생명의 존엄성 : 인간배아 줄기세포 연구 논쟁에 관한 신학적 고찰 = Sanctity of Life: An East Asian Theological Reflection on Human Embryonic Stem Cell Debates

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

The human embryonic stem cell debates since the beginning have been rhetorical, full of gene-hype. However, these debates imply serious theological and political hermeneutics in the definition of human life, the dignity of life, respect, and women. It also demands a reassessment of the Western Christian anthropology of human personhood (person as innate, person as relational, and person as proleptic). From the East Asian theological perspective, however, the dignity of life implies the imperative for a life to realize itself to the fullest end of what it ought to be. This involves the diligent practice of sanctification and self-cultivation in mindfulness (or respect). A researcher in a laboratory is also a human person who needs to engage in this rigorous practice of mindfulness. This may be the prerequisite to exercise one’s freedom to help other forms of life accomplish their imperative for self-realization. But this denotes not so much a self-defined created co-creator self-consciously stretching and enabling to create techno-sapiens or the superhuman cyborg, as a humble cosmic co-sojourner participating in the great transformative movement of theanthropocosmic trajectory, i.e., the Tao (the Way). The sanctity of life from an East Asian Christian perspective means a fulfillment and embodiment of the proleptic Tao (道), in its own freedom of life (wu-wei 無爲). After all, both science and religion are taos for life, the great openness for cosmic vitality (saeng-myeong 生命).