July 12, 2018 Show with Dr. Michael G. Muñoz on “Christian Bioethics, Brain Death & Vital Organ Donation”

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Now here's our host, Chris Arntzen. Good afternoon,

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Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, Lake City, Florida, and the rest of humanity living on the planet Earth who are listening via live streaming at ironsharpensironradio .com.

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This is Chris Arntzen, your host of Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, wishing you all a happy Thursday on this 12th day of July 2018.

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I'm so delighted to have for the very first time ever on Iron Sharpens Iron Radio, Dr. Michael G.

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Munoz. He is family pastor at Genesis Church of Spokane Valley, Washington, having an earned doctorate in bioethics from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois.

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He's also on the adjunct faculty at Spokane Community College and Grand Canyon University, and he's on the faculty at Spokane Valley Tech, and it's my honor and privilege to welcome you to discuss

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Christian bioethics, brain death, and vital organ donation. Dr.

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Michael G. Munoz. Well, thank you very much, Chris. I appreciate you giving me a chance to talk about this, and in fact,

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I forgot to ask you before we went on the air, is it Spokane or Spokane? Spokane.

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Spokane. That's what I thought, and I went against my gut, and I think I switched pronunciations in the midstream of my introduction.

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Spokane, that's what I thought, even though it's not spelled that way. Well, what we typically do on this program,

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Mike, is that we, for first -time guests, have our guests give a summary of their salvation story, that is, of course, if they are

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Christians, and the vast majority of the time my guests are Christians, born -again believers. Sometimes I have people from other religions on for specific reasons, even though I'm not a modern -day ecumenist, but you are a brother in Christ, so if you could give us a summary of your upbringing, what kind of religious atmosphere, if any, you were raised in, and what providential circumstances our sovereign

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Lord brought about in your life that drew you to himself and saved you. Well, thank you.

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I was a military brat. My father was in the Air Force, so I was actually born in 1963 in Columbus, Ohio, and shortly after that, he was shipped off to Vietnam.

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We were raised Catholic. Both my parents, my mom and my dad, were pretty serious Catholics.

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I remember on multiple occasions when we would be moving across the country, sometimes we'd have to drive over the weekend, and on Sunday morning, my dad was always very concerned with finding a small town, stopping, and actually attending church.

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So we'd go to church on Sundays, even when we were traveling. So in one sense, and this may sound odd, but in one sense,

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I had heard the gospel. I had heard at least gospel content. I believed in God.

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I believed in Jesus. I believed that Jesus died on the cross for sin, but I never did make the connection that maybe

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Jesus died on the cross for my sin. I don't know if it was me. I don't know if it was my rebellion.

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I don't know if it was just that that part of the gospel had never been shared, but it wasn't until my junior year in high school, and you'll probably find this amusing, but the assistant athletic trainer, who is now one of my best friends, came up to a group of us, and he asked us this question, if Jesus could make you a better football player, would you be interested?

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Wait a minute. Do I have Joel Steen on the line here? Who is this? He then shared a four spiritual laws talk with us, but you know what?

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He shared the missing component, that it was for me, that Jesus died on the cross for my sin, and I prayed the sinner's prayer.

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In fact, I probably prayed it a hundred times after that, but I really do believe that that was when

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I came to Christ. In fact, I believe that Christ was drawing me for a period of time before that, because I had this desire as a young kid, and as a very young teenager,

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I had this desire that I wanted to know that God was my friend, but for some reason, I knew he wasn't, and I just couldn't put it all together, but anyway,

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I believe that that was the day he converted me, and ever since that time, by his grace, I have been walking with him, volunteered for a long time with Campus Crusade for Christ in their high school ministry, met my wife at a community church in Phoenix, Arizona, and we were both growing in our faith, we were both reading our

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Bibles, but I never was really studying my Bible, and then one day,

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I think it was the second year we were married, a Jehovah Witness came to the door, and I invited him in.

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We sat down at my dining room table, and we talked, and to be quite honest with you, he literally schooled me.

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He literally embarrassed me in terms of how little I knew about my faith, and I will never forget that day, because I remember when he left,

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I literally wept, and I told my wife that I felt like I had greatly dishonored God, and you know, had basically let

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God down, but it was that day that started a desire in me to start to study and learn and grow in my faith, so then

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I began to really study my Bible. I bought some commentaries. I started reading commentaries. I found a friend at church who was

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Reformed. I didn't know it at the time, but he was, and he volunteered to teach me

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New Testament Greek, so we met at a local restaurant for a year on every Monday night, and he taught me how to read

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New Testament Greek. This and that led to the other, and eventually,

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I went to Reformed Theological Seminary, and I graduated. It's actually called an MAR, a Master's of Arts in Religion, and thoroughly

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Reformed in my thinking. Well, here's an important question in regard to that.

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Pato or Crado? I told you when I emailed you,

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I'm Eileen Presbyterian with a small p. Oh, that's right. I now remember. Crado. So, yes.

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Probably the only thing that frustrates me, as I think back on that time, is we changed churches a lot as we grew in our theology, and that probably wasn't the best thing to do, but at the time, we didn't know any better.

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God, through His providence, has led us to Spokane, Washington. We've been here about two years. He opened up a door that I wasn't even looking for, and that was here at Genesis Church in Spokane Valley, and so now

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I'm the Family Ministries pastor, and by His grace, I hope that it is many, many years from now, but I hope to die while attending this church.

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So, it's an evangelical free church. Our plan was to come up here and visit several churches.

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Unfortunately, it's kind of spread out here, so a lot of the churches are far, and we didn't want to travel 30, 45 minutes if we didn't have to, so we actually had a friend recommend

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Genesis Church. Well, lo and behold, there are two different Genesis Churches up here, and we went to the wrong one.

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I fell in love with it. That's interesting that you said that, because when I went to tweet today's interview,

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I think a different Genesis Church of Spokane, Washington came up. It may have.

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It may have. But we're in the valley, and that's the big difference is Spokane Valley.

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There's Spokane City and Spokane Valley. So, we attend here. I'm the Family Ministries pastor.

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I retired from the fire department after 35 years and took advantage of all their tuition reimbursement, and that kind of brings us to today.

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And as far as Genesis Church is concerned, I know that the evangelical free denomination allows individuals, or at least,

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I don't know if this is the same today as it used to be, but they may have more liberty within the different congregations to set one standard when it comes to the ordinance of baptism.

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But is your church one that would allow either infant or believers -only baptism, or is there a settled opinion on that in your congregation?

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No, it's pretty subtle here, and it would be adult baptism, or I guess a better way of saying it, believers -baptism only.

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And as far as the Doctrines of Sovereign Grace, are they universally believed there, as far as the leadership, anyway?

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No, I wouldn't say that they're universally believed, but the majority of the leadership lean that direction.

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How did they come up with Genesis Church as a name? I don't remember the exact verse.

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There's a verse in, I think it's 1 Corinthians, about being a new creation. I don't remember the specific verse that Pastor Brad referred to, but it actually came from that.

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So it doesn't have anything with the first book of the Bible, but being a new creation in Christ. Great.

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Well, our email address, if anybody would like to join us, is chrisarnsen at gmail .com, c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n at gmail .com.

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Please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

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USA. Please only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. And I could see this topic easily lending itself to people having questions that are personal and private, because we are, once again, when

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I say once again, I don't mean that we've dealt with this before. Although we have dealt with Christian bioethics, this specific subject we have not dealt with.

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I meant, as far as me repeating the theme today, Christian bioethics, brain death and vital organ donation.

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That's a very important issue, obviously, because there are millions of families across the world that face this subject when they are facing extremely important life and death decisions with the health care of their loved ones and perhaps even their own lives.

