The Theology of a Cadaver?

In my capacity as a Chaplain for the Seminole County Fire Department, it’s often a privilege to be present when personnel are training, honing the skills they need for any given call and emergency. Such training can include everything from hose and hydrant drills to high angle rescue, to medic emergency procedures. For paramedic practices, various dummies have been manufactured to help train personnel for protocols in CPR and airway intubation, and everything in between. These synthetic dummies, however, cannot replace the value of practice on the “real thing”: the human body.

This presents a challenge for designing training. How much of that can be practiced on a live volunteer? People might willingly be dragged across smooth floor, lifted into a rescue basket, or have their “broken” leg splinted, but they won’t agree to be intubated (airway tube), shocked (AED) or have someone practice drilling into their bones. For those later exercises, willing people have willed that their bodies be donated to science; and for purposes of the medic training, that resulted in the “Cadaver Lab.”

As chaplain, such moments make me question just how much of the fire department’s training do I really want to attend. On the surface, it seemed unwise, but brave the Cadaver Lab I did, and I’m now grateful to have been included. What’s more? I think that such training resources like the Cadaver Lab need to be incorporated into a theology of the body that permeates Christianity.

I’d like to offer a different take on the concept taught among Christians that comes from the book of 1st Corinthians. “Or do you not know that your body is the temple of the Holy Spirit who is in you, whom you have from God, and you are not your own? For you were bought at a price. Therefore glorify God with your body” (1 Cor. 6:19-20, NET). The context of this statement was the Apostle Paul’s admonition for the reader to abstain from sexual immorality, arguing that there’s no such thing as a “victimless crime;” that sexual sins violate the mandate of your design, and the intent of your body’s rightful owner…God.

This concept of the body as “God’s temple” has, in some circles, been expanded to prohibit other vices indulged with the body as well (i.e. gluttony, drunkenness, and some have gone on to apply to it smoking as well). In any event, the “body as God’s temple” concept has been applied to encourage abstinence; abstaining from sexual sins or any other vice that debases one’s own body from its intended dignity and purpose. This is a good and right message, and one sorely needed in a culture that indulges every appetite and whim.

The discipline of abstaining, however, is only half the message. Studying the spiritual disciplines intended for Lent (the penitential season that precedes Easter in the Christian calendar) will lead you to authors such as Richard Foster and Dallas Willard, who have written about both the abstaining AND engaging disciplines. Abstaining disciplines offer categories of things to DON’T do, while engaging disciplines point toward things to DO. On the one hand, examples of abstaining disciplines are things like fasting, silence, solitude, and frugality. On the other hand, examples of engaging disciplines include things like generosity, fellowship, or study. Some will think that this is a stretch, but I think the complementary categories of abstaining and engaging disciplines also can be applied to the “body as God’s temple” concept.

If there are things to NOT do with “God’s temple,” surely there are things to DO with God’s temple as well. This seems to me an important teaching that, while lacking a clear Bible verse as its referent, permeates the Christian notion of service. The manner in which you serve the purposes of God are all done in the body. In other words, every way you serve God you do so with “God’s temple.” When you show appropriate affection to a loved one, you assure them of their value using “God’s temple.” When you carry a heavy load for someone moving boxes, you serve them with “God’s temple.” Likewise, when you give blood in times of need, you offer life-giving assistance using “God’s temple.”

Imagine offering, in your last will and testament, “God’s temple” for the furtherance of life-saving knowledge for firefighters, paramedics and nurses in training. That is what these people did who gave their bodies for the Cadaver Lab. The instructor took a moment of silence at the beginning of the class to honor those that had donated their bodies for the lab, which I found to be an appropriate and fitting homage. It seemed to me, though, that a Christian perspective can go even further.

As with an organ donor, upon death the body is donated to give life. As for things to DO with “God’s temple” (as opposed to things NOT to do), I can think of few more praiseworthy uses for “God’s temple.” Were any of the people, whose body helped to teach medic procedures, Christians? I have no idea, and it holds no bearing on the nobility of their choice. I do think, however, that Christians, having been taught the “body as God’s temple” concept, should be particularly open to such final acts of service. As one’s final choice with what to do with their body, surely advancing knowledge and giving life should be high on the list of things to do with “the temple of the Holy Spirit.”