@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Most people would at least give lip service to the idea that human life is sacred.
Indeed, after a generation of fighting over issues such as abortion, stem cells, and
euthanasia, “the sanctity of life” has become a slogan wielded by many Christians as
justification for their positions. But sometimes little thought goes into that
slogan. It is assumed that “everyone” knows what “sanctity of life” means.
1 Yet the concept is actually much more complex in its origins and its implications than is commonly understood. And it won’t be sufficient for Christians to continuemouthing a slogan without thinking through what it means and how it really affects our worldview.
We also need to come to grips with realities in our culture. Forty years of “culture wars”
have had their dark impact. Many who havecome to loathe what they understand as
conservative Christianity have also come to dismiss its rhetoric, especially “sanctity of
life.” Some completely reject the idea that human life is sacred; others say that they
accept some version of the concept but reject the way evangelicals, Catholics, or
conservative politicians have deployed it. So what is the sanctity of human life? Should
Christians of all stripes assert it and in what ways? Or should we abandon the term as
either politically motivated or too limited inits application? On the contrary, I believe
that the sanctity of human life is not simply a slogan, but an extraordinarily rich and
important Christian moral conviction that has far wider implications than most of us
realize. The belief that each and every human being has an inviolable dignity and
immeasurable worth is one of the most precious legacies of biblical faith to the
world. It profoundly elevates the way human beings view and treat one another. It
restrains the darkest impulses that course within our fallen nature. Every day for
millennia it has both saved lives and enriched their quality. Indeed, it provides
the bedrock upon which the moral and legal codes of our culture and much of the world
have been built.
For these reasons it is a concept worth protecting—both from those who
understand its meaning only vaguely and use it as a cheap political slogan, and from
those more deadly foes who know exactly what it means and therefore seek to reject it
at its roots. The only way we can truly understand and recapture its depth,
richness, and implications is to turn to Scripture itself.
THE OLD TESTAMENT AND HUMAN DIGNITY
Creation. Most declarations about the sanctity of life begin with this dramatic
passage from Genesis 1:
Then God said, ‘Let us make human beings in our image, in our likeness, so that they
may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all
the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’
So God created human beings in his own image, in the image of God he created them;
male and female he created them. (Gen 1:26-27).
2 What exactly is meant here? What is this
image and/or likeness of God (the imago
dei) in which humans are made? On first
glance, it seems that the image refers to
some kind of correspondence or
resemblance between humans and God, as
between parent and child.
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But the image may refer to our function as
well: the instruction that human beings are
to exercise dominion over the created
order. First God says “let us make human
beings in our image,” then immediately he
says that they shall have dominion. The
logical deduction is that what it means to be
made in God’s image is to exercise
dominion over the world and its creatures.
Biblical scholar Gerhard Von Rad explains
that this refers to our “status as lord in the
world.”
5 This might be seen as a kind of
transfer of divine sovereignty, much like the
model of a human king who delegates his
authority to chosen emissaries or
representatives.
Psalm 8 picks up these themes of royalty
and dominion in its own magnificent
reflection on the connection between God’s
grandeur and human worth: Many have
speculated that our resemblance to God
includes “godlike” intellectual, spiritual, and
moral capacities that set us apart from other
creatures.
When I consider your heavens,
the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars,
which you have set in place, what are mere mortals that you are mindful
of them, human beings that you care for them?
You have made them a little lower than
[God]
and crowned them with glory and honor.
You made them rulers over the works of
your hands;
you put everything under their feet. . . (Ps 8:3-6)
Here the psalmist expresses a simultaneous
human smallness and greatness. Looking up
to the heavens, humans appear dwarfed by
creation’s grandeur.
Looking down from a God’s-eye perspective,
humans are in fact kings, exercising a royal
dominion over the entirety of creation. This
elevation of human dignity is a staggering
contribution to human culture.6
Genesis 9 links the imago dei to the
significane of murder and its punishment.
It is only here that the imago dei concept is
used to tell this royal species what it may
not do:
Whoever sheds human blood,
by human beings shall their blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made humankind. (Gen 9:6)
The reference to bloodshed here is highly
significant. In the ancient Hebrew
anthropology, “the life of a creature is in the
blood” (Lev 17:11). This life-breath is what
animates a living, moving creature; it sets
apart the living from the dead. This “life” is
found in the blood itself. If you kill a human
being, you are spilling its life or soul into the
ground, from which it “cries out” to God
(Gen 4:10). This life coursing through us
comes from God and falls under divine
sovereignty. Thus those who shed a
human’s blood not only destroy one made
in the image of God, they usurp God’s
sovereignty. Human life is under God’s
control, not ours.
God’s Compassion, Care, and
Deliverance. The Old Testament teaches
that God not only creates human beings
with dignity, but he demonstrates that
dignity in his deep compassion for us. God’s
universal care for humans begins in Genesis
itself: he sets the man and woman in a
garden in which their physical and aesthetic
needs are met without great labor. And God
gives the man and the woman to each other,
that they might not be lonely (Gen 2:18-25). Though they distrust and disobey God—
which brings shame to the first couple and evokes God’s sorrowful wrath—immediately after the curses are pronounced in Genesis 3, “the LORD God made garments of skins for Adam and his wife, and clothed
them” (Gen 3:21). Naked people need to be clothed, not just for physical protection but because human beings are ashamed of their nakedness. Even a human race under judgment receives divine protection and care.