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But this is a topic that I think that needs to be brought forth in a bibliocentric way, in a

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Christ -honoring way, and I'm glad that you reached out to me to suggest this subject.

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Um, how did you become interested specifically in Christian bioethics to begin with?

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Well, um, I don't know how many years ago, probably 15, 20 years ago, I was actually asked to teach a class for the fire department, a class on ethics.

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And so I started studying it and really just fell in love with the topic matter, fell in love with the subject.

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I have been greatly influenced by Dr. John Frame. He was one of my seminary professors.

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I've read pretty much everything he's written, as well as critiques of others on what he's written.

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And so I just, I fell in love with the topic and I wanted to do it from a

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Christocentric perspective. And my son was diagnosed with cancer when he was 12.

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He was diagnosed with non -Hodgkin's Burkitt's lymphoma. And so that kind of shifted a lot of gears in my family, a lot of thinking.

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That was another huge influence on my interest in bioethics. My daughter, as a result, became a critical cardiac care nurse.

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My son became an EMT. This is the same son that had the diagnosis, you mean? The same. Yes, I always, sometimes

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I forget to tell the story. So I'm glad you said that. He's alive and healthy. He lives in Hawaii, so he's suffering for Jesus.

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Loves it over there. Does he know Jeff Durbin and the folks from Apologia Church? They have a church plant out there.

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I'm not sure which island, but it's out there. Yeah, he's on Oahu. I'm not sure which island they're on.

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But if you find out they're on Oahu, I'd love to know that because I would pass that information on to him.

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So I was on the ethics committee for Phoenix Children's Hospital for a little over two years until we moved up here to Spokane.

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And I just found the topic fascinating. But one of the things that I have found, and obviously this is based on my reading, but one of the things that I have found is that Protestants don't have a large voice in bioethics.

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Catholics tend to dominate, and obviously non -Christian thinking. But Protestants, there's a few writers,

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Meliander, he's a Lutheran, I believe. Van Dronen, he's a Presbyterian Reform, he teaches at Westminster West.

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And then John Frame's book that he wrote back in 1988 that he titled Medical Ethics, yet today the various topics that he wrote about would fall under bioethics.

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So that was another thing that kind of sucked me in and got me interested because I would like a larger

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Protestant voice. Bioethics is one of those topics where religious opinion still matters.

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Yeah, well it's interesting that you chose Loyola University, which is a Roman Catholic, a Jesuit college in Chicago, Illinois, to get your doctorate in bioethics.

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Yeah, and you know a lot of that is I was working for the fire department at the time, and I was looking for a program that I could do at least a portion of it from a distance, you know,

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I may have to visit campus a couple of different times, but you know the overwhelming majority I could do from a distance.

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And that was the only place that I could find that had some semblance of any type of a theological track.

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So that's why I chose Loyola. Well, this is a fascinating topic,

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Christian bioethics, brain death, and vital organ donation. I guess let's take those phrases one at a time before we go head on into the paper you wrote.

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And by the way, the paper, how did it get into the hands of the Oxford Journal where they have it published?

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Well, the actual journal that it's published under is Christian Bioethics. Okay. It publishes several different journals, and that's one of them.

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Okay. Well, explain to our listeners who may be completely unfamiliar with this phrase or they have some idea but they're just not certain on what you mean by bioethics and then, of course,

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Christian bioethics. Okay. Well, bioethics, the way I like to explain it is bioethics is medical ethics on steroids.

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And the use of steroids would even come under the umbrella of bioethics, whether or not that's appropriate.

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Right. So medical ethics is basically the provider patient type ethics.

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So whether it's a doctor or a nurse or a caregiver, it would be provider patients. Bioethics expands a little further than that, and it deals with research.

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It deals with proportionality. It deals with beginning and end of life issues.

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And the other reason or the other thing that's really interesting about bioethics, what drew me to it is it's very eclectic.

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So you have pastors and priests and rabbis and lawyers and doctors and philosophers and politicians and, you know, everyday citizens, and they're all called to the table to discuss these things.

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And right now, even in our day and age, they all seem to have a voice. So it's very eclectic in its approach.

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Christian bioethics is obviously simply approaching it from a biblical perspective, a biblical worldview.

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So answering ethical questions, medical ethical questions, beginning end of life questions from a

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Christian perspective. What does scripture have to say on that? And one of the things I like about John Frame is he says that as a

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Christian, there's a sense in which it helps, it makes ethics easier in the sense that we have

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God's revelation, we have direction from God, but it doesn't make solving every ethics problem easy.

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We still have to do our work. We still have to investigate. There's still a lot of facts that need to be understood.

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And right now, medical technology is far outpacing medical ethics, right?

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I think we need some Christians in the thick of things. Basically pulling on the reins,

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I think we need to slow down. Just because we do something doesn't mean we ought to do something. Right. So therefore, where Christian bioethics comes into play, especially, is that you need wise and biblically literate people to be delving into matters and searching the scriptures to make sure that people are not violating those scriptures when they take advantage of the monumental progress in science and medicine.

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Because obviously, there are things going on in science and medicine that aren't detailed in the scripture because they didn't exist then.

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And even though that's true, however, there are still principles in the Bible that may give one the liberty or may prevent one from partaking and making use of and taking advantage of modern medicine in various aspects.

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Absolutely. One topic that we won't talk about today, but that would be cloning. And there's a lot of confusion out there on cloning, but one of the reasons or purposes of cloning would be to harvest stem cells.

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Now, what's going to happen if we don't pull the reins back a little bit and it starts happening?

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And as a Christian, my son is diagnosed with cancer and the doctor comes to me and says, well, we can cure him.

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We can cure him in about 24 hours, but we got to use these embryonic stem cells. What do I do as a Christian? Do I allow him to be treated by a process that, you know, hundreds if not thousands of embryos, human beings, body and soul were killed and now we have this treatment?

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Do I, as a Christian, do I have the liberty to take advantage of that or should I reject it because of where it came from?

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It's things like that where I think the Christian needs to voice their opinion, especially because we're losing so much in our world, in America right now anyway, and this is an area where they still want to hear from us.

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So let's speak up while we've got the opportunity. Right. And even the, you know, it was good that you emphasized embryonic because there are stem cells.

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Right, right. And then, of course, even with the embryonic stem cells, the use of them or the forbidding of use of them, there is the debate on whether or not it is appropriate because people will say, well, even though I agree,

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I mean, a Christian would say and a pro -life person would say, even though I am horrified by the infanticide taking place under the name of a woman's right to choose and even sugarcoated by the word abortion, because it is murder, they will say, well, these babies, unfortunately and tragically have been murdered.

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So they're already deceased. And can we not make use of them? And then the other side would say, but then you are going to begin an industry of harvesting these pre -born children.

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And the abortion industry will be further and more aggressively seducing women into having their babies murdered in order to be used for this industry.

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That's really what the debate is, isn't it? Yes. Between Christians. Right. And believe it or not, it's also involved in the

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IVF, the in vitro fertilization, because when it comes to harvesting stem cells, they typically take them from living embryos that have been frozen after IVF.

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Right. So, you know, that opens up a whole other world of, you know, what are we doing?

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And, you know, should we participate in that procedure? And if we do, is there a way to do it Christianly? And so this is what got me excited about this topic.

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Right. And then one more thing before we leave the phrase Christian bioethics, I'm assuming there would be, not necessarily, but I'm assuming that in some cases it would involve a difference between Roman Catholic bioethics and a

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Bible -believing evangelical Protestant bioethics, in that the Catholic Church does have rules that are not always based on scriptural mandate.

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They have principles even involving marital sex and other things that are not to be found in scripture, and that the

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Protestants find to be Pharisaic additions to God -breathed scripture.

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Do you follow what I'm saying here? Absolutely. So I'll give you some examples. Birth control would be a big example, and then helping people that are having trouble conceive would be another huge example of areas in bioethics where Protestants and Catholics would arrive at different conclusions.

