Posted by Isaac | Posted in Religion and Philosophy | Posted on 08-16-2005
Tags: doctors, Hauerwas, religion
I was reading some ethics work by Stanley Hauerwas, and I came across an interesting topic: Do doctor’s have more power than ministers? To start, let me relate the passages that stood out to me.
My way of explaining this is that when someone goes to seminary today, he can say, “I’m not into Christology this year. I’m just into relating. After all, relating is what the ministry is all about, isn’t it? Ministry is about helping people relate to one another, isn’t it? So I want to take some more Clinical Pastoral Education (CPE) courses.” And the seminary says, “Go ahead and do it. Right, get our head straight, and so on.” A kid can go to medical school and say, “I’m not into anatomy this year. I’m into relating. So I’d like to take a few more courses in psychology, because I need to know how to relate better to people.” The medical school then says, “Who in the hell do you think you are, kid? We’re not interested in your interests. You’re going to take anatomy. If you don’t like it, that’s though.”
Now what that shows you is that people believe incompetent physicians can hurt them. Therefore, people expect medical schools to hold their students responsible for the kind of training that’s necessary to be competent physicians. On the other hand, few people believe an incompetent minister can damage their salvation. [Emphasis added]. This helps you see why that what people want today is not salvation, but health. And that helps you see why the medical profession has, as a matter of fact, so much power over the church and her ministry. The medical establishment is the counter-salvation-promising group in our society today.
The Hauerwas Reader, 2001. Pg 611.
He makes some very interesting claims in these short paragraphs. As a person who does not believe in an after-life, this is nothing short of simple sense to me; that is, personally I place no stock in the salvation principles of a minister and, in fact, anything that a minister can do to better their personal and psychology skills to help people better deal with this life, the more I support it.
What about people of faith, however? Coming from a point of pure logic, it makes sense that a person would seek salvation as a means of prolonging one’s life. That is, mortality is a horrible and scary idea and anyone who truly faces the idea is scared witless. Which is one of the reasons that idea of salvation is important–to know and understand that “the end of life” is not the end. However, in this modern age, do people of faith see life, in today, as more important than salvation? Is the idea of salvation as believable, or worth working for?
One argument possible idea circumvents the above questions, but it deals with Christian Protestantism, or the influence therein. That is, when salvation became a personal issue, the priest/pastor/minister diminished in power. To clarify what some might argue, salvation may have always been important to the individual, but one of the changes made in the Protestant reformation is that salvation became something possible through an individual’s relationship with God, not because of a priest or the church.
My conversation obviously focuses on Christianity and leaves a glaring hole where other religions fit in, yet I am curious as to thoughts on this issue.
What do you think; do doctor’s have more (earthly, secular) power than ministers?
A doctor’s work yields more visible results than that of a minister. If someone breaks a leg, and it’s bleeding, there’s bone sticking out, etc., a doctor can heal it so that there is a visible difference. On the other hand, if someone wants to quit smoking and looks to a minister for guidance, the results are less visible to the human eye. It is not to say that there is no difference in the person once they have stopped smoking in excess, but you cannot look at them without an x-ray machine and say, “Hey, his lungs are looking a lot better.” See, now they have to go to a doctor to see the results. Though this does not make either of their jobs less important than the other, it does make the doctor a more powerful figure in society.
I say put a doctor and a minister in an octagon ring and have them duke it out.
But in all seriousness, I’d say it simply depends on who you ask. Those with faith would say a minister wields more power, and so forth.
BUT, everyone is familiar with reality. No one has ever seen some celestial figure come to earth and wreak some sort of good upon the earth. No physical [real] evidence is there to back faith, whereas a doctor has all of his credits in his patients.
Call me old fashioned, but I think we should worship the sun and moon as powerful gods.
hey when you gonna put another post up here???
So we’re at dinner and Dave’s 13 year old niece discovers that I went to an all girls’ high school. She asks, “If you go to one of those, don’t you turn lez?”
Dave reaches over and touches my leg as if to say, “It’s gonna be okay, Annie.”
I responded, “Obviously not. But ‘lez’ isn’t a nice word to use.”
Her mother tells her that is a rude question to ask somebody. She responds, “Why? I’m just wondering – maybe if you’re only around girls then you turn gay – you know, you take what you can get.”
I told her it doesn’t work that way – people don’t “turn gay.” I told her that I believed people were born “gay” or “straight” and they don’t “choose” to be or “turn” gay.
Then her mother said to me, “Well, I believe that a big part of it is learned.”
I’m somewhat flabbergasted by this because she is a doctor and for some reason I assume a doctor would have an educated opinion about something. I wanted to press her further about it, but Dave squeezes tighter on my knee. I can tell by his face that he does not want to have this debate, so I drop it.
On the way home I question him about it. I was somewhat concerned because it seemed as though he really didn’t want me telling his whole family how I feel about homosexuality. I told him, “Dave I know that it is your family, but you know that I could give a shit about a persons sexuality and I’m not about to hide that.”
He let me know that he has absolutely no problem with me being very vocal about it (phew! Got scared there for a second – maybe people really DO change after marriage!), he just thought Christmas dinner with his Dad was maybe not the best time to enter into a homosexuality debate. Which is probably true. He went on to say that his family knows how he feels about all the so-called “controversial issues.”
I guess I just think that if you are going to change the world, you have to start with the little piece of the world that you come into contact with on a daily basis, and even more so with young people. I just really want to impress upon his niece the idea that “people are people.”
But I guess when I was 13, I was an idiot, too, and said a lot of stupid things just because I didn’t know any better.
anyway my whole point is this – i truly do believe that you to change the world, you start with the little piece of the world that you are in. but yet somehow, the people that are closest to you are the easiest ones to gloss over. why is it that we are more uncomfortable debating “controversial issues” with our family than we are with strangers? or is that just me? i think it is easier to “forgive” the people close to you, even though those are the ones you should really be getting on.