Beyond Moralism by Bishop John Shelby Spong

Author:Bishop John Shelby Spong [Spong, Bishop John Shelby]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-062-04797-7
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Australia
Published: 2000-07-15T14:00:00+00:00

Suicide

The Hebrews interpreted the sixth commandment as forbidding suicide. When suicide results from anger turned inward in an extreme expression of self-hatred and despair, it denies the holiness of life. Those who made their covenant with God did not consider the psychological dimension of this as we do, but they did understand that suicide is a fatal distortion of God’s will for that life. The murder of self was a crime, and so it has been regarded in Judeo-Christian America where people unsuccessful in their suicide attempts were subject to arrest in some states until 1961, when the law was repealed. Out of the same attitude ecclesiastical (canon) law formerly denied Christian burial to suicides.

Very few suicides are recorded in the Hebrew or Christian scriptures. Saul fell on his sword after the Philistines had killed his sons in battle at Mount Gilboa and after all was lost. Ahithophel, Absalom’s chief counsel, hanged himself when he lost face after his advice was rejected. The insurrectionist Zimri reigned as king of Israel for seven days and died in a fire he set in the palace when he was about to be overthrown. Judas hanged himself, according to the gospel of Matthew, after his betrayal of Jesus. These were overt cases of the conventional understanding of suicide. But there are others less obvious, less traditional.

The church has not always regarded all suicide as sin. In the early centuries of Christianity, with the church reeling under heavy per-secution, church leaders rewarded martyrs by encouraging the faithful not to recant. Tertullian, a second-century church father, wrote, “The blood of the martyrs is the seed of the church.” A doctrine developed that promised immediate entrance into heaven without any side trips through purgatory for all those who gave their lives for the church. The overly zealous provoked arrest that their souls might be assuredly redeemed. Religious extremists of other religions, then as now, have used the same promise of an eternal reward to achieve both political and religious ends. It was true of Japanese kamikaze pilots in World War II and of Buddhist monks in Vietnam, and it is true of Islamic terrorists in our day. It was a major force in the life of the early Christians. Yet that behavior is clearly suicidal.

A third motivation for suicide is a desire to bring about a greater good. In this category we might list Samson’s destruction of the temple, in which he was killed. Even Jesus could have avoided Jerusalem and a probable execution had he not been a man with a mission. History is filled with protestors who publicized their cause and tried to elicit support for the sake of justice by taking their own lives through fasting or provoking execution. Those whose causes we shared we called martyrs, witnesses to the good. But they were suicides nonetheless. Who among us is today ready to give a simplistic moral judgment on so complex a human activity?

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.