In his paper titled “The Nihilism of Modern Medicine,” Dr. Kimbell Kornu discusses what he sees as medicine’s ultimate shortcoming – a transcendental of death, which leads to nihilism for all parties involved. His thesis, through the paradigm of Heidegger and Nietzsche, is that “Death lies at the heart of modern medicine and is thus nihilistic.”[i] Though the term nihilism can be taken in many ways, such as out of nothing comes something, one way in which Kornu uses it is to say, “With nihilism, Nietzsche seeks to invert Platonism, such that the highest values of Western culture and history (i.e. Christianity, morality, and the world of ideas and being) are brought low and replaced with the world of becoming, life and will to power” under the paradigm that “God is dead.”[ii] In this view of nihilism, per Heidegger, man is left to himself to save himself from the inevitable Death, which is “the shrine of Nothing.”[iii] The stated antidote for this secular “out of Nothing/Death is something” is Christianity’s creation ex nihilo, and Christ who overcomes death with Life. Kornu concludes that death’s finitude, paradoxically, is what gives meaning to life, in a Christian sense. “Christian theology would be the first to affirm human finitude.” Thus, “even for Christianity, death is still medicine’s transcendental.”[iv]

The overarching premise of Kornu’s argument is that Death reveals Nothing (nihilism). But Death does not reveal Nothing: Death reveals Life. “If death exists, God exists.”[v] Aquinus revealed this same logical truth: “If evil exists, God exists.”[vi] In light of this paradoxically self- evident rational truth, that death illuminates life, then death is not nihilism. Because of this, Kornu’s view of modern medicine, vis-a-vis Heidegger and Nietzsche, is inadequate. An anti- God framework for modern medicine is impossible to achieve so long as death exists because death reveals life. And Christianity reveals that Jesus Christ is this Life.

A nihilistic paradigm for medicine would be one in which there is no death, in which case man is immortal, in which case medicine would be meaningless. Consider the temptation to sin in the third chapter of Genesis is motivated by the lie, “You will not surely die.” Heidegger attempts this move, maligning Christians, implying they would find no real meaning in death because of the Church’s Platonic tradition of teaching the existence of an immaterial, transcendental soul of man that is immortal.[vii] In the paradigm of immortality, the absence of death, then Death would be Nothing. Then medicine would be meaningless. So it is memento mori which reveals life and gives meaning to medicine in the care for the dying. Jesus says, “The well [immortal] have no use for a physician, but the sick [dying] do.” (Mark 2:17)

This brings us to the ontology of the human being. Only through a shared ontology of man facing finitude in bodily death does both medicine and the Church collectively realize that man does not have life in himself; we are not immortal. It is only through this proper bodily ontology of man’s being, which the Church calls the image of God, is the finitude of man in death a reality. And this reality of bodily death is what reveals bodily life, which comes from without.

Brian Brock’s response to Dr. Kornu says, “Heidegger is intentionally and explicitly not working within the neo-Platonic exitus-reditus theological eschatology of Maximus.”[viii] With this in mind, he suggests that an alternative “annunciation” or “sign” paradigm “is able to respond to the conflict of the Christian confession with medical nihilism in much more concrete ways.”[ix] Turning away from a neo-Platonic paradigm of dualism, held by Maximus the Confessor, to one which focuses concretely and univocally on our human persons born in the world, bodily, he says:

“To restate the metaphysical question at stake: is the new one in the womb a silent resource from human manipulation aiming to defeat death (as active nihilism has it)? Or is God somehow calling to humanity through this newly created being who comes from God’s hand?”10

Here we can see that we are moving from the metaphysical to the physical, bodily birth of a child from a woman’s womb, a material sign of God’s involvement in creation. Or consider God’s annunciation to the world through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ bodily. This “man from heaven” through Mary’s womb in another concrete annunciation to the world that material bodies in the world matter to God.

But of matter, Dr. Jeffery P. Bishop says, “The epistemologically normative body for modern medicine is the dead body”[xi]. But as already stated, death of the body rationally and logically reveals its opposite, the living body. Through death we see its opposite: life. Death in the body reveals life in the body. Why then does it follow that the epistemologically normative body for medicine is the dead body and not the living body?

Contradictorily, Bishop also says, the “resurrected body of Christ is an ontological reality” and “the teleological body towards which all bodies aim.” And that this resurrected body is “not only epistemologically normative, it is also the formal and final cause of our material bodies.”[xii] Are there two contradictory normative bodies in creation? Is the dead body normative? Or is the resurrected living body normative? Which one is objectively true?

If the objective reality in this world is facing death and finitude in the body, and this is witnessed through both our bodily death and Christ’s bodily death, but is also seen through the teleological “resurrected body of Christ as an ontological reality,” which becomes “the formal and final cause of our material bodies,” then how is it that modern medicine’s genuine care for material bodies is nihilistic? The practice of medicine sounds Christian, not nihilistic.

Dr. Daniel Hinshaw writes in Suffering and the Nature of Healing, “From the perspective of many of the Church Fathers of the fourth century, medicine, in its broadest context to encompassing curing illness as well as caring for the sick, was viewed as the perfect profession.”[xiii] Why then is there a perceived divide between medicine and the Church today? I believe the answer lies in the way the Church views the ontology of man. In the remainder of this essay, I wish to explore this question of the ontology of man in relation to Kornu’s negative critique of modern medicine.

Stanley Hauerwas offers, “That medicine and religion are interrelated cannot be avoided. The interesting project is understanding how.”[xiv] Peter J. Leithart’s response to “The Nihilism of Modern Medicine” ends by saying, “Not only in medicine, but in the sciences and the realm of human knowing in general, there needs to be an ‘ontological’ revolution, which must be a theological revolution founded on a resurgent anthropomorphism.”[xv] My hope in this essay, responding to Dr. Kornu’s essay on Heidegger, and echoing Peter Leithart above, is to articulate how mankind’s Dasein – ontological existence of humanity – should be defined as “the body in life and death,” for medicine, Christianity, and humanity in general.

The practice of medicine presupposes an object of such practice. The object of such practice is the patient. The patient is a human being. Who and what and where is the human being? I propose that medicine and Christianity should both agree that the body is the who and the what and the where of the human being: people are their bodies. Christianity states that the body is the image of God. So, coming back to Heidegger, the dead body may be one view of the Dasein of humanity’s existence, but even so, if the body is seen as the imago Dei and the person, then even in death, the body is not nothing. On this point, consideration of the recognition of the patient’s body (dead or alive), as the image of God, is surprisingly absent in Dr. Kornu’s essay. Is the image of God, even in death, nothing? Certainly this perspective of the body as the imago Dei has not been lost from our moral conscience as a collective people, even amidst the supposed nihilism of modern medicine.

