Christian perception of sickness benchmark: a planning guide

The word counts are the assignment's clearest instruction about weighting. Question one gets 250 words, question three gets 250, and question two gets 450 to 500 — as much as the other two combined. That middle question is also the only one with four sub-questions inside it, and it is the one where a paper either engages with a Christian account of sickness and medicine or produces a paragraph of general piety. Plan the middle section first and let the two shorter answers frame it, rather than writing straight through and arriving at the hard question with a hundred words left. The counts are also minimums and ceilings in the way benchmark rubrics usually treat them, so a 250-word answer that runs to 400 is not generosity, it is a failure to compress. Label each answer with its question number so the marker can see the counts have been respected.

Question one is a genuine dilemma, and the wording is deliberately loaded — decisions that seem to the physician to be irrational and harmful. Notice that the seeming belongs to the physician, which is the whole difficulty: the case turns on whose judgement of harm counts. It is also worth being precise about whose autonomy is at stake. Mike is not the patient; James is. What Mike holds is not patient autonomy but parental authority to decide for a child who cannot decide for himself, and that authority is limited in a way a competent adult's own refusal is not. Getting that distinction right in the first sentence is the single highest-yield move available in a 250-word answer. Everything after it — whether the physician should defer, and for how long — becomes a question about the limits of surrogate decision-making rather than about respecting a patient's wishes.

Once the distinction is made, the ethical literature gives you two competing thresholds and the answer is stronger if you name both rather than asserting one. The best interests standard asks what serves the child; the harm principle asks whether the parent's choice crosses a threshold of significant harm that would justify overriding them. Recent work defends best interests against the harm threshold on the grounds that knowing a child well is not the same as knowing what is medically best. Take a position, but show that you know it is contested — the question asks for your rationale, not for a verdict. It is also worth noting what the physician's realistic options actually are, since "allow" and "override" are not the only two: continued discussion, a second opinion, an ethics consultation and a time-limited trial all sit between them, and naming one shows you understand how these cases are handled in practice.

The middle question has four parts and they build. How should a Christian think about sickness and health; about medical intervention; what should Mike do; and how should he reason about trusting God while treating James in relation to beneficence and non-maleficence. Answer them in order, because the fourth depends on the first three. The most useful theological move is to reject the false alternative the case sets up: within a Christian worldview, medicine is not opposed to trusting God but is ordinarily how care is provided, so the choice is not between faith and treatment. Where a paper simply asserts that God can heal, the marker has no way to distinguish a considered position from a slogan. The stronger version does the harder work: it explains why suffering and healing are both intelligible within the worldview, and why that does not settle any particular treatment decision by itself. Use the course's own topic materials for this rather than reaching outside them, since the benchmark is assessed against the worldview as the course presents it.

Be careful with beneficence and non-maleficence, since the question names them explicitly. Both are principles about outcomes for James, and neither is a principle about Mike's beliefs. Applying them properly means asking what the delay costs the child in medical terms and whether the harm of the intervention is proportionate — which requires you to take the clinical facts of the case seriously rather than treating it as an abstract ethics problem. This is also where the topic 3 chart and questions you are told to use come in: your answers should be consistent with what you recorded there. If your thinking has moved since Topic 3, say so and say why; a documented change of position is a strength in an ethics paper and a silent contradiction is not. Note also that non-maleficence cuts both ways here: treating carries risks of its own, and a paper that treats it as though only inaction could cause harm has applied the principle in one direction only.

Question three is about the spiritual needs assessment and it should be practical rather than devotional. A structured tool gives the physician something to do rather than something to feel: FICA asks about faith, importance, community and how to address it in care, while HOPE asks about sources of hope, organised religion, personal practice and effects on care, and is usable with patients who have no religious affiliation at all. The specific yield in this case is identifiable — it surfaces the faith community whose expectations may be shaping Mike's decision, and identifies who he trusts, which is often the route to a resolution that argument alone will not reach. Remember the brief's other requirements: a strong thesis, support from the topic materials, and the rubric this benchmark is assessed against. Read the rubric before you start rather than after, because a benchmark assessment usually maps to a programmatic competency and the wording of that competency tells you what the marker is required to find.