The deadly message of the “death capsule”

Scripture offers the repeated warning that humans must remember their mortality. “Like men you shall die” God warns to rulers in Psalm 82. “Teach us to number our days,” Moses implores God in Psalm 90.

Some, such as the transhumanists of our time, announce their attempt to overcome death, flaunting these Biblical truths. Yet others in our society increasingly seek death out. The number of suicides in the United States has skyrocketed. Governments like Canada’s and some in Europe offer, even encourage, persons suffering illness or other pain to end it by ending their lives.

An organization in Switzerland had planned to start using a new “death capsule” to carry out suicides. Developed by Philip Nitschke, known as “Dr. Death,” persons would enter this compartment, push a button filling it with nitrogen gas, and then pass out before dying. Thankfully, Switzerland decided to forgo its use, for now.

Suicide presents both philosophical challenges and heart-rending stories. Philosophically, it pushes the limits of how we ground justice. So much of our society’s understanding of right builds from the concept of consent. To treat someone unjustly involves acting upon them contrary to their own wishes. Thus, the problem with death comes from a person not agreeing to it, thus the deadly system would kill against the person’s will.

At the same time, reducing justice to consent equates our view of right with the subjective desires of individuals. It denies the existence of objective good to which humans should conform both for the sake of right and their own ultimate benefit. Consent comes into conflict with a Christian perspective when someone wants to act contrary to God’s laws, whether natural or specially revealed.

Suicide displays the tension between viewpoints based on consent and those that conform to God’s law. The primary problem with killing is not that the killed did not agree. First, it comes from the destruction of God’s creation, which He called good. Second, it runs contrary to the creation mandate to be fruitful and to multiply, replacing that calling to create life with the ending of life. Third, killing is wrong in that it destroys one made in God’s image, a point made as early as Genesis 9:6 (and implied in God’s confrontation of Cain for slaying Abel). Thus, when God then declares in the Decalogue to not murder, it includes the murder of oneself.

Moreover, suicide assumes that we determine the meaning and purpose of our own lives. Yet just as God created us, so He ordained our purpose as found in loving Him and our neighbor. We see something resembling this view against killing in Alexander Hamilton’s early writing The Farmer Refuted. There, he argued that natural rights consist of means divinely bestowed on humans to fulfill their God-mandated purpose. Hamilton continued that God “gave existence to man, together with the means of preserving and beatifying that existence.” Such an argument, of course, condemns someone destroying someone else’s existence. But the logic also applies to those who destroy themselves. They, too, have sinfully thwarted God’s purposes in their creation.

William Blackstone, a deeply influential 18th-century English jurist, called suicide “self-murder.” He argued that the act is an affront to the political community, particularly the king, by denying the regime of one of its members. Yet he also grounded the legitimacy of condemning it and making suicide illegal as violating God’s will. He noted that “the law of England wisely and religiously considers, that no man hath a power to destroy life, but by commission from God, the author of it: and, as the suicide is guilty of … invading the prerogative of the Almighty, and rushing into his immediate presence uncalled for.” Again, these intellectual and legal ancestors rejected suicide as violating the objective law of God, regardless of the subjective desires of individuals.

Persons wishing to end their lives often have and do live great physical, mental, and spiritual suffering. Such suffering might involve chronic pain, permanent disability, the death of a loved one, and past or ongoing abuse. Some feel trapped by their pain with no seeming escape from perpetual hurting except by also escaping earthly existence. As we make the Scriptural and logical argument against suicide, we cannot dismiss or downplay the terrible conditions those seeking death face. We must be willing to listen long and listen fully.

But we must not meet these cries with sanitized death chambers or Canada’s medical assistance in dying (MAID) law. We must protect life by law even when people refuse to protect themselves. We must meet them with love that recognizes their pain while affirming their God-given lives. We must be there for them not just when they declare a desire to die but every moment. Most of all, we in the Church must meet them with Christ, the suffering servant who endured the death of the cross that all suffering might cease for His Bride. That present comfort and future hope we all must cling to in this life.