Why It Is Difficult to Talk About Ethics of the Body

"When I came in and sat down and looked around, I realized it was a Roman Church full of plaster statues and bad art, realistic art. I hated the statues; all the emphasis on the human body. I was trying to escape from the human body and all it needed... I saw the bodies standing around me on all the altars... and I remembered that they believed in the resurrection of the body, the body that I wanted destroyed forever.

But could my vapor love that scar? And then I began to want that body that I hated, but only because it could love that scar. We can love with our minds but can we love only with our minds?"

~ Graham Greene, The End of the Affair

What do we immediately think of when ethical discussions around the body, sexuality, and procreation arise? What intuitions immediately surface? We get a layer or two underneath these reactions by asking, “What’s behind that?”

In Carl Trueman’s 2020 book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, he writes,

Central to understanding the world in which we live is the concept of the social imaginary. This concept highlights that the tremendous changes we are witnessing can be interpreted through a variety of lenses. First, it is important to understand that most of us do not think about the world in the way we do because we have reason from first principles, to a comprehensive understanding of the cosmos. Rather, we generally operate on the basis of intuitions that we have unconsciously absorbed from the culture around us.

Conversations around fertility and bioethics fascinate me. It’s not so much the explicit arguments or official teaching which intrigue me, but the reflexive ways in which these discussions often unfold.

The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is an exploration of our current air of expressive individualism, the sexual revolution, and how the confluence has given rise to phenomena such as the normalization of transgenderism. Much of this book echoed Abigail Favale’s The Genesis of Gender as a “how we got here” type of journey.

For instance, he writes,

The increasing power of technology "fueled a view that the world was increasingly the raw material of human creativity, not the act of divine creation. The social imaginary emerging in the 19th century was one that intuitively placed human beings as the sovereigns at the center of a universe to which they could give shape and significance.

Issues surrounding “biblical sexuality”, in vitro fertilization, surrogacy, transgenderism or the general culture of death and absolute procreative control provide opportunity for reflection on which areas we see as morally urgent (if at all), and which are left out in matters of sexuality.

What struck me while going through this book was how much of it illuminated patterns in discussions of fertility and bioethics with many conservative Christians. The prominence of emotivism as the sole driver of moral action is one. The reality of human nature and its relationship to medicine is another. And the two feed off each other.

Emotivism and Untethered Compassion

Trueman:

Human beings may like to think they still believe in good and bad, but these concepts are unhitched from any transcendent framework and merely reflect personal, emotional, and psychological preferences. In practice, it is we who decide our own preferred ends—and shape our ethics to that purpose. Any greater sense of purpose, any transcendent teleology, is now dead and buried.

Most conversations we now have about the medicalization of fertility — whether suppressing or erasing it through medicalized forms of contraception, or forcing it through in vitro fertilization — begin with an emotional framing. This is simply how we are as humans. It is normal and is not in and of itself bad! Such sentiments have their place in the workings of the soul. These deep wells of emotion and desire are, however, nothing stable to build moral reasoning upon.

Trueman continues:

What is true about abortion can be extrapolated into other areas. In our contemporary society, sexual morality has become largely a matter of pragmatic considerations. Will this make me happy? How can I attenuate the risks? Does it harm someone else's psychological wellbeing? And because these measures are always changing and are frequently subjective, they provide no stable framework for ethics.

In cases of removing fertility through medicalized forms of contraception, there are many common reasons people give for avoiding pregnancy generally. We likely know them ourselves. For our purposes, we won’t focus on the discernment process or particular reasons. The point being, we can see this is simply where many conversations begin: “I feel a certain way about X reality. We have a reason to want X.”

In cases of forcing a chance at pregnancy through in vitro fertilization, there is most certainly a couple in the depths of grief. They have likely been bowled over by deep longings their bodies have not allowed them to realize. Of course these are valid emotions anyone would have, and any one of us would experience the same if put in the position of being open to children and not receiving them. Again, this is simply where conversations begin: “I feel a certain way about X reality. We have a reason to want X.”

