Living in the Wounds of Secularity: Christian Musings on Healing Medicine's Secular/Religious Divide
Jeffrey P. Bishop, MD, PhD, Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Theological Studies, Tenet Endowed Chair in Health Care Ethics, Saint Louis University
The typical story about religion and medicine goes something like this:
"There was once a war between the religions, those violent and irrational things. The twins of reason and science, born of the secular, were needed to adjudicate the fights between the irrational religions. Medicine, born of reason and science, and thus grandchild of the secular, has surpassed religious forms of care, and triumphed in beating back superstition and narrow moral views."
Or sometimes the story goes like this: "Just as religion and the secular have always been separate domains within society and in our lives, so are religion and medicine. Religion treats the spiritual; medicine treats the physical."
On both modern ways of thinking we are left with dualism: faith and reason are separated; body and soul are separated; religion and science, and thus religion and medicine are separated. Our modern way of thinking is dualistic; but human living is not so neatly divided
The resulting dualism that continually erodes the need to take seriously the meaning of a life, the non-physical, non-secular part. In separating the two, we don’t protect religion. Instead we set the grounds to explain it away in reductionistic secular terms. Doing so renders religion and the spiritual irrelevant.
The problem is that these stories about religion and medicine we have been told are false stories. And the dualisms that fill this false story compound the sufferings of the sick and dying.
In response, I hope to diagnose the ills of the secular in a way that enables a conceptual healing to take place. In the first part of this talk, I will show that we have never been secular in the way that it is meant today. I will show how even the “secular” is already a spiritual idea, having itself been born out of Christian thinking. In the second part of this talk, I will argue that medicine is born in a deep fundamental mystery, a mystery of being, where dualisms are not possible. In the third part of the talk, I will address the question, how does one heal the dualisms created by the "secular"?
I think the only way that these dualisms can be healed is through a recognition of the deep mystery of our being, which means that only our spiritual traditions can heal these secular dualisms. To try to give a "religious" answer to the question of healing would inadvertently accept some of the conceptual distortions of the secular. I can only think like a Christian. Trying to give the archetypal “religious” answer to these dualisms would be both arrogant and offensive to the rich traditions of Islam and Judaism, or others – these traditions each have their own beautiful answers. So, I will venture a Christian response to this question, and will hope to learn again from my Muslim and Jewish friends.
"There was once a war between the religions, those violent and irrational things. The twins of reason and science, born of the secular, were needed to adjudicate the fights between the irrational religions. Medicine, born of reason and science, and thus grandchild of the secular, has surpassed religious forms of care, and triumphed in beating back superstition and narrow moral views."
Or sometimes the story goes like this: "Just as religion and the secular have always been separate domains within society and in our lives, so are religion and medicine. Religion treats the spiritual; medicine treats the physical."
On both modern ways of thinking we are left with dualism: faith and reason are separated; body and soul are separated; religion and science, and thus religion and medicine are separated. Our modern way of thinking is dualistic; but human living is not so neatly divided
The resulting dualism that continually erodes the need to take seriously the meaning of a life, the non-physical, non-secular part. In separating the two, we don’t protect religion. Instead we set the grounds to explain it away in reductionistic secular terms. Doing so renders religion and the spiritual irrelevant.
The problem is that these stories about religion and medicine we have been told are false stories. And the dualisms that fill this false story compound the sufferings of the sick and dying.
In response, I hope to diagnose the ills of the secular in a way that enables a conceptual healing to take place. In the first part of this talk, I will show that we have never been secular in the way that it is meant today. I will show how even the “secular” is already a spiritual idea, having itself been born out of Christian thinking. In the second part of this talk, I will argue that medicine is born in a deep fundamental mystery, a mystery of being, where dualisms are not possible. In the third part of the talk, I will address the question, how does one heal the dualisms created by the "secular"?
I think the only way that these dualisms can be healed is through a recognition of the deep mystery of our being, which means that only our spiritual traditions can heal these secular dualisms. To try to give a "religious" answer to the question of healing would inadvertently accept some of the conceptual distortions of the secular. I can only think like a Christian. Trying to give the archetypal “religious” answer to these dualisms would be both arrogant and offensive to the rich traditions of Islam and Judaism, or others – these traditions each have their own beautiful answers. So, I will venture a Christian response to this question, and will hope to learn again from my Muslim and Jewish friends.