At the other end of life’s spectrum, patients and medical teams are opting increasingly for euthanasia and physician-assisted suicide, in order to avoid a painful and drawn-out death. These are bioethical issues of major importance that pose extraordinary challenges in this “postmodern” world.

In the past few years, biomedical technology has grown immensely, providing new possibilities for healing as well as new threats to our well-being. With these recent developments come a host of bioethical challenges that the Church must not only face, but respond to in a strong, clear voice. Most of us, of course, have no formal medical training. Yet as priests and concerned laypersons, we are called upon to offer guidance—to medical professionals, to patients and their families, and to the general public—regarding the moral consequences of biomedical research.

In this article, I will limit myself to discussing one bioethical issue that is particularly important, especially in light of recent legislation sanctioning practices that pose a serious and imminent danger to human life: manipulation of the human embryo in the interests of stem cell research.

From the perspective of Orthodox Christianity, all research on human subjects, like all treatment of the terminally ill, should be guided by the Christian understanding of human persons as created “in the image of God.” God alone establishes ultimate meaning and purpose in human existence. Therefore it is only God who provides the framework by which we can make moral judgments with regard to medical technology and to the manipulation and treatment of human persons.

In today’s secular, postmodern, and highly pluralistic world, this kind of affirmation sounds sectarian and retrograde, if not absurd. How can we as Christians impose our own standards of moral conduct upon a society that has abandoned those standards in favor of a philosophical relativism that rejects the very existence of absolute values and truths? Recent years have seen the ascent of relativism—rejecting absolute and objective values and truths, while in turn presuming that all subjective interpretations of what is good and true are of equal standing. If, in my opinion, human life only really begins at birth, then I am free to dispose of fetuses as I please, with no moral consequences. Your conviction that life is sacred from conception may be important for you, but you have no right to impose that conviction on me.

Given this plethora of “acceptable” perspectives,1 we as Orthodox Christians can only bear witness to what we know and hold to be true. We need to hold, with unwavering conviction and determination, to “the faith once and for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3). God has revealed His will, and continues to do so, in and through those traditional sources that serve as the ground of our faith: the Old and New Testaments, early patristic teachings, and the Church’s Liturgy. The chief ethical question that arises for us is, “How are we to apply the givens of our faith in specific situations that involve human life?”

From Utilitarianism to Deification

When the laws of the marketplace govern medical care and medical research as they do in the United States, the potential for innovative therapies is matched by the potential for abuse. During the past few years, for example, secular voices in the medical and pharmaceutical fields, together with much of the media, have tried to convince us that the human embryo, especially in the earliest pre-implantation stages of its growth, constitutes something less than a human person. The embryo, they assert, is to be regarded as mere tissue, with no claim to individual identity or to legal protection. This is merely an extension of the reasoning behind the pro-abortion movement. If a third-trimester fetus can be aborted with no ethical or legal consequences, then it seems only reasonable to conclude that embryos can be created and destroyed with impunity. A growing consensus sees such a conclusion as self-evident because of the potential usefulness of embryonic stem cells for creating medical therapies for a wide variety of neurological and other diseases.

The Orthodox Christian response to that reasoning is clear, although it goes very much against the reigning mentality in today’s culture. In Romans 3:8, the Apostle Paul lays down the basic moral principle that governs the Church’s approach to the question: We may not do evil so that good may come. A good result does not justify an immoral action.

From the viewpoint of the Church, to destroy embryonic life is to destroy a human person. Even if we consider the potential good that can be derived from embryonic stem cells, insofar as the harvesting of those cells destroys the embryo, it involves the killing of a newly created person—a person created in the image of God. Since that act itself is inherently evil, there is no ultimate good to be derived from it. No moral calculus that weighs the good against the bad in this case has any validity, because before God we may not do evil in order to obtain a good result.

This perspective of the Church flies in the face of postmodern ethics, which holds utilitarian expediency as the highest moral standard. To paraphrase Dostoevsky: Without God in this secular, pluralistic environment, anything is permissible, particularly if it can serve utilitarian ends such as improving human health and extending the life span. From the perspective of the Gospel, on the other hand, we simply may not save or ease the conditions of one life by sacrificing another. This is the work of Christ, accomplished once and for all by His sacrifice on the Cross. As for ourselves, it is essential that we hold to the truth that human life finds its ultimate value and purpose beyond the limits of biological existence. A long life is desirable only in that it may further our growth toward what Orthodox Church tradition calls theosis or “deification”: eternal participation of the human person in divine life, the life of the Holy Trinity.