In a long essay exploring the morphing of the healing profession over time, I wrote:

Oliver O’Donovan, in his 1984 book Begotten or Made?, a treatment of personhood and the fitting boundaries of reproductive techniques, identifies how a blind virtue of compassion—when untethered from anything beyond itself—can become the driving motivator for action: ‘Compassion is the virtue of being moved to action by the sight of suffering–that is to say, by the infringement of passive freedoms. It is a virtue that circumvents thought, since it prompts us immediately to action. It is a virtue that presupposes that an answer has already been found to the question “What needs to be done?,” a virtue of motivation rather than of reasoning. As such it is the appropriate virtue for a liberal revolution, which requires no independent thinking about the object of morality, only a very strong motivation to its practice.’

In Trueman’s book, he proposes that we have been a therapeutic culture for a long time. In the absence of a sacred order this means Psychological Man reigns, and is guided by the sentiments of the self.

He writes,

These cultures are really just therapeutic cultures, the cultures of Psychological Man. The only moral criterion that can be applied to behavior is whether it produces feelings of wellbeing in the individual.” “Ethics, therefore, becomes a function of feeling… because there is no greater purpose that can be justified in any ultimately authoritative sense. ...

In a world of empathy-based ethics, the moral sense is basically the aesthetic sense. And that means when the sacred order collapses, morality is simply a matter of taste, not truth.

A collapsed sacred order. Feelings of well-being. Untethered compassion. Empathy-based ethics.

Our emotions desire a certain end. Pathos longs for something to be true, to change reality to fit the desire. This is understandable! Untethered from any further sense of what is good about the created order, however, Christians are just as prone to thinking like those who are not seeking to live before the face of God their Maker.

Trueman observes:

In this context, it is interesting to note how much of the debate about sexuality in Christian circles likewise tends to operate in terms of personal narratives, isolated from any larger metaphysical or theological framework. Even in the church, personal stories have a powerful, emotional impact that can easily transform the chief end of human beings into the personal happiness that stands at the heart of the therapeutic culture.

He notes the arguments that same-sex and transgender couples now deserve the right to their own families via assisted reproductive technology. It is interesting to observe how many conservations around procreation and IVF for other couples hold similar sentiments.“This, in turn, points to the function of the family as being primarily therapeutic. It is about the sense of psychological well-being of the parents.”

Emotivism in the realm of ethics is also amplified when we are confronted with moral dilemmas and potential action “at the bedside,” as it were. Proactive approaches are always better than reactive ones. Times of urgency and emotional pressure are never helpful times to be confronted with issues never before considered. We need the moral sensibilities of our bodily life shaped before then.

Trueman writes that, "The movement of sexual problems from the sphere of morality to the sphere of medicine is one that continues today, as society's strong preference for technical—rather than moral—approaches indicates."

For our purposes, that means there is a need to provide theological, practical, and relational tools for navigating the reality of our bodies in ways that retain a sense of their sacredness over mere utility. Farming out our imaginations about sexuality to rudimentary sex ed in high school and medical professionals has not worked out swimmingly thus far. We need truer, more whole stories. After all, ignorance during times when such knowledge doesn’t seem pressing can later become a matter of urgency. A lack of thought in the beginning will lead to barren formation in the end. These are simultaneously physiological, relational, and ethical issues.

Consider the girl (or woman) who has never learned the basics of her reproductive cycle, what symptoms are concerning, which deserve proper investigation and care, or what ovulation and the monthly window of fertility is, or how she can expect such variations throughout the month to affect her physically and mentally.

Consider the engaged couple who has never learned or considered the same—and weren't encouraged to—prior to marriage.

We know what happens with women and girls who have physical complaints or concerns in most doctor’s offices. We also know what happens with spouses who haven’t been taught to mutually learn and respect their bodies in marriage. Medicalization in the form of hormonal contraception can be a bandaid given from providers for deeper maladies which deserve deeper investigation and care. Such medicalization is a way to offload ongoing participation and responsibility, or of sidestepping the annoyance of friction and the need for attentiveness in sexual relationships.

Consider the couple struggling with infertility. This is an emotional—and simultaneously physiological—experience. They may not have considered, prior to their very real crisis, the workings or health of their reproductive systems. They may not have been directed to providers trained in Restorative Reproductive Medicine or NaProTechnology—which aim to live up to the name of the healing profession when it comes to seeking restoration of both overall and reproductive health. Most traditional medical providers have limited tools and time for investigating root causes of infertility. Therefore, many are referred to IVF without so much as a proper diagnosis (let alone investigation) into particular, common causes of “unexplained infertility.”

