What is clear in my opinion is that the introduction of state assisted suicide is a decisive step on the road towards a properly post Christian civilisation and a world in which the goodness and value of human life is no longer taken as self-evident. The point that must be stressed is that debate over these matters is largely fruitless.
Christianity is the only answer to a culture of death
By Jamie Franklin Church of England Newspaper. March 28th
It seems fair to say that the majority of people in our civilisation have little to no idea how their ethical beliefs came into being. They have an axiomatic sense that certain things are right and wrong, but if pressed as to why they think this would have absolutely no idea what to say.
The philosopher Alisdair MacIntyre, in his great workAfter Virtue, compared the situation to an imaginary scenario in which a civilisational catastrophe has wiped away all structured and organisational knowledge of the physical sciences and yet traces and fragments of the disciplines remain. Individual truths about the sciences may survive among the remnants but the overall framework is lost. Our ethical situation is something like that: we know what we think (largely speaking) but we have no idea why we think it.
This is where the surprising bit comes in. When we consult the historical record, we can see without a shadow of a doubt that the ethical outlook of Western people derives from the Christian past.
Christianity gathered up the most sophisticated philosophical thought of Ancient Greece and the Scriptural revelation of Judaism and universalised it in a uniquely powerful religious synthesis. Indeed, Christianity was so powerful and so successful in its triumph that people in Christianised cultures eventually took for granted the beliefs that they held and began to believe that they were obviously true.
Again, when we consult the historical record, we can see that this is not so. To take one of many examples, in the Greco-Roman world into which Christianity was born, the practice of exposing infants was well-known and socially acceptable. Infants were routinely left to die at the sole behest of their fathers for a variety of reasons, chief among them that they were female, but also due to physical deformities, poverty, or religious superstition. The prohibition of exposure, abortion, and paedophilia derived largely from the early Christian Church and the taboo associated with these things endured for as long as it did because of Christianity.
Many other examples could be brought forth here.But the salient point is that it was not an accident that these attitudes developed. And nor was it simply a soft, pious inclination on the part of the early Christians.The ethical framework that developed as a result of Christianity was dependent upon theological and metaphysical beliefs. The root of belief brought forth the fruit of ethics.
Monotheism, Polytheism, Trinitarianism
What is the connection between theology and ethics? Some simple examples suffice to demonstrate this. For a start, Jewish and Christian monotheism stand in stark contrast to the pagan tribalism of the Ancient Near East and the Greco-Roman world. Polytheism, by its very nature, implies standards that are relative to particular gods and regions. In polytheism,there is no God Over All who can pass judgement on Molech, Ba’al, Jupiter, or Zeus, but all are authoritative in their own domain. Monotheism, on the other hand, implies that there is a single God to whom all are accountable and that what is right or wrong are inextricably linked with that God and to what he demands. There is no relativism but a single ethical standard that must be upheld.
The Jewish political philosopher Yoram Hazony makes the point that atheism and polytheism must end up at the same place ethically speaking because both reject the notion of the Most High God and therefore must cleave to relative standards of right and wrong. The point is not that atheists or polytheists are necessarily relativists but that relativism is the logical outworking of their theological positions and, in the long run, the inevitable destination.
We might also consider the Trinitarian notion of God that comes to us from the Christian religion. In Christianity, God is conceived not as a singular monad, existing alone in eternity, waiting to create a race of slaves or companions to satisfy his desire for company. Rather the Christian notion is that of a harmonious correspondence of unity and difference or ‘One God in Three Persons’, as the official creedal formula puts it.
The implications of the doctrine of the Trinity are quite extraordinary: it implies that God has no need of creation but that he is completely satisfied and infinitely joyful within his own being.
What then of the world and of the people within it? They are a pure expression of the delight and joy of God’s being. The Patristic Fathers of the early Church often used the imagine of a fountain so full of water that it cannot but overflow. Creation is,in this sense, delight, joy, love, and a pure gift from a God for whom it is completely needless.
This image of God and his relationship to creation is fundamentally different to the creation myths one finds in ancient pagan religions. One commonality amongst them is that the world is born out of violent conflict between warring gods and that the world is even created out of the corpse of the god who is slain in said conflict. This is the case in the Babylonian creation myth, Enuma Elish, in which the world is created by Marduk from the slain corpse of the god Tiamat. And a very similar idea is present in Norse, Aztec and Hindu mythology. In those stories, the corpses of the gods Ymir, Tlaltecuhtli, and Purusha respectively are repurposed as material to create the world.
The point of all of this is that the metaphysical, religious, and philosophical vision of a culture has a direct and necessary link to the ethical beliefs and practices of that culture. In the Western world we have tricked ourselves into believing that ethics are simply obvious to anyone who can think rationally. And yet nothing could be further from the truth.
Humanity
To bring this up to date, there is no easier way to make the point than to speak about our vision of humanity. To put it simply, Christianity universalised the Jewish idea that men and women are created by God in his own image. This implied that humanity in some sense shared in the sanctity of God, that there is a dignity and value to human life that must be respected and nurtured. Again, uniquely for the Greco-Roman world of the time, Christians placed a great emphasis upon care for the sick and the dying, women, the elderly, and children. The early Christian writer Tertullian reports the amazement of surrounding pagans who observed the love that Christians shared and their readiness to die for one another.
My view is that this religious and ethical consensus has largely held in the Western world since the time of the early Church but has begun to fragment significantly in the last sixty or so years. This has happened because people have rejected belief in the Christian religion. There are numerous ways of demonstrating this but chief among them must be the passing of the Abortion Act in 1967 and its implementation in 1968. Since that time approximately 10.8 million abortions have occurred in the UK.
The so-called ‘Assisted Dying’ legislation currently being debated in the Houses of Parliament is the correlative of the Abortion Act because it too is reflective of a post-Christian rejection of the sanctity of human life.
Regardless of the good intentions of some who support it (misguided though they are), there is no doubt whatsoever that this legislation, if passed, will result in the expansion of the euthanasia programme to encompass those suffering from less severe illnesses, depression, and economic hardship, and the elderly and children. Indeed, the mercy killing of children has already begun in nations such as Belgium, Canada, and the Netherlands. Indeed, in 2005, the latter became the first country since Nazi Germany to legalise the killing of children.
Where all this ends is not clear. But what is clear in my opinion is that the introduction of state assisted suicide is a decisive step on the road towards a properly post Christian civilisation and a world in which the goodness and value of human life is no longer taken as self-evident. The point that must be stressed is that debate over these matters is largely fruitless.
The only thing that can decisively shift Western society away from its love affair with death is a return to the Christian religion. We cannot have the fruit of Christianity without the root of Christian belief and practice. There must be a return or the consequences will unfold with ironclad inevitability.
Jamie Franklin is Vicar of Holy Trinity Winchester and the host of the Irreverend: Faith and Current Affairs podcast.
He is the author of The Great Return: Why Only A Restoration of Christianity Can Save Western Civilisation (Hodder Faith).
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