Maybe the whole place is haunted
There are other ghosts lingering from the Christian past- ones that may seem benevolent.
This piece describes the lives of two families who had babies with Trisomy 18, a diagnosis that is “incompatible with life”. Contrary to the diagnosis, children with Trisomy 18 do live- not for very long, and not without a lot of medical care. But they do have life, and as the article describes, that life is profoundly valuable to the families who care for them. The mother of one of these children is clear about this:
“I know Lennie’s time is limited,” Ashlee said. “But even two years or five years or six years is better than none at all.”
We also hear from Dr. John Carey, an emeritus professor of Pediatrics at the University of Utah. (Here at this substack we love pediatricians, we think they are the best people. I am married to one so I feel authorized to speak on the matter).
From the article:
Some hospitals refuse to operate on babies with trisomy 18, reasoning that surgery will cause pain and suffering for the babies, who will have a poor quality of life and whose care will consume their parents’ lives.
Dr. Carey said he used to share this view, but changed his mind when he got to know families who sought intensive treatment for their babies. Now, when they are refused such care, Dr. Carey helps them find hospitals willing to provide it.
“There is something about seeing these families cope that inspired me,” he said.
“Before I had perceived this as the parents’ and the child’s misfortune, a kind of tragedy, a burden,” he said. But then he saw that the children brought meaning to their parents’ lives.
“The connections and relationships are the most rewarding and authentic I have had as a physician,” he said.
What we see here is another Christian haunting. That life is “good” can be said to be an inheritance of Judeo-Christian religions. Check out this paragraph from the Letter to Diognetus:
Christians are indistinguishable from other men either by nationality, language or customs. They do not inhabit separate cities of their own, or speak a strange dialect, or follow some outlandish way of life. Their teaching is not based upon reveries inspired by the curiosity of men. Unlike some other people, they champion no purely human doctrine. With regard to dress, food and manner of life in general, they follow the customs of whatever city they happen to be living in, whether it is Greek or foreign.
And yet there is something extraordinary about their lives. They live in their own countries as though they were only passing through. They play their full role as citizens, but labor under all the disabilities of aliens. Any country can be their homeland, but for them their homeland, wherever it may be, is a foreign country. Like others, they marry and have children, but they do not expose them. They share their meals, but not their wives.1
“Share their meals but not their wives” should be a low-key Christian slogan; but that is not the focus here. Do you see that line about how they “have children but do not expose them”? “Exposure” here refers to a practice of leaving disabled and infirm children to die instead of caring for them in the household.2 In the ancient world, disabled children were often killed instead of cared for, but Christians were known as people who saw that the life of all mattered, regardless of how infirm.
“Life is good” is now a slogan on hats and t-shirts, but that it is so common does not mean that we have taken it to heart. The problem with slogans is that they mean whatever they are taken to mean. “Life” and “good” can generate varied meanings depending on the context of the hearer and speaker. Good might mean, alternately- pleasurable, successful, meaningful, fun, happy, endowed with significance, etc.
If “life is good” is taken to be a slogan with meaning that is entirely context-dependent, we will get individual stories of heroism, like the ones of families caring for infants with Trisomy 18 that I noted above. But we also get stories where other individuals make different choices, such as terminating those infants, because the “life” that is judged to be present in these infants cannot be seen as good.
We will also get a lot of confusion around reproductive technologies. If “life is good”, isn’t more life good? Isn’t any life good? Why would we not avail ourselves of any means possible to bring new life into the world, if it is so good? When a Christian principle like “life is good” becomes a slogan, it can lead to individual moral heroism, but it can also become susceptible to technological interpretations that lead it astray. Religious principles need to be secured by something that is trans-cultural and trans-historical, but not a proposition or an emotional expression.
They need to be secured by something that is more like a language.
For Christians to be known as those who “marry and have children, but do not expose them” today, the question of actual exposure would not be relevant. For the Christian religion to stay consistent, it has to have the stability of a language that remains itself over time, even as individual words or idioms change. The entire culture and world that the language exists in may itself change, but Spanish or Italian might be spoken the whole time. It is slow going, but I can make out Old English writing, even if a lot has changed over time, because it remains the same language.
When we give too much credence to either propositions or emotions and inward experiences, we risk losing the idiomatic quality of a religion. We make the inner experience- either the doctrinal proposition or the emotion- the thing that is transcultural. We end up making religion itself the thing that needs to be interpreted by the culture, and not the other way around.
Let’s look at another example. Just like “life is Good”, “God is love” might be taken to be a central Christian statement, core to the faith throughout all time. You don’t have to be a very astute student of art history to know that the claim “God is love” becomes pretty hard to square with historical depictions of God.
How does “God is love” mean the same thing for Grunewald’s Crucifixion (below):
as it does for this image, for the fresco at Chora church in Istanbul?
How could we, in Lindbeck’s words, identify a “common experiential core” (83) between these two images?
In the first, God’s love looks like suffering and death. In the second, love looks like the victory of a great warrior-king. Christians are used to layering meanings so that we can hold both of these images to be true at the same time, but we can only do this if we have a “stable” meaning of both God and love.
If we are judging these images by the emotions they provoke, it would seem that we have two very different religions- the first evoking sorry and sympathy for a crucified Lord, the second helping us feel strong and courageous at a conquering king.
If we are judging them by the propositions that could be made about them, we’d have to work to figure out how both image “said” the same thing about God. God is someone who suffers, and God is victorious over the grave? Using Scripture and theology, we can certainly hold these two claims together, but as any teacher of theology will tell you (and as lay people realize every Easter), it is not all that easy to hold both of these images together in propositional form.
But, if what is stable is the “lenses through which human beings see and respond to their changing worlds, or the media in which they formulate their descriptions” (83), than there is no need for the claim “God is love” to generate the same emotion or propositional truth throughout time. The claim is instead a pair of lenses that Christians use to understand, not an emotional experience they have, or an argument they can make.
…the difficulty with locating the constant element in a religion on the level of either objective description or inner experience is that this tends to result in the identification of the normative form of the religion with either the truth claims or experiences appropriate to a particular world, whether that of Constantinople or the catacombs, of Florida or the Arctic. Then to be a Christian one must think, perhaps, like a medieval scholastic or a contemporary liberationist, or have an existential stance like Jesus. It may be more difficult to grasp the notion that it is the framework and the medium within which Christians known and experience, rather than what they experience or think they know, that retains continuity and unity down through the centuries (84).
Back to the children with Trisomy 18. It is not uncommon to hear the families who care for gravely ill children accounted as “saints”. In the same breath, what we mean is that we, normal people, could never do such a thing.
But all that is being done, in this case, is the modern version of not leaving children out to exposure! The problem is that we have taken the once-Christian truism of “life is good” and interpreted it through our inward experience. When a religion becomes subject to our inward, emotional experiences, how we feel about a practice becomes as relevant as how consistent the practice is with the faith itself. Doing the bare minimum required to insist that “life is good” becomes the domain of heroes and saints. The rest of us are left to drowsily search out meaning by seeking to have our emotions and inner lives affirmed. Such a view makes ordinary faith heroic, and leaves the rest of us living by mere slogans. But God is your Father, he is not your dad- none of this, after all, is about you.
https://www.vatican.va/spirit/documents/spirit_20010522_diogneto_en.html
For more on this see Larry Hurtado, Destroyer of the Gods.