We need to consider our bodies—and help our fellow Christians do the same—prior to becoming deer in headlights under the weight of desperate, emotional pressure to instrumentalize our bodies. If our bodies matter at all to our faith then this, too, is spiritual work.

Human Nature

Trueman:

Take away the idea of universal human nature, and ethics sends into the subjective emotivism that MacIntyre sees as characterizing our present age. Empathy on its own is liable not just to sentiment, but to degenerate into a sentimentalism that simply wants other people to be happy in their own way, on their own terms. It is the collapse of this meta-concept of human nature that will prove so critical...

What things are behind many of our assumptions when talking about the body?

Kelly Garrison, in her article A Return to Love, writes a gentle plea for clearer vision about what is true of human nature and thus of our approach to sexuality: “any lessons about sex and anatomy must focus on the body as it is—that is, vulnerable, fertile, mortal—not what we wish it to be.”

What are we wishing the body would be? What might be preventing us from living within the limits of the body as it is? In essence, “What’s behind that?” is an invaluable question.

The Glorious Goodness of It

The word “just” can strip the beauty out of anything special, intimate, or sacred. It’s worth asking how we have come to feel that way about our bodies. It’s “just some flesh, just biological functions.” We do not believe this about other matters of sexuality. I wonder at what point we believe the body does start being meaningful?

We will leave that to others embracing the issue of embodiment more broadly. I remain fascinated by the things we do to our fertility, and the practice of procreation outside of the marital bond.

The Medicalized Transformation of It

In her essay Religio Medici, Kristin M. Collier explains:

Our bodies, our histories, our relationships are given before they are chosen. They have a radically “thrown” quality; we come into the world already dependent on parents and other caregivers, on the natural world, on social structures we did not design, and above all on God. Our lives are not things we own so much as vocations we receive. To forget this is not only a theological error; it has practical consequences that are both numerous and baleful. When the body is seen as raw material for self-expression or self-construction, any limit—mortality, disability, vulnerability, infertility, aging—becomes a kind of insult. Technology then appears as the liberator that can free us from these indignities. The goal of medicine shifts from caring for the body as given and toward redesigning it… The “can” of technological possibility quickly becomes a “should.”

Consider especially her comment about the limits of our body becoming a sort of insult. What parts of our humanity insult, distress, or annoy us? In what ways do we think medical technology ought not just heal what is amiss, but free us from parts of our nature we no longer want?

Trueman again:

The idea of self-creation, that we can shape our essences by acts of will, is deeply embedded in the way we think... weakening, and even abolishing, the idea that human nature is a given—something that has an intrinsic, non-negotiable authority over who we are.

Medical techniques and attitudes have been reshaping our view of our bodies, sexuality, and procreation in ways that have nothing to do with healing or aiming toward true health. Rather, the healing profession has, in various ways, turned into a means of fulfilling psychological desires of what we want to be true about ourselves.

C. S. Lewis draws a similar parallel in The Abolition of Man.

There is something which unites magic and applied science while separating both from the wisdom of earlier ages. For the wise men of old the cardinal problem had been how to conform the soul to reality, and the solution had been knowledge, self-discipline, and virtue. For magic and applied science alike the problem is how to subdue reality to the wishes of men: the solution is a technique; and both, in the practice of this technique, are ready to do things hitherto regarded as disgusting and impious...

Perhaps we were meant to form our souls to reality. But now, we bend the nature of the body to the will.

"...then the problem becomes one of the body, one to be treated with medication and surgery. Technology, therefore, makes the whole claim plausible. Technology, one might even say, defines ontology." This defining of ontology, Trueman goes on to observe, is “fueled by a powerful individualism, and facilitated by a technological ability to manipulate biological realities… thanks to surgery and hormones, and modern medical breakthroughs, we can now plausibly separate gender from sex and even revise the relationship of the sexes to the means of reproduction.”

In a word, “Take away the notion of human nature, and all that is left is free-floating subjective sentiment.” Likewise, in an interview at the Public Discourse, Angela Franks shares that,

The modern rejection of substance rejected the need to have linguistic clarity around who and what the triune God and Jesus Christ are. I think the motive for that is really just the modern obsession with freedom. Because if I am not limited by a certain nature, by my human nature, if I am not limited by being this finite substance, then this whole new world of possibilities opens up. ... Yet transgenderism is only the latest and most extreme form of this movement… it is a symptom, not a cause.

