Dr. Ben Witherington: What Should We Think about Suicide?

Very much worth your read and thoughtful reflection.

The recent case of Britanny Maynard and her move to Oregon in order to commit physician assisted (or at least physician plus drugs assisted) suicide, has reopened the debate about what we should think about suicide in general, and doctors willing to violate their Hippocratic oath to assist others in committing suicide. I am not here concerned with the debate in the larger culture, but rather would want to talk about whether Christians should, under any circumstances, be in favor of such a thing, perhaps as a lesser of two evils solution to a problem, as seems to have been suggested in a recent blog post on this very website, Patheos. I would like to list several major reasons why Christians should not be endorsing such a practice at all.

Firstly, the essential premise behind much of this whole discussion is flawed. It assumes ‘my life is my own and I have a right to choose how it ends’. This is frankly bad theology altogether. My life is not my own. As a Christian it belongs to God who gave me that life in the first place. I have my life as a sacred trust, not as a possession or a right. I am not free to do just anything with my life when my health is robust, nor do I have a right to do just anything with it when my health is not. To put it in general Pauline terms “my life is not my own, I have been bought with a price. I have been crucified with Christ, and it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me.” As I said, this is me as a Christian talking to other Christians. This logic applies to those who have signed on to follow the ethical teachings of Jesus, Paul and the other NT writers.

Read it all.