I agree that the Buffy episode referred to didn’t really explain the problem with raising the dead (and Buffy did seem to make up its morality as it went along) but I thought some of the problems were explained in Season Six with regards to the successful resurrection performed – that a person’s soul has already moved on, and depriving them of heaven (or purgatory, even) once they’ve experienced it is unimaginably cruel.

Nor does it seem that even fantastic methods of bringing a person back (e.g. time travel, or prayer) would involve “playing God”, so long as the methods used didn’t involve witchcraft, or other similarly occult practices, and one needn’t invoke any notion of playing God to see why bringing back the dead using such methods would be wrong. So it’s not clear that talk of “playing God” actually adds all that much to the analysis.

I’d agree with you there. But going back to the original post, most horror stories/movies/tv shows that deal with the topic DO use witchcraft or occult practices to raise the dead. (I can’t think of many horror stories where someone has been resurrected through prayer and then ‘came back wrong’). Whence arises the moral confusion of Buffy – the creators can’t say that controlling people and nature through witchcraft is wrong, because they’ve already established, earlier in the show, that witchcraft is morally neutral. So they’re reduced to saying ‘Raising the dead is wrong because it’s wrong’.

If you can stand the slightly cheezy horror of Buffy, the second and third seasons of Supernatural deal with several characters being raised from the dead, and all the issues it raises, in an interesting (and morally consistent) way.

Pax Christi,

I forget–did I trounce you utterly or were you on my side?

If I recall we also demonstrated to everyone’s satisfaction that under most mainstream political theories the Mutant Registration Act was a great idea.

To tie in with your recent discussions on economic inequality, “playing god” is very much like the concept of “equality” in this way. Although you were always careful to use the term equality in a precise way, I’m sure you know that most “man on the street” debates over economic inequality are really about dueling conceptions of equality (equality of outcome v. equality of opportunity, etc.) in which the term “equality” does no work at all. It’s just a container for other moral intuitions. See, e.g., Peter Westen, The Empty Idea of Equality, 95 Harv. L. Rev. 537 (1982); see also almost everything that Stanley Fish has ever written.

There are so many issues and ways I can deal with them here. For the sake of brevity. I will only give quick responses, without all the significant details to back up what I say — so consider it only an outline of a response instead of a full response.

The first thing I would point out is that Frankenstein was not about bringing life from the dead, but about bringing life out of nothing — and thus it really was about playing God. Of course, there is, after that, the idea that bringing the dead back to life could be playing God. It is not, of course, always conclusive.

But here are things to consider: resurrection is not the same as resuscitation. The first brings us into the fullness of the divine life and open up to that life while the second continues to bring us to live and breathe within our fallen modality; it is a prolonging of life along the terms of the Nazgul in the Lord of the Rings instead of bringing life its internal vitality through transformation.

In saying this, however, there is no real reason why resuscitation cannot be used by God as a path for ressurection; after all, Scripture points out in the eschaton those living will be transformed in a similar way as the dead. But here is a question: whence the purgatorial transformation in such a person? It still is possible, but would not a prolonged life in a fallen state cause one to possibly feel less and less need for God and to become more and more secular with their back turned more and more against God that purgatory is no longer an option. Is not death, in some way, a grace and gift and that grace is experienced as grace as we, in our death, share in the death of all humanity in and through Christ? But as I said, in theory, resuscitation could be a method by which God brings about the resurrection — and a very interesting, odd Russian philosopher said it was not only possible but the task of humanity to do this (Nikolai Fedorov). The problems I raised about the kind of life and what it would do with our relation to God, I think, were not sufficiently answered by him (and why it became also the project of the atheists even if Fedorov was Christian).