Two powerful real life examples illuminate the importance of the dead body. One is the story of Alan Kurdi, a dead little boy. Alan Kurdi was a three year old Syrian refugee boy who drowned in the Mediterranean sea while trying to cross to Europe with his family. His body washed ashore on a beach in Turkey. A photojournalist captured the tragic image of the dead little boy’s body, wearing his little boy pants, his little boy shirt, and his little boy shoes, lying lifeless on the beach, in the shallow break of the seashore. The image of this dead little boy, who was unknown to the world in the photo, captivated the world with shame and horror, and rightly so. The dead little boy is the dead little image of God.[xvi]

The second story is of a Tunisian grave digger. In 2018, the Washington Post featured a story of Chamseddine Marzoug, a former farmer, who upon finding bodies of drowned refugees ashore on the beaches of Tunisia, took the bodies, washed them, and buried them in graves in a cemetery with fresh flowers. In the piece, Marzoug says, “When we bury them, we give them dignity.” Both stories speak to a still revered importance of the dead body.[xvii]

The Christian narrative and the historical event of the incarnation of God, the Word becoming living flesh, who is the human being Jesus Christ, is a revelation to the world that the physical human body is of supreme importance to God both alive and dead. This apocalyptic birth of God through Mary and the Spirit gave birth to a new ontological reality, not only for mankind, but for God Himself: a bodily human being in time and space. In fact, the scandal of Christian theology is that in our monotheistic worship to God the Father, we also worship, in “one adoration,” the body and person of Jesus Christ.[xviii] This worship of the man Jesus Christ is visibly demonstrated to varying degrees and ways in the Church, especially in the Orthodox and Catholic sacrament of the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Furthermore, with respect to the imago Dei, the Scriptures testify that Jesus Christ is “the Image of God.” Lastly, the Second Council of Constantinople defends Orthodox Christianity by stating the Lord Jesus Christ bodily is the Second Person of the Trinity.[xix]

Consider when Jesus died, his dead body was still cared for and adored. He was prepared for burial with myrrh resin, spices and lotion, wrapped in linen, then sealed in a proper burial tomb, “in accordance with Jewish burial customs.” In John’s Gospel, after his burial, Mary Magdalene is weeping at Jesus’ tomb over his absence, as witnessed by the empty tomb. What we see here is that Mary’s understanding of Jesus is strictly in relation to his body. She is visiting the place where Jesus is. Jesus is his body. Mary is monistic (not dualistic) in her understanding of Jesus’s person. She says, “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him.” (John 20:13) Mary does not say, “They have taken my Lord’s body away and I don’t know where they have put it?”

On this note of the body being the person, Dr. Daniel Hinshaw says in his book, “The reverent concern for the physical remains of the dead person shown by traditional Christianity is a strong reminder that the person is still very much connected to his or her body, whether dead or alive.”[xx] But what we have inherited from ancient Orthodox Christianity, drawing from the Hellenistic culture of that time, is a dualistic ontology of man, where the body is not conceived as the being of the person. This dualistic ontology of man has created in the Church an abstract and immaterial Dasein of man’s being. In the process of defining man’s being and person as immaterial and immortal (the soul), the imago Dei (the body) seems to have been forgotten by the Church. It is no wonder that the destruction of the body by cremation is now authorized in certain denominations of the Christian Church.

But in his research, Dr. Bishop states that the practice of anatomic dissection of the body, which the Church ceded to medicine over three hundred years ago, caused the dead body to become “ the fetish of medical students.”[xxi] Peter Leithart, in his response to Dr. Kornu writes, “[physicians] come to knowledge of living bodies by studying corpses and cadavers.”[xxii] Or, as Dr. Bishop puts it, “the dead body became the ideal type, the ideal type against which life would be measured. The dead body began to be mapped onto the bodies of the living.”[xxiii] All of these provocative statements are not accurate in the real world of modern medicine. The anatomy lab is just one small fraction of a pre-clinical students’ education and now, more than ever, the medical students have exposure to living patients already in their first year. Medicine’s classic Hippocratic Oath,“do no harm,” with its emphasis on the living patient’s body, is still operative in medical training and practice, although imperfectly. In medicine, the difference between a dead body and a living body is as stark as the difference between night and day. The difference is in fact horrific, not normative. Medicine “calls” one’s death, down to the minute, because medicine still sees life and death of the person as a real and tragic event in time and space in the body. Medicine still recognizes people as their bodies, not because the dead body is normative, but because it is not. The irony of this is that Church seems to have lost the understanding of people as their bodies, spellbound by the immaterial and abstract notions of metaphysical philosophy.

I also disagree with Peter Leithart’s statement that medicine, within its practice, has “inherent necrophilia.”[xxiv] In my experience as a medical educator and practicing physician, the opposite is true. Medicine does not love corpses. Corpses are a reminder of the power of death over a person. When a virus or bacteria or cancer attacks one’s body, the person himself is being attacked. It would be dualistic and irresponsible for a physician to suggest that the disease is not afflicting one’s person, but is only attacking the body. If modern medicine loved dead bodies and thought the body was not the person, then why would medicine be fighting so hard against death of the body? Death, revealed in the body, is certainly not normative nor loved by doctors. When the body dies, the person dies. Modern medicine still hates death.

When Jesus’ body was crucified, the Son of God died. Death of his body was the death of the Son of God. In this act of death, the righteous dying for the unrighteous, the Son of God died, unless of course his death is overlaid with dualism. It is a horror and is far from normative to consider that God sent his unique Son, Jesus Christ, to die a bodily death on a Roman Cross. The death of the body is also something terrible in Christianity, for it is the death of the Son of God. The Son of God is a real human being.

A physician’s entire scientific training, the grounding of their philosophy of medicine, is geared towards an understanding that a person, ontologically, is his or her body. When the body dies, the person dies, for the body is the person. The Scriptures support this view:

“Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7)

“For dust you are, and to dust you shall return.” (Genesis 3:19)

Through Scripture, man is seen as made from the matter of the earth and animated by the gift of God’s spirit to that matter. This ontology of man means that humanity does not have life in himself. The life in man in his or her body is a gift from God, but that life is not the person. The person is the matter, the body, which is animated by God’s spirit. Absent God’s spirit in the body, giving it life, the person is dead. Thus, the concept of “soul,” in a plain reading of Scripture, is man’s body, which is the image of God, animated by the spirit, which God gives or takes away. Finitude is proper to humanity. The tree of Life does not reside within us. We are not God. Modern medicine is not God. This mortal ontology of the “soul” being the body and image of God is one both medicine and the Church can share together.

Through philosophy, can one even begin to conceive of a human person apart from his or her bodily existence? I would suggest it is impossible. Anthropomorphism seems inevitable because human beings naturally depend on the physical body for existence. Just consider in art, literature and music how difficult it is to communicate anything of meaning without using matter. Can a visual artist communicate without employing objects that exist? Can literature describe anything at all without describing things that really exist in the world? (consider the problem Dante had with the metaphysical in his Divine Comedy, which contains a disclaimer in the preface). Even music relies on the existence of symbols or vibrations in the world to express meaning. The point is this: Making the argument that the essence of something is independent of and not identical with its existence in the world (dualism) is problematic. Can one possibly know the essence of something apart from its existence in the world? I do not believe this is possible.

It should be no surprise, then, that modern medicine does not see the world and human beings through the eyes of transcendental idealism, forms of being, or essence, which lay the foundation for dualism. When it comes to the ontology of the human person, medicine naturally focuses on the world of real existence. For this reason, many physicians would not identify the person metaphysically. Dr. Jeffery P. Bishop states in his essay, On Medical Corpses and Resurrected Bodies, “Modern reductive science has consistently claimed that it has no metaphysics.”[xxv] I would rather suggest that as monistic realists, modern medicine sees the existence of a person not through the lens of dualism. The transcendental is transcended in the medical view of the person; the existence of the person is the essence of the person and vice- versa (there is no distinction or separation). This is not reductionist materialism, as some would falsely claim, rather it is anti-dualism.

As Leithart correctly points out, “Modern materialism…could not exist without the prior dualistic act of division.”[xxvi] Who then divided man into two? The Church did, beginning in the Third Century, by merging the Scriptures with the philosophical schools of Neoplatonic thought, which laid the ground for today’s Orthodoxy. Therefore, modern medicine is not to blame for the critique that it teaches or practices modern materialism (that is materialistic reductionism) because that perspective can only exist within a dualistic paradigm. Modern medicine does not teach nor practice medicine within a dualistic paradigm in any sense. Medicine teaches monism of the human being. Medicine sees people as bodily human beings.

