Polly Toynbee, who is a columnist at The Guardian, she says this religious people are entitled to their views, but not to impose their notion of the sanctity of life on others. Belief in the sanctity of life, aka the image of God, was religiously believed by Christians, and as legislation developed, it started to be enforced on cultures. And the Christians who invented charity in the way that we understand charity to be, the Christians who invented hospitals and hospice care and orphan care, they legislated their morality on society, and right at the heart of it was the image of God. Which means that there is a sanctity to every single human life. That sanctity is innate, it is inviolable, it is infinite. And it is a wonderful thing. It was right at the heart of the invention of charity, the way that we think of charities, the invention of orphan care, the way we now think of orphan care, the invention of hospitals, the way we now think of hospitals, the abolition of infanticides, the abolition of the gladiatorial games, the abolition of pederasty, child sexual abuse. Trace these legislative reforms back and you will find religious views. You will find a religious community, aka Christians, enforcing their belief in the sanctity of life, and it has been for the absolute transformation and flourishing of human society. I am a religious person and I want to impose the sanctity of life on all cultures. I want to impose that. What a monster I am. Hi, I'm Glenn from Speak Life. We like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. Will the UK join 10 US states, most of Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and six European countries in legalizing assisted suicide? This Friday, UK members of parliament will have a free vote to decide what to do about this bill. It allows for doctor-assisted suicide. The word suicide is not used in the legislation, but it is the patients themselves taking the medication that will end their own lives. It is suicide being offered as a therapeutic option, among other options. We are assured that it will be only optional for those who are terminally ill with six months left to live and who are in unremitting pain. But opponents of this legislation, and I am one of them, insist that this is a door that must not be opened. Now you'll have heard from my opening to the video, I am a Christian, we like to see all things through the lens of Jesus. And very often in this debate, religious views are put to one side and thought of as a niche interest for religious hobbyists. What I want to say to you in this video is that we are all hurling Bible verses at one another. We might have forgotten the references, but we are having a theological discussion about the nature of life and death and value and meaning, and all these things are irreducibly religious commitments. Let's just take the headline slogans of the disagreement. To those who are opposed to this legislation, the phrase the sanctity of life is incredibly important. To those who favor this legislation, the slogan the right to choose is very important. But both slogans are religious in nature. There is no scientific experiment that can prove the sanctity of life, and there is no scientific experiment that can prove the right to choose. These are theological presuppositions that we all have. And that might come as news to people like Polly Toynbee, who is a columnist at The Guardian. She says this many of the driving forces behind the well-financed anti-campaign are religious organizations. At the same time, Shabana Mahmoud, Wes Streeting, Gordon Brown, and many others say openly that religion has informed their views, but then add other reasons. Yet many hide their religious motivation, knowing that in this most secular society, the idea that only God can ordain births and deaths looks preposterous. What kind of God demands people suffer in agony to the very last? Religious people are entitled to their views, but not to impose their notion of the sanctity of life on others, as they have in previous unsuccessful right to die bills. I am a religious person and I want to impose the sanctity of life on all cultures. I want to impose that. What a monster I am. The sanctity of life is, of course, a secularized expression of a biblical truth that we are made in the image of God. Page one of the Bible, after a good God has made a good world, he places humanity in charge with incredible dignity. They are made male and female in the image of God, in his likeness, and they have dominion over the world. It's a shockingly humanistic belief to have right there on page one of the Bible. It's God's world and he puts man in charge, and he gives man this inviolable worth and dignity that male and female are king and queen of all creation. Compare this to other Mesopotamian creation myths, and you've got the Enuma Elish or the Atrahasis myth, and there you have wild, unpredictable, capricious, and not very nice gods making a chaotic world out of chaos, death, and killing. And through the sacrifice of a god, there is blood that is shed, and humanity is made in order to slave for the gods. Humanity is made from chaos and killing, and they are made to slave. In the Bible, humanity is made by a good God at the end of a patient, gracious process in which humanity are made not to slave for the gods, but to rule his creation on his behalf. To an ancient person that sounds wildly and unforgivably humanistic. Let's think of Celsus, who in the second century writes this The radical error in Jewish and Christian thinking is that it is anthropocentric, that is human-centered. They say that God made all things for man, but this is not at all evident, he goes on to say. In what way is humankind better than ants and bees? And pagan Celsus might say that, modern evolutionary biologists might say that. In what way are we better adapted to our environment than ants or bees? In what way are we better at surviving and reproducing than amoeba? In what way is humanity king of all creation with its inviolable worth and dignity? And yet this is the insistence. The Hebrew Bible, the New Testament are both insisting that humanity is made in the image of God. There is a sanctity to the life of every single human being, because we are the most godlike thing you've ever clapped eyes on. And every single member of the human family is the most godlike thing you've ever clapped eyes on. When religious people have imposed this belief on society, the sanctity of life has led to the greatest movements for human progress and flourishing in history, and it's not even close. Let me show you how the image of God played out as Christians began to preach this in the early centuries. Here are the Clementine homilies preached sometime before 380 AD, but summarizing the belief of the earliest Christians. In this sermon it is said, Ye are the image of the invisible God. Whence let not those who would be pious say that idols are images of God, and therefore