Is there a Christian response to the growth in medical technology?

This does not mean that we do not, in some way, "go to God" in death but that the Christian construction of death as a simple transfer to another and more glorious room is mistaken both in terms of what we know about the materiality of the self and of the major thrust of the New Testament. Our task of defining Christian hope in the face of death is thus more nuanced and, we hope, more biblical.

What is there in the Christian tradition that trains us to live loosely to our lives and to not mistake longevity with the life promised by the gospel? The gospels tell us of Jesus who knew that there were some things more important than dying. If he had not known that he would have surely skipped out over the hill to Galilee and safety. But as it happens we have the record of his agony in the garden of Gethsemane and his resolute journey to the final conflict.

The three synoptic gospels draw this agony in the starkest terms and the conclusion that Jesus shrank back in horror at the fate that he saw before him is inescapable. Thus there is in his response to the coming events no glib presumption of a glorious outcome nor fatalistic acceptance of it but a real encounter with death.

A resort to the resurrection may not soften the sharpness of this; the dying of Jesus was a real dying. The raised Christ is also the crucified Christ as is witnessed by the texts that have him showing the disciples the holes in his hands and his feet. The raised one does not die again but, according to Luke and John, returns to the Father to become an aspect of God.

We must, therefore, take Jesus' journey towards death as a real journey to personal oblivion. As followers of Jesus in the things that were central to his life we too are called to face death as an erasure of the experience of self. Certainly we join the communion of saints in death but that communion is not a communion of the self-conscious dead but a communion of eternal memory and as such is a part of God.

The rite of baptism says as much. The baptised one is understood to go down into the waters of death with Christ and to be raised to new life with him:

I have been crucified with Christ; and it is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me. And the life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me. (Gal 2:19,20)

According to the writer of Colossians 3:3 our lives are "hidden with Christ in God." There is a strong sense of our lives being taken from us only to be given back "in Christ". The parallel idea in the gospels is the saying about losing and saving ones life: "For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake, and for the sake of the gospel, will save it." (Mark 8:35 and parallels)

For Paul, this is about freedom from the law/flesh/elemental spirits of the universe and death. We live at a remove from our lives, in which death has no dominion, even though we die. But it is just this remoteness that is the promise of having our lives to the full. In other words our lives are not governed by the reality of death but by the grace of God shown to us in Christ. The essence of all of this is taken up in question 1 of the Heidelberg Catechism of 1563: "What is your only comfort in life and in death? Answer: That I, with body and soul, both in life and in death, 'am not my own', but belong to my faithful Saviour Jesus Christ".

Christians are the ones for whom death has lost its sting, not in that death has been removed from the earth but that, living in Christ, death has no dominion over us. Death does not poison our lives with dread and desperation. This is what eternal life is, not the eternity of the self but the presence of God that turns the time of natural process into the eternal time of God. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the gospel of John in which eternal life is a present reality for those who believe. "And this is eternal life, that they may know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ whom you have sent." (John 17:3)

Popular religion is most often a response to the reality of death. When religion has the fear of death as its point of fixation and origin we find ourselves completely under the dominion of death. Death determines our hope. The agony of the patient is often that the only hope they see is in the expertise of the surgeon. This is a hope that promises but more of the same. By contrast, Christian hope is conditioned to look for the promise hidden in the future as a new and unexpected work of God. It is often the case that the patient is not told the truth about their condition because it is thought undesirable to remove all hope. But the hope that we have in Christ is not negated by the imminence of death. In Christ the religion of death is replaced by the religion of grace and love and life.

Christians are in a position to confront the runaway phenomenon of medical science by showing, in the lives that they live, that death has been displaced by the Lord of life. When the terminally ill grasp after any procedure, no matter how heroic, to extend their lives, they demonstrate that death is the lord of life. When Christians in the same situation refuse further treatment of a terminal condition, other than the palliative, this is not a denial of life but an affirmation that their lives are not ruled by death but by something much greater. In the face of this something that is much greater, death, while still being of great consequence to us, does not have the final word.

When our medical profession takes death to be the enemy to be opposed to the last gasp, literally, death increases its power in our lives. This amounts to a demonising of death and is the engine that drives our medical services out of control. While our hospitals are marvels of technology and management but also of care and compassion there is the danger that they will become symbols of human self-deception telling us that all may be cured. The medical profession already labours under the increasing expectation of relief and cure. As we invest more and more in medical care this can only increase and we may have a population so focused on staying alive that they will forget to live and to take the risks that living inevitably entails. Then life would truly be death-bound.