A person’s being thus is identical with his or her body, living or dead. This is not material reductionism. Unless death means something other than the end of the person’s life (such as a Platonic escape of an immaterial soul to life outside the body) then medicine is correct to see the person from the perspective of the body. If death of a person is not in reference to their body, which Heidegger suggests is true for the Christian paradigm in an unfavorable sense, then the Church needs to determine who is correct. Is death of the body really death of the person, or not?

To the extent that Heidegger reveals death is the real and the tragic end of the person through the death of the body, I would wish to see modern medicine and the Church find agreement. I don’t see why Christianity must disagree with Heidegger. “The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Eccl 12:7) On this point, Emmanuel Falque in his essay, “Suffering Death” states:

“Thomas Aquinas himself established the ‘limit,’ rather than the unlimited, as our most proper state. This way one would deny Martin Heidegger the false privilege of excluding Christians from finitude, as if they did not first of all belong to the rest of humanity.”[xxvii]

Death is real to Christians too. Christians and medicine alike witness this death of the person through the body.

Both natural philosophy and Christianity witness to the reality that matter matters. Bodies matter; even dead bodies have worth. The Egyptians would have recoiled at the idea of cremation of the body. If our matter is of worth according to natural philosophy, how much more worth does our body, the image of God, have in the context of the Christian teaching of the resurrection of the body? The resurrected body is the ultimate end for humanity. This is why Jesus rebuked the Sadducees for their questions mocking the resurrection of the body, for by them they were mocking matter, denying that bodies have supreme worth to God. Jesus said, “But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.”(Luke 20:37-38)

Created matter is therefore “good” because God “created it” and “saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” (Gen 1:31) God created this world of matter and real existence to reveal Himself immanently in this matter. And God does reveal Himself through creation: space, time, energy, matter, nature, humanity, life and history, all of which are traces of God in the world. Peter J. Leithart explores this theme in his book, Traces of the Trinity: Signs of God in Creation and Human Experience.[xxviii] Under this theme, the physician scientist, in fact, goes to creation and sees traces of God (whether they acknowledge this is irrelevant) in the wonder of our molecular structure of cells and proteins animated by God. The modern era of scientific discovery has brought into focus the drama of the human molecular person in motion, not inert or dead. God is certainly the author of the living, biochemistry and physics animated, our living bodies. The living body is what most captivates physicians and modern scientists, not the dead body. In my view, modern science’s study of the living body has opened up an amazing cellular and molecular ontology of humanity, the image of God in motion, which the Church has yet to incorporate into its stated Orthodox formulations.

In his publication “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Bio-medicine,” George L. Engel “blames the Church for creation of the mind-body dualism in modern medicine,” writes Dr. Daniel Hinshaw.[xxix]

“[Engel] uses as justification for his assertion the permission that was granted by the Western Church to scholars like Vesalis at the time of the Renaissance to perform human anatomic dissection. The implication was that the body was now ceded to physicians as their responsibility, but the mind and sprit were still the property of the Church.”[xxx]

This artificial “split” of the human person between “the body” and “the mind/spirit” grew up within a long tradition of a dualism, which saw man as divided up between material and immaterial. Peter Leinhart’s response to Dr. Kornu clearly spoke to this development. He concluded that, “Dualism erects a wall of separation between matter and spirit. Life is on the side of the spirit.”[xxxi]

Certainly, modern medicine is guilty of neglecting the immaterial aspects of life that animate the body, God’s gift, but that is not because modern medicine denies the spiritual or denies God, as some would falsely claim. It’s just that modern medicine has limits, and natural science (studying God’s creation) is primarily focused on “the human body in motion,” which is the profession of medicine. The practice of modern medicine does not presuppose the absence of existence beyond natural science limits, such as the preclusion of God or the spiritual. As I just recently published in the Annuals of Internal Medicine, holistic medicine correctly affirms the existence of God as being important, even though the spiritual is not easily measured and discernible by methods of natural science inquiry.[xxxii] What is surprising, however, is that the Church seems to have ceded the body, the image of God, to what is presupposed to be the secular world of physician-scientists, as if the body is of less importance to the Church than it is to modern medicine.

God’s fingerprints in our bodies are revealed down to the level of the cell, a topic that I’ve written on previously, called “Theobiology.”[xxxiii] The ancients had no view into this beautiful molecular world of our body. The Christianity shaped by scholasticism, which has formed Orthodoxy, heavily relied on a priori reasoning to determine knowledge about our bodies (philosophical science). Since the Enlightenment, however, Christianity has become inundated with a fascinating world of empirical information about our bodies, which are used to make a posteroriori conclusions about our bodies (natural science).

Today the challenge for the Church is to more clearly articulate the Christian Orthodoxy of man in a more monistic theo-anthropomorphic ontology, the imago Dei. The body is the person and does not have life within him or herself, but is dependent upon God. Such a simple and self-evident ontology of the human being, the body animated by God, the Church, medicine and “human knowing in general” can comprehend. But such a “back to basics” revision in man’s ontology towards monism will require the Church to rethink tradition. The Church can do this, guided by the body of Scripture, scholarship in philosophy and the natural sciences, and the Holy Spirit. A dualistic ontology of the human being, which imputes immortality to man in himself through an “immaterial soul,” has caused great conflict and confusion in the history and theology of the Church. This has been especially evident in the Church’s wrangling over the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ, who is also a man.[xxxiv] This conflict over the doctrine of man in the Church continues today, separating the Body of Christ.

Thus, the Church’s stated Orthodox doctrine of man has not yet reconciled the worlds of philosophical science and natural science into one cohesive view. Orthodoxy still reflects an unreconciled dualism in the Church’s ontological doctrine of man. The theology I have proposed in this paper is that the Church, medicine, and even the world in general, can essentially agree that people are their bodies: Man’s proper ontology is his body because the body is the image of God.

Looking at the witness of the bodily person of Jesus Christ is helpful here because Jesus Christ is also a man. The gospel says that God became flesh and is the man Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the human Son of God, the Image of God. Through Jesus’ human body we can see God himself bodily. In effect the logic is this: we know God through Jesus, and we know Jesus through his body. Jesus said, “When you see me (Jesus) you see the Father (God).” (John 14:9) Jesus Christ is God’s divinity made matter on earth. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:14) Jesus Christ is God bodily. Jesus’ body is The Word of Life.

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning The Word of Life.”

God is matter in Jesus Christ. Therefore, no dualism is proper to God in Jesus Christ’s person, the Second Person of the Trinity. [xxxv] [xxxvi]

Theology needs to clean up its language to be less dualistic. Dr. Jeffery P. Bishop says, “In theology, meaning and mechanism are inseparable from one another.”[xxxvii] Despite his best intentions in this statement, this is still a dualistic formulation of theology. To merge meaning and mechanism into one, we should rather say, “In theology, meaning and mechanism are one and the same.” Here we now mean there is no difference from what I experience (meaning) and and my body (mechanism). For I am my body. “I have a body, therefore I am.”38

If no dualism is proper to the man Jesus Christ’s person, The Resurrection and Life, how much more true is it for our human persons, who have not life in ourselves. Unlike Jesus Christ, we are not Life, but are dependent upon God for life. In ourselves, we are not immortal, but depend on God for life in our bodily being. Man facing the horror of bodily death, the absence of life in the body, is something both Heidegger, Christians, and the world in general should agree upon. In truth, the serpent should have said: “You will surely die.” So it is for all men, including the Son of God who is also a man. Human beings face death in mortal bodies. God’s temporal gift to the world is life in our bodies for a short while, until we meet death in our bodies. But through the gospel of Jesus Christ, God gives us Life in resurrected bodies. Jesus Christ’s body is The Resurrection and The Life given by God for our bodies: human beings made in God’s Image.