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And even Protestants disagree over contraception. But at least Protestants, most

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Protestants, most who claim to be Protestants, would claim that we have a source where we can go and debate.

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But with a Catholic, you've got this outside stuff that's coming into the argument, so it's a different type of debate.

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Right. Well, now we enter into the phrase brain death.

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And before you go into that, I'm actually going to take my first break because I don't want to cut you off in mid -sentence.

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And if anybody would like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnsen at gmail .com,

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C -H -R -I -S -A -R -N -Z -E -N at gmail .com. Please give us your first name at least, your city and state of residence, and your country of residence if you live outside the

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USA. Don't go away, God willing, we'll be right back with Dr. Michael G.

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Munoz after these messages from our sponsors. Iron Sharpens Iron welcomes

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This is Chris Arnzen, if you just tuned in to Iron Sharpens Iron Radio. Our guest today for the full two hours, with about 90 minutes to go, is

30:09

Dr. Michael G. Munoz, family pastor at Genesis Church of Spokane Valley, Washington, having earned a doctorate in bioethics from Loyola University in Chicago, Illinois.

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He's also on the adjunct faculty at Spokane Community College and Grand Canyon University, and on the faculty at Spokane Valley Tech.

30:34

We are discussing Christian bioethics, brain death, and vital organ donation. If you'd like to join us on the air with a question of your own, our email address is chrisarnzen, at gmail .com,

30:43

c -h -r -i -s -a -r -n -z -e -n, at gmail .com, and please give us your first name, your city and state, and your country of residence, if you live outside the

30:52

USA. Only remain anonymous if your question involves a personal and private matter. We were just about to get from you a definition of brain death, because there may be some misunderstanding about that specific term and its definition.

31:08

People might automatically assume if somebody's in a coma they're brain dead. They may have all kinds of misconceptions about this, so what is technically the accurate definition of brain death?

31:20

Okay, well the first thing to keep in mind is brain death, the vegetative state, which is a horrible word to use, but it comes from Aristotle, and coma, all three refer to different things.

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So brain death, the way it's defined in the medical world, is the death of the entire brain, upper brain and including brain stem.

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So it's basically when the blood from some type of a traumatic injury has been affected to where the brain does not receive blood and the brain will die very rapidly.

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It will begin to die within six minutes. If the injury is significant enough, the brain will stop receiving a supply of blood and it will die.

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And when they autopsy patients who have been brain dead and have been kept alive for a period of time on a ventilator, their brain actually will become liquefied.

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Wow. Yeah. So it is the complete necrosis death of the brain.

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And one of the confusions in brain death and how it is associated or tied with the death of the human brain is there are those like Peter Singer from Princeton University that believe it should just be upper brain death.

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So it's not the death of the entire brain, it's just upper brain death. So a person in a persistent vegetative state, as far as Dr.

32:45

Peter Singer is concerned, would be considered dead. The person is gone, the human being might be there, but he makes this distinction between human being and person.

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So the person would be dead. But when I speak of brain death and when the medical community speaks of brain death, especially when it's tied to organ donation, it's the entire upper, middle, and lower brain.

33:07

All right. Now we move on to the phrase vital organ donation. And if you could,

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I mean, it seems self -explanatory, but we may be surprised by some things you say. Well, vital organ donation, for the most part, in terms of the paper

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I've written, centers around the heart. It's non -paired organs. So like a living person can donate a kidney.

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There are other things that could be donated. A lobe of a lung could be donated. A portion of a liver could be donated.

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Vital organs would be organs that you need to remain alive. So you couldn't donate a heart while you're living.

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And currently in our country, we have a rule, it's called the dead donor rule. And it's not a law, believe it or not, but it is followed rather strictly.

33:55

And that is that you cannot take vital organs from still living patients. So in my thinking, that may or may not present a conundrum if in fact brain dead patients are still alive.

34:10

Yeah. Now we have all three of these phrases that we mentioned colliding and bringing about problems and dilemmas and questions and challenges for not only the world, but for Christians especially, trying to obey

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God and honor him while making some of the most difficult decisions they can ever face in their lives.

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Christian bioethics, brain death, and vital organ donation all coming together. Now, what is it that specifically drew you to write this paper on the subject?

34:48

Well, in the course of my doctrinal work, we had to write some major papers at the end of my studies.

34:55

And I wanted to do one on the beginning of life, and I wanted to do one on the end of life. So this was the topic

35:00

I chose on the end of life. And what really struck or caught my attention anyway was consistency.

35:08

Are we being consistent in our reasoning? Are we being biblically consistent as we approach this topic?

35:13

One of the things I mentioned in my paper is there are some real popular Christian books on ethics like Feinberg and Feinberg's work,

35:21

A Brave New World, where brain death is given about a paragraph and it's assumed to be true.

35:29

It is assumed to equate with the death of the person, and there's no argument. There's no mention that there's even a debate going on.

35:36

And in my thinking, at least how I got started on this, was life doesn't begin with a brain.

35:43

Why should we assume without good argumentation that it ends with the loss of a brain if a person can be kept alive with medical means?

35:53

So that's what got me started in this. And the other thing was, if brain death does not equate the death of the person, and again,

36:02

I think the listener needs to keep in mind that the non -believing world is more and more trying to make a distinction between a human person and a human being.

36:13

So according to a lot of non -Christian thinking, when you're conceived, because it's beyond a shadow of a doubt now, life begins at conception, but it's human life.

36:24

It's not personal life, according to the world. And toward the end of your life, if you have

36:29

Alzheimer's or dementia, the person can die even while the human being stays alive.

36:38

So the non -Christian world likes to make these distinctions. We don't begin with the brain. Why should we automatically consider ourselves dead even though there's all types of ailments and medical conditions out there that need medical assistance to keep a person alive?

36:55

Well, I think that one of the differences that people might immediately bring up between someone that they are told is brain dead by their physician or by others and somebody who has

37:08

Alzheimer's or some other disabling ailment or condition that involves the brain is that an

37:18

Alzheimer's patient, if you spill hot coffee on that person accidentally, they're going to be scalded.

37:25

They're going to react with pain. They may even react with joyful or pleasant stimulation surrounding them.

37:32

They may smile. They may laugh. So in other words, there are differences between the state of being between those two.

37:39

And if you could explain what you mean in regard to these kinds of things. Well, you're right.

37:45

There are differences. But a brain dead person can give birth to a child.

37:51

A brain dead person with very little medication can regulate their own body temperature and other type of homeostatic functions in their body.

38:02

They can mature. They need to be shaved. They can mature sexually. They have all these functions.

38:09

So yes, there are differences. And I think we need to bring the differences into consideration. It's something I address at the very end of the paper.

38:15

But the question boils down from a Christian perspective, from a biblical worldview, is a brain dead person on a ventilator actually dead?

38:27

Or are we keeping that person alive via the ventilator? Or another way of looking at it, the definition of death, or at least why

38:36

I would say definition of death in the scriptures, is the departure of the spirit or the departure of the soul.

38:43

So has the spirit or soul departed from that body? When it's warm, the lungs, yes, via medical help, the lungs are working, the heart is beating, the blood is circulating, they still need to be shaved, and those types of things.

39:00

And where it becomes important, I think, for a Christian is not the only way, but pretty much the safest and most efficient way to receive a heart transplant is from a brain dead patient on a ventilator.

39:13

Because the heart is so affected by a lack of oxygen that to wait for the patient to actually die and to be without oxygen for six minutes or more often damages the heart, and then you can't use it as a transplant.

39:28

But with a brain dead patient, you can take them into the operating room while still on the ventilator, and you can harvest the heart.

