With the rush to force the legalisation of assisted suicide through Parliament without time for due deliberation, it seems timely to publish the text of a talk I gave a while ago for Cambridge Students for Life, and again at a church away day. It’s not intended as a full treatment of the questions around assisted dying, but it seeks to provide biblical grounding for the goodness and dignity of human life.
If you would like to take more time to think deeply about assisted suicide, from January to June 2025, the Pastors’ Academy Online Ethics Reading Group is going to read and discuss a variety of historic and contemporary texts on the ethics of suicide, assisted suicide, and dying well. (More details, including how to sign up, to follow soon.)
For more immediate consideration of the topic, two short books by Christian authors with medical expertise as well as theological insight are helpful:
Euan Goligher, How Should We Then Die? A Christian Response to Physician-Assisted Death (Lexham Press, 2024).
John Wyatt, Right to Die? Euthanasia, Assisted Suicide, and End of Life Care (IVP, 2015).
For an online article that carefully addresses the nature of assisted suicide and public deliberation about it, see Andrew Errington, ‘Against “Voluntary Assisted Dying”’.
*****
When you encounter another human being, what are you encountering? Is an encounter with another human being different from an encounter with an AI Chatbot? Is it different from an encounter with a mouse, or a goldfish, or your pet dog? Intuitively we think it probably is. But is there any solid ground for that belief? Perhaps it’s just a leap of faith, a free-floating intuition or hunch that might be wrong, a set of preferences that bear no relationship to what is real.
Or how about another set of questions: How do you know if someone’s life is worth living? Or if it’s no longer worth living? How should we as a society decide whose life has value? Can we know whether all human lives are equally valuable? Or are some lives less valuable than others? Are all human lives equally worth protecting and preserving? And if they aren’t, how can we know when someone’s life isn’t valuable enough to protect and preserve?
What value should we ascribe to the life of an unborn child? Does it make a difference if the parents don’t want that child? What about the life of someone who is old and frail? Or someone who is seriously ill? Does it make a difference if they don’t want to carry on living? If they feel they’re a burden to others? If they feel like is too painful and hard?
These are pressing questions, because it seems likely that in the lifetime of this parliament, there will be debates and votes on removing restrictions on abortion – so that all time-restrictions for abortions might be removed. And there will be a strong push for Parliament to introduce laws on ‘assisted dying’. It was interesting – and alarming – to see the goodness of assisted suicide suddenly talked about, in the first half of the year, in repeated stories in the news. There seems to be a concerted effort to shape public opinion in order to normalise and promoted the legalisation of medically assisted suicide.
More personally: what about you? Is your life worth living? What are you worth? What do you do when you reach the point when it feels like your own life is no longer worth living?
My aim in this talk is not to address directly questions of the beginning and end of life, such as abortion, or assisted suicide, or questions about intense suffering, or social and economic inequalities. I’m aiming to be more ambitious than that. I want to lay a deep foundation to help us think about those questions. I want to ask the question, ‘When it comes to the dignity and value of human life, what is reality? What is really real? And how does that provide solid ground to believe that all human life is unimaginably precious, and every human life has indescribable dignity.
I’m going to try to make a very simple point, although my argument is going to unfold in several stages. The simple point is this: all human life is precious because it is the good gift of the good God. All human life – whoever the person is, whatever their age and stage of development (from conception through to old age), whatever their abilities and capacities, regardless of illness or weakness or frailty or suffering, regardless of how much or how little other people value them – all human life – the life of every individual human being – your life – has inestimable value because it is the very good gift of the very good God.
We live in a time when that idea is challenged and denied, and many people believe that some lives simply have less value than others: the lives of the unborn; those who are old and frail; people who are terminally ill; those who are dying. Legalised abortion is tragically endemic around the world, leading to something like 14 million children being murdered in the womb each year. Physician assisted suicide is legal in a number of Western nations: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Switzerland, and eleven US states.