Kristin M. Collier MD FACP is a clinical assistant professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School where she also serves as the Director of The University of Michigan Medical School Program on Health Spirituality and Religion. Tim Collier is a homeschooling father of four boys. 


[i] Kimbell Kornu, “The Nihilism of Modern Medicine” Theopolis Insitute, May 7, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-nihilism-of-modern-medicine/

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Conner Cunningham, “Is There Life before Death” The Role of Death in Life. Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 148.

[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Catechism of the Catholic Church 366, 997, 1005.

[viii] Brian Brock, “Annunciation and the Nihilism of Prenatal Testing” Theopolis Insitute, May 14, 2020.

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 166.

[xii] Ibid, 178

[xiii] Daniel B. Hinshaw, M.D. Suffering and the Nature of Healing (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 24.

[xiv] Stanley Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 7.

[xv] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xvi] See photo: http://100photos.time.com/photos/nilufer-demir-alan-kurdi (visited May 24, 2020).

[xvii] See video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdNTPQPNzmA (visited May 24, 2020)

[xviii] The Second Council of Constantinople – 553 A.D., particularly Anathema’s III,IV, V and IX. http:// www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/ 0553-0553,_Concilium_Constantinopolitanum_II,_Documenta_Omnia,_EN.pdf

[xix] Anathema X from the Second Council of Constantinople – 553 A.D states: “If anyone does not confess his belief that our Lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified in his human flesh, is truly God and the Lord of glory and one of the members of the Holy Trinity: let him be anathema.”

http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/ 0553-0553,_Concilium_Constantinopolitanum_II,_Documenta_Omnia,_EN.pdf

[xx] Daniel B. Hinshaw, M.D. Suffering and the Nature of Healing (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 189.

[xxi] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 168.

[xxii] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xxiii] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 168.

[xxiv] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xxv] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 172.

[xxvi] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xxvii] Emmanuel Falque, “Suffering Death” The Role of Death in Life. Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 46.

[xxviii] In this book, Peter J. Leithart makes a very powerful case against a Cartesian Dualism of man’s being. In his first endnote for Chapter 1 “Outside In, Inside Out” Leithart univocally says (to my refreshment), “I am not a seeing thing inside the box of my body. It’s my body doing the seeing and experiencing. Once we correct Descartes there, we have to re-envisgage everything else too.” In some sense, this essay of mine is attempting to do just that by proposing a univocal being for man: his body.

[xxix] Daniel B. Hinshaw, M.D. Suffering and the Nature of Healing (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 17.

[xxx] Ibid, 17-18.

[xxxi] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xxxii] Kristin M. Collier, Cornelius James, Sanjay Saint, Joel Howell. “It is Time to More Fully
Address Teaching Religion and Spirituality in Medicine?” Annals of Internal Medicine. May 19, 2020. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-0446

[xxxiii] Kristin M. Collier. “A Theobiology of a Mothers’s Voice.” Church Life Journal, March 3, 2020. https:// churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-relational-theology-of-biology/

[xxxiv] Nestorius’ teaching and Nestorianism is founded on a rigid hermeneutic of dualism: the presupposition that mortal man (body: human nature) cannot be God (Spirit/Word: divine nature). While Christian Orthodoxy is not the rigid dualism of Nestorius, it does maintain still today a strong sense of dualism within its formulation of Jesus Christ in two distinct natures. Scripture does not seem to have this problem of dualism in its formulations of Jesus Christ. “The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) Jesus’s flesh (body) is divine (God). (See John 6) Essentially, all seven of the Ecumenical Church Councils have debated over the doctrine of how to define Jesus Christ, given that he is matter (body). Debate continues today in small circles through the lens of an ancient academic dialectic (dualism) and equivocation that is barely holding on. The world deserves a univocal answer to the question raised by Christianity: Is God flesh or not?

[xxxv] Abstracting away Jesus’ body to conceive of an eternal disembodied Word in transcendent form or essence before the incarnation of the Word is considered an accepted dualistic metaphysic of Christian Orthodoxy before the incarnation, that is moving from Jesus’ historical body and person, to his eternal origin, being God in the beginning, without body. The Apostle John shows this is Orthodoxy proper. But when we do this as the Church, working within the concept of God as Trinity, we often make the mistake of putting an abstract form of Jesus (often no longer named Jesus), who lacks body, in our concept of the Second Person of the Trinity that we worship and adore. This is essentially dualistic Nestorianism. Christian Scripture and worship forces us to reconcile Jesus Christ within the Holy Trinity of God. The fact that the Second Person of the Trinity is a human being is not a theological problem to be solved through NeoPlatonic philosophy and metaphysical dissection. We need not be dualistic about Jesus. Scripture and many aspects of Orthodox liturgy and hymns push against this dialectic through the worship of Jesus. Christians worship the bodily man Christ Jesus. But for some in the Church, under the philosophy of NeoPlatonic dualism, the body and flesh of Jesus in the Trinity is a problem. Certainly the man Jesus being God is the Scandal of Christianity. But we need not equivocate in dualistic paradigms to answer the charge of the man Jesus being God. “The Jews replied, ‘We’re stoning you not for any good work, but for blasphemy! You, a mere man, claim to be God.’” (John 10:33) Yes, this man Jesus of Nazareth is God, contrary to the charges against him. If Jesus the man is God, then the Church no longer needs to theologically equivocate the meaning of “Son” in the Trinity to give it a NeoPlatonic sense, for the Son of God is a real fleshy Son, born from Mary’s womb. Only through Platonic dualism superimposed on Scripture can we gather two senses to the meaning of “Son of God.” From Scripture we witness and worship the beautiful paradox that Jesus alone is the Second Person of the Trinity, the human Son of God (in eternal relation to the Father). The implication is apocalyptic. Jesus’ humanity (flesh) is in the Godhead! (see footnote 19)

[xxxvi] See also this excellent essay exploring the person of Jesus Christ: Henry L. Novello, New Life as out of Death: Sharing in the“Exchange of Natures” in the Person of Christ. Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 96-119.

[xxxvii] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 174.

[xxxviii] Obviously, I am playing off Rene Descartes maxim “I think, therefore I am” and reframing the being of mankind away from “a thinking being” and towards “a bodily being.” This has positive implications. It’s not the intellect that makes a person. This has favorable implications for the intellectually challenged or disabled in the Church. It’s the imago Dei, the body, that makes the person. So long as I have a body, “I am.” This reveals the inherent worth of our person in relation to our bodies, even our dead bodies. It also points to our need to preserve the “I am” of our being through proper burials of the body. Lastly, it points beyond the grave to the “I AM,” Jesus, the Resurrection and Life for our body, a sign that the normative body for mankind is the living body through the dead body (and not the other way around). “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the Life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” (2 Cor 4:10)

Next Conversation

In his paper titled “The Nihilism of Modern Medicine,” Dr. Kimbell Kornu discusses what he sees as medicine’s ultimate shortcoming - a transcendental of death, which leads to nihilism for all parties involved. His thesis, through the paradigm of Heidegger and Nietzsche, is that “Death lies at the heart of modern medicine and is thus nihilistic.”[i] Though the term nihilism can be taken in many ways, such as out of nothing comes something, one way in which Kornu uses it is to say, “With nihilism, Nietzsche seeks to invert Platonism, such that the highest values of Western culture and history (i.e. Christianity, morality, and the world of ideas and being) are brought low and replaced with the world of becoming, life and will to power” under the paradigm that “God is dead.”[ii] In this view of nihilism, per Heidegger, man is left to himself to save himself from the inevitable Death, which is “the shrine of Nothing.”[iii] The stated antidote for this secular “out of Nothing/Death is something” is Christianity’s creation ex nihilo, and Christ who overcomes death with Life. Kornu concludes that death’s finitude, paradoxically, is what gives meaning to life, in a Christian sense. “Christian theology would be the first to affirm human finitude.” Thus, “even for Christianity, death is still medicine’s transcendental.”[iv]

The overarching premise of Kornu’s argument is that Death reveals Nothing (nihilism). But Death does not reveal Nothing: Death reveals Life. “If death exists, God exists.”[v] Aquinus revealed this same logical truth: “If evil exists, God exists.”[vi] In light of this paradoxically self- evident rational truth, that death illuminates life, then death is not nihilism. Because of this, Kornu’s view of modern medicine, vis-a-vis Heidegger and Nietzsche, is inadequate. An anti- God framework for modern medicine is impossible to achieve so long as death exists because death reveals life. And Christianity reveals that Jesus Christ is this Life.

