In our day, care for the elderly is an ethical issue that looms large for
families and for the church. The
‘marvels of modern medicine’ are keeping people alive considerably longer. Elderly diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, are
rising as well because people die later.
At the same time, in many countries, families are more disjointed than
ever due to the significantly higher number of divorces. Most countries have seen a steady decline in natural
population due to birth rates dropping. Also,
contemporary society is ‘on the move,’ and families are often split up because
children move far away or parents retire in far-away places. In the West, the culture of individualism
leads many parents to value not being a burden to their families in their old
age. Some countries have debated assisted
suicide for the elderly.
Medical care and elderly care have, over the years, increasingly become the responsibility of the state. Consequently, the state also has an interested in the subject of euthanasia. This is clearly the case in more socialist countries, but it is also true in capitalist countries where the costs for care are immense. Elderly care homes are often run as businesses for profit rather than by religious orders. Families and churches assume that people have taken out insurance and retirement plans and are prepared to face the challenges of age through their independent planning and the state’s provisions. In America, a couple’s life savings can easily be wiped out in a year or two paying medical bills and the cost of care, and they become dependent upon the state. Yet the strain on the health care system, the rising costs of health insurance, and the desperate situation of many elderly are significant problems in society. Given the burden placed on families and the poor quality of life, no wonder that the highest suicide rate in the population is among those 85 and older in the USA.
For our purposes, I will look at some texts in antiquity to appreciate the context and then turn to Scripture. Not all pertain to suicide, but they bear on the issue.
1. Ancient Near East
Laws in the Ancient Near East were passed that encouraged parental care. In the Ur-III (prior to 2100 BC) period, children supporting their parents were exempt from corveé, the annually required service, a labour tax, to the palace.[1] To family units of parents and children were also servants and slaves that made up a household. Within Israel, families made up clans and clans made up tribes, and tribes made up the nation. The more a society is arranged communally, the more those dependent on others due to physical, mental, or age limitations, the more such persons will find help, encouragement, purpose, and so forth. In some countries, one will find beggars on the streets, but one might notice that the beggars come from certain ethnic groups and not others that have strong family connectivity. The same principle might apply to destitute people contemplating suicide (and perhaps also an act of violence).
Ancient Near Eastern laws required parents to support their children, children their parents, and husbands to support their wives. Lipit-Ishtar Laws (from southern Mesopotamia after the collapse of Ur-III at the end of the 3rd millennium, BC): ‘With a ... decree(?) I made the father support his children, 1 made the child support his father. I made the father stand by his children, I made the child stand by his father’ (Prologue). In the Laws of Hammurabi (Babylonia, 1700s, BC) we find: ‘If a man marries a woman, and later la)bum-disease seizes her and he decides to marry another woman, he will not divorce his wife whom la)bum-disease seized; she shall reside in quarters he constructs and he shall continue to support her as long as she lives’ (Law 148).
Inheritance laws were tied to care of the elderly. Two letters from Old Babylonia order a son to provide rations for a mother (AbB 11, 139; AbB 12, 124).[2] Neglectful children could be disinherited. A 12th c. BC document in Egypt records a mother’s disinheritance of four sons because they abandoned her and gives everything to her other four sons.[3]
Daughters, usually only given a dowry, could inherit in the absence of sons (Codex Ur-Namma B2; cf. Numbers 36.6-9). In Susa, a father could disinherit his sons and give the inheritance to his daughter (MDP 23, 285)[4] or divide his estate between his sons and daughters (MDP 22, 16). A mother could disinherit a daughter, as in the legal case of MDP 22, 137:
Mah-ummi of her own free will and in full command of her faculties, anticipating her death, she broke the clod [legal record; her will] of Iluluti, her daughter and gave all her property in the city and in the country, a field irrigated by rain and by irrigation, a field requiring 80 liters of seed in the third district, to Iltišu, her (other) daughter (lines 1-12).
In
MDP 23, 285, the daughter given the inheritance must perform two duties: take
care of the father and feed him while he is alive and present kispum for his spirit when he is
dead. Kispum is the Akkadian word for
funerary ritual and is derived from the verb kaspum (to break bread).
