Living Well and Dying Faithfully: Christian Practices for End-of-Life Care. Edited by JOHN SWINTON and RICHARD PAYNE. Foreword by STANLEY HAUERWAS.

Abstract

Christians have a postmodern problem with death that is altogether more prosaic than the great mystery of the passion, death, and resurrection of our faith. It is that the personal autonomy of our age has spawned the notion that we should be allowed the consumerist choice of the timing and manner of our deaths through voluntary euthanasia, or ‘assisted dying’, as it is sometimes called. This has led notably to two kinds of response. On the one hand, we have the emergence of the Christian apologist for euthanasia, in the shape of the Reverend Professor Paul Badham of University of Wales, Lampeter, whose case is based on the imperative of compassion and a woefully inadequate reading of the Golden Rule, as extrapolated from Matt. 7:12. Meanwhile, Christian polemicists paint themselves into the other corner of theodicy, where they are forced by the pro-euthanasia lobby to justify human suffering and protracted, painful death in the context of atonement theology and the hermeneutics of the cross.