We can have sex stripped of procreative powers before its time. We can have the gratification of biological children obtained through any means necessary.

Hayden Nesbit writes in his reflection on Resonance and the Psalms,

Indeed, one of the casualties of trying to control the nature of the world is that we distort its true nature. Creation by nature speaks to us, but we have rendered it mute by our incessant attempt to master it through control.

In muting the design of the created order, it also seems possible to mute our moral sensibilities. It’s hard to talk about something one can no longer see. Medicalizing our sexuality—whether to be rid of fertility or to force a pregnancy—is so commonplace, it is no longer a matter of robust consideration. It no longer factors in our spiritual or moral formation. It is not just underappreciated. It is often not even on the map.

Why does this matter? Why should we care about any of this? Erik Varden offers an answer:

Faith in the Son of God made man requires of me an embodied response, made concrete in a life of conversion, not just in the rehearsal of abstract sublimities.

Our Own Formation

What does the Christian life consist of? Is it rehearsing abstract sublimities of theological truths? Does it include embodied responses, humble faith made concrete?

I’ve been thinking about spiritual discipleship and how moral formation goes hand in hand with it. In this way, our inner dispositions find outward expression.

Bodily and particularly sexual ethics reinforce ways of being in the world. They reinforce what we believe about what it means, or doesn’t, to live set apart lives. They reinforce what we think it means to live as awe-filled, obedient, and very loved creatures “before the face of God.”

Do we see the face behind such an invitation?

We need the orthodoxy of proper theology and doctrine. We need the orthopraxy of right living and moral action—to show our orthodoxy makes sense in the world. We also need the orthopathy of ordered passion and affections. In The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis describes this dance when he says “the head rules the belly through the chest.”

Our bodies were designed with intention and declared good. Our sexual lives in marriage were meant to be nourishing of the marriage itself. Of course, this comes by way of pleasure and subsequent emotional bonding. If we look at God’s intention for the blessing and sanctification that is offered in marriage, I can’t help but think we were meant to press into the reality of being one flesh in the sharing of our procreative potential. I can’t help thinking the friction of getting to navigate our biological workings of our bodies is actually a feature, not a bug to dispose of as we wish. Pleasure is one way we are united. The other is in the way we handle and communicate the reality of our shared fertility.

The prospect of this confronts us with many emotions about many things. Physiological factors ebb and flow throughout the month. Mood changes affect our communication. We have desires, frustrations, longings, or fears about pregnancy and parenting. We all struggle in what to talk about and when to do so.

These are also invitations to be formed as a couple and individually into the likeness of Christ. How closely do husbands pay attention to the bodily life of their wife, as one flesh with her, as a husband living with her in an understanding way? How closely do both pay attention to the layer or two beneath longings, fears, frustrations, desires for control, openness to God’s voice? How will both be confronted with the disposition behind related issues in our hearts and marriages? Bumping up against the grain of our humanity—and especially the procreative nature of sexuality—can reveal much. How will we find out what’s there if we refuse this invitation of patience and forbearance?

How else does formation work except ultimately through our bodies? Formation happens through what we choose to do—the habituation of the fruit of the Spirit, the habituation of virtue. Christian tradition says we practice virtue to gain the virtue.

Of course we want what we want immediately. We don't want to keep choosing it over and over. We don’t want to keep having to deal with our pesky bodies. But there are challenging, tender, soul-stretching experiences we miss out on with our spouse and with God when we are not willing to do that.

We are catechized by what we believe, but perhaps more so by what we do. What we do in the body catechizes the soul at a deep level. It can catechizes the conscience. Things spoken, heard, permitted, practiced, endorsed over time forms prominent grooves, dulling us to what might otherwise have disturbed us.

Like the unassuming but steady stream of water, our souls are formed for ill but also for good. I wonder how much we’ve lost the ability to notice the water itself—this “social imaginary”—which wears grooves into our personal and communal intuitions.

In an essay considering paths of spiritual formation, Leah says “Christians know we are to grow in Christlikeness; we are tempted to believe that we have the foresight and wisdom to determine what will get us there.”

