Health and Medicine in the Reformed Tradition

Promise, Providence, and Care
KENNETH L. VAUX

It is now widely recognized throughout the medical and allied professions that wholistic health care is an idea whose time has come, an idea that must be implemented through every means possible. One of the means is to draw on the major religious bodies with a view to "assembling, assessing, and applying the wisdom of the faith traditions...to issues of health care faced by individuals, families, and society." That quotation is from the agenda of Project Ten, an international program of the Lutheran General Medical Center in Park Ridge, Illinois. The books resulting from Project Ten show how the beliefs and practices of the various faith traditions shape and are shaped by encounters with issues in health and medicine.

Kenneth Vaux's book on the Protestant Reformed tradition (also called Calvinist or Presbyterian) is particularly relevant to the theme of health and medicine. As Martin Many notes in the foreword, modern medical care and technology grew up in large pan on the territory shaped by this tradition: namely, Switzerland, the Netherlands, France, Scotland, and most of North America. While the inventors and practitioners of modern medicine may not all have been Christian or Protestant or Reformed, or thought of themselves as such, nevertheless, knowingly or not, they carried with them assumptions about life which they would otherwise not have had. It is these assumptions that Kenneth Vaux investigates in this book.

KENNETH L. VAUX is professor of ethics and medicine at the University of Illinois Medical Center, and consultant in ethics and director of Project Ten at Lutheran General Medical Center, Park Ridge, Illinois.



Contents

Foreword			vii
Preface			xi
Introduction: Definitions			1
Part I:	WHAT DO WE BELIEVE? THE NATURE OF GOD		7
1.	The Reformed Tradition: Beliefs and Questions		11
	Creative Sovereignty		11
	Reconciliation		16
	Redemption		18
Conclusion		22
Part II:	HOW SHALL WE ACT? HUMAN LIFE		25
2.	Being Human: Life's Powers and Predicaments		28
	The Power of Health		28
	Well-Being		28
	Dignity		37
	The Predicament of Disease		46
	Suffering		46
	Madness		57
3.	Becoming Human: Life's Transitions and Transactions		68
	Passages		68
	Sexuality		82
4.	Acting Human: Life's Choices and Destiny		101
	Morality		101
	Healing		117
	Caring		123
	Dying		131
Postscript			144
Notes			145

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