This ritual is associated with offering food to the dead, and the food
basically consists of water and bread…. The dead needs this offering to be
happy and in peace….’[5]
In MDP 28, 405, a mother gives her daughter the house because she provided food for her during a famine. The concern over inheritance and elderly care also led some to adopt children. A celibate woman at the temple, a naditu, might adopt a child and exchange care in her old age for inheritance rights (e.g., CT 2, 47 records a trial about this).
In
the Codex Hammurabi, a law requires that a father had to prove ‘a great
offence’ (probably neglect of care) was committed on two occasions before being
permitted to disinherit his son/s (CH 168 and 169):
~ 168 If a man should decide to disinherit his son and declares to the judges, "1 will disinherit my son," the judges shall investigate his case and if the son is not guilty of a grave offense deserving the penalty of disinheritance, the father may not disinherit his son.
~ 169 If he should be guilty of a grave offense deserving the penalty of disinheritance by his father, they shall pardon him for his first one; if he should commit a grave offense a second time, the father may disinherit his son.
A widow must not be put out of her house, and she cannot sell it as it is the inheritance of her children (CH 171-172). Normally, a widow did not inherit from her husband but kept only her dowry and could return to her father’s house or remarry. The inheritance went to the sons.
In some wills, a man gives a slave to his widow to care for her after his death:
Sin-rabi gave a slave (and other property?) to (his wife) Nur…
As long as she lives,
she will benefit (from the slave); after her death, her 3 sons will
inherit/acquire (her property).
The son who does not take care of her, will have no share in
the house (i.e., her property).
In front of gods and of 6 witnesses (MDP 28, 402).[6]
From these examples, we see the concern for families to play their role in care for the elderly. We also see how the promise of inheritance was tied to family care provided by offspring, adopted persons, or slaves. As a woman’s dowry could be security in the case of a divorce, so the promise of an inheritance could be security in one’s old age. A culture and laws that encouraged the family unit’s care for the elderly removed one reason that elderly persons contemplate suicide—when they are needy and cannot care for themselves.
2. G
Aristophanes’
play, Clouds, has an old man trying
to convince his son to study philosophy.
The humourous play identifies an age-old problem the young often face
with aging parents when the youth says, ‘Ah me! What shall I do, my father
being crazed? Shall I bring him into court and convict him of lunacy, or shall
I give information of his madness to the coffin-makers?’ (Clouds 814). Diogenes
Laertius says that laws existed to protect parents from children who would
otherwise abandon them: ‘for instance, if any man
neglects to provide for his parents, he shall be disfranchised….’ (Lives
of Eminent Philosophers D.L. 1.2.55.[7] Later he says, ‘Honour
the gods, reverence parents’ (D.L. 1.2.60).
Aelian provides us with some surprising insight to cultures in which the elderly committed suicide or that put elderly people to death. He says,
There is a law at Ceos that those who
are extremely elderly invite each other as if going to a party or to a festival
with sacrifices, meet, put on garlands and drink hemlock. This they do when
they become aware that they are incapable of performing tasks useful to their
country, and that their judgement is by now rather feeble owing to the passing
of time
(Historical
Miscellanies III. 37).[8]
It was a custom in Sardinia that the children of aged parents beat them to death with clubs and buried them, in the belief that it was wrong for the excessively old to continue living, since the body, suffering through age, had many failings…. The Derbiccae [eastern Persia] kill those who are seventy years of age. They sacrifice the men and strangle the women (Historical Miscellanies IV.1).
We may even suppose, that it is out of compassion to us that she has ordained certain substances to be poisonous, in order that when we are weary of life, hunger, a mode of death the most foreign to the kind disposition of the earth4, might not consume us by a slow decay, that precipices might not lacerate our mangled bodies, that the unseemly punishment of the halter may not torture us, by stopping the breath of one who seeks his own destruction, or that we may not seek our death in the ocean, and become food for our graves, or that our bodies may not be gashed by steel. On this account it is that nature has produced a substance which is very easily taken, and by which life is extinguished, the body remaining undefiled and retaining all its blood, and only causing a degree of thirst. And when it is destroyed by this means, neither bird nor beast will touch the body, but he who has perished by his own hands is reserved for the earth (The Natural History 2.63).[10]
Pliny identifies diseases that most commonly lead people to commit suicide:
The general experience, however, of the present age has come
to the conclusion, that the most agonizing torments are those attendant upon
strangury, resulting from calculi in the bladder; next to them, those arising
from maladies of the stomach; and in the third place, those caused by pains and
affections of the head; for it is more generally in these cases, we find, and
not in others, that patients are tempted to commit suicide (The Natural History 25.7).