We can choose to accept being a creature crafted by our Maker. We can choose to live more fully within the grain of our given bodies, within the limits of our flesh. Transformation might come.

If we have healthy fertility, we can choose to accept the friction that comes with receiving it and navigating it for the years it’s given to us. If we have broken bodies, we can choose to pursue the healing of whatever is not functioning as intended. If we have bodies that cannot—for anatomical reasons or factors we have pursued restoration of—bring forth children from our marriage bond, these are realities that can burst with devastating grief. We need a robust, Christian vision of what living within the limits of our flesh looks like—for the blessedly fertile, for the sick and struggling, and for the infertile.

Our crosses are ours to bear, and the blessings found in those crosses ours to receive. This is the way of the Christian life. We worship the incarnated Christ. He took on flesh in order to pour it out, and so our own bodies and physical laments take on meaning. The body holds the ways in which we were made to know Him, in all the delights and suffering along the way. It is ours to receive, as bought with a price and given in love.

If Christianity is good news, we need to show in our very selves that it is. That trusting Him and living under His sacred order is not an intellectual exercise, but flows into the whole of life—including our bodies, sexuality, pregnancy and parenting. We can trust Him and submit to Him in our flesh, because we are the clay and not the potter. As Erik Varden puts it, “Once our eyes have been opened to faith as something real, a reorientation of existence is called for.”

Reoriented and freed from postures of utility, we might yet find there is work the Lord wants to do in us—work not in spite of, but in the midst of—our finite selves. The boundaries have fallen for us in pleasant places.

We are invited to become humble enough to be molded with firm hands. Hands that can form His image from dust and bone. Hands that can form us through the fleshy means He chose for us. Hands that have only ever worked for our good.

He is not a harsh taskmaster. Will we allow the potter to do His work?

The Christian Witness

I’ve heard it said that the question of the first millenium was “Who is Christ?” (and thus, the councils and creeds). The question of the second millennium was “Who is the Church?” (and thus the Reformation). The question of the third millenium might very well turn out to be “Who is Man?” (and thus our response to technologically-driven anthropological questions which arise about the body, sexuality, and procreation).

Our moral reasoning and action is never confined to our own life. It does not affect only ourselves. What we believe are merely personal decisions are in fact theological statements and anthropological in nature. They contribute to a slow drip which affects ecosystems and props up plausibility structures for ways of thinking about our body, sex, and procreation.

And so, our collective formation is the Christian witness. Individual action can dilute or make more potent the witness of the whole. We are in the midst of an anthropological crisis about the human person, sexuality, and why our bodies even matter at all.

Faced with massive disembodiment, sexual disorder, and bodily desecration, we need a coherent vision of the human person to share with the world. Let us show—and not just tell—that another creaturely life is possible.

May we be found speaking true things with our earthen vessels, the temples of the Holy Spirit.

Its essence is not ours to refashion, wish away, or transcend. Any proclamations to the culture around us regarding the goodness of living within the bounds of God’s created order—especially in the realm of sexuality—first needs to be true of ourselves.

Otherwise, we will remain scandalized by certain sexual practices and procedures out there, not seeing how our imaginations have been cut from the same cloth. We, too, resist the limitations and friction of our bodies. We, too, bend our sexual nature to our will.

To change course, Trueman suggests Protestants must revive natural law and a high view of the body, before wagging fingers at the world around us.

Which brings us back to my original realization—that a book about the attitudes and plausibility structures which fostered transgenderism are the same ones a person bumps up against when discussing fertility and bioethics with even conservative Christians.

Matthew Lee Anderson wrote that his book Earthen Vessels

argued that evangelicalism had tacitly adopted secular practices and habits through inattentiveness to our bodily life. It is not our explicit affirmations and denials that matter, I suggested, but what happens beneath the surfaces and outside the edges of our view. But that means the way to recover a community and a society of people who value the goodness of bodily life in its fullness is not through reducing the chief expressions of our public witness to the last, thin thread of sexual ethics that we can all still agree on. Rather, we must set about rediscovering and reviving the broad and beautiful backdrop of the goodness of mortal flesh, a goodness we have each denied in a thousand different ways. We cannot authentically or authoritatively name and resist the “spirit of our age” until we recognize that before the world made Caitlyn Jenner, we made it.