Jeffery Bishop’s magisterial The Anticipatory Corpse concludes with a question: “Might it not be that only theology can save medicine?”1 To that question I want to give not merely a general affirmation, but a particular affirmation. Not only can “only theology save medicine” but, in fact, only a biblical theology. Moreover, if the contemporary medical industrial complex is plagued by what Bishop calls “the medical gaze”2 then what a biblical theology must offer is an alternative vision, a new way of seeing the work of healing: an account of healing “through new eyes”.
Bishop explains that for modern medicine, it is the corpse, and not the living person, which defines the space of knowledge and practice, “because it is the stable ground against which the flux of life and disease can be known.”3 Christ’s course of action in John 11 frustrates this epistemic foundation. He refuses to afford to death the role of defining origin or end of healing. The threat of death does not jolt him into rushing to the medical bedside of his friend (v. 4-7) and neither does he allow it to define Lazarus’ pre-raised condition, Lazarus has only “fallen asleep” (v. 11).
And yet, for all this, Christ is not naïve. He knows the pain of death. He admits its reality when discussing the resurrection with Martha, and weeps when he draws near to the grave. The shadow of the sting of death even casts a pall on the victory of Lazarus’ miraculous resuscitation, as the section concludes with the ominousness of the plots of those who will kill the Physician. Christ’s death is in fact sealed in the very act of raising the dead. And, as anyone reading John’s account would most likely know, Lazarus would eventually die again.4 Our Lord is no death-denier. For the denial of death, or medicine used to thwart the power of death in the sheer elongation of biological life, is still begotten of a power ontology that “understands life as mere materiality, dead material either building itself towards its own telos in the post-human or collapsing into the abyss of eternal return.”5 To the medical gaze we are dead already, and life is just a dervish playing in the dust of an ever-permanent ash-heap. Anticipate it prematurely or deny it fervently, we are, in the words of Walker Percy’s Binx Bolling, “dead, dead, dead…”6
Christ refuses to grant to death “[t]he stable place of the dead body” which “allows medicine to perfect its language…”7 In the presence of the Great Physician everything turns on its head. Death is not the permanent, all-defining end. Life is. The words Christ speaks to Martha destabilize the pretended stability of death: “I am the resurrection and the life. Whoever believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and everyone who lives and believes in me shall never die…” (v. 25-26). Against the eternal stability of the resurrected Body, death, along with disease, is revealed to be the thing that is in flux and precarious.
A biblical account of healing, therefore, instead of considering the corpse as clinically preeminent, must consider the resurrected body as the defining epistemic foundation. The contemporary church’s theology of healing, however, while it’s account may differ in surficial places from that of modern medicine, often follows the medical community’s ontology of power. Whether one finds themselves in a charismatic healing service, or in a cessationist church where all healing is rendered natural/medical, there is an implicit embrace of the anticipatory corpse in the modern church that finds in death, and not in the resurrection, the impetus for healing.
As long as we assume a Heideggerian primacy to death, the church will forever be caught between the bitter poles of what Byung-Chul Han has termed “the palliative society”: a society for whom all reminders of death register physically and socially as pain, and demand anaesthetization; where all life is deported to the gulag of the safe and healthy.8 When we conceive of death as the ultimate ground of being upon which life plays as an irregularity, the purpose of care is merely the palliation of pain for the living who are, in the last analysis, already dead –the living dead. Such a life is a “bare life empty of meaning” suggests Han, drawing on the insights of Giorgio Agamben9 “a life that no longer narrates.”10 Martha speaks poignantly to Christ, “If you had been here my brother would not have died.” As does a piece of any honest reader in their first reading of John. We agree with Martha in the essential belief that the interests of healing, even the interests of the Kingdom itself, lay in the sheer extension of biological instance.
But these are not the interests of healing born of a vision of the resurrected Body. Rather, “[t]he Christian narrative gives pain a language.”11 The Great Physician, by his healing (which looks radically different at different times… sometimes even like not-healing), makes pain and death and sickness (irregularities and fluctuations on the deepening surface of eternal life) eloquent before God. The healing of the Great Physician is concerned with the resurrected Body, and with bringing us into conversation with what David Field has called “the deep and real”.12 Just as real as the sarcophagal linens dangling from the elbows of the risen Lazarus, is the way in which the healing work of the Great Physician speaks and brings those to whom his healing word touches into dialogue with the Father.