Pliny
the Younger recorded his loss of a friend, Corellius Rufus, who took his own
life due to immense and worsening pain over a long period from gout (Letters I.VIII, ‘To Calestrius
Tiro’). The focus of the letter falls on
friendship. Not even so close a friend
as Pliny dissuade Rufus from his resolve, so dire was Rufus’s predicament. Pliny writes, ‘I sadly fear, now that I am no
longer under his eye, I shall not keep so strict a guard over my conduct.’[11] The loss of a dear and true friend is
one’s own loss, the loss of friendship that makes one better.
The
same Pliny reports the weighing of whether or not to commit suicide by another
friend, Titus Aristo (I.XVI, ‘Letter to Catilius Severus’). Writing to Catilius Severus, Pliny says that
his friend managed his illness admirably while weighing his decision by
reason. This entailed calling his
friends to consult with the doctors to determine whether his sickness was
terminal. If it was difficult and long,
but not terminal, he would not choose suicide.
The doctors thought he would recover.
Also helpful were the tears and entreaties of his wife and daughter and
his friends’ affectionate intersession.
Systems
of thought that downplay physical circumstances, positive or negative, and
highlight reason can become too stern in rejecting the body’s needs and
desires, too ascetic, and deny any concern over death. In such a case, one might approve of suicide,
especially if the system includes hope of life after death. This was a challenge for Platonism and Neoplatonism. The latter was developed by Plotinus, who
suffered from such a disease that even his friends stayed away from him. While Plotinus argued that death was good, he
further argued that because positive and negative experiences of the body were
indifferent, they should not determine whether or not to commit suicide. Only if one’s reason was affected negatively
should one consider suicide. He says,
‘the finer [way, that when virtue raises the natural to what is still better]
is to set at naught what terrifies the common mind’ (Enneads I.4, ‘On Happiness’).[12] If the pain is too great, he is free to
decide what to do. In another tractate,
Plotinus says that, when the soul bound up with the body, it will be released,
but to act to release it (suicide) is to use violence and to act out of a
passion such as grief or anger, which is not acceptable for a man of reason (Enneads I.9, ‘The Reasoned Dismissal’).[13]
Plutarch
mentions a suicidal epidemic that took hold of many young women in Miletus (Mulierum Virtutes XI). This is believed to have happened in 277
BC. Many of them slipped away and hanged
themselves. Plutarch notes that the
cause was unknown, but he adds that they had ‘an earnest longing for death’.[14] The epidemic was stopped when someone
suggested public shaming of the deceased: ‘those maids who hanged themselves
should be carried naked through the market-place.’ Plutarch concludes that disgrace was a
greater deterrent than death.
Just how should Christians face the Biblical challenge to honor one’s parents and care for the elderly? This matter will need practical wisdom, but a family’s and church’s discussion of how to address it can begin with an awareness of what Scripture says on the issue of caring for one’s parents and the elderly. Scripture establishes an ethic of care for the elderly on the fifth of the Ten Commandments. Both Testaments are concerned to care for widows, as well as orphans and foreigners in Israel, all of whom are vulnerable.
3. Old Testament and Jewish Context[15]
The Jewish context includes several references from the Apocrypha, but most of the relevant passages are from Scripture. Jews were expected to honour their parents, obey them, not rob them, and care for needy widows.
a. Honouring Parents
Scripture expects people to honour their parents, and this command is one of the Ten Commandments.
Exodus 20:12 Honor
your father and your mother, so that your days may be long in the land that the
LORD your God is giving you.
