Cloning:  The Destiny and Danger of Being Human

Cloning in its various forms (cells, tissues, whole organisms) should be considered in tandem with (1) the mapping of the human genome, (2) the entire range of genetic interventions and “engineering,” (3) all that goes under the rubric of “genetic medicine”, (4) the agricultural sector, in which we alter genetically both plants and animals.  In these activities, we seem to be engaged in processes refashioning or re-making the human person and the species we are most dependent on.  This re-fashioning of the human is the fundamental issue posed in cloning.  Up to now we have sought to refashion the non-human portion of the ecosystem, but we have turned our efforts to ourselves.  The exciting promise of this re-fashioning is that the conditions of life may be rendered new and liberating; the moral dubiousness lies in the unworthy motives, the outright mistakes that may attend our cloning efforts and the possibility of reducing human life to an object of manipulation.

The following questions are representative of those that arise as we engage cloning and genetic engineering:  

What criteria govern our re-fashioning of ourselves?  
Why do we engage in such efforts?  What are our motives?

To allow human flourishing?
To correct or heal what is defective or undesirable, i.e., to improve human life?
To be entrepreneurial— and achieve self-determination and profit?

Does every person have an inalienable right to have defects corrected?
Does society have the right to impede any person’s seeking to correct their defects?
Since our efforts to re-fashion ourselves inevitably involve other species, both plants and animals, can we assume that the entire biosphere exists as a resource for human improvement?  

Four problem areas that arise on this terrain—

These questions point to four major areas for attention, each of which deserves fuller analysis than is possible here.  

(1)  Our relationship to other species.  The questions that arise here are: What is our relationship to other animals?  Where do we fit into the commonwealth of creatures in God’s creation?  Do the creatures of the biosphere exist primarily as a resource for the enhancement of humans?  Do we humans have a responsibility to other species?  Should we be concerned to “improve” other creatures, as well as ourselves?  How would the term “improve” be defined?  What contribution are we called to make to the creation and to its other inhabitants, comparable to the contribution we exact from creatures for our own benefit?  Mary Hendrickson deals with these issues at length in her article.

(2)  The significance of ideas.  Philosophers like Collingwood and Whitehead nearly a century ago reminded us what Immanuel Kant had already pointed out in the early eighteenth century:  that the word “nature” refers to all that is “out there” and also to our concepts and definitions of what is out there.  Nature is unknowable apart from our ideas or concepts of nature. as much as it is an objective reality independent of humans.

Cloning and all of the other elements of the genetic-medical-agricultural complex that I designated at the outset are fully conditioned by human ideas and our construction of those ideas.  A few examples:  We construct the ideas of defect and even illness that are made the subject and object of genetic intervention and in which cloning is brought to bear.  We define, in effect, what normative human being is, and proceed with our definitions as criteria for our engineering.  Is deafness a defect, for example?  Perhaps most hearing persons consider deafness to be a handicap.  A large segment of the deaf community challenges that definition.  Is Down’s syndrome a tragic flaw or an occasion of grace?  It depends on which set of parents we consult.  Is transspecies organ transplantation desirable or a blasphemy?  Should we genetically engineer embryos so as to eliminate short people, to eliminate the common cold or influenza? The answers to all of these questions are dependent on how humans construct their ideas and definitions.

The questions we must deal with from these reflections are:  How do we distinguish between more and less adequate ideas of what is human, what is ethical, and what is given to us through divine revelation?  How do we maintain our obedience to God in Jesus Christ, when we recognize that we ourselves construct our ideas of what Christ means to us and how we should be obedient?  Indeed, the New Testament itself intentionally presents us with a plurality of ideas of Jesus.  How do we claim authority for any ideas of human integrity and Christian ethics in our churches where there is a plurality of ideas on these topics, each of which is considered by someone to be of divine origin?

(3)  How correction and error are inextricably related.  Even though we may believe that our actions are correcting and improving what nature has given us, we are inevitably introducing error into the natural processes, the consequences of which are not known to us.  By hindsight, we can see the error, as well as the corrections, entailed in our interventions in natural processes.  Nuclear energy, building dams, biological manipulating of farm animals, Thalidomide, the use of X-rays.  We can see both correction and error in these efforts.

