Christmas and Humility

Andy Crouch has written a thoughtful essay for Christianity Today highlighting the tension between the celebration of Christmas and the coming age of genetic enhancement. For some reason I can't link to it, but here's an excerpt:

"A Christian might put [the case against genetic enhancement] more plainly: If you no longer see life as a gift, you are no longer able to love.

But I suspect that the most eloquent arguments of columnists and philosophers will be fruitless. Name one technology that human beings have developed but not used. If we were willing to use the awesome and awful technology of nuclear weapons, why would we prevent people from "enhancing" their descendants?

So followers of Christ will have to decide whether to join our culture in its quest for mastery. It's hard to see how we can do so and still celebrate Christmas. To grasp the meaning of that event, early Christians turned to the language of fulfillment. Even in the cradle this baby was "fully" God, they said. But he was also fully human. He lacked nothing essential to the good human life, even in that dark night where the best available technology was fire to heat the water for his birth. He lacked nothing, Luke says, as he grew in wisdom and stature and favor with God and man. He lacked nothing when he died in violent pain in that long-ago age before anesthesia. Even now, we believe, he is still fully embodied, fully human, yet more truly embodied and more truly human than ever before. He has the divine life, the perfect human body that our technology feverishly and vainly seeks to achieve.

Do we want his life? Or do we want technology's alluring facsimile? Are we willing for our children to be less than normal, that they may understand something essential about humility, responsibility, and love?"