Advent is a time for the church to prepare to celebrate the gift of new life: Jesus, God made flesh, born of a virgin, laid in a manger. In a gruesome twist of timing, however, this Advent season has begun with euthanasia once more in the news.
At the end of November, British lawmakers approved the Terminally Ill Adults (End of Life) Bill to move forward, albeit by a relatively slim margin: 330 in favor, 275 against. Australia and some US states already have similar laws in place, while Canada’s MAID program (Medical Assistance in Dying) has become the country’s fifth leading cause of death. In Canada, as in the Netherlands, those who seek, select, or acquiesce to “assisted dying” need not be old, nor their illness terminal. Even young people with mental maladies have been killed this way.
These programs raise moral, theological, and political questions for believers, but many of them are quite easily answered: Christians oppose euthanasia.
The church’s moral teaching has always held that murder—defined as the intentional taking of innocent life—is intrinsically evil. It follows that actively intending the death of an elderly or sick human being and then deliberately bringing about that death through some positive action, such as the administration of drugs, is always and everywhere morally wrong.
This ethical argument is very similar to the one Christians make about abortion. We could modify the oft-quoted line from Dr. Seuss—“A person’s a person no matter how small”—by substituting old or ill for “small.” (Other substitutions also suggest themselves: smart, abled, sexed, or hued.) To be sure, there are relevant differences between active euthanasia and, for example, removing a brain-dead person from life support. There are none, however, between administering fatal drugs and offering or prescribing them: Both directly facilitate the intended death of a patient under a doctor’s medical care.
Christians are not alone in valuing life; many Jews, Muslims, and other people of goodwill also affirm the intrinsic goodness of human life. But there is a distinctly Christian conviction at work here, and it is bedrock to our faith: Every human being, from conception to death, is created by God, loved by him, and stands under his protection.
The claim that innocent human life is inviolable is not primarily a claim about us humans, then, but about our Creator. To murder (or torture or enslave, as the church father Gregory of Nyssa saw as early as the fourth century) is to trespass without authority, to assert rights where one has none. It is to unsay God’s “very good” spoken over a fellow creature, to reject and despise a man or woman whom the Lord has brought into being and for whom Christ died. Inviolability is the upshot of our creation in the divine image.
Unlike many topics in theology and ethics, this is not an issue on which the church has ever been ambiguous. There were no early church councils to debate the taking of innocent life. It didn’t take centuries of conflict to adjudicate. On the contrary, Christians were known from the start for their adamant rejection of pagan disrespect for those unwanted by their families or deemed socially useless—the unborn and newborn, disabled and elderly.
Neighbors noticed immediately: In refusing to classify any human being as worthless, Christians were strange. They didn’t expose their baby girls. They cared for the orphan and the widow. And they applied this principle across the board, not only to others but also to themselves, which meant rejecting suicide, too, as a kind of murder.
Which brings us back to euthanasia, where the dominant story in countries like Canada is not forcible killing but death at the patient’s own request. Our culture’s instinct is to say that this kind of suicide is not the same as murder, that “death with dignity” is the right of the autonomous self. While understandable, this instinct is wrong.
My life is no more my own to take than is the life of another. True—in any number of ways, my life is “mine.” But in one crucial sense—the most important sense—it does not belong to me. As the Heidelberg Catechism puts it, I am not my own, but belong, body and soul, to the Lord who loved me and gave himself for me (Gal. 2:20). In Paul’s words, I was bought with a price (1 Cor. 6:20), and I cannot repay it except with thanks, obedience, and reciprocated love.
For Christians, therefore, autonomy as our culture understands it is not a relevant variable in the moral equation of euthanasia. This remains true even when the life in question is painful or likely to be brief. We simply lack the authority to put anyone, including ourselves, “out of their misery”—a phrase we reserve for animals for a reason. This authority belongs to God alone. There are legal, cultural, and political reasons to resist the logic of euthanasia, but above all, Christians are called to persevere in hardship by uniting our suffering to the passion of Christ, who bore our sins on the tree, thereby leaving us an example, that we might follow in his steps (1 Pet. 2:21, 24).