Peter Singer, perhaps the most influential living ethicist, advocates an extreme position in his widely read introduction to practical ethics. Singer is at least commendable for relentlessly following the logic of prioritising human autonomy in relation to abortion. Notice that he’s not just speaking of children in the womb; he also applies his argument to those who have been born:
[I]t is…characteristics like rationality, autonomy, and self-consciousness that make a difference. Infants lack these characteristics. Killing them, therefore cannot be equated with killing normal human beings…No infant – disabled or not – has as strong a claim to life as beings capable of seeing themselves as distinct entities, existing over time.[1]
At the other end of life: consider Canada’s ‘Medical Assistance in Dying’ scheme, also known as MAID. (In passing, just notice how sinister that acronym is, because a maid is someone employed to provide a service and make your life easier by cleaning up your mess after you.) According to an article in the New Atlantis 10,064 people used MAID to die in 2021.[2]The article describes Canadians – driven by poverty and a lack of access to adequate health care, housing, and social services – who have turned to the country’s euthanasia system. In multiple cases, military veterans requesting help from Veterans Affairs Canada were asked by case workers if they would like to apply for medical assistance in dying. At least one of those veterans asked for PTSD treatment, another was simply asking for a ramp for her wheelchair. — were asked by case workers if they would like to apply for euthanasia. The article quotes one man called Les: ‘“Even at 65, I don’t want to die,” he says. He says it again and again. “I really don’t want to die. I just can’t afford to live.”’
A more recent article on assisted dying tells the story of a 56-year-old Canadian woman called Allison Ducluzeau.[3] She had received a cancer diagnosis and been told that chemotherapy was unlikely to be effective. And so she was offered medical assistance in dying. Instead, she went to the USA, and with the help of friends paid $200,000 for treatment, and is now in remission. Rather than cover the expense of treating patients, Canada’s healthcare – or should we now say deathcare? – system prefers to help them die.
Strikingly, the author of that article, Ian Birrell, states, ‘I have no qualms over the ethics of assisted dying as an atheist — but huge concerns over its realities. While he was Prime Minister, Rishi Sunak said something similar. He’s concerned about the practicalities and risks of introducing assisted dying. But he’s not opposed in principle. And he’s not alone. Politicians in all the major parties are increasingly supporting the introduction of assisted dying.
You may think that’s sad, but understandable and okay. Or you might be horrified by it and think it’s wrong. But why is it wrong? Why would it be wrong to protect the lives of some people, and willingly end the lives of others, so long as they consent to it?
In response, I want to offer a Christian theological grounding for belief in the sheer goodness of human life, and extraordinary dignity of all human beings.
The Bible begins with the goodness of creation. ‘God saw that the light was good’ (Gen 1:4). And so it goes on throughout the chapter. Six times we’re told that God sees what he has made and says it is good. Until, on the sixth day of creation, God creates man in his own image, male and female, and blesses them to be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth. At which point, he looks at all his work, and proclaims that it is very good (Gen 1:31). God says the existence of human life is very good, and he wants more of it! Much more. It is a great blessing to see the world filled with people.
But let’s press pause. Because we won’t understand why human life is so good if we don’t understand what God is like. The repeated ‘good’ of Genesis 1 doesn’t just teach us about creation. First of all it teaches us about God. The doctrine of creation does not begin with creation; it begins with the Creator. The reason creation is good is because the Creator himself is good.
1. The Good God
In Mark 10, Jesus is approached by a man with a question, who addresses Jesus as ‘Good teacher’ (Mk 10:17). Jesus’ response is startling: ‘Why do you call me good? No one is good except God alone’. (Jesus isn’t here denying that he is good. Rather he’s making a subtle claim to deity – it’s right to call him good, and given that only God is good, what does that tell us about the Lord Jesus?) But it’s a startling thing to set his words alongside the opening chapter of Genesis. In part, of course, Jesus is saying that because we are sinners, no human person is morally good. But there is more to it than that.
