Here are a couple of challenging quotes from one of the most “assumption shattering” books that I have read since my time in seminary. From Oliver O’Donovan’s, Begotten or Made?:
“We have to consider this position of human ‘begetting’ in a culture which has been overwhelmed by ‘making’ – that is to say a technological culture… There is no place for simply doing. The fate of a society which sees, wherever it looks, nothing but the products of human will, is that it fails, when it does see some aspect of human activity which is not a matter of construction, to recognize the significance of what it sees and to think about it appropriately. This blindness in the realm of thought is the heart of what it is to be a technological culture.”
In the context of reproductive technologies:
“A decision to do nothing is not to be justified on the same grounds as a decision to act. A decision to do nothing is not merely a disguised decision to act by other means. There can be a presumption in favor of letting alone – a rebuttable presumption, certainly, but one which still acknowledges the difference between action and non-action. In medical ethics this presumption has always played a large part. Primum non cocere: the doctor’s first obligation was not to act, where there was normal life and health which his action might hurt.”
On the limits of our ‘making’:
“Christians should at this juncture confess their faith in the natural order as the good creation of God. To do this is to acknowledge that there are limits to the employment of technology and limits to the appropriateness of our ‘making’. These limits will not be taught us by compassion, but only by the understanding of what God has made, and by a discovery that it is complete, whole and satisfying. We must learn again the original meaning of that great symbolic observance of Old Testament faith, the sabbath, on which we lay aside our making and acting and doing in oder to celebrate the completeness and integrity of God’s making and acting and doing, in the light of which we can dare to undertake another week of work. Technology, too, must have its sabbath rest.”
