The Phenomenon of Death in the Era of Biotechnologies. A Perspective of Orthodox Dogmatics
The Phenomenon of Death in the Era of Biotechnologies. A Perspective of Orthodox Dogmatics

Summary/Abstract: In this study, I tried to identify some of the current challenges to the eschatology of the Church. The death problem in the era of biotechnologies and nanotechnologies generated by transhumanist philosophy concerns the course of man in an autonomous sense, emphasizing his immortality through technology. Death becomes a “biological option” and is treated as a disease technology can overcome. The present human nature is seen only as a stage in the evolution of the species. The mystery of death is linked mechanistically and autonomously to nature, not to the mystery of resurrection as a dogma of the Church. Man does not simply have a biological structure but an iconic-biological structure, his premises and goals being not in the multiple versions of the technological and computerized society but in the theological Christology of the Bible according to the image and likeness. Orthodox Dogmatics’ optimism regarding eschatology is based on its discovery in the Person of Christ and the Lives of the Saints. At the same time, Orthodox Dogmatics discovers the eschatological path of man on an optimistic note, generated by the face of God perceived not only as a Judge - a judgment that is actually in man, in the mirror of man - but as a good, merciful, forgiving, sacrificial and people loving Father. This perspective that outlines the eternal communion of eternal joy, human fulfillment, and eternal celebration in the light of the glory and immortal image of Christ and the love of the Trinity is distinguished from the immanent, dissolving, unpredictable and dehumanizing perspective of an autonomous “eternity”, pursued everywhere by the virulent action of death. The perspective of transhumanism on man’s destiny deprives man of the premises and the transcendent purpose of his being. Proposing the substitution of God by technology, which acquires divine attributes, transhumanism projects a self-transcendence, which is a pseudo-transcendence. At the same time, the death problem is not solved but only postponed!

• Details
• Contents