God is good in a way that no one and nothing in creation could ever be good. To call God good is not to put him alongside good things in creation and to say that he is just the biggest and best good in a series of goods. There’s no sliding scale of goodness, with God at one end, and everything else distributed at different points on the scale. God and creatures don’t exist on the same scale at all. There’s not this thing called ‘The Good’ that God has the biggest share in, the biggest slice of the goodness pie.
Compared to God, nothing and no one is good. God alone is not only good, he is goodness. The one true God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit is good in and of himself. He is good by his own goodness, not by a good imparted from somewhere else. He is a boundless ocean of goodness. And he is therefore the infinite absolute standard and source of all goodness.
Compared to this infinite ocean of goodness, the good of things in this creation, the good of the entirety of creation, is less than a drop in a bucket.
God’s goodness is his utter perfection. He is good with a simple goodness – meaning that he is not a lego-block God, made up of lots of different finite good things all added together. He just is goodness. He is therefore good with an infinite goodness – an infinite ocean of goodness and light.
God is good with an eternal goodness, without beginning, without end, without succession. His goodness is not parcelled out bit by bit over successive moments of time. He is always good – and so at every moment in history he relates to his creation, he relates to us, with infinite goodness. God is therefore good with immutable goodness – he is unchanging and unchangeable goodness. He cannot be a better God than he is, and he will never be a worse one.
God is good with holy goodness – high, exalted, spotless, morally pure. He is good with a noble goodness – full of dignity, worthy of all worship. He is good with wise goodness – he knows and approves all that is good and only what is good.
He is good with a gracious goodness, a righteous goodness, a loving goodness, a merciful goodness. And so he is good with a desirable goodness. Nothing could be lovelier, more pleasing, or more delightful than our God. ‘Oh, taste and see that the Lord is good!’ (Ps. 34:8).
So, God is good in himself with an absolute and inexhaustible goodness. But precisely because he is good, in the words of John Webster, God’s life is not ‘self-enclosed or self-revolving’.[4] God is not locked up in his own goodness. Because he is good, God is gracious. ‘You are good and you do good’ (Ps. 119:68). And the first of those good works is the work of creation.
2. The Good God’s Good Creation
From the infinite and unchanging stores of his own goodness, God ‘distributes his goodness bit by bit to everything he makes’[5] Rocks and rivers, bluebells and beech trees, dandelions and dragonflies, fields and forests, kestrels and kingfishers, lions and lemurs. In the words of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, ‘The world is charged with the grandeur of God’.
And so, in Genesis 1, we hear the repeated drumbeat: ‘it was good…it was good…it was good…it was good…it was good…it was good…’
Each thing in creation is good with its own, particular, distinctive tiny little share in the ocean of goodness that is God himself. But all the beauties of creation, in their differing degrees, are just traces of the goodness of God. Only one creature surpasses all the others and reveals to us the image of God (Gen. 1:27). So when God creates humans, male and female, the drumbeat changes: ‘God saw all that he had made, and behold it was very good’.
I live near Salisbury Cathedral, which is a magnificent example of thirteenth century early gothic architecture. As you stand in the nave, you can look up and be overwhelmed by the majesty of the building. But at the west end of the cathedral, in the centre of the nave, is a beautiful modern font. The still surface of the water forms a perfect mirror. This means that as you stand by the font, you can look down the length of the cathedral and up to its roof, and see its grandeur. Or you can look down at the font and see the glory of the building reflected in the water. In a similar way, God made humans in his image to reflect his glory and goodness out into the world.
So, what is it you encounter when you meet another human being?