A nihilistic paradigm for medicine would be one in which there is no death, in which case man is immortal, in which case medicine would be meaningless. Consider the temptation to sin in the third chapter of Genesis is motivated by the lie, “You will not surely die.” Heidegger attempts this move, maligning Christians, implying they would find no real meaning in death because of the Church’s Platonic tradition of teaching the existence of an immaterial, transcendental soul of man that is immortal.[vii] In the paradigm of immortality, the absence of death, then Death would be Nothing. Then medicine would be meaningless. So it is memento mori which reveals life and gives meaning to medicine in the care for the dying. Jesus says, “The well [immortal] have no use for a physician, but the sick [dying] do.” (Mark 2:17)

This brings us to the ontology of the human being. Only through a shared ontology of man facing finitude in bodily death does both medicine and the Church collectively realize that man does not have life in himself; we are not immortal. It is only through this proper bodily ontology of man’s being, which the Church calls the image of God, is the finitude of man in death a reality. And this reality of bodily death is what reveals bodily life, which comes from without.

Brian Brock’s response to Dr. Kornu says, “Heidegger is intentionally and explicitly not working within the neo-Platonic exitus-reditus theological eschatology of Maximus.”[viii] With this in mind, he suggests that an alternative “annunciation” or “sign” paradigm “is able to respond to the conflict of the Christian confession with medical nihilism in much more concrete ways.”[ix] Turning away from a neo-Platonic paradigm of dualism, held by Maximus the Confessor, to one which focuses concretely and univocally on our human persons born in the world, bodily, he says:

“To restate the metaphysical question at stake: is the new one in the womb a silent resource from human manipulation aiming to defeat death (as active nihilism has it)? Or is God somehow calling to humanity through this newly created being who comes from God’s hand?”10

Here we can see that we are moving from the metaphysical to the physical, bodily birth of a child from a woman’s womb, a material sign of God’s involvement in creation. Or consider God’s annunciation to the world through the birth, life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ bodily. This “man from heaven” through Mary’s womb in another concrete annunciation to the world that material bodies in the world matter to God.

But of matter, Dr. Jeffery P. Bishop says, “The epistemologically normative body for modern medicine is the dead body”[xi]. But as already stated, death of the body rationally and logically reveals its opposite, the living body. Through death we see its opposite: life. Death in the body reveals life in the body. Why then does it follow that the epistemologically normative body for medicine is the dead body and not the living body?

Contradictorily, Bishop also says, the “resurrected body of Christ is an ontological reality” and “the teleological body towards which all bodies aim.” And that this resurrected body is “not only epistemologically normative, it is also the formal and final cause of our material bodies.”[xii] Are there two contradictory normative bodies in creation? Is the dead body normative? Or is the resurrected living body normative? Which one is objectively true?

If the objective reality in this world is facing death and finitude in the body, and this is witnessed through both our bodily death and Christ’s bodily death, but is also seen through the teleological “resurrected body of Christ as an ontological reality,” which becomes “the formal and final cause of our material bodies,” then how is it that modern medicine’s genuine care for material bodies is nihilistic? The practice of medicine sounds Christian, not nihilistic.

Dr. Daniel Hinshaw writes in Suffering and the Nature of Healing, “From the perspective of many of the Church Fathers of the fourth century, medicine, in its broadest context to encompassing curing illness as well as caring for the sick, was viewed as the perfect profession.”[xiii] Why then is there a perceived divide between medicine and the Church today? I believe the answer lies in the way the Church views the ontology of man. In the remainder of this essay, I wish to explore this question of the ontology of man in relation to Kornu’s negative critique of modern medicine.

Stanley Hauerwas offers, “That medicine and religion are interrelated cannot be avoided. The interesting project is understanding how.”[xiv] Peter J. Leithart’s response to “The Nihilism of Modern Medicine” ends by saying, “Not only in medicine, but in the sciences and the realm of human knowing in general, there needs to be an ‘ontological’ revolution, which must be a theological revolution founded on a resurgent anthropomorphism.”[xv] My hope in this essay, responding to Dr. Kornu’s essay on Heidegger, and echoing Peter Leithart above, is to articulate how mankind’s Dasein - ontological existence of humanity - should be defined as “the body in life and death,” for medicine, Christianity, and humanity in general.

The practice of medicine presupposes an object of such practice. The object of such practice is the patient. The patient is a human being. Who and what and where is the human being? I propose that medicine and Christianity should both agree that the body is the who and the what and the where of the human being: people are their bodies. Christianity states that the body is the image of God. So, coming back to Heidegger, the dead body may be one view of the Dasein of humanity’s existence, but even so, if the body is seen as the imago Dei and the person, then even in death, the body is not nothing. On this point, consideration of the recognition of the patient’s body (dead or alive), as the image of God, is surprisingly absent in Dr. Kornu’s essay. Is the image of God, even in death, nothing? Certainly this perspective of the body as the imago Dei has not been lost from our moral conscience as a collective people, even amidst the supposed nihilism of modern medicine.

Two powerful real life examples illuminate the importance of the dead body. One is the story of Alan Kurdi, a dead little boy. Alan Kurdi was a three year old Syrian refugee boy who drowned in the Mediterranean sea while trying to cross to Europe with his family. His body washed ashore on a beach in Turkey. A photojournalist captured the tragic image of the dead little boy’s body, wearing his little boy pants, his little boy shirt, and his little boy shoes, lying lifeless on the beach, in the shallow break of the seashore. The image of this dead little boy, who was unknown to the world in the photo, captivated the world with shame and horror, and rightly so. The dead little boy is the dead little image of God.[xvi]

The second story is of a Tunisian grave digger. In 2018, the Washington Post featured a story of Chamseddine Marzoug, a former farmer, who upon finding bodies of drowned refugees ashore on the beaches of Tunisia, took the bodies, washed them, and buried them in graves in a cemetery with fresh flowers. In the piece, Marzoug says, “When we bury them, we give them dignity.” Both stories speak to a still revered importance of the dead body.[xvii]

The Christian narrative and the historical event of the incarnation of God, the Word becoming living flesh, who is the human being Jesus Christ, is a revelation to the world that the physical human body is of supreme importance to God both alive and dead. This apocalyptic birth of God through Mary and the Spirit gave birth to a new ontological reality, not only for mankind, but for God Himself: a bodily human being in time and space. In fact, the scandal of Christian theology is that in our monotheistic worship to God the Father, we also worship, in “one adoration,” the body and person of Jesus Christ.[xviii] This worship of the man Jesus Christ is visibly demonstrated to varying degrees and ways in the Church, especially in the Orthodox and Catholic sacrament of the body of Christ in the Eucharist. Furthermore, with respect to the imago Dei, the Scriptures testify that Jesus Christ is “the Image of God.” Lastly, the Second Council of Constantinople defends Orthodox Christianity by stating the Lord Jesus Christ bodily is the Second Person of the Trinity.[xix]

Consider when Jesus died, his dead body was still cared for and adored. He was prepared for burial with myrrh resin, spices and lotion, wrapped in linen, then sealed in a proper burial tomb, “in accordance with Jewish burial customs.” In John’s Gospel, after his burial, Mary Magdalene is weeping at Jesus’ tomb over his absence, as witnessed by the empty tomb. What we see here is that Mary’s understanding of Jesus is strictly in relation to his body. She is visiting the place where Jesus is. Jesus is his body. Mary is monistic (not dualistic) in her understanding of Jesus’s person. She says, “They have taken my Lord away and I don’t know where they have put him.” (John 20:13) Mary does not say, “They have taken my Lord’s body away and I don’t know where they have put it?”

