From its beginnings, Christianity has encouraged and provided health care, an activity featured in Jesus’ healing and in his parable of the Good Samaritan. Over the centuries Christian traditions have also offered guidance for physicians, other health care providers, familial caregivers and patients. While often distinctive, this guidance has sometimes overlapped with or incorporated, with modifications, directives in professional oaths and codes. ‘Medical ethics’, which was largely physician ethics until nursing emerged in the nineteenth century, was subsumed in the 1960s and 1970s under ‘bioethics’ or ‘biomedical ethics’, a broader conception that emerged to address new developments and problems in biomedicine. For instance, medical technologies could prolong life far beyond previous possibilities, transplant organs from one living or dead person to another, detect certain fetal defects in utero and offer new reproductive opportunities. Bioethics or biomedical ethics involves an interdisciplinary and interprofessional approach to ethical issues in the life sciences, medicine and health care.

Christian reflections on these developments build, to varying degrees, on scripture and tradition, along with appeals to experience and reason, sometimes expressed in the language of natural law. How various Christian churches rely on and rank these different bases of authority has important implications for their views in bioethics – for example, whether they are distinctive or overlap with secular perspectives.