This dialectic of correction and error may be a practical expression of what we Lutherans mean when we say that all of us are saints and sinners at the same time.  It is a design constraint for us to acknowledge.  It is an element to be factored into our genetic and cloning interventions.

(4)  Interrelating co-creating, entrepreneurialism, and self-improvement.  The genetics and cloning activities that we are reflecting on occur in the context of our culture as a whole.  Our practice of medicine and the healing arts is embedded in the fabric of our United States society and culture.  There is no pure practice of medicine, just as there is no pure practice of religion or of government or of business.  This fact must have a prominent place in our thinking.  Hans Tiefel underscores this cultural embeddedness in his article, under the heading, “The ways of God and American ways.”

The idea of re-fashioning our human lives occurs only in this cultural ambience, and indeed the idea of co-creating becomes rather dangerous in this American context.  Two facets of the American culture are particularly noteworthy in this connection: entrepreneurialism and self-help or self-improvement.

Certainly one could argue that the most pervasive and powerful philosophy in the Untied States today centers in the idea of free market entrepeneurialism.  This idea governs nearly facet of our public life.  All of life is perceived as the Market, and the good things of life emerge when as many entrepreneurs as desire are given unregulated freedom to design their wares, market them, and compete for consumers.  Some scholars would argue that this is what meant by the phrase “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the Declaration of Independence.  The result is that the public cannot be sure whether the benefits of cloning and related practices proceed from responsible reflection on human life and its well-being or from someone’s idea of what is marketable and profitable.  Given the realities of American culture and the exigencies of maintaining our health care system, the benefits of these practices will never exist in a pure state, untouched by the free market philosophy.

The United States is perhaps the greatest self-help culture in the history.  The “seven habits of highly successful persons” is a watchword for us, along with 12-step programs for every imaginable human problem.  But there is a difference between struggling to overcome alcoholism and sculpting one’s personality so as to fulfill a kind of psychic greed that enables one to “make friends and influence people,” as one Dale Carnegie advertised when I was growing up in the 1940s.

What challenge faces us in this domain?  Obviously, science, medicine, healing, beneficial interventions, and the businesses that carry them out are vulnerable, and they need to be protected and defended.  No figures in our society are more vulnerable than business entrepreneurs, scientists, and doctors, because they are fair game for the basest, most selfish desires of those who would be consumers of science and medicine.  At times, we can protect and defend science and medicine effectively only if we at the same time subject the public presentation, exercise, and consumption of medicine and healing to the sharpest, most penetrating criticism.  But this must never be carried on as if it were a rejection or condemnation of science and medicine and their “business.”

The basic questions that are posed by cloning are, as such, perennial for Christian theology.  The major challenge to theology is not that it has no repertoire of ideas pertaining to these questions, but rather that (a) when these questions are asked today, they often grow out of experiences that are new to our era, which our traditional ideas did not envision, and (b) the theological ideas are for the most part formal and therefore very general, so that their specific application to concrete experiences and problems requires enormous intellectual and moral effort.  To speak of the first challenge, previous experience has never dealt with the situation of a mother knowing that the fetus she is carrying is genetically damaged and therefore having to decide whether to abort it.  Nor have persons in prior eras had to decide whether it is good to receive an organ transplant from another species, or whether to manipulate an embryo genetically so as to produce a baby who can contribute biologically to the healing of a sibling who is genetically handicapped.

With respect to the second challenge, the Christian faith is clear in defining human beings as creatures in the “image of God” and who are intended to “glorify and enjoy God forever.”  But it is a rather torturous path from those emphatic assertions to the question of whether cloning a sheep glorifies God.  We know well that a common problem facing Christian ethical thinking is that it may on the one hand echo so strongly the theological principles that it seems out of touch with the daily practice of the lab or hospital, or it can speak so practically that it seems to be based more on common rationality than on distinctive Christian faith.  Technically, this is sometimes referred to as the problem of “middle axioms.”  It is not clear that Christian medical ethics has ever been able to resolve this dilemma.