On this note of the body being the person, Dr. Daniel Hinshaw says in his book, “The reverent concern for the physical remains of the dead person shown by traditional Christianity is a strong reminder that the person is still very much connected to his or her body, whether dead or alive.”[xx] But what we have inherited from ancient Orthodox Christianity, drawing from the Hellenistic culture of that time, is a dualistic ontology of man, where the body is not conceived as the being of the person. This dualistic ontology of man has created in the Church an abstract and immaterial Dasein of man’s being. In the process of defining man’s being and person as immaterial and immortal (the soul), the imago Dei (the body) seems to have been forgotten by the Church. It is no wonder that the destruction of the body by cremation is now authorized in certain denominations of the Christian Church.

But in his research, Dr. Bishop states that the practice of anatomic dissection of the body, which the Church ceded to medicine over three hundred years ago, caused the dead body to become “ the fetish of medical students.”[xxi] Peter Leithart, in his response to Dr. Kornu writes, “[physicians] come to knowledge of living bodies by studying corpses and cadavers.”[xxii] Or, as Dr. Bishop puts it, “the dead body became the ideal type, the ideal type against which life would be measured. The dead body began to be mapped onto the bodies of the living.”[xxiii] All of these provocative statements are not accurate in the real world of modern medicine. The anatomy lab is just one small fraction of a pre-clinical students’ education and now, more than ever, the medical students have exposure to living patients already in their first year. Medicine’s classic Hippocratic Oath,“do no harm,” with its emphasis on the living patient’s body, is still operative in medical training and practice, although imperfectly. In medicine, the difference between a dead body and a living body is as stark as the difference between night and day. The difference is in fact horrific, not normative. Medicine “calls” one’s death, down to the minute, because medicine still sees life and death of the person as a real and tragic event in time and space in the body. Medicine still recognizes people as their bodies, not because the dead body is normative, but because it is not. The irony of this is that Church seems to have lost the understanding of people as their bodies, spellbound by the immaterial and abstract notions of metaphysical philosophy.

I also disagree with Peter Leithart’s statement that medicine, within its practice, has “inherent necrophilia.”[xxiv] In my experience as a medical educator and practicing physician, the opposite is true. Medicine does not love corpses. Corpses are a reminder of the power of death over a person. When a virus or bacteria or cancer attacks one’s body, the person himself is being attacked. It would be dualistic and irresponsible for a physician to suggest that the disease is not afflicting one’s person, but is only attacking the body. If modern medicine loved dead bodies and thought the body was not the person, then why would medicine be fighting so hard against death of the body? Death, revealed in the body, is certainly not normative nor loved by doctors. When the body dies, the person dies. Modern medicine still hates death.

When Jesus’ body was crucified, the Son of God died. Death of his body was the death of the Son of God. In this act of death, the righteous dying for the unrighteous, the Son of God died, unless of course his death is overlaid with dualism. It is a horror and is far from normative to consider that God sent his unique Son, Jesus Christ, to die a bodily death on a Roman Cross. The death of the body is also something terrible in Christianity, for it is the death of the Son of God. The Son of God is a real human being.

A physician’s entire scientific training, the grounding of their philosophy of medicine, is geared towards an understanding that a person, ontologically, is his or her body. When the body dies, the person dies, for the body is the person. The Scriptures support this view:

“Then the LORD God formed a man from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.” (Genesis 2:7)

“For dust you are, and to dust you shall return." (Genesis 3:19)

Through Scripture, man is seen as made from the matter of the earth and animated by the gift of God’s spirit to that matter. This ontology of man means that humanity does not have life in himself. The life in man in his or her body is a gift from God, but that life is not the person. The person is the matter, the body, which is animated by God’s spirit. Absent God’s spirit in the body, giving it life, the person is dead. Thus, the concept of “soul,” in a plain reading of Scripture, is man’s body, which is the image of God, animated by the spirit, which God gives or takes away. Finitude is proper to humanity. The tree of Life does not reside within us. We are not God. Modern medicine is not God. This mortal ontology of the “soul” being the body and image of God is one both medicine and the Church can share together.

Through philosophy, can one even begin to conceive of a human person apart from his or her bodily existence? I would suggest it is impossible. Anthropomorphism seems inevitable because human beings naturally depend on the physical body for existence. Just consider in art, literature and music how difficult it is to communicate anything of meaning without using matter. Can a visual artist communicate without employing objects that exist? Can literature describe anything at all without describing things that really exist in the world? (consider the problem Dante had with the metaphysical in his Divine Comedy, which contains a disclaimer in the preface). Even music relies on the existence of symbols or vibrations in the world to express meaning. The point is this: Making the argument that the essence of something is independent of and not identical with its existence in the world (dualism) is problematic. Can one possibly know the essence of something apart from its existence in the world? I do not believe this is possible.

It should be no surprise, then, that modern medicine does not see the world and human beings through the eyes of transcendental idealism, forms of being, or essence, which lay the foundation for dualism. When it comes to the ontology of the human person, medicine naturally focuses on the world of real existence. For this reason, many physicians would not identify the person metaphysically. Dr. Jeffery P. Bishop states in his essay, On Medical Corpses and Resurrected Bodies, “Modern reductive science has consistently claimed that it has no metaphysics.”[xxv] I would rather suggest that as monistic realists, modern medicine sees the existence of a person not through the lens of dualism. The transcendental is transcended in the medical view of the person; the existence of the person is the essence of the person and vice- versa (there is no distinction or separation). This is not reductionist materialism, as some would falsely claim, rather it is anti-dualism.

As Leithart correctly points out, “Modern materialism...could not exist without the prior dualistic act of division.”[xxvi] Who then divided man into two? The Church did, beginning in the Third Century, by merging the Scriptures with the philosophical schools of Neoplatonic thought, which laid the ground for today’s Orthodoxy. Therefore, modern medicine is not to blame for the critique that it teaches or practices modern materialism (that is materialistic reductionism) because that perspective can only exist within a dualistic paradigm. Modern medicine does not teach nor practice medicine within a dualistic paradigm in any sense. Medicine teaches monism of the human being. Medicine sees people as bodily human beings.

A person’s being thus is identical with his or her body, living or dead. This is not material reductionism. Unless death means something other than the end of the person’s life (such as a Platonic escape of an immaterial soul to life outside the body) then medicine is correct to see the person from the perspective of the body. If death of a person is not in reference to their body, which Heidegger suggests is true for the Christian paradigm in an unfavorable sense, then the Church needs to determine who is correct. Is death of the body really death of the person, or not?

