The gulf between Christian and secular bioethics has far-reaching implications for public policy, healthcare organizations, clinicians, and patients and their families. There also are significant differences among various Christian approaches to bioethics. Differences and similarities between Christian and secular bioethics as well as among Christian approaches to bioethics are evident across three domains explored in this issue of Christian Bioethics. The first concerns different approaches to or methods for resolving ethical questions. The second concerns the ways in which understandings of (...) health and disease and human anthropology shape our judgments about what we may do in the pursuit of health or in response to disease. The third concerns how our perceptions of and regard for others affect judgments of moral worth and can influence healthcare decision-making. (shrink)

The term ‘culture wars’ has been used to describe deep, apparently intractable, disagreements between groups for many years. In contemporary discourse, it refers to disputes regarding significant moral matters carried out in the public square and for which there appears to be no way to achieve consensus or compromise. One set of battle lines is drawn between those who hold traditional Christian commitments and those who do not. Christian bioethics is nested in a set of moral and metaphysical understandings that (...) collide with those of the dominant secular culture. The result is a gulf between a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed in the face of a transcendent God and a final judgment versus a moral life and an approach to bioethics framed as if the world were without ultimate meaning and as if death were the end of personal existence. These approaches are separated by a moral and metaphysical gulf that sustains incompatible life worlds and incompatible understandings of bioethics. Attempts to bridge the gulf with secular reason are ineffective because there is no shared conception of reason or standard of evidence. Efforts to use the state to enforce a particular set of metaphysical and moral commitments, whether secular or religious, lead to public disputes with a war-like character. (shrink)