Journal: Southern Baptist Journal of Theology
Volume: SBJT 04:1 (Spring 2000)
Article: Finding a Prophetic Voice in the Biotech Century
Author: C. Ben Mitchell

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SBJT 4:1 (Spring 2000) p. 4

Finding a Prophetic Voice in the Biotech Century

C. Ben Mitchell

C. Ben Mitchell is assistant professor of bioethics and contemporary culture at Trinity International University and Trinity Evangelical Divinity School. He is also a consultant on biomedical and life issues for The Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission and is a senior fellow with The Center for Bioethics and Human Dignity in Bannockburn, Illinois. Dr. Mitchell is the general editor of the New International Dictionary of Bioethics (Paternoster, forthcoming in 2001).

Introduction

By all accounts, we have entered a new age of biotechnological expansion. Futurists almost universally claim that the 21st century will be what Jeremy Rifkin has called “The Biotech Century.”1 More recently, Vanderbilt University professor of business management, Richard Oliver, has announced that “The Bioterials Age will complete the triumph of economics over politics, which was begun in the Information Age. It will unleash forces stronger than nationalism and more powerful than the combined armies of the world.”2 Nations around the world are concerned about the long-term impact of biotechnology on our food products. For instance, on 29 January 2000, delegates from more than 130 nations adopted the first global treaty regulating trade in genetically modified products.3 Interestingly, the United States’s biotechnology industry opposed many of the regulatory policies included in the Montreal Treaty. The future portends great benefits from biotechnologies like genetic engineering, cloning, cybernetics, nanotechnologies, and a litany of neologisms yet to be invented; but the future may also portend human tragedy, a loss of human dignity, and an increasingly hostile world to concerns that transcend the purely materialist world of contemporary scientific research.

Are Christians even aware of these issues? Certainly some are. Does the church have anything to say about biotechnology? If not, why not? If so, what? Can we afford not to speak to these issues? Can we afford to misspeak on these issues? These are sober questions for Christians who are witnesses to the dawn of the biotech age.

In this article I will attempt both to show the evolution of biotechnology as a worldview (i.e., as a way of seeing the world) and to underscore the need for the church to exercise her prophetic voice. Finally, I will make several suggestions for churchly engagement in biotechnology.

The Biotechnological Explosion

While a little over a decade and a half ago it was unclear w...

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