Christian Bioethics: Challenges in a Secularized Europe
Orthodox Church of Greece, Greece
Address correspondence to: Metropolitan Hierotheos Vlachos of Nafpaktos and St Vlasios, 1 Georgiou Athana, 303 00 Nafpaktos, Greece. E-mail: imnab{at}otenet.gr
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Abstract |
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This article summarizes in three specific sections the key challenges faced by Christian and, particularly Orthodox, ethics in a secularized society. The first section, focusing on the task and aim of ethics, defines Orthodox ethics, which is linked with asceticism (man's attempt to keep the commandments of Christ) and aims at overcoming death and encountering the personal God. Put differently, the purpose of Orthodox ethics is the deification of human beings. The second section defines secularization and explores its consequences for the theology and pastoral work of the Church. Europe is dominated by scholasticism and moralism, whereas Orthodox theology, without rejecting it, transcends such a narrow preoccupation with our own world. Orthodoxy does not regard human beings solely from the perspective of their biological existence but assists them in going beyond mechanistic theories and the pursuit of happiness. The third section briefly describes how what can be termed "bio-theology" surpasses anthropocentric ethics with regard to the relationship between creation and grace, birth and rebirth, cloning and incarnation, transplantation and deification, and death and resurrection. The article concludes that Orthodox theology (a) does not reject the achievements of biotechnology or biomedicine; (b) assists humans in overcoming mortality by finding meaning for their existence and fullness of life, and (c) does not simply postpone death, but overcomes the fear of death and leads people to deification by grace.
Keywords: asceticism, deification, orthodoxy, patristics, secularization