We must avoid “everyone doing what’s right in their own eyes” while avoiding a one size fits all approach that does not adapt for our individuality when attempting to pursue whole person health.  Oughtness or rightness must come from outside of our persons as we cannot depend on our own limited knowledge, reasoning or fallen tendencies. We start with the obedience of the creature to the Creator and then recognize the gift of life and health as an assigned responsibility to nurture.  We are called to act as stewards of this gift, looking to our Creator for what virtues to pursue.  The virtues should not be solely self-directed but ones that promote our ability to love God and love our neighbor as well as care well for ourselves.  We must learn to care for our physical body, our mind, and our spirit in ways that enable us to rightly relate with God and others.   

               Today many gurus and health prophets emphasize health practices and principles which focus almost solely on what the individual gets out of their own health.  These experts sell “feeling good”, “stronger/faster/more fit bodies”, “Peace with nature”, “control of your own health”, and other slogans that do not extend beyond the mundane realm of existence.  They are not necessarily inherently bad values, but at least incomplete values, primarily because they miss out on the obligation which exists beyond one’s self.  At most, some will encourage us to be examples to our children or to do something so we can see our grandchildren one day.  At this basic level, they are not inherently wrong, but they miss out that there is a higher purpose to life’s existence.  Targeting the virtue of doing what is best for only oneself will never fully get at a healthy life because it misses the larger picture.

               The rightness of a proposed virtue to pursue should be evaluated to determine its true worth in pursuing.  We are not our own gods to set our own realities as creation needs a lawgiver, one who determines what is a virtue and the necessary means to achieve those virtues.  Our creaturely limits pose an obstacle to even choosing the right virtues much less achieving them for whole person health.  The limiting influence of fallen emotions and desires means that we are practically guaranteed to pursue the wrong set of virtues if left to our own wills.  Logic and science do not automatically overcome the desires of our fallen natures. 

               Even without the distorting influence of emotions and desires, determining virtues to pursue in health through the assumed emotionless process of science falls short of what we need.  Science neither knows enough about our functioning nor can extrapolate that to virtue to provide a foundation for us.  On one hand, contrary to popular opinion, science does not understand mankind fully from a biologically mechanistic standpoint. Science does not have the ability nor technology to know the dynamic and vastly intricate operations of our physical body at any given moment, much less in an ongoing dynamic sense.  The amount of data required to know and simultaneously process exceeds our capacity.  The computational capacity for even the information we can access is already beyond our ability leaving us with broad probabilities for understanding what is happening within our bodies presently much less for what will happen next in time.  As a result, we are left with an insurmountable obstacle to determining what appears good for our bodies in all circumstances of life.  On the other hand, even if science fully understood how our bodies function, transferring what is into what should be in terms of oughtness in pursuing a particular virtue cannot be proven.  Virtue cannot ultimately be derived from the descriptive nature of science. 

               To move beyond the realm of science and our limits, we must acknowledge the creature – creator distinction with its implications.  We are not our own, but belong to our “potter”, the one who formed us like clay from the earth.   We are beholden to follow the rules of this designer rather than attempt to make up our own rules by our own standards.  We are beholden to submit to the values and pursue the virtues our Creator ordained.  This moves us to an appreciation of this life as a gift which our Creator did not have to bestow upon us in creating us as He did.  When this life we live is viewed as a gift with responsibilities, we can approach its working out as ongoing acts of stewardship.  We are called to care for our health and nurture it so it can serve the purpose our Creator intended for it. 

               With the purpose of stewardship before our eyes, we can ask God what virtues should be our models.  We base these on the purposes He has laid out before us and also the direct instructions He has given us.  Loving God and loving our neighbor are set before us as the two greatest commands.  These two commands sum up the first and second tables of the Law, the Ten Commandments given to Moses on Mount Sinai.  Loving our neighbor is a reflection of how we love ourselves as we are told to love them as we love ourselves (Matthew 22:39 and Mark 12:31). Our virtues should lead to fulfilling the obedience of these two great commandments while vices would lead us away from fulling these commands.

               From here, we can look at our approaches to physical, mental, and intellectual health.  All forms of health can be means to these great ends or they can become ends in and of themselves which transform into idols at that point.  In other words, when the goals of health supersede the goals of loving God and loving our neighbor as ourselves, they function as an idols.  In contrast, when the goals of health functions as a means to serve these two commandments, they become worthy virtues to pursue.

(Continued in Part 2)

Next in this Series… “Virtues to uphold in Whole Person Health: Part 2”