ABSTRACT
This essay takes its cue from Jeffrey Bishop and serves as a call to those engaged in the practice of medicine to respond to the presence of the human body. This invitation is goaded by the theological significance of the human body; in the words of E. L. Mascall, “Christianity has consistently claimed to be concerned with body and soul at once.” Moyse grounds such concern with the indivisible body and soul in his reading of Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth. Here he draws us toward Barth’s relational anthropology, in which we discover a particular responsibility toward the body and soul of the Other. Subsequently, Moyse proposes that a complementary anthropology might benefit medicine. Yet the aim is not to pursue a theological intervention that colonizes medicine; rather, the aim here is to proclaim the theological such that the physician, for example, might learn to encounter her patient in the fullness of his being and by a posture of responsibility grounded by love.