No matter how young or old, impressive or unimpressive, strong or weak, brilliant or dull that person is to our eyes, they are extraordinary, and have immeasurable dignity. In the words of John Webster, ‘God the creator gives life, and the gift of life includes the bestowal of inalienable and inviolable dignity’.[6] ‘Inalienable’ means that it cannot ultimately be lost, no matter how degraded and diminished someone might seem. ‘Inviolable’ means that no one can take it away. And therefore, King David sings for joy: ‘God has crowned us with glory and honour’ (Ps 8:5) – ‘Creation is exaltation’.[7]
As humans we are kings and queens in creation; we have exceptional dignity because we have been dignified by God. He created us to be mirrors reflecting the extraordinary glory and goodness of the infinitely good and glorious God himself (cf. Ps. 8:1, 9).
But this means that human dignity, and a right understanding of the sheer goodness of every human life, is only found in relation to God. Our glory and dignity is real, but it is not our own possession. It is a gift that is received from God, and seen only in relation to God.
Of course, this is not how the post-Christian societies of the West see things. In 1785, at the beginning of the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant wrote that, ‘autonomy is…the ground of the dignity of human nature and of every rational nature’.[8]
So for Kant, and for Western societies in his wake, the dignity of each individual human is found in independence, in being your own ruler and lawmaker, with no one telling you what to believe or how to behave. Dignity means I must be free to be myself, free to decide for myself how to live (which logically must mean free to decide how and when to die), free to craft for myself a life (and a death) in my own way.
You can see those assumptions all over the place in our society when people talk about freedom, dignity, morality, living the good life. But do they reflect reality?
Think about what happens to human dignity when you remove God from the picture. Imagine the font in Salisbury Cathedral, but without the cathedral. Imagine it standing not in a gothic nave with its pillars and windows and roof. Imagine instead the font standing in a blank, dark space, with nothing other than itself. As you look across the font now, what would you see? Just the shape of the font and a shallow pool of water. All the grandeur has gone.
Why do we not see the dignity and glory of other human beings? Why are we not constantly awed and overwhelmed by the beauty and goodness of the weakest and least impressive life? It’s because we do not see the majesty and glory of God. God scares us, or bores us; he has become at best light and inconsequential to us. And therefore humans also shrivel and shrink before our eyes. When we get rid of God, we don’t only get rid of God. We also get rid of the uniqueness and dignity of humans, made in his image.
John Webster describes it powerfully:
‘[God] is the ground of creatures; without him, all is surface, and apart from him appeals to dignity can scarcely be more than cries of alarm, or prohibitions, or commands which lack final authority to compel action. Apart from God, dignity is precarious, hovering in an order of obligation untethered to an order of being.’[9]
If life is about autonomy and self-fulfilment, think what happens if someone gets in the way of living the life I want to live. If someone hurts me deeply. If an unwanted baby threatens to upend a couple’s life. If someone gets old and ill and and confused and weak, or feels they have become a burden on others. If someone no longer feels they have any real quality of life. If instead of a life of happiness and fulfilment, I find my life to be filled with darkness and trauma, or failure and despair. What happens if I just feel worthless?
But we are good creatures of the good God, made in his image to reflect his likeness, deeply loved by him. Therefore, even at our lowest ebb, our lives and the lives of every person has unimaginable dignity and value – a dignity we cannot ascribeto others, but which we are called upon to recognise, because it has been given by God.
However, not only are we creatures; we are sinners. And, as sinners who reject God and seek life without him, we do erode our dignity, because to reject our relation to God the creator and sustainer of life, is really to attempt our own unmaking. We can go further – even if we want to value the lives of others, if we care about modern day slavery, or the grinding poverty and hunger that so many endure, or victims of abuse, or care of the elderly, or the lives of unborn children – if we cut the God out of the picture, there is no solid ground for our concerns. All that is lift are cries of alarm, or prohibitions, or commands that lack any real authority, an order of desire and obligation untethered to an order of being.
Yet, in the face of our sinful attempts to reject our maker and unmake ourselves, the good God remained good. And continued to do good.
3. The Good God’s Good Appearing
‘But when the goodness and loving kindness of God appeared, he saved us…’ (Titus 3:4-5). There is so much to say; we only have time for two of them.