39:35

And the heart is pretty much never without oxygen until it is removed from the body.

39:40

And then the temperature is brought really low, it's transported, and you can use it as a transplant organ.

39:47

Now, obviously, the question immediately should be rising to the surface of people's minds right now.

39:55

Is it ever at all possible for a brain dead person to come back to some form of normal consciousness?

40:08

Yeah, that's a great question. And the answer to that question is no. If properly diagnosed right now, in terms of our medical ability, there is no way.

40:19

Now there have been cases, so you have to be careful what you read and where you read it, but there have been cases where people have been inaccurately diagnosed as brain dead, and they were actually in a persistent vegetative state, and they have come back, they have recovered.

40:34

But medically speaking, if it's a correct and a proper diagnosis, there is no coming back from brain death.

40:41

All right, we do have a listener who has a question for you. We have a few actually, but we'll get to them one at a time here.

40:49

We have Jennifer in Gardnerville, Nevada. And Jennifer says,

40:55

Dr. Munoz, in some cases, we know that trauma to the frontal lobe tends to diminish a person's ability to resist violent and or sexual urges.

41:08

Secularists point to this as evidence that our moral faculties are merely evolutionary apparatus that has developed as a of facilitating stable societies.

41:22

This suggests, in their view, that morality doesn't correspond with an objective reality, but is merely the result of natural selection, eliminating those who do not abide by norms and mores that allow a stable social interaction.

41:41

Morality is like teeth and hair, a pragmatic means of survival. How should the

41:46

Christian understand the nature of moral culpability in light of the way in which brain damage, particularly in the frontal lobe, affects a person's control?

41:57

Thank you, Jennifer in Gardnerville, Nevada. And you know, one thing I'm really getting tired of these idiotic questions that have absolutely no intelligence behind them.

42:06

I'm only kidding. They're very, very deep and well thought out.

42:15

And it's going to take a semester to answer that question. You know, one of the things that I challenge all my classes with is there's two things

42:26

I want to demonstrate to you. Number one, that objective moral values exist and you believe in them.

42:32

And number two, we all reason, and I use the word intuitive with my secular classes, but we all intuitively reason in a similar fashion.

42:42

There's a book, it's called A Natural History of Rape, and I love to refer to this book because I think it will help

42:49

Jennifer in her thinking. But the men in this book, it's written by two authors, and one of the things I like about this book is these guys are really consistent up until the middle of the book.

42:58

And basically their argument is rape is a result of an evolutionary need to survive.

43:05

And it was much easier for early man simply to grab a woman, rape her, spread his genetic material, and you know, we continued as a species.

43:16

But now we've developed to a point where we don't need to do that anymore. So now all of a sudden, the second half of the book, they want to convince you that it's wrong.

43:25

So the first half of the book says it's not wrong. It's not morally wrong. It's just an evolutionary mechanism that we, you know, a survival of the fittest type thing.

43:32

But in the second half of the book, now they want to try to do these grammatical gymnastics and tell you, well, now it's wrong.

43:40

In fact, they have no basis on saying anything is right or wrong. First of all, in a naturalistic evolutionary worldview, only matter and energy exist.

43:52

I like to tease with my students, I'm trying to get a new word in the dictionary. It's mattergy. I made it up.

43:57

But if enough people say it, it'll make it in the dictionary. Mattergy simply means matter and energy in motion.

44:04

Well, moral absolutes, numbers, laws of logic, things like that are not matter and energy in motion.

44:12

So to even speak of morality on a naturalistic perspective is really absurd and inconsistent.

44:20

And do you have anything further specifically to say about Jennifer's question? I think one of the things

44:26

I would say that as Christians, we have to recognize that the way God has created us, body and soul, whether you see those as two substances or some type of a unified substance, body and soul interact.

44:41

And damage to the brain can affect morality. We have to recognize that.

44:48

It doesn't excuse people. We're already guilty in Adam, so we're going to stand in God's judgment unless the work of Christ is applied to us.

44:58

So while we take that into consideration and while we have some extreme cases, we don't use the extreme cases to arrive at our everyday type conclusions.

45:11

So I would simply say that God isn't necessary for morality because morality is an abstract concept, but it's real, just like numbers.

45:17

Numbers are abstract, but they're real. We need them to survive. It's easy to say that moral absolutes don't exist in a classroom, but it's impossible to live that way.

45:27

So I would approach it more from a Ventillian perspective and simply say the impossibility of the contrary.

45:33

You need God to make sense of morality, period. Well, thank you very much, Jennifer. Keep listening to Iron Trip and Zion Radio and spreading the word about the program in Nevada and beyond.

45:44

If I could add one thing, I wanted to let you know there are some limitations here, but depending on how many questions we get,

45:51

I know you typically give away a free book or something like that. If you forward me the email addresses and if they're interested,

45:57

I would send them a copy of the paper. Oh, great. That's terrific, and I will do that.

46:04

And we also have Linda in Hilltop Lakes, Texas, who says,

46:11

Dear Chris, I'm very excited about today's program, especially since Dr. Munoz is working in Spokane, Washington.

46:18

I wonder if he knows about Bruce Gore, Bible teacher at Spokane First Presbyterian, the liberal branch,

46:27

PCUSA, but Dr. Gore is definitely not liberal, proclaiming the whole gospel according to his

46:32

YouTube ministry. I'm not familiar with him. The name sounds vaguely familiar, but I've never met him or I don't know much about him.

46:42

Okay, well, we'll try to get you in touch with each other on that. Thank you. Thank you, Linda. It's always a joy to hear from you.

46:51

Now, the thrust of your argument, unless I'm misreading you already, is that you believe that it is improper to automatically assume that if a person is brain dead, that they should be disconnected from life -supporting technology.

47:09

And you can correct me if I'm wrong. That's not quite accurate. Okay, but what

47:14

I was going to say also is that there also seems to be a huge difference, and I believe there is, it's not that it just seems to be, there is a huge difference from assisted suicide when you have somebody like Dr.

47:31

Kevorkian and people just on their own actually killing or murdering someone because they request to be killed by either injecting poison into their system or any other kinds of means.

47:47

There's a difference between that and there's also a difference between starving someone to death than to unhook a respirator or something like that.

47:59

Aren't these different, radically different approaches to how to deal with the situation of people facing terminal illness and other matters involving their life and death questions?

48:12

Absolutely. They are absolutely radically different. My position on a brain dead patient is

48:18

I don't believe the patient is dead. I believe that the patient is being kept alive via medical technology, but they are alive.

48:26

I believe they're still a body, soul, and a person. However, I would not argue against removing them from the respirator because they're in a futile position.

48:36

They're not going to come back from that diagnosis. And most people, and I cite several

48:42

Christian theologians in the paper, John Frain, David Van Drunen, I would count myself in this class, if I were brain dead,

48:50

I don't want to be kept alive on a respirator. I would rather go to heaven, go to glory, meet my savior.

48:57

So I would not recommend leaving them on a respirator. In fact, it's the law now in most hospitals, unless you get legal injunction, will only give you about 24 hours before they will automatically take them off a respirator unless they're an organ donor or unless you're waiting on family members to come and say their goodbyes, which is kind of contradictory if they're already dead.

49:23

But again, that's our secular thinking. But anyway, so my point is they're still alive.

49:30

I would not argue against removing them from the respirator. I don't think that's immoral or sinful, allowing them to die by natural causes.

49:39

And that's where we get to the organ donation. If they're alive, and if we harvest their organs, then it's that that's taking the life of the patient, the harvesting of the organs.

49:52

So the Christian has to ask themselves, can I participate in that? Is there a way to in that in a biblical way?

50:01

Or is there, you know, is there a reason I shouldn't participate?

50:07

So you're saying that when the the organs are harvested, this is happening while the respirators are still connected and that kind of a thing?

