Your life - steward or owner?

I’m in the process of reading a book on Bioethics which I’ve been asked to review for a Christian magazine.*  I thought I would just share one striking point he makes, and some of its corollaries.

The Bible describes a God who is always giving generously and sets forth human life as a precious  gift from God, of which we are stewards. The modern world, however, has rejected this concept of ‘stewardship’ in favour of ‘ownership’. Hence, we hear cries of ‘it’s my life, my body, I’ll do as I please with it’. Women, therefore, should be able to do as they choose with what is growing in their body, even to the point of full-term abortion. People should be able to choose when to end their lives. People can cut or harm their bodies in different ways. For Christians, however, the principle is ‘You are not your own, you were bought at a price.’ (1 Corinthians 6:19-20)

This writer suggests that the ‘ownership’ concept is dangerous for a number of reasons.

·         It encourages people to live lives of unrestraint and self-determination

·         It encourages a quest for absolute autonomy, with potential for cruel indifference to others especially the vulnerable

·         It engenders an insistence on ‘my rights’, again to the detriment of others

We are already seeing the out-working of this attitude in many areas of life, not just in decisions about the beginning and end of life. ‘Stewardship’ on the other hand

·         encourages people to be circumspect

·         encourages people to be mindful of the wishes of the Owner

·         encourages people to be careful with what God has entrusted to them

·         thinks about a fulfilment of duty and care to others

·         never returns a gift early or prematurely terminates stewardship

The author acknowledges that, in a post-Fall world, this stewardship can be hard and painful at times. But the giving, blessing God who bestows this gift of human life in the first place will also give grace to sustain us in the those difficulties. Abortion and euthanasia both imply that either that God’s judgment is defective and that we know better than he does when enough is enough, or that God does not exist altogether. So, by taking decisions about the beginning or end of life into our own hands, we not only abrogate a responsibility that does not belong to us but we also make God out to be either inept or uncaring.

One phrase which stood out for me was the author’s description of the ownership mentality as ‘predatory’ -  grabbing what is ‘mine’ at the expense of others – and there is a distinctly Darwinian ‘survival of the fittest’  tone to modern bioethics.  This is unsurprising, though tragic, in a post-Christian culture. But many Christians are in danger of unthinkingly swallowing this ideology too. We need to be very careful that this thinking with its outward veneer of ‘compassion’ and ‘dignity’ does not seep into our mindset and erode our faith and trust in God, our confidence in his  sovereignty and benevolence or allow it inflate our impressions of our own flawed judgment.

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* Bioethical Issues by Dr John Ling, Day One Publications, 2014