(a) He Took our Flesh.
The Word became flesh (Jn 1:14). He took to himself a human nature – a human body with a rational soul. He came into our world, small and weak like us. Small and weak like the smallest and weakest among us, an embryo in his mother’s womb. From being Lord, he was made a servant. Though he was rich, he became poor. Although he existed eternally in the form of God, he didn’t use that for his own advantage, but emptied himself and took the form of a servant. He was a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief. And all of these things, he did freely – readily and willingly – for us.[10]
He lived a very ordinary human life in an unimportant family in a small community. Even as he filled heaven and earth as God, as a man he took on profound weakness limitations. ‘He grew up before [God] like a young plant, and like a root out of dry ground; he had no form or majesty that we should look at him, and no beauty that we should desire him’ (Isa 53:3). There was nothing eye-catching about him, nothing obviously extraordinary or desirable.
In becoming small and weak, without form, without majesty, with no beauty that we should desire him, God’s Son further dignified our human nature, and showed the incredible dignity of a small, unattractive, unnoticed, unvalued human life.
Do you feel small? Do you feel weak? Do you feel unattractive or unvalued or overlooked? Do you mourn and grieve and suffer? All that was also true of Jesus, God’s Son, our Saviour.
The full glory of being a human was not revealed in creation: when we were crowned with glory and honour. The full glory and dignity of human life—ordinary, unimpressive, overlooked, unvalued human life—was revealed in the fact that God created us so that he could become one of us.
(b) He Died our Death
He had no form or majesty that we should look at him,
and no beauty that we should desire him.
He was despised and rejected by men,
a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief;
and as one from whom men hide their faces
he was despised, and we esteemed him not.
Surely he has borne our griefs
and carried our sorrows;
yet we esteemed him stricken,
smitten by God, and afflicted.
But he was pierced for our transgressions;
he was crushed for our iniquities;
upon him was the chastisement that brought us peace,
and with his wounds we are healed. (Isa. 53:2b-5)
The Son of God took upon himself our debased condition and our degradation; our sorrows and our suffering; our wounds and our woes; and the punishment of our sin. As he suffered and died in agony and shame he showed the dignity of a suffering, beaten, broken human life.
In anguish he cried out and sweat blood for us in the Garden. He watched his friends abandon and betray him. In silence, he stood as his accusers lied and slandered him. He was jeered at, and spat on, and whipped until his flesh was raw, crowned with thorns, dressed in an imperial robe, blindfolded and beaten round the head.
And then they brought him out. And and as the eternal Son of God stood before him, so utterly degraded, Pilate announced the truth of our humanity that he could not have begun to understand: ‘Behold, the Man.’ (Jn 19:5). Not just ‘Behold, a man.’, but ‘Behold The Man’, the True Man – the true, glorious image of God, broken and bleeding as he willingly laid down his life for our salvation. From the darkness and weakness of the womb, to the darkness and stillness of the tomb, and then on to eternal light and life on Easter Morning, the Lord Jesus Christ – the only begotten Son of God, the Goodness and Loving Kindness of God appearing for our salvation – reveals to us the dignity of even the most degraded human life, and the inconceivable value that our God and Father sets on lost and helpless human lives.
Conclusion
Human dignity – the goodness and value of every human life – is a dignity that is given by God alone. It is therefore a dignity that can only be grasped when we see ourselves in relation to the good God of life. Nevertheless, even if we are blind to it, because it is given by God, the dignity of human life remains.
Human dignity, and the dignity of any individual person, does not depend on social affirmation. It doesn’t require society to give dignity to people. Because God has already done that. We have no right to say some people have more dignity or value than others. And whatever we say about someone, it can’t change the reality of how good and valuable they are, and their life is. Human dignity is beyond manipulation.
You and I do not get to decide which human lives have dignity and value. Ethicists do not get to decide. The House of Commons does not get to decide. Doctors do not get to decide. Parents do not get to decide. Children, or spouses, or caregivers do not get to decide. I do not get to decide for myself about myself.