50:15

Right. They on a brain dead patient, they'll take them into the operating room, and they will leave them on the respirator until the very last second because that's what keeps the heart alive.

50:27

And there is no pain on the part of the of the brain dead individual when this is no, no.

50:37

But what's interesting, and a lot of this is for the family. But what's interesting is they will administer a certain amount of medication to make sure that there's no pain.

50:47

But you're right. Theoretically, if the entire brain is gone, there is no pain, there's no receptors, nothing like that, that's firing to the brain.

50:54

Now, in the days that God breathed the scriptures through his human authors, and we have all we need to know for salvation.

51:05

We have all we need to know how to conduct ourselves as Christians and how to function as a church and as individuals.

51:12

There was no such technology that could keep people alive if they had the kinds of illnesses or injuries that resulted in brain death, they would simply die and in a bed somewhere, while loved ones gathered around them waiting to bury them.

51:32

So in this day and age, since we have the the blessing of technology, it also comes with the dilemma of wondering what to do.

51:40

How could you rule out such a thing as harvesting organs, if indeed this person has zero possibility of recovering, zero possibility of gaining consciousness of any kind?

51:56

Right. I think, again, I think the Christian has two options. I think they can decide to not participate in the argument that I would use is the sixth commandment, thou shall not murder.

52:08

And the Hebrew word for murder there would basically cover any kind of unjustified killing.

52:15

So is it justifiable to take that person's life by harvesting organs?

52:21

Are we using them? Do they become a means to an end? Or, you know, is that different than simply turning the respirator off?

52:29

So that would be one direction that a Christian could intelligently go. The other direction that I think a

52:35

Christian could intelligently go, and this was the last part of my paper, is would this qualify as a legitimate and a biblical self -sacrifice on the part of the brain dead patient if they filled out the right kind of paperwork, you know, at some point in their life that they wanted to be an organ donor, that they wanted to donate their heart if they were ever diagnosed as, you know, in a brain dead condition, something along those lines.

53:03

So it's really two parts of the argument. The first part is does brain death equate to death of the person?

53:09

And I don't think science nor philosophy has proven that it does. The definition and the, not the definition, but the foundation for it continues to change.

53:19

It's not agreed upon. The debate is still alive and well amongst secularists as well as some religious folks.

53:28

So I don't think science has made its point. I don't think that death is purely a scientific question.

53:34

It's also a moral and religious question. So I don't think science has made its point.

53:39

And the second part then is what do we as Christians do? Would it be murder to take those organs or would it, could it be a self -sacrifice?

53:48

And we are going to our midway break right now before we get the answers from our guests to those questions.

53:55

This is our elongated break because Grace Life Radio 90 .1 FM in Lake City, Florida requires of us a 12 -minute break between our two major segments.

54:05

So please be patient. Take this time not only to write down questions for our guest, Dr. Michael G.

54:12

Munoz on Christian bioethics, but also take this time to write down the information provided by our advertisers so that you can more easily patronize them and make use of their services when possible.

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God willing we'll be back after this break with more of Dr. Michael G. Munoz and Christian bioethics.

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01:12:50

Dr. Michael G. Munoz. We are discussing Christian bioethics and if you'd like to join us, our email address again is chrisarnson at gmail .com.

01:13:02

And before I go to any of the listener questions that are waiting for you to answer, why don't you continue on with the thread of thought that you had before we went to the break with these major questions involving

01:13:15

Christian bioethics, brain death, and vital organ donation. Well, thanks.

01:13:21

I'd like to read a quotation from my paper. It's from Dr. David Van Dronen.

01:13:27

He teaches at Westminster Seminary in Escondido, California, and I included it because I think it's a really good summary.

01:13:35

So he writes in his book, Bioethics in the Christian Life, he says, Scripture generally regards death as the separation of soul and body, but we have no empirical way to determine the exact point when that separation takes place.

01:13:50

Since a living human being, an image bearer of God, is both soul and body united, the continuing functioning of the body is compelling evidence that the soul is still present and that a person is not dead.

01:14:04

And that's the position that I take on brain death. Just because we're using a certain amount of medical technology, we use medical technology all the time to keep people alive, and we don't say that they're dead.

01:14:19

A person that has to go and take dialysis twice a week. Steve Reeves, Christopher Reeves, I'm sorry, the guy that played

01:14:29

Superman back in the 80s, after his horrible accident when he was a quadriplegic, he was kept alive via a respirator.

01:14:35

But he was still conscious, so that made all the difference in the world to most people. A young child who's getting ready for a heart transplant and he's so weak that we put him on this technology called

01:14:47

ECMO, where we basically bypass his heart altogether. We don't consider the child dead.

01:14:53

So why do we consider a brain dead patient dead? Again, I'm not arguing that we should keep these people alive on respirators.

01:15:01

I think that's a different question. I think most people that were faced with that situation would choose to be taken off the respirator and let natural causes have their effect.

01:15:12

But I think we do need to recognize that these folks are alive, and I think that presents the

01:15:19

Christian with somewhat of a dilemma. Do we participate in vital organ donation?

01:15:25

Would we volunteer to donate our hearts? Would we accept a heart from a brain dead patient when harvesting the organs would actually be what's bringing about their death?

01:15:37

So would we choose not to participate because of the sixth commandment, thou shall not murder, which would include any kind of unjust killing, not all forms of killing, but any kind of unjust killing?

01:15:48

Or is there, because I think there's another duty in scripture, and that is to live self -sacrificially.

01:15:54

That is to sacrifice. No greater love hath a man than to lay down his life for another. Could we make a biblical argument that the person who is brain dead could be offering a legitimate self -sacrifice, and thereby the doctor would be doing no evil, would be doing no sin, would be doing nothing wrong in terms of harvesting the organs.

01:16:20

The person receiving the organs would be doing no evil, nothing wrong in accepting the organs.

01:16:26

And that's what I try to do in the second half of my paper. I try to offer two arguments buttressing the idea of self -sacrifice, which might allow a

01:16:40

Christian to participate. I do qualify everything with, there's a lot of consternation that goes into this, and one of the reasons that I reached out to you is because I think

01:16:51

Protestants need to begin a conversation here, and need to re -engage in this topic, and not just, and I want to be careful here because I don't want to insult anyone, but not blindly accept this concept simply because the secular medical world accepts it.

01:17:07

I think we need to question it, and we need to question it in terms of the scripture, and how scripture defines death, and how scripture recognizes death, and move forward from that point.

01:17:18

Now it seems to me, and of course again, correct me if I'm wrong, it seems that the biggest hurdle that you have is if the potential donor, the one who is brain dead, has not given his or her consent before they reach the point of brain death.

01:17:37

Yes and no, because even nowadays, if nothing were to change, they have to give their consent.

01:17:44

My biggest hurdle is most people, if I'm correct, if my reasoning is correct, and again that's why

01:17:51

I want to start a conversation, but if I'm correct in my thinking, then the person's not dead, and it's not just donating organs after death, it's actually donating organs, therefore that's the cause of my death.

01:18:04

Right, right, well I was specifying brain death, which is a term that even you have used.

01:18:10

I didn't, I was trying not to indicate that the person was dead, that they were merely brain dead. Okay, yeah, but what

01:18:17

I'm, I guess what I'm saying is, I think I understood what you meant, is most people think that brain death means the person's dead.

01:18:24

Right. If it doesn't, then we need to start educating people, especially Christians, otherwise.

01:18:30

But if a person is brain dead, if it were not for modern technology, they will certainly die fairly soon, will they not?

