Biotechnology: A pastoral reflection

Theology Today, Apr 2002 by Cole-Turner, Ronald

Whenever the church blesses bread and shares the cup, it encounters the real presence of biotechnology. Bread and wine are the gifts of God that come to us as creation mixed with technology, and we cannot escape technology's intrusion in things sacramental. True, the antecedents of wheat and grapes are found in nature, but well before biblical times each was used in its cultivated form, far different from the wild type, each the result of extensive selective breeding that stretches back over millennia and is the essence of human civilization itself. Added to selective breeding is another step, another human act, that of using yeast to raise the bread or ferment the wine. This is biotechnology pure and simple, even if those who first did it did not understand that they were using a living organism, the yeast, as a tool.

The act of using life as a tool, and by it transforming life itself, plunges us deep into a thicket of unanswered theological questions. Who are we human beings, organisms among organisms, life sustained by life, and what is our rightful place in the scheme of creation? Like all living things, we have DNA; but, uniquely among living things, we can read and modify DNA. What is bios or life, and what do we mean to say, when we add to the description of something, that it is alive? What makes us think we have the right to a techni of bios, a biotechnology? Some of us throw up our hands in horror at the likes of genetically modified food or genetically modified children, at cloning, or at the manipulation of human embryos. Others of us see it as salvation in our hands, as salvation at least over the vulnerabilities of our own organic dependencies, and best of all as salvation through technology alone. Biotechnology looms before us as heaven and hell at once, our great hope for the conquest of nature and our despair that, in controlling nature, we will be controlled.

Bread and wine are tiny first steps in the human journey into biotechnology. In its central act of worship, the church reaches for and blesses these products of biotechnology. When we worship, however, we do not concern ourselves in the least with the eucharist's technology. We see bread and wine as gifts of God, merely that. But do we not then limit the scope of our gratitude? What do we ask for when we pray that the Holy Spirit will transform bread and wine, so that they may become for us the body and blood of Christ? Can the Holy Spirit transform products of technology and give them holy purpose? Is our epiklesis limited to the elements on the sacred table? Or dare we pray the Holy Spirit to infuse, not just these particular products of biotechnology, but the whole enterprise with a reorienting and transforming might?

Left unclaimed and unblessed, biotechnology is frightening. Biological weapons and bioterrorism aside, it is easy to imagine countless offenses against nature and human beings perpetrated by genetic engineering and biotechnology, even by those who mean well or who act with public approval. Therefore, we want to ask if it is possible, by and in prayer, for the church to claim not just bread and wine piecemeal but biotechnology wholesale, to claim it as God's, to subject it to blessing, and thereby to give it a meaning beyond its own blind power. If we cannot escape technology's intrusion into the sacrament, can we hope and pray for a sacramental intrusion upon technology, that in biotechnology's visible form as human work the hidden substance of God's work might take on concrete reality? To do so is to act with theological boldness, exerting a claim that is not ours but God's, the claim of God to be creator and Lord of all, even to be the Lord of biotechnology.

The human articulation of this claim, like liturgy itself, is a task for the pastor more than it is one for the academic theologian. The struggle here is not one of analysis but of declaring a change of relationship, announcing a bit of good news to a technology-wary world by redefining the way things are, and thereby changing how we human beings see ourselves, our projects, and our technology. It begins, I suggest, with a confession and with a naming of the sins that so easily pervert our projects and our technology. It is often said that the problem with biotechnology is not in the technology but in us, in our moral and spiritual failings, and in the risk that in our hands a neutral tool will serve an evil end. Even so, we cannot rest at pointing out the general fact of human weakness, as if this alone resolves the problem and makes weak human beings morally better or morally fit to claim these wholly unprecedented powers over nature. More than this must be said, and so I try to name the sinful tendencies that too often shape and drive the technology.

Next, I consider whether we can reframe, theologically, the very meaning of biotechnology. Biotechnology can be seen, alternatively, either as the defiant outburst of an immature humanity seeking to escape its own adolescence, as so much "playing God," or as our path to an engineered salvation. Neither is right. Therefore, I consider whether genetics and biotechnology can be claimed as a supplement, no more but no less, to human life lived as God intends.