Body World Ethics Pt. II

My good friend Brad refers to the Mars Hill Audio Journal as "the best resource of it's kind." I simply refer to it as "wicked awesome," as is my custom. Read their purpose statement and you'll catch my drift. I received a subscription to said journal when I graduated seminary, and the four days it takes me to finish each bimonthly installment mark the only four in which I eagerly anticipate my otherwise boring commute.

Anyway, my faithful reader will recall a post I made over a year ago about Gunther von Hagen's "Body World's" (or as he no doubt likes to call it, Körperwelten) exhibit at the Museum of Science . My wife and I went the see the exhibit, but were equally parts impressed and haunted by the exhibit: Indeed it is wonderful (educational?) to marvel at the miraculous body our Lord has created, but did the exhibit somehow undermine our value as humans? Ought corpses (however beautifully preserved and displayed) be the subject of an exhibit at a science museum, complete with placards signed by body artist von Hagen?

Mars Hill addressed the exhibit with art professor Michael J. Lewis in this month's journal, and I thought they brought up a two other interesting points, which I will gladly boggart:

1) The exhibit is frightfully clean, dry, and almost playful. One hundred eighty degrees away from anything an actual corpse would be. This is redolent of much of what is found in advertising: images of clean, shinny, happy objects for purchase and/or gawking. When purchased, the consumer finds that image <> reality.

2) The exhibit cannot help but be reductionistic in that humans are wonderful machines, to be dissected and understood. The value, honor, dignity and miracle of the human body is lost in a sea of scientific know-how and intellectual curiosity. A cross section of a working jet engine? Quoth the exhibit patron, "Wow, isn't that something..." A cross section of a human being? Quoth the exhibit patron, "Wow, isn't that something..."

This all brought to the fore of my mind (wait! I smell a segue...wait for it...wait for it...) something originally impressed upon me by a professor at GCTS viz. the tremendous value of the human body:

1) Jesus, God incarnate, walked the earth in a human body*, and lives today in bodily form.
2) We're going to keep our bodies, and will be raised imperishable in a body.

Now, we don't get many specifics on what this all looks like, but suffice it to say that the human body has great value: firstly, because God created it, but equally-so because the testimony of Scripture, again and again, powerfully affirms the worth of the human body. Examples abound (hand-waving, I know, but it's late).

So, while my first post was ambivalent about Body Worlds, I think I've officially swung all the way to saying that Body Worlds makes me very queasy, but for no visual reason.

*I struggled with my wording here: I didn't want to launch into a theological treatise on the divinity and humanity of Christ; still, my wording sounds like God just possessed a human body, like he was in a car or something. Not my intent; please withhold your theological hate mail.