LCMS Convention Workbook St. Louis, Missouri — 1981, Page 406

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406

THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS

(c) When possible treatment involves grave burdens to oneself and to
others: and

(d) When there are no mgans left to relieve pain and no hope of recovery
remains.

The very listing of these considerations indicates the degree to which medi-
cal judgment is involved in the decision as to whether or not to employ heroic
measures in situations where no reasonable hope of benefit or of success
appears to exist, or where. in addition. excessive discomfort and or cost are
involved. The facts in a given case do not always present themselves in a
clear-cut fashion. If medical judgment indicates that a patient is irretrievably in
the process of dying. it is possible for a physician licitly to choose, for example.
not to treat new infections or emergencies. even those which are likely to
hasten the death process.

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Il. ETHICS IN THEOLOGICAL FOCUS

Having discussed in some detail the definition of important terms, it is now
necessary to turn to the major spiritual and moral considerations involved in
discussing the question of euthanasia. In order to get a proper perspective on
this vital matter which affects both faith and life, it will be helpful to examine it
on the basis of the Apastles’ Creed. In this formal staternent of faith we confess
our faith in God who, as Creator, Redeemer and Sanctifier, deals with life in its
totality as well as in its everlastingness. It would be difficult to imagine a more
comprehensive instrument of appraisal than this formulation of the Christian
faith as confessed and taught by countless church members down through the
ages.

1. Life Is the Creator's Gift

God created human beings to live and not to die. Death in any form is
inimical to what God originally had in mind for His creation. Death is the last
great enemy to be overcome by the power of the risen Lord (1 Cor. 15:26).
To speak of ‘death with dignity” or ‘merciful release,” therefore, consists of
engaging in unholy rhetoric. Death entails destruction, separation and loss.
None of these is part of the image in which God once created the human race
(Gen. 1:26). Dying, therefore, is not just another point in the cosmic process
or in the experience of living, as it is sometimes made out to be. Living is the
only proper response on the part of a being created by the God of life. Death is
the very negation of what God has given. Had it not been for man’s own
rebellion against the kind of intended relationship established by having been
fashioned in God's image. there would be no death. In that case even the
word “euthanasia” would never have occurred to anyone.

It is written of man in Gen. 2:7 that God breathed into him His very own
spirit to tum him into a living being. When death, therefore, is described only
in terms of the total stoppage of the circulation of blood and the cessation of
the animal and vital functions, or even as irreversible coma, that may not say
enough. For behind such a statement is a view of human life which identifies it
solely with that of the animal kingdom. This does not do justice to the biblical
revelation, which insists that people were not made to die like dogs in a ditch.
While the Scriptures depict the animals as also having {or being) nephesh
(soul), human beings are described as being unique in the sense that they are
endowed with ruach (spirit). Dying, therefore, is called giving up one's spirit,
as for example in John 19:30, where we read of Jesus’ death on the cross (cf.
also Eccl. 12:7).

The use of the criterion of “brain death” has contributed to a more
constructive discussion in depth of the subject at hand. This yardstick is based
on the death of the cortex, whose obliteration makes it virtually impossible to

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Il. ETHICS IN THEOLOGICAL FOCUS

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distinguish between a living patient and an unburied corpse. Such a person is
dead in the most elementary sense of no longer being able to respond within
the parameters established by the fact that he or she has been created in the
image of God.

Death by every definition represents a defeat. It runs counter to every
sustained expectation of each person as a living being. Having been made in
the image of that God who is Life itself, human beings, even in their fallen
estate, have within them a vague awareness that they are in this world not just
for the purpose of leaving it by one of ‘‘death’s thousand doors.”

The psalmist’s resistance to dying typifies the biblical view of death. He
expressed his thanks to God in these words: ‘‘Thou hast kept me alive, that I
should not go down to the pit” (Ps. 30:3b). To be sure, the apostle Paul freely
expressed the wish to depart and be with Christ as a status “‘far better” than
temnaining in the flesh (Phil. 1:23). At the same time, however, he realized that
it was more necessary for him to carry on here in his morta] body on account
of his converts to Christianity. At the end of his life, which had been full of
suffering of every kind, he was quite ready to acknowledge that the time of his
departure had come (2 Tim. 4:6). Yet he did so on the conviction that the
moment of his violent death had been established in the counsels of his God
and Lord. Unlike Seneca, the apostle gave no thought to taking his own life as
a way of nobly leaving the hardships of this present existence.

Death is an intensely personal experience. For man is not just ‘‘a brother to
the insensible clod,"’ to quote William Cullen Bryant Dying is nowhere
described in Scripture as gentile absorption into the Great All. At the same
time, death does not occur apart from considerations for the totality of all
things. There is a sense in which the individual's death is intricately woven into
the fabric of God’s permissive will for the whole of His created order. By
revelation the apostle Paul could hear the dark language of nature’s pathos as
it eagerly looked forward to the liberation of all creation from “‘the servitude of
corruption” (Rom. 8:21). John Milton was indebted to the apostle for this
insight, when he wrote:

Earth felt the wound, and Nature from her seat,

Sighing through all her works, gave signs of woe

That all was lost (Paradise Lost, IX, 780-782).
Hence the created world engages in that symphony of sound referred to by
the apostle as groaning together in travail (Rom. 8:22). Death and corruption
are alien powers that seem to triumph everywhere except for that destiny
which is associated with the resurrection of the body to eternal life on the part
of those who take God at His word.

It is within God’s purview alone to decide on the moment when the indi-
vidual is to share that life which lies beyond death in a world restored to a
splendor even greater than that of its pristine purity. Within the context of this
certain hope, mercy killing runs squarely against the grain of the will of a
gracious Creator, who allows an alien power to fell man by way of death for

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