01:18:41

I mean, is there a possibility? Absolutely. Yeah, okay. We do have a listener from Panoca, Alberta, Canada, Sicaly, which is from what

01:18:51

I understand from him, a Dutch name. He says, so from what

01:18:57

I understand, Michael Munoz is saying it's okay to pull the plug on the machine and let them die, but if it is known for certain that the person will die, but is kept alive until the surgery, and then pulling the plug after the heart is out, is wrong.

01:19:16

Seems contradictory to me, that if what he's saying, it seems contradictory to me, if that is what he's saying.

01:19:24

Could he please clear that up for me? Thank you. I apologize if I misunderstood. Just a simple man

01:19:30

I is. No, that's a great question, and I don't want there to be any confusion there.

01:19:39

To remove somebody from a respirator is to let natural causes take their effect. Most Christians would agree with that.

01:19:47

I personally haven't come across any well -written Christian book on ethics or, you know, well -reasoned journal article written by a

01:19:57

Christian that finds fault in that. Now, of course, I haven't read everything that's been written, so I'm sure there's somebody out there that does find fault in it, but I would say the majority view is nobody sees that as doing anything wrong.

01:20:09

To remove treatment from somebody who doesn't want treatment any longer is not to sin, but it's to respect their wishes, and then they would die of natural causes.

01:20:18

In a brain -dead person where we're taking their organs, they're not passing from natural causes.

01:20:25

They're passing from the fact that we're removing those organs, so there's complicity on the part of the surgeon, on the part of the surgery staff.

01:20:37

They are ending the life of the patient, not naturally, but simply by removing their heart and other organs.

01:20:44

I think that may sound like a minor difference, but I think it's huge. We do have, let's see here, we have

01:20:53

Susan Margaret in Dauphin County, Pennsylvania, who says, is harvesting organs from a brain -dead individual possible after the respirator has been shut off?

01:21:07

It can be. There's a technique. It's called donation after cardiac death.

01:21:14

I mean, even organs are donated, like, even when people are killed in car accidents. Right, right.

01:21:20

In fact, I work, as I said earlier, I worked for the fire department for 35 years, and it's getting to now when we respond on bad accidents.

01:21:28

There were patients in the past that we would not have worked in the field, but with new medical technology and stuff, we're being encouraged to continue to do

01:21:36

CPR and work these patients all the way into the emergency room because of organ donations and things like that.

01:21:43

So, yes, some organs do very well after the heart has stopped and after the body has done without oxygen.

01:21:49

Kidneys and things like that, you can donate. Eyes, you know, things like that you can donate, but the heart doesn't do very well there.

01:21:59

So, even in donation after cardiac death, basically what they'll do is they'll take the person off the respirator, and as long as they quit breathing within 60 seconds or 60 minutes, they will, depending on the standard, depending what state you're on, they will wait two to five minutes, and then they will pronounce the person dead, and they will quickly start harvesting organs.

01:22:22

And what you're saying is when they pronounce the person dead, that is not true? On a brain -dead patient, they'll pronounce the person dead while they're still on the respirator.

01:22:33

On donation after cardiac death, a lot of people, both secular and religious, have some concerns because just because the heart stops within two minutes, the definition of death that's accepted is in an irreversible stoppage of the heart, and two minutes to five minutes later is not really irreversible.

01:22:53

So, they will use philosophical tactics, and they'll define irreversible along the lines, well, the patient didn't want you to do

01:23:02

CPR, so in that sense, it was irreversible. But biologically and physically, it's not irreversible.

01:23:07

So, there are folks that have concerns with that technique as well. But again, that's the only way to get a heart.

01:23:13

The only way to get a healthy heart is a patient who remains on the respirator up until those organs are removed, or if you're going to pronounce them, you know, two to three minutes after they quit breathing, and basically, you're prepped for surgery.

01:23:28

This is done in the OR. You know, they've got big central lines already inserted in the patient, and it's just a matter of cracking the chest and harvesting the heart.

01:23:40

So, there's a difference between those two, but again, the heart will get damaged very rapidly without oxygen.

01:23:48

So, we have Christopher from Suffolk County, Long Island, New York, who says, could you not apply the same logic as those who advocate the just war theory, where people are being killed, but it is to preserve the life of a greater number who are deemed to be innocent, and I understand

01:24:09

I'm not speaking of theological innocence. I am speaking of those who are comparatively, in an earthly sense, innocent.

01:24:16

And we even have an example of the death penalty, where society is being protected through the execution of a murderer, and we also have women who are pregnant and are having life -threatening situations with the baby in the womb that will certainly die, not that we would ever advocate the murder of the baby, but it may be prematurely delivered, knowing it will certainly die, in order to save the life of the mother, where the intention is not to kill the baby, but to save the life of the mother.

01:24:49

These are all matters that seem to lend support to organ donation of a brain -dead individual.

01:25:00

Yeah, and I would agree with him. In fact, that's my second argument at the end of the paper. I titled it

01:25:05

The Principle of the Conservation of Life, and I used the very example of an ectopic pregnancy, or a cancerous pregnancy, where the child is going to die no matter what, but we do have a chance of saving the life of the mother.

01:25:18

What are we going to do? Would we treat her, or would we let both people die? And I argue that we would treat her on the basis of conservation of life.

01:25:27

John Frame and others would also say on the basis of self -defense, they would use that principle as well.

01:25:32

So if it's a legitimate self -sacrifice, then I would argue that we could apply that same principle to the brain -dead patient.

01:25:40

I'm just saying that we need to educate folks prior to getting to that point, so they know what they're doing.

01:25:47

Christians know what they're doing, because I think some Christians would opt out of this if they were convinced the person wasn't dead, and they should be given that right, if my biblical argument doesn't stand up to scrutiny.

01:26:03

We have Joey in Clifton, New Jersey, who says, Dear Michael, thank you for raising awareness on these very important issues.

01:26:11

I think your arguments about the ethical issue of organ harvesting from brain -dead individuals are quite reasonable, but they do hinge upon your premise that a brain -dead individual is still alive with a body and soul.

01:26:26

I'm wondering what evidence you use to draw that conclusion, assuming we are talking about full brain death.

01:26:35

Right, and again, I would go back to how full brain death is defined.

01:26:41

What is the meaning of death? Is it simply biological? Because if it's simply biological, then the patient on the respirator is not dead.

01:26:49

They're not biologically dead. So now there has to be some type of a philosophical element to death.

01:26:55

So how do we philosophically or theologically define death? Right, because we don't know. The Bible doesn't give us precise detail on the departure of the soul from the body, and that's really the issue, isn't it?

01:27:09

Exactly. So if we don't know when the soul leaves the body, and yet the body is still functioning with medical help as it does in all kinds of other instances that we would never say the person's dead, it really does center on consciousness.

01:27:24

We want to say that the person is dead because the consciousness is gone. Well, we're not conscious when we sleep.

01:27:31

We're not conscious when we're put into a medically induced coma to treat other things, and yet we wouldn't consider these people dead.

01:27:40

Some would argue that Alzheimer's patients are not really self -aware or conscious. So I think it's a slippery slope.

01:27:47

If we say that brain -dead people are dead simply because they're not conscious even though we're keeping their body biologically alive, then now we have to deal with all these other things and all these other conditions that would lead to a certain lack of consciousness.

01:28:02

And again, there goes the slippery slope. So because there's no empirical...

01:28:07

The only empirical evidence that the soul has left the body based on scripture is total cessation of heart and lung along with total unconsciousness that is never regained.

01:28:20

So what I'm arguing for is we should look for both, and if medical technology is keeping one of those functioning, then we should consider that person alive.

01:28:33

We're going to our final break. It's a much briefer break than the earlier ones, and before we go to the break,

01:28:38

I'm going to read a question to you so you can ponder it during the break. We have

01:28:44

John in Bangor, Maine who wants your reaction to the Terry Schiavo case where the feeding tube was removed from this woman, not even with the consent of her own biological family and parents, but on the insistence of her estranged husband.

