Book Review: Bioethics and the Christian Life by David Vandrunen

Pages: 254
Pub­lisher: Cross­way
Year: 2009
Author: David Vandrunen

This past semes­ter I had the oppor­tu­nity to take a course on a sub­ject I’ve been inter­ested in for a long time–bioethics. It was a very inter­est­ing course for what it offered, but suf­fered from the same prob­lem which plagues most con­tem­po­rary courses on ethics, and that is that an act is only viewed in a cer­tain moral light rel­a­tive to the per­spec­tive of the observer, rather than in and of itself. Bioethics and the Chris­t­ian Life does not fol­low this trend, and pro­vides a good intro­duc­tion to the con­sid­er­a­tions of bioethics.

The pur­pose of this book is to “[explore] how ordi­nary Chris­tians, in the midst of the lives that they are called to live in Christ, may come to a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how to respond to the bioeth­i­cal ques­tions that con­front them, their fam­i­lies, and their fel­low believ­ers in the church” (p. 13). This book is very prac­ti­cal in nature, and doesn’t deal heav­ily with the­o­ret­i­cal issues (i.e. the dif­fer­ences between a human per­son and a human being, if there are any).

Van­drunen has devoted his time to two “top­ics” (which seem to make up the major­ity of bioeth­i­cal debates, regard­less), the begin­ning of life and the end of life. For the begin­ning of life sec­tion, Van­drunen address top­ics such as abor­tion, con­tra­cep­tion, infer­til­ity and fer­til­ity treat­ments, and the choice to not have chil­dren. The sec­tion I was most inter­ested in was on the sta­tus of the human embryo and the ques­tion of when human life begins (Van­drunen defends life begin­ning at fer­til­iza­tion), and Van­drunen does a good job at defend­ing his position.

In the end of life sec­tion, Van­drunen addresses death, sui­cide and euthana­sia. Quick to bring each issue back to a the­o­log­i­cal per­spec­tive, Van­drunen men­tions an inter­est­ing aspect of medieval the­ol­ogy that dealt with dying well, which I found rather inter­est­ing. This served as a con­trasted with our more mod­ern atti­tude that death is suf­fer­ing and should be avoided. It’s pointed out that for the medieval, a slow(er) death meant that one could arrange his affairs and say his good­byes (not a per­spec­tive I’ve heard from many peo­ple). Van­drunen like­wise talks about the dis­tinc­tion between “killing” and “let­ting die,” which is rel­e­vant to both the debate over euthana­sia, and the con­sid­er­a­tions of stop­ping treat­ment in the face of an incur­able dis­ease, or dis­ease that might pos­si­bly be cured only at great risk. In deal­ing in all of these areas, Van­drunen con­sis­tently refers back to his def­i­n­i­tions and (more impor­tantly) back to scrip­ture. Tak­ing related issues into con­sid­er­a­tion, Van­drunen offers a fairly robust exam­i­na­tion of the bioeth­i­cal issues tack­led in his book.

There were a few short­com­ings that both­ered me as a reader, empha­sis on me, as I’m not entirely sure that this will be much of a prob­lem for oth­ers. The first issue is that a sig­nif­i­cant por­tion of the book is ded­i­cated to lay­ing a foun­da­tion (the­o­log­i­cally) and defin­ing the terms which will be used through­out the book (which is not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing).  Van­drunen seems to assume that the reader will be gen­er­ally unfa­mil­iar with these terms, and he might actu­ally be right for mak­ing that assump­tion. The result for some­one who has already gone over the basics is that it feels as if Van­drunen could have spent less time in this prepara­tory stage, and more time some where else.  The other thing that both­ered me is that even though the author deals with a wide array of sub­jects, he usu­ally only offers guid­ance, rather than def­i­nite answers. This is per­haps nec­es­sary for a book of this sort, where the cir­cum­stances and deci­sions being addressed are very really for a lot of peo­ple. Per­son­ally, I tend to like books which come to more def­i­nite con­clu­sions (I sup­pose that’s why it’s called a guide to mak­ing dif­fi­cult decisions).

Over­all, if you’re not famil­iar with bioethics, or have ques­tions regard­ing any of the above top­ics, then you might give this book a look. It’s a good intro­duc­tion, will make you famil­iar with the lan­guage of bioethics and will give you a good start­ing point for look­ing at greater depth into these sub­jects. If you already are famil­iar with bioethics, then it’s likely that this book will only tread famil­iar ground, and you may only profit from the bio­graph­i­cal essay at the end of the book, which is a list of con­sulted resources.

Many thanks to the peo­ple at Cross­way Pub­lish­ers for pro­vid­ing a copy of this book for review pur­poses.

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3. Book Review: The Last Chris­t­ian on Earth by Os Guinness
4. Book Review: The Chris­t­ian Delu­sion ed. John W. Loftus
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