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Take Back Death!
Christian Witness in the Twenty-First Century

JOHN BEHR

WE ARE in crisis. This crisis has its roots in the twin phenomenon of the indus-
trialisation and urbanisation of recent centuries, and it is growing in its rami?-
cations—economic, ethical and bioethical, anthropological, and, not least,
theological—to a truly epic scale. Whilst undoubtedly bringing great boons to
those fortunate enough to bene?t from them, the extension of this “industri-
alisation” into medical practice and dealing with the dead, though noted by
many, have profound and unsettling implications for human life that have not,
I would suggest, been su?ciently analysed or even recognised.

What I have in mind are the radical changes that we, in Western society,
have undergone in our understanding of the relation between life and death.
We live in a radically di?erent world compared to our forebears, of even a few
generations ago, let alone a few millennia ago. Over the last couple of centu-
ries, modern medicine, through scienti?c inquiry, technical ability, and social
organisation, has had tremendous success in dealing with illness, all but eradi-
cating various diseases which would have decimated earlier populations. We
have access to health care (whatever one might think of health-care reform and
funding), which were simply unimaginable to our predecessors. We can, rightly,
have con?dence that most of the su?erings which previously were thought in-
evitable and untreatable, can be remedied. We now have every expectation that
virtually any illness can be treated, so that we can expect to “live long and
prosper.”

But, this has resulted several signi?cant modi?cations. Jean-Claude
Larchet, for instance, points out that “[t]he development of medicine in a
purely naturalistic perspective [has] served to objectify illness, making of it a
reality considered in itself and for itself.”1 Sicknesses are now something
uniquely physiological, independent of the a?icted person, so that rather than
treating the patient (”patient” meaning the one who is su?ering), physicians
today treat or cure the illness or the a?icted organs, through ever more sophis-
ticated and abstract technical procedures, so depersonalising medical therapy
and isolating the patient from “their” disease.

1 Jean-Claude Larchet, The Theology of Illness (Crestwood NY: SVS Press, 2002) 11-13.

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