It is a mistake to assume that the “sanctity of life” us a sufficient criterion for an appropriate concept of death. Appeals to the sanctity of life beg exactly the question at issue, namely, that you know what kind of life it is that should be treated as sacred. More troubling for me, however, is how the phrase “sanctity of life,” when separated from its theological context, became an ideological slogan for a narrow individualism antithetical to the Christian way of life. Put starkly, Christians are not fundamentally concerned about living. Rather, their concern is to die for the right thing. Appeals to the sanctity of life as an ideology make it appear that Christians are committed to the proposition that there is nothing in life worth dying for.
Stanley Hauerwas, Suffering Presence: Theological Reflections on Medicine, the Mentally Handicapped, and the Church, page 92
Considering the centrality of a “pro-life” ethos has become to many Christians today, this small passage from Suffering Presence really struck me when I read it. It did so because of the way this really strikes at some sacred cows on both sides of the left-right divide in American Christianity.
First, obviously so, this strikes hard at the borderline idolatrous way many conservative, evangelical and Catholic Christians have latched onto the “sanctity of life” as perhaps the driving force behind their political and social engagement as Christians in the world. Ever since the grounding of much of Catholic social thought in these terms in the post-Vatican II world of Pope John Paul II, the right to life has driven the priorities of millions of Christians, many them to a point that could charitably be called myopic at best.
On the other hand, in recent years, many of the Christian left have taken up sanctity of life rhetoric in a different form, in their certain insistence that this life is really all there really is, and thus, this life must take whatever form the bearer of life chooses at that exact moment, with no matter to tradition, morality, or any bounds of authority. Because the great hereafter is so unknown and uncertain (a claim I’m not denying at all), we must maximize this life for ourselves, right here and right now.
I like this passage because it makes the uniquely Christian claim that perhaps our culture is a little too enamored of life itself, at the expense of other priorities. Hauerwas reminds throughout the text that, for a Christian, life is not the Ultimate Concern of existence; rather, that Concern is God, and so our purpose becomes not to live life more fully, but to live life more concerned with what God demands of us.
In this upside down view, our faith – grounded in a Scripture that is too often held up as some users manual for how to live life well – is a way of being that teaches us what to die for, and how to do that dying well. The secret of life, in this way of thinking, is that we all die, inevitably, but we don’t all die equally. In the meantime, we should be living for things that might cost us our lives but, paradoxically, make life worth living well. We should be seeking some Good greater than that which can be contained in life. Because that is what we see in Christ: a God who does live, but who also dies, because death was ultimately less potent than the Love of God.
Justin DaMetz 