The following themes of classic Christian Faith seem to me to be particularly important for our Christian reflection on the terrain, not only as I have sketched it, but also as other writers in this report have described it.

Theology of Creation:

Our affirmation of God the Creator tells us that, in the final analysis, the nature we have been given is God’s work of creation.  We affirm the doctrine of “creation out of nothing,” which asserts, finally, that God is the only creator, the source of our natural world.  We also affirm “continuing creation,” which says that God has not left the creation, but continues to be the ongoing sustainer of the world.  The “nature we have been given” includes the nature that we consider to be in need of correction, improvement, and healing, and it also includes the human nature that is capable of assessing defect and correction, as well acting on that assessment to make interventions in nature, including human nature.  This nature also includes our reflective capacity to decide how to respond to the situation in which God has placed us—ranging from encouraging cloning to banning it outright.  We have been given a situation, and we have also been created as persons who can react to that situation and take responsibility for our actions—all of this is our created nature from God.  In this sense, human destiny in our time is to be tied up with our action of re-fashioning, because it is our nature to be such.  We believe that the ultimate source of this nature is God’s work of creation.  This theological understanding of creation does not resolve practical difficulties in the lab or hospital, but it does predispose us to recognize that in our practice of medicine, genetics, cloning, and agricultural engineering, we are never not in the presence of God and never not dealing with what God has created.

I believe that this sensibility is central to Lutheran theology, and it is expressed in our doctrines of the Two Kingdoms, Law and Gospel, the Finite is Capable of the Infinite, the Hidden and Revealed God, and in our sacramental theology of the Real Presence.  These are often interpreted as if they are dualisms.  On the contrary, I believe they abolish dualism.  Each of these theological doctrines, in its own way, insists that there is no segment of the world or of human experience from which God is absent.

Several difficulties arise for us in these doctrines of creation.  For example, we find it difficult to account for evil, genetic defect, illness, because these seems to be contrary to the will of a good and loving God, as is revealed to us in the New Testament.  Further, we may conclude that God has created us as creatures who can decide that the creation requires correction and healing.  For some, this is an empowering conviction that suggests that the sky is the limit for human ingenuity, while for others it is blasphemous, because it gives license for humans to tread on God’s territory and tamper with what the Creator has made.  The affirmation of Creation does not resolve these ambiguities and disputes, that is left for the struggle of faith and imaginative theological construction.  But the affirmation of the faith tradition will not let us rest with the idea that any aspect of nature, including human nature, is somehow absent of God and outside God’s work of creation.  Nature in the lab or hospital, or farmland, no matter what its external appearance, is God’s.  And so are the human agents in those areas.  Psalm 139 can in no way be discarded as a text that is relevant to our theme:  “O Lord, you have searched me and known me. . . . For it was you who formed my inward parts; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.”  It may be difficult to understand how these words apply to the genetic alteration of embryos, but our faith tradition invites us to discern how this is true.

There was a time in human history, more than 10,000 years ago, when nature, as people experienced it, did not include farms and agriculture.  There was a time when it did not include cities or telephones or electronic communications.  Today nature comes under the forms of farms, cities, and computers.  A recent survey indicates that children and teenagers do not call computers to “technology,” but rather see them as part of the their natural world.  We are rapidly coming to understand that nature includes what humans do to nature, how they transform it.  Nature comes to us today under the forms of human co-creating activity, under the forms of what humans can make of nature, the forms of genetic engineering and cloning.  This means that God’s creation comes to us under these forms, as well.

Created in the Image of God:

Many historians and theologians have said that this affirmation is the single most important statement that our tradition makes about humans.  There is no consensus in the tradition as to exactly what this assertion means—it has been interpreted in a multitude of ways.  It is safe to say, however, that in the light of the “image of God” affirmation, we have not fully understood what it means to be human if we omit our relationship to God or fail to acknowledge that in some important way, the nature of God is normative for human nature.  Christians find the nature of God set forth in Jesus Christ.  (Hebrews 1:2-3; Colossians 1:15.)  Christ reveals God, Christ is redeemer, and Christ is also a statement about what humans, most fundamentally, are called to become.