Deuteronomy 5:16 Honor
your father and your mother, as the LORD your God commanded you, so that your
days may be long and that it may go well with you in the land that the LORD
your God is giving you.
Leviticus 19:3 You shall each revere your mother and
father....
As elsewhere in the Middle
East, however, there were examples of children who did not honour their
parents.
Proverbs 30:11 There are those who curse their fathers
and do not bless their mothers.
Proverbs 19:26 Those who do violence to their father
and chase away their mother are children who cause shame and bring reproach.
Apart from commanding children to honour their parents,
Sirach offers reasons for doing so:
Sirach 3:2-16 For the Lord honors a father above his
children, and he confirms a mother's right over her children. 3 Those who honor their father
atone for sins, 4 and those
who respect their mother are like those who lay up treasure. 5 Those who honor their father
will have joy in their own children, and when they pray they will be
heard. 6 Those who respect
their father will have long life, and those who honor their mother obey the
Lord; 7 they will serve their
parents as their masters. 8
Honor your father by word and deed, that his blessing may come upon you. 9 For a father's blessing
strengthens the houses of the children, but a mother's curse uproots their
foundations. 10 Do not
glorify yourself by dishonoring your father, for your father's dishonor is no
glory to you. 11 The glory of
one's father is one's own glory, and it is a disgrace for children not to
respect their mother. 12 My
child, help your father in his old age, and do not grieve him as long as he
lives; 13 even if his mind
fails, be patient with him; because you have all your faculties do not despise
him. 14 For kindness to a
father will not be forgotten, and will be credited to you against your
sins; 15 in the day of your
distress it will be remembered in your favor; like frost in fair weather, your
sins will melt away. 16
Whoever forsakes a father is like a blasphemer, and whoever angers a mother is
cursed by the Lord.
Sirach 7:27-28 With all your heart honor your father,
and do not forget the birth pangs of your mother. 28 Remember that it was of your
parents you were born; how can you repay what they have given to you?
Sirach 23:14 Remember your father and mother when
you sit among the great, or you may forget yourself in their presence, and
behave like a fool through bad habit; then you will wish that you had never
been born, and you will curse the day of your birth.
b. Children are to obey their parents and not scorn them:
Punishment of rebellious and ungrateful offspring:
Deuteronomy 21:18-21 If someone has a stubborn and
rebellious son who will not obey his father and mother, who does not heed them
when they discipline him, 19
then his father and his mother shall take hold of him and bring him out to the
elders of his town at the gate of that place.
20 They shall say to the elders of his town, "This son
of ours is stubborn and rebellious. He will not obey us. He is a glutton and a
drunkard." 21 Then all
the men of the town shall stone him to death. So you shall purge the evil from
your midst; and all Israel will hear, and be afraid.
Proverbs 23:22 Listen to your father who begot you,
and do not despise your mother when she is old.
Proverbs 23:24-25 The father of the righteous will
greatly rejoice; he who begets a wise son will be glad in him. 25 Let your father and mother be
glad; let her who bore you rejoice.
Proverbs 30:17 The eye that mocks a father and scorns
to obey a mother will be pecked out by the ravens of the valley and eaten by
the vultures.
c. Children must not rob their parents:
An offspring may be of the opinion that he or she has rights to the family fortune and simply take what he or she likes. This would disregard their actual dependency on the parents, which extends to recognising that the parents possess the assets of the family until the time of inheritance. Thus,
Proverbs 28:24 Anyone who robs father or mother and
says, "That is no crime," is partner to a thug.
d. Caring for needy widows (and orphans) is virtuous:
Tobit 1:8 A third tenth I would give to the orphans and widows and to the converts who had attached themselves to Israel. I would bring it and give it to them in the third year, and we would eat it according to the ordinance decreed concerning it in the law of Moses and according to the instructions of Deborah, the mother of my father Tobiel, for my father had died and left me an orphan.
Sirach 4:10 Be a father to orphans, and be like a husband to their mother; you will then be like a son of the Most High, and he will love you more than does your mother.
