What does the Bible say about euthanasia?

Question 12063.

Assisted dying is no longer a theoretical question in Britain. Parliament has debated it repeatedly, opinion has shifted, and a good many Christians find themselves uneasy without being able to say exactly why. This article is my attempt to give the why.

I want to write it carefully, because behind the policy debate there are people watching someone they love suffer, and abstract arguments are cold comfort in a hospice at three in the morning.

What assisted dying actually means

Definitions matter here because the debate is full of slippery language. Assisted dying usually refers to a doctor supplying the means for a patient to end their own life. Euthanasia refers to a doctor administering it directly. Both are distinct from withdrawing treatment that is no longer doing any good, and from giving pain relief that may shorten life as a side effect of controlling suffering.

That last distinction is the one most often missed. A Christian is not obliged to prolong dying by every available means. Allowing a person to die when treatment has become futile is not killing them, and refusing burdensome intervention is a legitimate decision that families make all the time.

So the question is narrower than it first appears. It is not whether we must fight death by every possible technology. It is whether a life may be deliberately ended, by request, on grounds of suffering.

Why Scripture speaks against it

The foundation is the image of God. Human life carries a weight that is not derived from its usefulness, its independence or its capacity for enjoyment. Genesis grounds the prohibition of murder precisely there, that whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in His own image, Genesis 9:6.

Then there is the consistent biblical conviction that life and death belong to God rather than to us. The LORD kills and brings to life, Hannah sings, 1 Samuel 2:6. Job, in the worst suffering recorded in Scripture and urged by his wife to curse God and die, does not take that route.

Scripture also has a settled view of suffering that our culture has lost entirely. It is never presented as good in itself, and it is never presented as meaningless. Paul speaks of affliction producing endurance, of the God of all comfort, of a Saviour who suffered. Assisted dying assumes that suffering has no purpose and therefore no answer but termination, and a Christian cannot accept that premise.

The strongest argument on the other side

I want to state it fairly, because the case for assisted dying is not made by wicked people. It is made by people who have watched someone die badly. They argue that compassion demands we relieve suffering that cannot be relieved otherwise, that autonomy over one’s own body is a basic dignity, and that forcing someone to endure agony against their will is itself a cruelty.

That argument has real force and I would not pretend otherwise. Anyone who has sat with a dying person in unrelieved pain understands the pull of it. My disagreement is not with the compassion but with the conclusion, and I hold it knowing what it costs the person in the bed.

Which is why the church’s answer cannot be a placard. If we oppose assisted dying, we take on an obligation to be present with the dying, to fund and support hospice care, and to make sure nobody in our congregations dies alone.

Dignity, and where our culture locates it

A great deal turns on what we mean by dying with dignity. The modern usage tends to locate dignity in control, in continence, in being spared indignity of the body. On that account, dignity is something illness takes away and only death can restore.

Scripture locates dignity somewhere else entirely. It is conferred at creation and it is not withdrawn by weakness. The person who can no longer feed themselves, who no longer recognises their children, who has to be washed by a stranger, has lost none of it, because it never rested on capacity in the first place. My answer on the image of God works through the foundation.

This is why Christians should be uneasy about the phrase itself. If dignity depends on independence, then every dependent person is living a diminished life, and that is a judgement that reaches far beyond the dying. It reaches the disabled, the demented and eventually anyone who is simply old. Assisted dying does not create that judgement, but it gives it legal form.

Paul writes that the parts of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, 1 Corinthians 12:22. He is speaking about the church, but the instinct is the same one, and it runs directly against the assumption that value tracks capability. Every argument for assisted dying that leans on dignity has to answer that.

The practical dangers

Every jurisdiction that has legalised this has widened it. Safeguards presented as strict have loosened within a decade, extending from the terminally ill to the chronically ill, then in some places to the mentally ill and to minors. That is not scaremongering, it is the documented record, and anyone who believes the limits on assisted dying will hold should look at what has happened elsewhere before saying so with confidence.

There is also the pressure that legality creates. Once dying early is an option, it becomes a question the frail must answer, and some will answer it out of a fear of being a burden. Elderly people are remarkably good at working out what is expected of them, and a right to die has a way of becoming a duty to die in a society under fiscal strain.

And there is what assisted dying does to medicine. A profession whose commitment has always been not to kill acquires a new function, and the trust between a vulnerable patient and a doctor changes in ways that are difficult to reverse.

Speaking to someone in the middle of it

If you are watching someone suffer, and the thought has crossed your mind that this should end, I am not going to condemn you for it. Watching helplessly is its own agony and the mind reaches for exits. Bring it to God honestly rather than pretending you never thought it.

What I would say is that good palliative care can do far more than most people realise, and that pain which appears unmanageable is frequently manageable with the right specialist involvement. Ask for a palliative care referral, ask again, and do not accept the first answer if it is inadequate. Hospice teams in this country are extraordinarily skilled and they are used to being called in far later than they should have been.

And do not underestimate what presence does. I have sat with many dying people, and the ones who fared best were rarely those with the least pain. They were the ones who were not alone. That is something a church can supply and a parliament cannot legislate for at any price.

If someone has already taken this route

Families carry a particular kind of grief when a death has been chosen, and they often carry it in silence because they fear the church’s judgement. Let me say plainly that the eternal destiny of a believer rests on the finished work of Jesus rather than on the manner of their death. My answer on where those who take their own lives go sets that out at greater length.

If that is your family, you need pastoral care rather than a position paper, and any church worth the name will give you the first long before it mentions the second. Grief of this kind tends to arrive tangled with guilt over conversations that were never had and words that were said badly, and it needs unpicking slowly with someone who will not flinch. Do not carry it alone, and do not let anyone hurry you through it.

So, now what?

Decide what you believe before it is personal, because nobody thinks clearly for the first time in a hospital corridor. Talk to your family about your own wishes, write them down, and make sure someone knows where the paper is and what you meant by it.

Support the hospice movement, which grew out of Christian conviction under Cicely Saunders and remains one of the finest expressions of it anywhere in the world. Visit the dying in your church, even when you do not know what to say, because turning up is most of it and silence at a bedside is not the failure we imagine it to be. And pray for those in Parliament handling this, whichever way they lean.

If our objection to assisted dying is to be credible, it has to be carried by people who are actually sitting at bedsides. Are we?

The LORD kills and brings to life; he brings down to Sheol and raises up.

1 Samuel 2:6, ESV