Assisted Suicide vs. the Incarnation

This posting from the issue of Liturgy dealing with “Death and the Liturgy” is by the issue’s Guest Editor, Lizette Larson-Miller, whose own contribution to the journal (excerpted here) explores the theological implications of physician-assisted dying.

Two documents, written roughly eighteen years apart, reflect a tremendous shift on euthanasia, or assisted suicide, in the reflections of one Christian church, the Anglican Church of Canada. The first document, Care in Dying, makes an argument for palliative care and against a society or a “human community” that would resort to supporting assisted suicide. . . 

 The second document [In Sure and Certain Hope], reflecting on the reality of the Supreme Court's 2015 decision to move to legal euthanasia (passed by Canada’s Parliament in June of 2016), is a “new resource for the Anglican Church of Canada that would provide updated perspectives in light of the new legal situation.”

 Like . . . Care in Dying, the 2016 document argues that expanding and supporting palliative care continues to be important and should be available to more people, particularly for the socially and economically disadvantaged. But In Sure and Certain Hope changes direction with regard to purpose and intent.

 The theological section is not only shorter (deliberately so as not to repeat all that was laid out in Care in Dying) but considerably weaker, arguing that no clear biblical teaching is relevant to the realities of the contemporary situation, that the classic theological argument against suicide (“life as gift of God”) is not to be assumed to be counter to physician-assisted suicide. . . and that the various historical arguments of suicide as sin do not encompass the current situation. Following that, the document turns to a rebuttal of the meaning of suffering offered in the 1998 document, before moving to pastoral and sociological issues surrounding assisted dying.

Larson-Miller raises here the issue that assisted suicide is problematic for Christians because it discounts arguments against identification of Christ with the baptized and through the on-going participation in the holy eucharist.

. . . . We have died to ourselves in baptism, our lives are not our own. We continue a baptismal journey into the heart of the Triune God throughout our lives, crystallized in sacramental participation in the body and blood of Christ, and practiced in the act of kenosis, emptying ourselves of whatever allows our own desires to overshadow the indwelling of God, so that with the Apostle Paul we can say, “The life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God, who loved me and gave himself for me” (Gal. 2:19b–20). Because we are quickened in baptism—made alive in Christ Jesus—that transformed and ever-transforming relationship means that we die in the Lord as Christ’s own, too.

 . . . . The focus of this essay on assisted suicide or physician-assisted dying is centered on the baptismal unity of the Christian with Christ and the Trinity, and with the corporate body of Christ the church in a manner that suggests if our life belongs to God, if we are Christed, our life is not ours to take. 

This is a theological approach not mentioned in the Canadian Anglican documents on physician-assisted dying, and an omission that seems particularly odd because of the emphasis in the Anglican Church of Canada and other Anglican member churches on baptismal ecclesiology.

The full essay is available in Liturgy 33, no. 1 available by personal subscription and through many libraries.

 

Lizette Larson-Miller, “Dying in the Lord: Theology, Pastoral Care, and Legislation in the Example of a Canadian Context,” Liturgy 33, no. 1 (2017): 34-40.