Philo, Laws 3:98-99 Again, let those persons meet with the same punishment who, though they do not compound drugs which are actually deadly, nevertheless administer such as long diseases are caused by; for death is often a lesser evil than diseases; and especially than such as extend over a long time and have no fortunate or favourable end. For the illnesses which arise from poisons are difficult to be cured, and are often completely incurable. 99 Moreover, in the case of men who have been exposed to machinations of this kind, it often happens that diseases of the mind ensue which are worse even than the afflictions of the body; for they are often attacked by delirium and insanity, and intolerable frenzy, by means of which the mind, the greatest blessing which God has bestowed upon mankind, is impaired in every possible manner, despairing of any safety or cure, and so is utterly removed from its seat, and expelled, as it were, leaving in the body only the inferior portion of the soul, namely, its irrational part, of which even beasts partake, since every person who is deprived of reason, which is the better part of the soul, is changed into the nature of a beast, even though the characteristics of the human form remain.
Philo, Laws 3:205 And the law has taken such exceeding care
that no one shall ever be the cause of death to another, that it does not look
upon those who have even touched a dead body, which has met with a natural
death, as pure and clean, until they have washed and purified themselves with
sprinklings and ablutions; and even after they are perfectly clean it does not
permit them to go into the temple within seven days, enjoining them to use purifying
ceremonies on the third and seventh day.
Philo
reasons that people facing the choice of evil deeds or suicide should choose
the latter. In this quotation, he is
speaking about starving people killing and eating other people:
‘And it appears to me that some lawgivers, having started
from this point, have also promulgated the law about condemned women, which
commands that pregnant women, if they have committed any offence worthy of
death, shall nevertheless not be executed until they have brought forth, in
order that the creature in their womb may not be slain with them when they are
put to death’ (Virtue 139).
Philo, Laws 3:98 Again, let those persons meet with the same
punishment who, though they do not compound drugs which are actually deadly, nevertheless
administer such as long diseases are caused by; for death is often a lesser
evil than diseases; and especially than such as extend over a long time and
have no fortunate or favourable end. For the illnesses which arise from poisons
are difficult to be cured, and are often completely incurable. 99 Moreover, in
the case of men who have been exposed to machinations of this kind, it often
happens that diseases of the mind ensue which are worse even than the
afflictions of the body; for they are often attacked by delirium and insanity,
and intolerable frenzy, by means of which the mind, the greatest blessing which
God has bestowed upon mankind, is impaired in every possible manner, despairing
of any safety or cure, and so is utterly removed from its seat, and expelled,
as it were, leaving in the body only the inferior portion of the soul, namely,
its irrational part, of which even beasts partake, since every person who is
deprived of reason, which is the better part of the soul, is changed into the nature
of a beast, even though the characteristics of the human form remain.
Philo, Laws 3:205 And the law has taken such exceeding care
that no one shall ever be the cause of death to another, that it does not look
upon those who have even touched a dead body, which has met with a natural
death, as pure and clean, until they have washed and purified themselves with
sprinklings and ablutions; and even after they are perfectly clean it does not
permit them to go into the temple within seven days, enjoining them to use
purifying ceremonies on the third and seventh day.
Philo
reasons that people facing the choice of evil deeds or suicide should choose
the latter. In this quotation, he is
speaking about starving people killing and eating other people:
‘And it appears to me that some lawgivers, having started
from this point, have also promulgated the law about condemned women, which
commands that pregnant women, if they have committed any offence worthy of
death, shall nevertheless not be executed until they have brought forth, in
order that the creature in their womb may not be slain with them when they are
put to death’ (Virtue 139).
Philo, Rewards 136 Such evils, that which appears at first to be
the lightest of all misfortunes, namely, poverty, is naturally calculated to
produce, when it is the result of the vengeance of God; for even though cold,
and thirst, and want of food may be terrible, still they might at times be
objects worth being prayed for, if they only produced instantaneous death
without any delay. But when they last a long time and waste away both body and
soul, then they are calculated to reproduce the very greatest of the calamities
recorded by the tragic poets, which appear to me to be described in a spirit of
fabulous exaggeration.
1.
