Is Suicide a Sin?

Is Suicide a Sin?

Is Suicide a sin? If so, does God forgive it? Those questions come to me fairly often. Most recently, a former student and friend committed suicide. He was a well-loved chaplain, a loving man, compassionate and caring. Everyone who knew him admired him. But he suffered major depression. His death made me think again about this question.

I do not think suicide is a sin, but if it is, it’s one God automatically forgives. Not because there is some law or mechanism inside God that makes him forgive but because GOD IS MERCIFUL.

People who commit suicide do so only because, in their own minds, they see no alternative. There is a sense in which, in the moment they decide on it, they are mentally and/or emotionally distraught. There is a sense in which “They know not what they do.”

IF suicide is a sin, as some churches teach, then I say God forgives it immediately. Through Jesus I see God as unconditionally merciful. That is probably where I break rank with many other evangelical Christians. I didn’t say “all” but “many.”

Suicide is not evil; it is a tragedy. Of course, subjectively, it feels like evil to many who suffer because of it. But objectively, it isn’t evil. It is sad.

I think most people have no idea what major depression feels like. If you have never suffered it, I know you can’t know what it feels like. It is a feeling of total despair and isolation, isolation because you know no one can know how you are feeling in it. People can sympathize and even empathize, but they can’t feel your feelings.

Except God. “God understands your heartache….” Only God really does. “God understands and cares.” “It matters to him about you.”

These sentiments were all a swirl in the evangelicalism I grew up in, but what I observed was that people who sang these lyrics and others like them suddenly changed when it came to major depression. It was interpreted as a spiritual failure. And when someone committed suicide, the assumption was that they were probably in hell because of it. Of course, their closest loved ones often did not think so, but quietly, behind their backs, people said so.

In some churches, people who committed suicide could not be buried in sacred ground, the church’s cemetery.

I look forward to seeing my former student and friend in heaven. We had serious disagreements about theology, but he was one of the kindest, most caring, compassionate man I ever met. He was the very living example of a Christian person even if his theology did not fit my idea of orthodoxy.

As much as I care about generous orthodoxy, the churches’ commitments to basic biblical and Christian doctrine, I do not think God decides who to admit to his heaven based on their beliefs. That is probably another area where I break rank with many, perhaps most, conservative evangelicals (and others).

So why does what a person believes matter? Because believing rightly honors God and the Christian faith. And I believe one belief that matters among those that matter most is that God is merciful as well as just. His justice is merciful justice. “Jesus paid it all.” Nobody needs to be in hell. If they are there, it is because they prefer to be there (C. S. Lewis, The Great Divorce).

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