Immediate or Delayed Animation?

Let’s take a closer look at the moral implications of embryonic stem cell research and therapies derived from it.

Unlike their Roman Catholic counterparts, Orthodox theologians have never tried to specify at what point God endows the newly created embryo with a soul. Western thought has theorized that the soul is either co-created with the body, or infused into the body after fertilization. This line of reasoning, however, distinguishes the soul from the body as a separate entity. In the holistic, Orthodox perspective of the Greek Fathers, it would be more appropriate to speak of the body, not as “having” or “possessing” a soul, but as being “ensouled.” Neither body nor soul ultimately exists without the other. Thus, we affirm that Christ’s victory over death results not in the “immortality of the soul,” but in the resurrection of the body.

The “soul,” in other words, is to be understood as the animating principle in human life that guides development of the person from fertilization through death, and into the Kingdom of heaven. This way of thinking leads to an important conclusion: that human life is sacred from its very beginning, since from conception it is ensouled existence—created in the image of God and endowed with a sanctity that destines it for eternal life.

With recent discoveries in the field of embryology, however, many scientists, including Orthodox and other Christians, are proposing that we rethink our traditional understanding of the relation between soul and body so as to distinguish fertilization from “conception.” To explain their argument, we need to take up the ancient debate concerning when human life actually begins. We need to address the question of whether animation, or ensoulment, is immediate or delayed—that is, whether fully individuated existence is present from the time the nuclei of sperm and ovum unite to form a zygote, or whether it does not begin until over a week later, when the embryo becomes embedded in the uterine membrane.

There is no doubt that genetic individuality exists from fertilization or “syngamy”—when the nuclei of the male and female gametes unite to form the single-cell zygote, marking the first stage of embryonic growth. That fusion produces a unique arrangement of 23 pairs of chromosomes, which contain the DNA, or “genetic blueprint,” that will determine the organism’s development throughout its lifetime.

The most important question we need to consider is whether genetic individuality signifies developmental individuality. Developmental individuality is the development of a specific human individual as a result of cellular differentiation. Most embryologists hold that the cells of the developing embryo do not begin to differentiate—to become specialized so that they can produce specific organs and tissues—until the embryo begins to implant itself in the uterine wall, about ten days after fertilization. Others, however, hold that cellular differentiation occurs from the second stage of mitosis, and therefore we must consider the embryo to be characterized by both genetic and developmental individuality from that stage, before implantation.

Throughout history, this entire debate has been waged as one between “immediate animation”—ensoulment upon fertilization—and “delayed animation”—ensoulment upon implantation. With the great majority of Orthodox ethicists, I have supported the theory of immediate animation. The embryo is an individual human existence from the beginning of gene expression, shortly after fertilization. As such, the pre-implantation embryo must be regarded as a genetically and developmentally unique human being, endowed with the “image of God.”

Nevertheless, most scientists who work in the field of embryology today hold a different view of the matter. They maintain that the pre-implantation embryo is only the essential substratum of human life—it does not yet constitute an individual human being. This view is based on several considerations that reflect recent discoveries in the field of embryology.

First, these scientists hold that each of the cells of the early embryo is “totipotent”: that is, each separate cell is capable of developing into a complete individual being, since it contains the entire genome and supposedly is not yet differentiated. Second, there is the problem of a high rate of “wastage”: the fact that from fifty to seventy percent of all embryos are spontaneously miscarried prior to implantation, before the mother ever knows she is pregnant. They hold that such a massive loss of embryos argues intuitively against the idea that each one is an ensouled human being. Third, prior to implantation identical twinning can occur, and occasionally those entities can recombine. This appears to throw into question the very notion of “individual” human existence at this point. And fourth, a profound transformation of the embryo occurs with implantation: totipotency is lost, and with it the capacity for twinning; the neural streak or primitive body axis appears, which marks the beginning of the development of the central nervous system; and new information is provided to the growing embryo by the uterus itself. The result of this transformation, which occurs with implantation, is the beginning of neurological growth and organ development. These factors lead many, if not most, embryologists today to argue that the true beginning of human life occurs not at fertilization, but at implantation of the embryo in the membrane of the mother’s uterus.