01:29:03

And also, there seems to be evidence that Terry Schiavo was responding to stimulus.

01:29:10

She seemed to be smiling and making noises as if she was reacting with joy to certain things.

01:29:16

Other people wrote her off as dead. We would love to hear your response to that.

01:29:22

And if you could, respond to that when we come back from the break. This is our final break. If you want to join other listeners with a question of your own, do so now or forever hold your peace.

01:29:31

It's chrisarnson at gmail .com. Don't go away, we'll be right back with Dr.

01:29:37

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that's solid -ground -books .com and see what priceless literary gems from the past or present you can unearth from solid ground solid ground christian books is honored to be a weekly sponsor of iron sharpens iron radio welcome back this is the final 25 minutes of our program today with michael g munoz on christian bioethics uh brain death and vital organ donation if you'd like to join us on the air do so now quickly because we're rapidly running out of time our email address is chrisarnson at gmail .com

01:35:56

chrisarnson at gmail .com as you know uh michael we had a listener before the break ask about the terry shiavo case a probably a globally known case where the i can't even remember if he was still married to terry or not i think he might have even left terry for another woman or something yeah yeah i believe i can't remember if they were divorced or just separated but he was with another woman at the time right and he and he was claiming that she had privately in conversation said if i ever wind up in a situation where i'm uh brain dead or however she allegedly phrased it please pull the plug i don't want to remain and nobody else was aware of this apparently other than her estranged husband and this was a different situation entirely from removing one from a respirator because she was actually a feeding tube was removed if you could respond to that okay again what i wanted to point out is if there there's a difference between the shy vocation and what we've been talking about previously she was never diagnosed as brain dead she was diagnosed as being in a persistent vegetative state and then people kept insisting that she was brain dead weren't they that term was used incorrectly in a lot of the media and that that's part of the problem this this got so huge in the media and it got huge politically and she was clearly conscious oh she was conscious um but she did need a feeding tube to survive so she couldn't eat she couldn't chew and swallow she couldn't and there are many people who are able to think and and do other things with consciousness that need those things right correctly um but she was diagnosed in the persistent vegetative state and it just so happens that you know now we have the evidence of her autopsy and it was demonstrated via her autopsy that the diagnosis was correct and she was in that state long enough that statistically she had no chance of recovery or surviving without the feeding tube so now we get into the ugly mess of you know uh the husband that left her um but he still had legal rights to make decision her parents you know wanted to keep her alive and were willing to care for her and then you have the additional mess of the media getting involved and the governor of florida getting involved and even president bush himself started to get involved so it became a mess and it's a little frightening to respond to this question because there's so much that needs to be explained and laid out in the the myth and the truth of the situation put into place i'll say this this is the ugliness of sin this is the ugliness of you know infidelity and adultery um and this is where people need to be educated so she wasn't brain dead she was in a persistent vegetative state the autopsy demonstrated that she was responding to stimulus it was obvious well it was obvious in some of the videos that they showed um i think you can question that and again i know this is emotional it's going to be tough and some people are going to like my answer but again the autopsy demonstrated that what we saw and what we thought was a response to stimuli really wasn't um and there's a lot of things that people in this condition do that is often mistaken for response to stimuli um especially when the media picks it up and takes it on having said that it's a whole another question in bioethics on whether or not it's moral to remove a feeding tube most christians recoil against that idea because they think it's just one of those basic care type things that we should continue the one thing that i'll say and i'll leave it there because i don't think it would be fair to go any further without a lot more explanation is the type of feeding tube that she had would be considered a medical procedure so now the question is could if she had really made her uh desires clear would it be moral for her to say stop treating me via this procedure um so it's very complicated extremely complicated now let me go back to something that you had mentioned earlier uh the the issue of self -sacrifice and self -sacrifice could not only be in the realm of wanting to donate vital organs it could be to spare loved ones from the enormous financial burden of taking care of you after you are brain dead but we have uh innumerable examples of self -sacrifice that take place we have soldiers on battlefields knowing that something that they're going to do in a heroic event of rescue they know that they are going to die and they do it this is not suicide this is something that they're doing to save the life of others well of course the prime example jesus christ dying on calvary's cross this was not suicide this was an event ordained by god before the foundation of the world that the trinity agreed upon and christ voluntarily laid his life uh down to do even though he in an earthly sense was murdered by evil men this was something that was ordained by god he he laid down his own life so is it ever wrong for a person to say if i am brain dead i do not want my family to suffer the financial burden of keeping me alive or even the fact that they know that i am in a hospital bed uh turning into uh a a skeleton or what have you uh and they uh or that they want to give the organs that will actually save lives is that ever a wrong decision for the for the person themselves to make right and uh i don't think so i think a person can choose not to uh uh receive medical treatment i define self -sacrifice in my paper as um uh an unselfish act directed toward the good of another at the expense of the actor but not motivated by a desire to hurt oneself so if there was a cure for brain death and the person could be cured and they made that choice then i would question why they're making that choice that would be something akin to physician assisted suicide but in the case of brain dead there's no coming back um so i think and again that's part of my argument uh can we make the biblical case for this being a legitimate self -sacrifice i use christ i use samson as examples of biblical self -sacrifices um one of the most recent uh medal of honor winners his name is william kyle carpenter he won the medal of honor he's still alive but he won the medal of honor by jumping on a grenade and we don't refer to that we wouldn't call that suicide we call that self -sacrifice even though sometimes these things are referred to as suicide missions that's not what was really meant by it it's it's the the it's the notion that doing something is almost certainly going to kill you if you do it but you're doing it to benefit others exactly here's here is where it gets tricky in the case of a brain dead patient it's never really a complete self -sacrifice the physician has to be involved the hospital has to be involved the operating team has to be involved they have to basically carry out the sacrifice for the patient so can we legitimately uh argue for that in scripture and my argument was the idea of representation which is extremely important to covenant theology is extremely important to both our being in adam and our being in christ um uh it's significant to uh reform theology in terms of the new covenant and our representation in christ it's important in understanding what an apostle was which was basically the equivalent of the jewish shalia where basically the apostle spoke when the apostle spoke and wrote uh they spoke for jesus their words are jesus's words i'm not denying the god -breathed notion behind it but god used their personalities he used their minds he used their words he empowered them bore them along by the holy spirit but when they spoke when the prophets in the old testament spoke they represented god so this idea of representation is well known throughout the scriptures scriptures most christians understand it can that apply to the brain dead patient can the physician become his representation his representative in harvesting those organs and thereby making it a legitimate self -sacrifice and in my paper i argue yes so in my paper i argue the principle of conserving conserving life which we talked about a little bit earlier and the principle of representation would make this a legitimate biblical self -sacrifice on the part of the patient but i think protestants need to discuss this and talk about it have i erred in my thinking have i taken scripture out of context anywhere are there holes in my argument if you come to the conclusion that the brain dead person is not in fact dead but is still alive body and soul being kept alive by medical means we have cj from lindenhurst long island new york who asks is there anything we should know about signing a donor card and doing that on our driver's license etc are there things that we are being deceived about in regard to what will happen if we are in an accident etc etc that is a very good question and right now i don't think there's any deception going on um i recommend a couple of things um if you want to be an organ donor you can do that via your driver's license or something like that but i think more importantly i think people need to have a medical power of attorney that's somebody that they care and love somebody that knows what their wishes would be so in my case my wife is my medical power of attorney i'm her medical power of attorney because we're intimate we know what we believe about life we know our christian views she knows that i wouldn't want to stay alive on a respirator if i were brain dead i know that she wouldn't want to stay alive on a respirator if she were brain dead so i think you need to have a medical power of attorney and it'll solve a lot of problems at the end of life and i think a living will is also an option my own opinion if you have a medical power of attorney you've kind of solved the living will issue but if you don't have somebody you that you trust you're not married you don't have somebody you're really close with then i would recommend getting a living will the thing to keep in mind with the living will is you want to update it regularly you want to look at it at least once a year and make sure that your your views and your desires haven't changed because if they've changed and you update that and you don't update the document then uh legally they're going to follow the document but i don't think there's any deception right now in our country in terms of you know when you sign up at the driver's