New Testament
Jesus’ controversy with religious authorities was largely about how the Law was used to limit the righteous life. Living with boundaries as to what one should not do did not produce an ethic from the heart, an ethic about what to do beyond limitations. One such controversy was over the use of the Law to avoid caring for one’s parents. By saying that some property or money was dedicated to God, one could continue to use it for one’s own purposes while refusing to use it for someone in need. Jesus called this trick out as hypocrisy, a breaking of the very Law they claimed to be observing. Jesus quotes the fifth commandment to challenge this practice:
Matthew 15:4-9 For God said, 'Honor your father and
your mother,' and, 'Whoever speaks evil of father or mother must surely
die.' 5 But you say that
whoever tells father or mother, 'Whatever support you might have had from me is
given to God,' then that person need not honor the father. 6 So, for the sake of your
tradition, you make void the word of God.
7 You hypocrites! Isaiah prophesied rightly about you when he
said: 8 'This people honors
me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; 9 in vain do they worship me,
teaching human precepts as doctrines.'"
(Also Mk. 7.9-13)
Jesus did not abrogate the Law; He affirmed it (Matthew 5.17-20), as we see in this exchange with someone about obeying the laws of Moses. The man asks which laws he needed to keep, and Jesus quotes several of the ten commandments, as well as Leviticus 19.18:
Matthew 19:18-19 He said to him, "Which ones
[should I keep]?" And Jesus said, "You shall not murder; You shall
not commit adultery; You shall not steal; You shall not bear false
witness; 19 Honor your father
and mother; also, You shall love your neighbor as yourself." (Also Mk.
10.18-19; Lk. 18.20)
Paul also upheld the fifth commandment:
Ephesians 6:2-3 "Honor your father and
mother"-- this is the first commandment with a promise: 3 "so that it may be well
with you and you may live long on the earth." (Cf. 1 Timothy 1:9; Romans 13.9).
Consistent with concern to care for widows in the Old Testament, Paul set up an order of widows in the churches that the church might care for those without families to help them (1 Timothy 5.3-16). If the Church is more than a faith community and is also a familial community, relationships will be in place to care for the vulnerable and needy, and this would remove one of the reasons that people consider suicide.
For Paul, autarkes is coopted as a Christian virtue. He says,
Philippians 4:11 Not that I am speaking of being in need, for I have
learned in whatever situation I am to be content [autarkēs].
However, it is a radically different virtue from Stoicism in the Christian worldview. For this Christian apostle, the virtue of self-sufficiency derives from empowerment by and reliance upon God: "I am able to do all things through the one who empowers me" (Phl. 4.13). It is not ‘self-sufficiency’ but ‘God-sufficiency’. Moreover, while it is an individual’s independence from others, it is part of a strongly communitarian ethic in which ‘love’ is the first virtue. Paul’s mention of his autarkēs to the Philippian church is in the context of writing with thanks for their help.
Whereas autarkes could and did lead some Stoics to suicide, it meant trust in God even to the point of martyrdom for Christians.
Through this example one sees something of the connection between the narrative which one tells about life and the meaning of the virtues by which one lives. Examples might be multiplied.
Indeed, suicide poses some significant contradictions to Christian ethics. As with the Stoic virtue, autarkes, is intensely individualistic. But the Christian worldview is, or should be, intensely communitarian. As Stanley Hauerwas says, ‘The church does not have a social ethic but is a social ethic...insofar as it is a community that can clearly be distinguished from the world. The world is not a community and has no such story, since it is based on the assumption that human beings, not God, rule history.’[16]
The question of assisted suicide was brought into greater public discussion in South Africa with a letter to the Washington Post on 6 October 2016 by a one-time champion of the fight against Apartheid, the former Archbishop of the Anglican Church of Southern Africa, Desmond Tutu.[17] Tutu himself phrases the issue in terms of ‘dignity’—living with dignity and dying with dignity. I cannot help but think that there is more to his reasoning, whether conscious or not. Fighting for liberation from Apartheid can be combined with a liberation ethic for other topics. Abortion has often been promoted as a matter of women’s liberation, homosexuality as a matter of sexual liberation, and assisted suicide as a matter of a person’s freedom to take his or her own life. The secular West (including South Africa) is barely able to frame a moral argument that does not begin and end with freedom. Indeed, ‘dignity’ is a version of Stoic autarkes.