To the extent that Heidegger reveals death is the real and the tragic end of the person through the death of the body, I would wish to see modern medicine and the Church find agreement. I don’t see why Christianity must disagree with Heidegger. “The dust returns to the earth as it was, and the spirit returns to God who gave it.” (Eccl 12:7) On this point, Emmanuel Falque in his essay, “Suffering Death” states:

“Thomas Aquinas himself established the ‘limit,’ rather than the unlimited, as our most proper state. This way one would deny Martin Heidegger the false privilege of excluding Christians from finitude, as if they did not first of all belong to the rest of humanity.”[xxvii]

Death is real to Christians too. Christians and medicine alike witness this death of the person through the body.

Both natural philosophy and Christianity witness to the reality that matter matters. Bodies matter; even dead bodies have worth. The Egyptians would have recoiled at the idea of cremation of the body. If our matter is of worth according to natural philosophy, how much more worth does our body, the image of God, have in the context of the Christian teaching of the resurrection of the body? The resurrected body is the ultimate end for humanity. This is why Jesus rebuked the Sadducees for their questions mocking the resurrection of the body, for by them they were mocking matter, denying that bodies have supreme worth to God. Jesus said, “But that the dead are raised, even Moses showed, in the passage about the bush, where he calls the Lord the God of Abraham and the God of Isaac and the God of Jacob. Now he is not God of the dead, but of the living, for all live to him.”(Luke 20:37-38)

Created matter is therefore “good” because God “created it” and “saw all that he had made, and it was very good.” (Gen 1:31) God created this world of matter and real existence to reveal Himself immanently in this matter. And God does reveal Himself through creation: space, time, energy, matter, nature, humanity, life and history, all of which are traces of God in the world. Peter J. Leithart explores this theme in his book, Traces of the Trinity: Signs of God in Creation and Human Experience.[xxviii] Under this theme, the physician scientist, in fact, goes to creation and sees traces of God (whether they acknowledge this is irrelevant) in the wonder of our molecular structure of cells and proteins animated by God. The modern era of scientific discovery has brought into focus the drama of the human molecular person in motion, not inert or dead. God is certainly the author of the living, biochemistry and physics animated, our living bodies. The living body is what most captivates physicians and modern scientists, not the dead body. In my view, modern science’s study of the living body has opened up an amazing cellular and molecular ontology of humanity, the image of God in motion, which the Church has yet to incorporate into its stated Orthodox formulations.

In his publication “The Need for a New Medical Model: A Challenge for Bio-medicine,” George L. Engel “blames the Church for creation of the mind-body dualism in modern medicine,” writes Dr. Daniel Hinshaw.[xxix]

“[Engel] uses as justification for his assertion the permission that was granted by the Western Church to scholars like Vesalis at the time of the Renaissance to perform human anatomic dissection. The implication was that the body was now ceded to physicians as their responsibility, but the mind and sprit were still the property of the Church.”[xxx]

This artificial “split” of the human person between “the body” and “the mind/spirit” grew up within a long tradition of a dualism, which saw man as divided up between material and immaterial. Peter Leinhart’s response to Dr. Kornu clearly spoke to this development. He concluded that, “Dualism erects a wall of separation between matter and spirit. Life is on the side of the spirit.”[xxxi]

Certainly, modern medicine is guilty of neglecting the immaterial aspects of life that animate the body, God’s gift, but that is not because modern medicine denies the spiritual or denies God, as some would falsely claim. It’s just that modern medicine has limits, and natural science (studying God’s creation) is primarily focused on “the human body in motion,” which is the profession of medicine. The practice of modern medicine does not presuppose the absence of existence beyond natural science limits, such as the preclusion of God or the spiritual. As I just recently published in the Annuals of Internal Medicine, holistic medicine correctly affirms the existence of God as being important, even though the spiritual is not easily measured and discernible by methods of natural science inquiry.[xxxii] What is surprising, however, is that the Church seems to have ceded the body, the image of God, to what is presupposed to be the secular world of physician-scientists, as if the body is of less importance to the Church than it is to modern medicine.

God’s fingerprints in our bodies are revealed down to the level of the cell, a topic that I’ve written on previously, called “Theobiology.”[xxxiii] The ancients had no view into this beautiful molecular world of our body. The Christianity shaped by scholasticism, which has formed Orthodoxy, heavily relied on a priori reasoning to determine knowledge about our bodies (philosophical science). Since the Enlightenment, however, Christianity has become inundated with a fascinating world of empirical information about our bodies, which are used to make a posteroriori conclusions about our bodies (natural science).

Today the challenge for the Church is to more clearly articulate the Christian Orthodoxy of man in a more monistic theo-anthropomorphic ontology, the imago Dei. The body is the person and does not have life within him or herself, but is dependent upon God. Such a simple and self-evident ontology of the human being, the body animated by God, the Church, medicine and “human knowing in general” can comprehend. But such a “back to basics” revision in man’s ontology towards monism will require the Church to rethink tradition. The Church can do this, guided by the body of Scripture, scholarship in philosophy and the natural sciences, and the Holy Spirit. A dualistic ontology of the human being, which imputes immortality to man in himself through an “immaterial soul,” has caused great conflict and confusion in the history and theology of the Church. This has been especially evident in the Church’s wrangling over the doctrine of the person of Jesus Christ, who is also a man.[xxxiv] This conflict over the doctrine of man in the Church continues today, separating the Body of Christ.

Thus, the Church’s stated Orthodox doctrine of man has not yet reconciled the worlds of philosophical science and natural science into one cohesive view. Orthodoxy still reflects an unreconciled dualism in the Church’s ontological doctrine of man. The theology I have proposed in this paper is that the Church, medicine, and even the world in general, can essentially agree that people are their bodies: Man’s proper ontology is his body because the body is the image of God.

Looking at the witness of the bodily person of Jesus Christ is helpful here because Jesus Christ is also a man. The gospel says that God became flesh and is the man Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ is the human Son of God, the Image of God. Through Jesus’ human body we can see God himself bodily. In effect the logic is this: we know God through Jesus, and we know Jesus through his body. Jesus said, “When you see me (Jesus) you see the Father (God).” (John 14:9) Jesus Christ is God’s divinity made matter on earth. “The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us.” (John 1:14) Jesus Christ is God bodily. Jesus’ body is The Word of Life.

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we looked upon and have touched with our hands, concerning The Word of Life.”

God is matter in Jesus Christ. Therefore, no dualism is proper to God in Jesus Christ’s person, the Second Person of the Trinity. [xxxv] [xxxvi]

Theology needs to clean up its language to be less dualistic. Dr. Jeffery P. Bishop says, “In theology, meaning and mechanism are inseparable from one another.”[xxxvii] Despite his best intentions in this statement, this is still a dualistic formulation of theology. To merge meaning and mechanism into one, we should rather say, “In theology, meaning and mechanism are one and the same.” Here we now mean there is no difference from what I experience (meaning) and and my body (mechanism). For I am my body. “I have a body, therefore I am.”38

If no dualism is proper to the man Jesus Christ’s person, The Resurrection and Life, how much more true is it for our human persons, who have not life in ourselves. Unlike Jesus Christ, we are not Life, but are dependent upon God for life. In ourselves, we are not immortal, but depend on God for life in our bodily being. Man facing the horror of bodily death, the absence of life in the body, is something both Heidegger, Christians, and the world in general should agree upon. In truth, the serpent should have said: “You will surely die.” So it is for all men, including the Son of God who is also a man. Human beings face death in mortal bodies. God’s temporal gift to the world is life in our bodies for a short while, until we meet death in our bodies. But through the gospel of Jesus Christ, God gives us Life in resurrected bodies. Jesus Christ’s body is The Resurrection and The Life given by God for our bodies: human beings made in God’s Image.