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DMVD to be an organ donor i know in the past a lot of people were afraid i don't want to sign up because i want to make sure i'm dead well again there's not that kind of evil i don't think going on most people in the medical profession really do care about their patients really do care about what they do you know sadly there are bad people everywhere and there might be somebody out there but it's not running well of course you do have physicians that are truly evil because they are knowingly ripping babies apart in their mind yes you have that um i agree with you um and again i think we need to judge things by god's standards so yes you do have that and you have physicians assisting people in killing themselves i think that's evil um no i think i think probably i'm playing mind reader here as far as cj's question but i think that what motivates people to have anxiety apprehension or fear about being a donor is they think that the doctors are going to be less heroic or aggressive at saving their lives if they're in an accident or something you know the doctor might say you know i think i'm going to go on a coffee break right now and let me know when those organs are ready or something you know that they may think that there's not going to be the uh aggressive enthusiasm and interest in saving somebody's life if they are an organ donor yes and that is one of those uh fears but i think it is somewhat mythological in my experience of bringing patients to the emergency rooms and being on the ethics committee at phoenix children's hospital if nothing else doctors some doctors i want to be careful here some doctors are simply motivated by reputation and losing a patient is not something they want to be known for most doctors that i have had the experience of watching and working with always act aggressively when they think there's a chance for life when they think there's there's even a smidgen of hope for survival in fact one of the problems that we would have on the ethics committee is i felt like some of the doctors went too far they should have stopped treatment because there was absolutely no medical chance but they continued to do things and now they've created bigger problems so that just hasn't been my experience you just triggered a memory as uh phoenix children's hospital where are where my dear friend dr james r white of alpha omega ministries was a chaplain i don't know because i know for a fact that he was a chaplain at more than one hospital i know for a period of time he was the chaplain at thunderbird samaritan hospital so i don't know if he was ever one at phoenix children's okay but uh being one who lived in phoenix uh did you ever meet dr white and develop a friendship with him oh yeah i thought i put that in the original email oh okay i know dr white is jim i met dr white when he had hair we go back way back next time you talk to him ask him about the one -on -one basketball game we had about 25 years ago okay and i i guess you're the only person on the planet earth that he allows to call him jim you know i know he prefers james yeah yeah but when i met him it was jim and he didn't seem to have a problem with it back then well the next time i see him i'm calling him jimmy boy anyway there you go um let's see we have arnie in perry county pennsylvania who asks do you have any comforting words to people who may be listening to this who are now racked with guilt because of decisions they made in regard to loved ones who were diagnosed as being brain dead whose organs were donated and now they feel like they've done something horribly wrong and sinful can you say anything to comfort them now that they may be experiencing very serious traumatic reaction to what you have said that is an awesome question i think there's a couple of things to consider i'm not convinced that they did sin um i guess it depends on you know uh how you want to define acting in ignorance i know scripture makes a distinction between a high -handed sin and you know your your regular run -of -the -mill sin um i think that and i i run into this problem when i teach bioethics at churches even when we talk about birth control and ivf and things like that and and one of the things that i tell my uh audience is we're responsible for what we know we're responsible to learn but god is very gracious when it involves things that we didn't know especially if we did due due diligence um i actually quoted you this last sunday i i preached and the topic was original sin and the thing that i quoted from you is what you tend to say at the end of every program jesus is a greater savior than we are a sinner amen and we need to take the knowledge that we have and as we keep growing and as we keep learning from the bible and we want to use it to move on the address of the passage doesn't come to my head but i remember the apostle paul how he said i'm not what i used to be i'm not what i'm going to be but i keep moving forward and those would be my words of comfort well i'd like you now in four minutes time to uninterrupted unburden your heart and leave our listeners with what you most want etched into their hearts and minds i think what i want most etched in our hearts and minds is that we as christians need to work really hard at developing a consistent and a thorough biblical worldview that's really what this boils down to we need to be careful who we listen to what we listen to i mean even every sunday when we go to church there was one of an older lady in the congregation and she came up to me afterwards this last sunday and she told me that she had taken notes and stuff like that and she says yeah i take these notes because i want to go home and check out what you say and then she apologized she said oh i'm sorry i didn't mean that i don't trust you i said you are doing the thing you go home and you search the scriptures and you see if what i said was in line with what the scriptures teach so is the concept of brain death in line with what the scriptures teach the scriptures define death as the separation of body and soul how do we know that has happened empirically well again the only thing that the scriptures tell us is when the heart and the cease and it's accompanied by irreversible unconsciousness which believe it or not for the last 20 uh well for the last 10 ,000 2 ,000 sorry i want to get my dates right for the last 2 ,000 years that's how medical science is defined and recognized death so this concept of brain death is something new it's based on new technology and i said early on medical technology technology is far outpacing medical ethics so be true to the word of god um understand how to make decisions this is something that we didn't even get into um but one of the things i do in my paper is like i said earlier i reintroduce an ethical decision making model of john frames and it's based on god's covenant name yahweh and what that means what does it mean that god is lord well it means he is completely sovereign over all situations so we never find ourself in a situation that god's not in control of it means he has the authority to tell us how we ought to live and it means he's a covenant keeping god he desires a relationship with his people and we can use those same concepts the normative perspective is going to god's word and seeing what god says about right and wrong the situational perspective is understanding what it means to be brain dead understanding what's been written about it understanding that there's no good foundation to to arrive at the conclusion that it means the death of the person and as christians we have the right and it's not unintelligent in fact it's very intelligent to question that conclusion and then finally there's the personal perspective is self -sacrifice legitimate can we make a biblical argument for self -sacrifice in donating organs if we're in a position at the end of life where we're diagnosed as brain dead there's no hope of survival chances are we want to turn off the respirator anyway we can die in a way that brings the gift of life to another person or we can simply die and i don't think it's a sin if you chose not to donate your organs um but we can self -sacrifice does the bible allow that i think it does based on the principle of the conservation of life and the idea of representation i think it can be done without any sin and i think that we can you know love our neighbor and love our neighbor as ourselves so um again be consistently christian that that's the message because you know what i say in my paper i could be wrong here and there will be some christians that disagree but be biblically consistent and let's engage in the conversation and i just really want to thank you uh for allowing me to come on and i really do pray that this starts a conversation and people start talking about this amen and we have time for one more quick question uh we have bb in cumberland county pennsylvania who says what we have not addressed today is the issue of those who believe they may be guilty of in essence killing someone else by preventing the needed organs to be donated to them how do you respond to that dilemma i don't think that's killing somebody else i don't think there's uh uh anything in scripture that spells out um exactly you know how that's supposed to take place there's there's no clear warrant in that says you have to check the box on your uh driver's license um i think that's taking an unwarranted step i don't think you're responsible for killing others we could take that to an extreme am i responsible for killing children in other countries because i don't give every spare you know dollar that i have away and you know am i ever allowed to go watch a movie because i could be out sharing the gospel or doing something like that should i simply eat bread and rice because that would free me up to give more money to people that are suffering i think that's taking it a little too far um would be my response well i want to make sure that our listeners have uh your website for the church where you are on the pastoral team there at genesis church of spokane valley washington it's svgenesis .org

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sv for spokane valley genesis .org svgenesis .org

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do you have any other contact information that you care to share um you know if they wanted to reach out to me and ask any further questions it's mike at svgenesis .org