Be that as it may, the occasion of Tutu’s letter allows for some reflection on the matter of assisted suicide. One should note that the situation that leads one to consider taking his or her own life is made in a desperate situation. Tutu limits his comments to terminally ill people and people in great pain. Both situations are difficult for others not terminally ill or in great pain to speak into. Yet several things can be said about our ethics that need to be said about assisted suicide as well.
Conclusion
While St. Paul does not address the subject,[18] one might argue that his reasoning would have been consistent with the Pythagoreans, Socrates, and Plutarch—as one might expect from anyone working from a worldview in which God gave oversight and was involved with individual lives. On this, Jews, Christians, and many Greeks and Romans might agree. The Stoics understood the world deterministically, but they lacked the notion of a personal, divine being. Popular beliefs in the Graeco-Roman world and beyond included a disordered world where magic might cheat fate or sacrifices might persuade the gods. The Christian worldview, even more than that in Judaism, provided a context in which life’s struggles and pains might be addressed positively rather than with the despair of suicide. Christians held that there was one God, that He was in control of the world even though it had fallen into sin, that He had provided a sure salvation and therefore hope, and that He had established a people, the Church, that cared for one another as parts of a body care for one another. The primary virtues of Christian life were faith, love, and hope.
Paul
has several further lines of argument that might address the issue of suicide. First, each Christian had a divine ‘calling’:
‘Only let each person lead the life that the Lord has assigned to him, and to
which God has called him. This is my rule in all the churches’ (1 Corinthians
7.17). This applied even to a person in
the situation of enslavement.
Second,
Christians found peace and contentment even in the face of trials in life. Paul claims, “I have learned in whatever
situation I am to be content.” Such
contentment comes from God: “I can do all things through him who strengthens
me” (Philippians 4.13). The ‘all things’
in this claim is not about being able to do anything but being enabled by God
to face whatever one must in what one does: being brought low or abounding in
life, being hungry or in plenty, living in abundance or in need (4.12). Jesus, too, had once said to His disciples
that they should be at peace because, ‘In the world you will have
tribulation. But take heart; I have
overcome the world’ (John 16.33).
Third,
Christians face whatever life brings with the goal, as Paul states,
that Christ will be
honored in my body, whether by life or by death. For to me to live is Christ, and to die is
gain. 22 If I am to
live in the flesh, that means fruitful labor for me. Yet which I shall choose I
cannot tell. 23 I am
hard pressed between the two. My desire is to depart and be with Christ, for
that is far better. 24
But to remain in the flesh is more necessary on your account (Philippians
1.20b-24).
Fourth, suicide is often chosen by persons in despair and an inward isolation. They will more likely do so when others around them fail to provide the support they need, and this is even worse in a self-absorbed culture where people pursue their own ends rather than help those in need, where community breaks down, and where friendships are shallow (as with online relationships). The Christian moral culture, however, should be guided by Paul’s statement, “Let no one seek his own good, but the good of his neighbor” (1 Corinthians 10.24). In this, he echoes Jesus’ great commandment, to do to others as one wishes they would do to oneself (Matthew 7.12; Luke 6.31). Paul set up an order of widows in the churches (1 Timothy 5.3-16), organised a work-for-food programme (2 Thessalonians 3.10), cared for the poor (Galatians 2.10), raised funds for the poor elsewhere (in Jerusalem; 2 Corinthians 8-9), and encouraged churches to do good to everyone, beginning with the church (Galatians 6.10; 2 Thessalonians 3.13; Ephesians 2.10). Thus, the Christian community’s loving care for one another provided the context in which individuals should not, generally speaking, fall into an inward despair and contemplate suicide. Of course, even in such communities, other factors may overwhelm suffering individuals.
