Carey & the English Tar Pit

It must be Anglicans for Helping People Kill Themselves week around the world. South African archbishop Desmond Tutu now favors assisted suicide, as I reported earlier in The suicide tar pit. English archbishop George Carey has done the same thing.

Keeping such killing illegal “undermin[es]  the principle of human concern which should lie at the heart of our society,” he wrote in the Daily Mail. He said he’d changed his mind because “The old philosophical certainties have collapsed in the face of the reality of needless suffering.”

“Today,” he said, “we face a central paradox. In strictly observing the sanctity of life, the Church could now actually be promoting anguish and pain, the very opposite of a Christian message of hope.”

The Christian hope is that Christ will be with us at every moment of our lives and in the worst suffering. Killing people to prevent them suffering further is not an act of Christian hope and preventing them from being killed is not the opposite of Christian hope. It would be difficult to find anything in the New Testament to justify defining our hope in Christ as: You die.

One understands Carey’s feelings when faced with great and permanent suffering. None of us want cavalierly to talk about suffering as if it were easy to endure. But on this point Carey is quite wrong, and using his immanentization of a Christian reality to justify something Christians can’t justify.