Therefore, things like abortion, and suicide and medically assisted suicide are very great evils.
These things are often presented in positive terms. Abortion is described as healthcare, based on a woman’s right to choose. Physician assisted suicide is described as dignity in dying. But the positive language cannot mask the truth, which is that they are profoundly wicked acts, because they kill human beings whom God has given life. He alone has the right to decide when and how human life ends.
These acts destroy beautiful creatures with unimaginable God-given dignity, creatures who are very good because they have been made in the image of the good God.
This reveals a chilling truth about our society, and its culture of death. As I encounter the extraordinary goodness and dignity and beauty of another human being, if I do not recognise and ascribe dignity to that person I reveal my moral emptiness and darkness. If a society does not lavish all the love and care and protection from harm that every human being deserves, it reveals its emptiness and darkness. We live in a society and culture that is profoundly ignorant, blind to reality, and deeply wicked and corrupt, hostile to God and therefore, deep down hostile to all that is good.
The question of the goodness of life, the dignity of life is not a matter of indifference. It’s not a matter of different possible and valid opinions that we should just tolerate in a secular pluralist inclusive society. Nor is it a matter of private religious conviction. I have certainly given Christian arguments. But I have done that because they’re ultimately the only arguments that can secure the dignity of every human life on solid foundations. And these are not private religious opinions. These are statements about reality – the reality we all inhabit as creatures who have our lives not from ourselves, but from God.
People in Britain today fear the idea that God could interfere in questions about the beginning and end of life – abortion, assisted suicide. They fear the idea that in the meantime, God could interfere in the laws that govern how we live in all kinds of ways. Oddly, sometimes Christians also fear that God’s law might interfere with our laws, because in their thinking the idol of autonomy has displaced the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
We live in the world forged in the wake of thinkers like Immanuel Kant. We have been taught to fear heteronomy – the law-giving rule of another. We believe deep in our bones, with Kant, that ‘autonomy is…the ground of the dignity of human nature’.
But that is a lie. The truth – reality – is this: to be human is to have our existence from a source of life. And that is not something dark or threatening. It is something happy and deeply liberating, because God is good. He is not a distant God, or a cruel God; he is the generous God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. The fact that we have our life and our dignity from Him means that although we might not even have existed, by his loving kindness we are, and we live.[11]
[1] Peter Singer, Practical Ethics (Cambridge University Press, 1983), 182.
[2] Alexander Raikin, ‘No Other Options’, The New Atlantis, Winter 2023.
[3] Ian Birrell, ‘I Was Offered Assisted Dying Over Cancer Treatment: In Canada a Broken Healthcare System is Killing Patients’, Unherd, 30 May 2024.
[4] John Webster, God without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology. Volume I: God and the Works of God (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 24.
[5] Petrus van Mastricht, Theoretical-Practical Theology, Volume 2: Faith in the Triune God, trans. Todd M. Rester (Reformation Heritage Books, 2019), 1.12.16.VII.
[6] John Webster, God without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology. Volume II: Virtue and Intellect (London: Bloomsbury T&T Clark, 2015), 35. (Hereafter, GWM II.)
[7] GWM II, 37.
[8] Immanuel Kant, Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals, translated with an introduction by Christopher Bennet, Joe Saunders and Robert Stern (OUP, 2019), §436.
[9] GWM II, 29.
[10] See Synopsis Purioris Theologiae / Synopsis of a Purer Theology. Latin Text and English Translation: Volume 2, Disputations 24-42, ed. Henk van den Belt; trans. Riemer A. Faber (Leiden: Brill, 2014), 25.14.
[11] The way this ending is phrased draws heavily on John Webster: ‘To be human is in every element of our being to be referred to a source of life; and that reference is not dark heteronomy but the deeply happy reality that, although we might not have been, by divine generosity we are and live.’ GWM II, 187.