Kristin M. Collier MD FACP is a clinical assistant professor of Internal Medicine at the University of Michigan Medical School where she also serves as the Director of The University of Michigan Medical School Program on Health Spirituality and Religion. Tim Collier is a homeschooling father of four boys. 


[i] Kimbell Kornu, “The Nihilism of Modern Medicine” Theopolis Insitute, May 7, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-nihilism-of-modern-medicine/

[ii] Ibid.

[iii] Ibid.

[iv] Ibid.

[v] Conner Cunningham, “Is There Life before Death” The Role of Death in Life. Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 148.

[vi] Ibid.
[vii] Catechism of the Catholic Church 366, 997, 1005.

[viii] Brian Brock, “Annunciation and the Nihilism of Prenatal Testing” Theopolis Insitute, May 14, 2020.

https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/annunciation-and-the-nihilism-of-prenatal-testing/

[ix] Ibid.

[x] Ibid.

[xi] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 166.

[xii] Ibid, 178

[xiii] Daniel B. Hinshaw, M.D. Suffering and the Nature of Healing (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 24.

[xiv] Stanley Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1986), 7.

[xv] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xvi] See photo: http://100photos.time.com/photos/nilufer-demir-alan-kurdi (visited May 24, 2020).

[xvii] See video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rdNTPQPNzmA (visited May 24, 2020)

[xviii] The Second Council of Constantinople - 553 A.D., particularly Anathema’s III,IV, V and IX. http:// www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/ 0553-0553,_Concilium_Constantinopolitanum_II,_Documenta_Omnia,_EN.pdf

[xix] Anathema X from the Second Council of Constantinople - 553 A.D states: “If anyone does not confess his belief that our Lord Jesus Christ, who was crucified in his human flesh, is truly God and the Lord of glory and one of the members of the Holy Trinity: let him be anathema.”

http://www.documentacatholicaomnia.eu/03d/ 0553-0553,_Concilium_Constantinopolitanum_II,_Documenta_Omnia,_EN.pdf

[xx] Daniel B. Hinshaw, M.D. Suffering and the Nature of Healing (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 189.

[xxi] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 168.

[xxii] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xxiii] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 168.

[xxiv] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xxv] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 172.

[xxvi] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xxvii] Emmanuel Falque, “Suffering Death” The Role of Death in Life. Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 46.

[xxviii] In this book, Peter J. Leithart makes a very powerful case against a Cartesian Dualism of man’s being. In his first endnote for Chapter 1 “Outside In, Inside Out” Leithart univocally says (to my refreshment), “I am not a seeing thing inside the box of my body. It’s my body doing the seeing and experiencing. Once we correct Descartes there, we have to re-envisgage everything else too.” In some sense, this essay of mine is attempting to do just that by proposing a univocal being for man: his body.

[xxix] Daniel B. Hinshaw, M.D. Suffering and the Nature of Healing (Yonkers: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2013), 17.

[xxx] Ibid, 17-18.

[xxxi] Peter J. Leithart, “Healthcare in a Human World” Theopolis Insitute, May 21, 2020. https:// theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/healthcare-in-a-human-world/

[xxxii] Kristin M. Collier, Cornelius James, Sanjay Saint, Joel Howell. “It is Time to More Fully
Address Teaching Religion and Spirituality in Medicine?” Annals of Internal Medicine. May 19, 2020. https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/M20-0446

[xxxiii] Kristin M. Collier. “A Theobiology of a Mothers's Voice.” Church Life Journal, March 3, 2020. https:// churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/a-relational-theology-of-biology/

[xxxiv] Nestorius’ teaching and Nestorianism is founded on a rigid hermeneutic of dualism: the presupposition that mortal man (body: human nature) cannot be God (Spirit/Word: divine nature). While Christian Orthodoxy is not the rigid dualism of Nestorius, it does maintain still today a strong sense of dualism within its formulation of Jesus Christ in two distinct natures. Scripture does not seem to have this problem of dualism in its formulations of Jesus Christ. “The Word became flesh.” (John 1:14) Jesus’s flesh (body) is divine (God). (See John 6) Essentially, all seven of the Ecumenical Church Councils have debated over the doctrine of how to define Jesus Christ, given that he is matter (body). Debate continues today in small circles through the lens of an ancient academic dialectic (dualism) and equivocation that is barely holding on. The world deserves a univocal answer to the question raised by Christianity: Is God flesh or not?

[xxxv] Abstracting away Jesus’ body to conceive of an eternal disembodied Word in transcendent form or essence before the incarnation of the Word is considered an accepted dualistic metaphysic of Christian Orthodoxy before the incarnation, that is moving from Jesus’ historical body and person, to his eternal origin, being God in the beginning, without body. The Apostle John shows this is Orthodoxy proper. But when we do this as the Church, working within the concept of God as Trinity, we often make the mistake of putting an abstract form of Jesus (often no longer named Jesus), who lacks body, in our concept of the Second Person of the Trinity that we worship and adore. This is essentially dualistic Nestorianism. Christian Scripture and worship forces us to reconcile Jesus Christ within the Holy Trinity of God. The fact that the Second Person of the Trinity is a human being is not a theological problem to be solved through NeoPlatonic philosophy and metaphysical dissection. We need not be dualistic about Jesus. Scripture and many aspects of Orthodox liturgy and hymns push against this dialectic through the worship of Jesus. Christians worship the bodily man Christ Jesus. But for some in the Church, under the philosophy of NeoPlatonic dualism, the body and flesh of Jesus in the Trinity is a problem. Certainly the man Jesus being God is the Scandal of Christianity. But we need not equivocate in dualistic paradigms to answer the charge of the man Jesus being God. “The Jews replied, ‘We’re stoning you not for any good work, but for blasphemy! You, a mere man, claim to be God.’” (John 10:33) Yes, this man Jesus of Nazareth is God, contrary to the charges against him. If Jesus the man is God, then the Church no longer needs to theologically equivocate the meaning of “Son” in the Trinity to give it a NeoPlatonic sense, for the Son of God is a real fleshy Son, born from Mary’s womb. Only through Platonic dualism superimposed on Scripture can we gather two senses to the meaning of “Son of God.” From Scripture we witness and worship the beautiful paradox that Jesus alone is the Second Person of the Trinity, the human Son of God (in eternal relation to the Father). The implication is apocalyptic. Jesus’ humanity (flesh) is in the Godhead! (see footnote 19)

[xxxvi] See also this excellent essay exploring the person of Jesus Christ: Henry L. Novello, New Life as out of Death: Sharing in the“Exchange of Natures” in the Person of Christ. Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 96-119.

[xxxvii] Jeffrey P. Bishop, “On Medical Corpses” The Role of Death in Life Ed. John Behr and Conor Cunningham (Eugene: Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2015), 174.

[xxxviii] Obviously, I am playing off Rene Descartes maxim “I think, therefore I am” and reframing the being of mankind away from “a thinking being” and towards “a bodily being.” This has positive implications. It’s not the intellect that makes a person. This has favorable implications for the intellectually challenged or disabled in the Church. It’s the imago Dei, the body, that makes the person. So long as I have a body, “I am.” This reveals the inherent worth of our person in relation to our bodies, even our dead bodies. It also points to our need to preserve the “I am” of our being through proper burials of the body. Lastly, it points beyond the grave to the “I AM,” Jesus, the Resurrection and Life for our body, a sign that the normative body for mankind is the living body through the dead body (and not the other way around). “We always carry around in our body the death of Jesus, so that the Life of Jesus may also be revealed in our body.” (2 Cor 4:10)

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