In our age of advanced medical technology that emphasizes health and well being, the human body has become the near-exclusive province of the professional health care industry. The solutions it proposes, the assumptions it takes for granted, and the judgments it pronounces are taken as gospel. But as Christians, we are called to view all of life–including medicine–through the lens of faith. After all, it was God who created our bodies.

In Reclaiming the Body, a physician and a theologian take a critical look at some of our assumptions and explore what theology has to say about medicine, our bodies, and our health. This is not a Christian treatise on medical ethics nor a book with a medicine-bashing agenda. Rather, it invites the reader to do theological and ecclesiological reflection on both the body and the Body in an effort to reframe the relationship between Christian faith and medicine. Along the way, the authors deal with timeless and contemporary issues such as embracing suffering, caring for the sick, using reproductive technologies, caring for the poor, obsessing over physical perfection, and dying.

In this remarkable book Brian Volck and Joel Shuman offer the wisest counsel we have received for how Christians can negotiate the world of modern medicine. This is not another diatribe against doctors or the medical establishment, but rather they write for Christians in the hope that we can come to use medicine as a form of service for the up-building of the body that is the church. Though the book is wonderfully accessible and hopefully will be read in congregations, anyone who has been engaged in the work of medical ethics and/or theology and medicine over the last thirty years will find this book makes a remarkable intellectual contribution to that enterprise. Drawing on an extraordinary range of literature both theological and literary, Volck and Shuman help us see the difference it might make for how we as Christians learn to live and die–for how our medical care of one another should be shaped. I simply cannot say enough good about this book.–Stanley Hauerwas, Duke Divinity School

Birth, life, and death. We pass through them all and encounter medicine in each. As we journey through the stages, Shuman and Volck invite us to reconceptualize medicine away from the individualistic, technocratic model of our culture to a truly theological reflection and response. Reclaiming the Body is lucid, creative, thoughtful, biblical, integrative, and a significant resource for practitioners and patients who call themselves Christian.–Dennis Hollinger, Evangelical School of Theology