Genetic engineering and cloning may be carried out in blasphemous and perverse ways, but they are rooted in our deep-down desire to fulfill the image of God within us and our fellow human beings.  How that truth can be clarified is the task of Christian reflection, devotion, and action.

Sin:

The first word of Scripture is that we are created by the good God, in the image of that God.  The second word is that we are out of synch with our own created nature; we are alienated from what we are intended to be.  It is important what comes first and what comes second.  It is also difficult to understand, even though its existential actuality is very clear. I believe that this is rendered by one of the meanings of the traditional Lutheran axiom, “saint and sinner at the same time” (simul justus et peccator).  The assertion of Original Sin says this—it says that sin is what we do in sinful acts, but it also says that sinful acts flows from our created nature.  The creatures who have been made in the image of God are also sinners.

For our topic, we may say both that the capability for  genetic engineering and cloning are good, since they flow from the distinctive human nature hat God has created, and that they are never without sin, however, because the engineers and the cloners are never without sin. Our cloners are saints and sinners at the same time, and so also our ethical precepts concerning cloning will be both saintly and sinful at the same time.  There will never be a perfect code of ethical guidelines for cloning.  The question is how this insight can be rendered effective in the actual practice of genetic engineering and cloning.

Christ’s Self-giving Love for the World:

In his diaries, Philip Berrigan (Jesuit priest and activist) went to the heart of what Christians believe about Jesus Christ when he said:  “I always believed that Jesus died for the sake of the world, and we are supposed to do the same.”  That states the Christian understanding of what we are here for.  Consequently, it follows that our practice of genetic engineering, in medicine and in agriculture, and our efforts at cloning must somehow be placed in the service of our giving ourselves for the sake of the creation, including its people and its other species.

What could this possibly mean, in practice?  I have met doctors, some of them Christians and Jews, some of them neither, who have said emphatically, “I will do whatever is in my power to meet the needs of the people who come to me.”  This argument is difficult to disagree with, even though it may be quite sentimental and problematic at times.  In the case of “embryo reduction” in the wombs of women who carry multiple conceptions, I have heard doctors say, “It is evil to kill a fetus, but it will be even more evil for that woman and her family if I do nothing, and all her fetuses die.”  I cite this example intentionally, because it will seem abhorrent to many people.  The doctor who said this, however, meant also that he would make himself vulnerable to the criticism and even the possibility of doing evil, because it was necessary to help a woman out of an even more difficult eventuality.  Could we say that this doctor (who, by the way, is devoutly religious) was expressing Philip Berrigan’s truth?  If we answer “no,” how would we imagine that Berrigan’s Christological faith could be acted out in this realm?

God’s Future:

The future is determinative for the creation—the future God envisions and is bringing about in God’s own mysterious ways.  This conviction is fundamental to Christian faith.  In technical jargon, theologians call this the “eschatological” character of our faith and of God’s creation.  The theological foundation for entrepreneurialism and self-improvement—even when they are thoroughly perverted—lies in this eschatological character of the nature God has created.  This conviction has enormous implications for genetic engineering and cloning.  It suggests that we must be clear that cloning and genetic intervention is undertaken in behalf of the future—the future of the persons involved, the future of the creation.  How can this eschatological perspective be brought to bear upon our genetic and cloning medicine?  That is a major task of Christian discipleship to accomplish.

Genetic engineering, in medicine and agriculture, various forms of cloning and related activities, are not far off possibilities.  They are present realities.  In the next generation, they may be as much a part of fabric of life in the United States as internal combustion engines and computers have become.  The question is how these activities will be implemented in our common medical practice, and in what ways Christians can be disciples in their vocations under the conditions of genetic, cloning culture.  This consultation is a welcome effort by the ELCA to engage these questions.