Adult Stem Cells: A Viable Alternative

This is, of course, a very technical and difficult debate. But it is one that has the most serious consequences. If an individual human being appears only at the point of implantation and with the appearance of the primitive streak, this allows us to manipulate the early embryo with moral impunity. Embryonic stem cells (which must be harvested from the embryo before implantation) can be retrieved, and the destruction of the pre-implantation embryo has no ultimate moral significance. This also means that embryos may be cloned in order to provide stem cells for therapeutic purposes.

There is no doubt that embryonic stem cells and possibilities for cloning hold an extraordinary potential for developing therapies and medicines to combat a broad range of diseases, including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, ALS, muscular dystrophy, and even AIDS. While most scientists and medical professionals firmly oppose reproductive cloning (that is, creating live human babies), they just as firmly support therapeutic cloning and embryonic stem cell research precisely because its potential to heal is so great.

In this regard, however, we have to come back to the admonition of the Apostle Paul in Romans 3:8: We may not do evil so that good might come. If the pre-implantation embryo is indeed individuated human life, a true human being, and thus a person who bears the divine image, then any manipulation of that embryo, for therapeutic or other purposes, is inherently immoral and must be condemned as such by the Church. If, on the other hand, conception is in reality a process that comes to completion only with implantation, then our opposition to embryonic stem cell research and cloning is unjustified. Unwittingly, we are opposing valuable medical research on grounds of a misunderstanding.

As I read the evidence, however, I can only conclude that God in fact brings a new human being into existence through the process of fertilization, which leads to the onset of gene expression. There simply is no other point, not even implantation, at which we can affirm: “Human life begins here.”

Embryonic stem cell research is often touted as a potential panacea that will heal neurological illnesses and lead to the manufacture of new organs to replace old ones. We can only feel compassion for victims of Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s diseases, for example, who believe that embryonic stem cell research should receive government funding and public backing for its extraordinary potential. To date, however, very few if any successful therapies have been developed using stem cells taken from human embryos.

Far more effective, and far less problematic from an ethical point of view, is the use of adult stem cells, or those taken from placentas and umbilical cords. These have already proven their worth, and they can be found in a great variety of tissues, including muscle, liver, brain, and bone marrow. They have been found even in baby teeth. It was originally thought that adult cells could only reproduce their own kinds of tissue. Recent research, however, has shown that pluripotent adult stem cells can be used to produce a vast variety of cells. Some scientists, in fact, are convinced that within a few years it will be possible to extract a person’s own somatic cells, restore their pluripotency, and use them to provide a nearly limitless number of therapies. Before long, therefore, we may be able in the most literal way to obey the ancient admonition, “Physician, heal thyself!”

Embryonic stem cell research is just one of a multitude of ethical issues we need to grapple with today. Yet it is among the most important of all, since the approach we take depends on our understanding of the meaning and value of human life itself. In this postmodern world, there are enormous pressures to treat life as a commodity to be used and exploited for strictly utilitarian ends. It is our responsibility, as members of the Body of Christ, to perceive and proclaim a different truth: that human life derives from and is destined to return to the transcendent Life of the Holy Trinity.

The challenge before us, therefore, is to honor, preserve, and protect human persons at every stage of their development, from conception to the grave. Remaining faithful to this calling, uttered by Christ and the Gospel, we can surrender ourselves and one another, with all of our potential and integrity, into the loving hands of the Author of Life.

The Very Rev. John Breck was Professor of New Testament and Ethics at St. Vladimir's Seminary from 1984 to 1996. He is presently Professor of Biblical Interpretation and Bioethics at St. Sergius Theological Institute, Paris, France, and with his wife Lyn he directs the St Silouan Retreat near Charleston, SC.

This article is excerpted from Fr. John and Lyn Breck's book, Stages on Life’s Way . It was published in AGAIN 26.3 (Fall 2004), 16-19. It appears here with the permission of Conciliar Press .