Jeffrey Bishop

With the increased costs of health care, hospitals have put increased pressure on chaplains to show efficiency and effectiveness. In addition, with the drive of evidence-based medicine, new techniques of spiritual assessment are being created, allowing chaplains to demonstrate their effectiveness. In this paper, I demonstrate the circular nature of the construction of these tools of spiritual assessment and argue that they are created in the image and likeness of generic chaplaincy. I also demonstrate how these tools come to direct spiritual therapy. However, these spiritual assessments and therapies are idols and ersatz liturgies directed at medical rather than spiritual ends. I conclude with a reflection on Jean-Luc Marion’s distinction between idol and icon, and argue that only the true Liturgy of the Church can deliver true grace, true spiritual therapy.

This issue of Christian Bioethics brings together essays that offer theological responses to the final question of The Anticipatory Corpse: “Might it not be that only theology can save medicine?” (Bishop 2011, 313). In this essay, I begin to spell out what I had in mind when I asked that final question. For Christians, the right way to comport oneself to others—the right orientation—grows out of Divine Liturgy. This is theology in the most practical of senses. Liturgy is a set of practices, of rituals, that bring people into right relationship with one another. Liturgy tells us that its participants cannot give an account of their own existence, and it tells us that other human animals are not resources to be controlled, or bodies to be overpowered by technology or by their own wills. Thus, with Evagrius Ponticus, we can say that the theologian is the one who prays. It is primarily those faithful people who, by virtue of their faithfulness, understand how they are to comport themselves to others, because they are oriented to the Divine. It is through these Holy people that theology might save medicine.