Fifth, and perhaps the most mentioned reason that Christians oppose suicide, is their belief in the the value of human life, God’s gift. Some societies do not value human life, or the life of certain groups or individuals. The Christian value for human life goes beyond what many affirm as the value of ‘dignity’, a value sometimes twisted into support of suicide and euthanasia. Christians distinguish between humans and animals because humans are created in the image of God (Genesis 1.26-28).[19] Furthermore, Christians affirm that our bodies are not our own as we have been bought with a price—the price of Jesus’ death for us—such that we are to glorify God in our bodies (1 Corinthians 6.20; 7.23). We might further say that the Christian view of the body is related to Christian Trinitarian theology. Paul says, reflecting thought about the Triune God:
Or do you not
know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have
from God? You are not your own, 20 for you were bought with a price. So glorify
God in your body (1 Corinthians 6.19-20).
[1] Steinkeller, ‘The Care of
the Elderly in Ur III Times : Some New Insights,’ (2018; forthcoming), p.
2. Cited in Hossein Badamchi, ‘The care
of the elderly in Susa: A study in the Akkadian documents from the Sukkalmah
Period,’ Akkadica 139 (2018), fasc.
2, pp. 159-178; available online at: https://www.academia.edu/38010491/The_care_of_the_elderly_in_Susa_A_study_in_the_Akkadian_documents_from_the_Sukkalmah_Period?email_work_card=view-paper (accessed 17 Oct., 2022).
[2] Badamchi, p. 161.
[3] Ibid.
[4] MDP refers to the 51 volumes of archaeological and epigraphic
material discovered at Susa and published in Mémoires
de la Délégation Perse (MDP).
[5] Ibid., pp. 163-164. Badamchi adds that a restless ghost is a dead
person without a name, who has no water poured out for him, and who had no kispum bread.
[6] Ibid., p. 169. MDP 28, 403 is a similar document.
[7] Diogenes Laertius, Lives
of Eminent Philosophers, trans. R.D. Hicks (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1972; orig. 1925).
[8] Aelian, Historical
Miscellanies, trans. Nigel G. Wilson (Loeb Classical Library 486;
Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1997).
[9] Valerius Maximus, Memorable
Doings and Sayings, Book II, 6, ed. and tr. D. R.
Shackleton Bailey. Cambridge and London: Loeb Classical Library, Harvard
University Press, 2000); retrieved from online at: https://ethicsofsuicide.lib.utah.edu/selections/valerius-maximus/ (accessed 29 December, 2024).
[10] Pliny the Elder, The Natural
History, trans. John Bostock, M.D., F.R.S.
H.T. Riley, Esq., B.A. (London: Taylor and Francis, Red Lion Court, Fleet
Street, 1855).
[11] Gaius Plinius Caecilius Secundus, Letters of Pliny, trans. William Melmouth, rev. F. C. T. Bosanquet
(Project Gutenberg); online: https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/2811/pg2811-images.html#link2H_4_0009
(accessed 29 December, 2024).
[12] Plotinus, The Enneads, trans. Stephen MacKenna (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1954).
[13] Plotinus also disapproves of using drugs for suicide in this
tractate.
[14] Plutarch, Plutarch's
Morals, trans. by many and corrected and revised by William W. Goodwin
(Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1874).
[15] See further, Resource to explore: J.
L. Verbruggen, Filial Duties in the Ancient Near East (PhD
Diss.; Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University, 1997).
[16] Stanley Hauerwas, "The Gesture of a Truthful Story," in
his Christian Existence Today: Essays on
Church, World and Living in Between (Durham, NC: Labyrinth Press, 1988), p.
101.
[17] See: https://goo.gl/rFA1VS.
[18] We have one occurrence of suicide in
Scripture—when King Saul and his armor bearer committed suicide before being
captured and tortured by the enemy:
1 Samuel 31:3-5 The battle pressed hard against Saul, and the archers
found him, and he was badly wounded by the archers. 4 Then Saul said to his
armor-bearer, "Draw your sword, and thrust me through with it, lest these
uncircumcised come and thrust me through, and mistreat me." But his
armor-bearer would not, for he feared greatly. Therefore Saul took his own
sword and fell upon it. 5 And
when his armor-bearer saw that Saul was dead, he also fell upon his sword and
died with him.
No comment is made about the ethics of these suicides, and
it appears that they are chosen in the face of an even worse death.
[19] Nigel Biggar, Aiming to Kill: The Ethics of Suicide and Euthanasia (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2004).
Comments