that one is too unspeakably lazy to bother thinking about whether innocent human life is being destroyed or not.

It is true that sometimes matters will be too complicated to decide. But the only way one can say with integrity that the matter is too complicated is by thinking about it first, rather than deciding it is too complicated in advance and short-circuiting the discussion.

So maybe when we are talking about ethics, it's ok, in the words of Mrs Merton, to "have a heated debate."

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Thank you Michael for putting me onto this.