The medical gaze cares not for the narration of the life of the patient. The anticipatory corpse does not speak. For the Great Physician, on the other hand, healing is precisely concerned with bringing the whole person into dialogue with God. Christian healing is therefore necessarily liturgical: the Physician speaks, and Lazarus responds with the enacted word of his exodus from the grave.
Now, I understand that I offer this in contribution to a conversation already hosted by Theopolis –one that has already finished. But I also believe in a Master who pays a full sum to the workers who arrive in the last hour of the day’s labor. Even in the late hour, there is enough work to do… and if our cultural trends indicate anything they would indicate that such work still exists. For though our COVID-19-related restrictions loosen, our view of the purposes of the body and, concomitantly, our understanding of the healing of the body, has not fundamentally changed. Folks who applaud the “return to normal” are very much still willing to rush-back into the arms of the medical nihilism (incisively outlined by Kornu) when something medically legitimated by conversative evangelicals plagues us.
Late come then, I suggest that it is not merely in a strictly intellectual salvation that a biblical theology can save medicine. A sound biblical theology of healing –if it is going to have any meaningful impact on a culture strung-out between the Janus faces of necrophobia and necrophilia– must be incarnated in the liturgical practices of the church. We must bring our reading of the body in John 11 to bear upon a consideration of the church’s historic rites of healing: reconciliation of penitents, ministry to the sick, communion of the sick, ministry to the dying, and the burial of the dead.13 These are the ways in which the church lives liturgically into the vision of healing cast by Scripture. They are the ways in which the Church participates in the work of the Great Physician by bringing the sickness, sin, pain, and death of the world into conversation with the God Who Speaks. Moreover, I think it is from the font of the church’s liturgy, flooding from the Temple to the outer world, that medicine might find the theological salvage invoked by Bishop.
What would it look like for a medical practitioner’s vision of their ministry if at the top of the lengthy checklist of their treatment plans there was inscribed: “Has the patient gone to the elders to confess their sins and receive absolution? Has the patient been baptized in the triune Name? Has the patient gone to the elders to receive the anointing of oil and the chrism of unction?”
What would it look like if that same checklist, after all of the other spiritual and medical items of the procedural battery (pharmacological, surgical, therapeutic, chemical, etc.) had been fulfilled, there stood one more for the doctor to check: “Has the medical staff alerted the elders to administer last rites and, where able, the Holy Meal?”
Mark Brians is rector of All Saints Anglican Honolulu.
- Jeffrey Bishop, The Anticipatory Corpse: Power, Medicine, and the Care of the Dying, (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2011), 313. ↩︎
- A term he develops in detail in Anticipatory Corpse, 2011, 43-56. ↩︎
- Anticipatory Corpse, 2011, 56. ↩︎
- Imagine being Martha and having to plan two funerals, decades apart, for the same deceased man: “Well, we had white roses the last time he died, so let’s do pink this time.” ↩︎
- Jeffrey Bishop. “From Anticipatory Corpse to Post-Human God” Journal of Medicine and Philosophy, 41:6, 2016, 689-690. See also the discussion of the Nietzsche-Heidegger ontologies of power detailed in Kimbell Kornu’s contribution to the Theopolis Conversation on medicine: Kimbell Kornu, “The Nihilism of Modern Medicine” Theopolis Institute, May 7 2020, https://theopolisinstitute.com/conversations/the-nihilism-of-modern-medicine/ ↩︎
- Walker Percy, The Moviegoer, (New York: Noonday Press, 1960), 288. ↩︎
- Anticipatory Corpse, 2011, 56. ↩︎
- Byung-Chul Han, The Palliative Society: Pain Today, trans. Daniel Steuer, Medford, MA: Polity Press, 2020. ↩︎
- Han, 2020, 22; cf. Giorgio Agamben. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. trans. Daniel Heller-Roazan. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
↩︎ - Han, 2020, 22 ↩︎
- Han, 2020, 20 ↩︎
- David Field, “True Self, False Self,” Lecture, Theopolis Institute Fellows Program, Birmingham AL, January 17, 2022. ↩︎
- Listed as they appear in the 2019 BCP, 222-266. ↩︎