In Christ and in the lives of all the poor and hurting to whom he ministered, we see that every human life, no matter its relative health or condition, is precious to the Lord. We honor his love by honoring all lives, precisely in their suffering.
To be sure, Christians want to ameliorate suffering. But if we know anything, we know that no policy, no discovery, no technology can conquer death. As theologian Stanley Hauerwas likes to say, there is no getting out of life alive. Choosing the hour and means of our death is one particularly seductive counterfeit defeat of death. But Christ alone is the victor over that “last enemy” (1 Cor. 15:26).
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If, however, the ethical question of euthanasia is clear within the church, it becomes more complicated when we turn to law and public policy. Christian votes and advocacy can influence laws governing medical practice, but we also live in a pluralistic, secular society in which our beliefs and practices are not the only or even the most dominant influence. Though our ethics may not prove persuasive to those who don’t share our faith, we should nevertheless fight to keep euthanasia from being legally permitted or socially approved. Why?
The two—laws and norms—are related. Even with “right-to-die” laws passing across the Western world, few would defend them through bald appeal to the valuelessness of incapacitated or aging lives. No one wants to say out loud that old or very sick people should get on with it and just die already. But that is the message of these laws.
Besides the outrage of tasking doctors with violating the Hippocratic oath—or, what’s worse, the Orwellian twist that describes killing patients as “helping” them by relieving their pain—the social implications are undeniable. If I am unwell and a doctor presents me with three options, one of which is my own termination, suddenly suicide becomes a real option in a way it probably wasn’t before.
This is one reason we as Christians are right to stand up for the vulnerable even if we fail to persuade the majority. That task will continue whether or not such laws pass where we live. The church rejects the Scandinavian vision of a world “cured” of children with Down syndrome. We equally reject a world “freed” of the aged, the hurting, or the lonely. We want these people to live.
We owe no one an apology for saying so, but we do owe those the world devalues our sustained, costly care. With medicalized suicide on the table, the vulnerable are bound to wonder, Would the world be better off without me? Am I a burden to my family, or perhaps to society? Would my sacrifice benefit a welfare system already stretched to the brink? After all, some victims of MAID have reportedly “chosen” it because they lacked the funds for housing or adequate treatment. (Christian approaches to medicine, insurance, and markets are relevant here. Let the reader understand.)
In a word, we serve the world best when we not only model lives that accept the fact of death—though not its finality—but also encourage others to live to the full until their time runs out. We do this via norms and laws, but above all we do it by serving and loving the hurting and vulnerable, by showing them, through word and deed, that their lives have value and are worth living to the end. A person’s a person no matter how old, no matter how ill, no matter how pained.
And if such persons are burdens, we must bear them and bear with them (Gal. 6:2, Eph. 4:2). As Christian ethicist Gilbert Meilaender put it in the title of a 2010 essay, “I want to burden my loves ones.”
The truth is, we are burdens, from the moment we are born. There’s no getting around it. There is no burden-free life. To seek to engineer one is to rid the world of people who burden. It isn’t ending suffering so much as ending people who suffer.
That’s not kind or beautiful, dignified or selfless. At Christmastime it’s aptly labeled Scroogian. It was, you’ll recall, that “squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner” Ebenezer Scrooge who, regarding the needy in London who’d rather die than go to the poorhouse, said: “If they would rather die … they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.”
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Humbug! The church knows better. The yoke of Christ’s law bids us to invite the world’s burdens into our midst and there find life, joy, and solidarity. To quote Hauerwas again, “in a hundred years, if Christians are identified as people who do not kill their children or the elderly, we will have done well.”
The onus here isn’t on those who die by legalized euthanasia. Even if they request this kind of death, they are victims of a system. The problem is a regime, downstream from an entire cultural complex. In other words, the onus for change is on the rest of us. The church must, by the Spirit’s power, be a community of care for the sick, the depressed, the lonely, the elderly. Laws are but a stopgap. What we need is a culture of life to confound the culture of death. We say yes to life tomorrow by saying no to death today.
Brad East is an associate professor of theology at Abilene Christian University. He is the author of four books, including The Church: A Guide to the People of God and Letters to a Future Saint.
