Still Waiting for St. Benedict: Christianity and Bioethics in Matthew Vest’s Ethics Lost in Modernity

Abstract In this article, we engage critically with Matthew Vest’s book Ethics Lost in Modernity. We outline its argument, highlighting Vest’s use of the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein. The book presents Wittgenstein’s notoriously difficult philosophy in a comprehensible way and draws on it in a compelling critique of contemporary mainstream bioethics as a “language game.” Vest explains well why bioethics is simultaneously boring and capricious, accommodating its language to whatever regime of power prevails. His arguments helpfully enable Christians to show how and why secular bioethics fails to secure its normative principles with rational certainty and thus, perhaps, to break through its hegemony in contemporary discourse. Yet, we also point out a tension in Vest’s stance toward modernity itself. Vest calls for a return to “premodern” ways of thinking and being, but his own fruitful encounter with Wittgenstein shows the benefits that can arise when Christians enter into dialogue with modernity rather than rejecting it. We argue that a “shadow-seeing” attitude toward modernity, which recognizes its deviations from Christian orthodoxy while patiently reorienting it toward Christ as the true source of its genuine moral advances, befits those of us Christians who, like Vest, believe that bioethics has lost its way.