that it is right to worship them, for the image of God is man. Do you get the idea? Pagans, Babylonians, Assyrians, Greeks, Romans, they would go to the temples and they would look at their images, and there were statues that represented their gods to them. They would burn incense to those images of the gods, and that would be their little religious duty. And then they would do their commerce and cultural life and and and occasionally acts of some kind of charity. But what if you don't have an image of God to do reverence towards? Because Christians and Jews have never had an image of God to do reverence to. Because for Christians and Jews, who is the image of God? Ah, humanity are the image of God. And so our religious duty is not so much to go to a temple and burn incense, our religious duty is to go to the image of God and serve God through his images, who are people. That's how the sermon continues. He who wishes to be pious towards God does good to man. Because the body of man bears the image of God, which is man, in this wise, food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothing to the naked, care to the sick, shelter to the stranger, and visiting him who is in prison to help him as you can. What are Christians doing as they are engaging in charitable work? What are Christians doing as they are establishing hospitals and later on hospices, as they are establishing orphan care? What are they doing? They are practicing their religion. As James says, religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this, to look after orphans and widows in their distress, and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world. A pagan might ask Christians, so where is your gods? They might be able to show you their gods because they've got all sorts of images. A Christian doesn't have a temple like that, a Christian doesn't have images of God like that. But when asked, what does religion look like for you? the Christian doesn't say I go and burn incense to an image. A Christian says I go and feed the hungry and clothe the poor, and I care for widows and I bring orphans into new families, and I revolutionize the way that human beings are seen, and that is my religion. Do you see how humanistic it is? It's divinely humanistic, but is so profoundly humanistic. Belief in the sanctity of life, aka the image of God, was religiously believed by Christians, and as legislation developed, it started to be enforced on cultures. And the Christians who invented charity in the way that we understand charity to be, the Christians who invented hospitals and hospice care and orphan care, they legislated their morality on society, and right at the heart of it was the image of God, which means that there is a sanctity to every single human life. That sanctity is innate, it is inviolable, it is infinite. And it is a wonderful thing. It was right at the heart of the invention of charity, the way that we think of charities, the invention of orphan care, the way we now think of orphan care, the invention of hospitals, the way we now think of hospitals, the abolition of infanticides, the abolition of the gladiatorial games, the abolition of pederasty, child sexual abuse. Trace these legislative reforms back and you will find religious views. You will find a religious community, aka Christians, enforcing their belief in the sanctity of life, and it has been for the absolute transformation and flourishing of human society. Around the same time as the Clementine homilies, Gregory of Nyssa was preaching his fourth homily on the book of Ecclesiastes, and it is the earliest denunciation of the practice of slavery wholesale in history. And it is for profoundly theological reasons, it is because Gregory believes in the image of God. Let me just read a paragraph to you. He who knew the nature of mankind rightly said that the whole world was not worth giving in exchange for a human soul. He's speaking about Jesus in Mark chapter 8. What can you give in exchange for a soul? says Jesus. Whenever a human being is for sale, therefore, nothing less than the owner of the earth is led into the sale room. Has the scrap of paper and the written contract and the counting out of obes, or you might say dollars, maybe the counting out of pounds, dollars, euros, has that deceived you into thinking yourself the master of the image of God? What folly. It is the image of God that is right at the heart of opposition to slavery. It took a very long time. Within medieval Christendom, a belief in the image of God actually had slavery melting away so that it was not existent in Western Europe. It was abolished legally in France in 1300. It came back with a vengeance when the new world was discovered, and greed and egregious evil got the better of some Christian civilizations. And the transatlantic slave trade was an unconscionable evil and one of the worst examples of slavery in the world. Slavery is a human universal, but the transatlantic slave trade was perhaps the worst form of it that we have ever had in human history, and we must raise our hands to that and say, that is wicked, but what abolished it, what abolished it was belief in the image of God. That is the title of one of David Bryan Davis's most influential works on the transatlantic slave trade and on the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade. As the preeminent historian of the transatlantic slave trade, he is very clear that it was a religious movement, not a rationalist movement, it was a religious movement that ended the transatlantic slave trade because of belief in the image of God. Just listen to what Abraham Lincoln said, for instance. Nothing stamped with the divine image and likeness was sent into the world to be trodden on and degraded and imbruted by its fellows. Listen to what this enslaved man, this wonderful preacher against the evil of slavery said, Frederick Douglass. There can be no more a law for the enslavement of man made in the image of God than for the enslavement of God himself. That vision is what ended slavery. The common, equal, and inviolable dignity of each member of the human family is right at the heart of the greatest moral reforms in human history. I mean, just take the Wedgwood medallion as an example. As this black man kneels before his maker, acknowledging that he is in the image of God, a common humanity and dignity is expressed there. Am I not a man and a brother? Are we not all one family, children of the same heavenly Father, offspring of the same God? And therefore, in that common humanity, there is a sanctity to every single human life, and therefore human beings cannot be bought and sold any more than God can be bought and sold. I am very glad that religious people enforce this view on the world. I'm very glad that the sanctity of life is a religious view that has found expression in legislation. Now that slogan, the sanctity of life, is up against a different slogan, the right to choose. Now, interestingly, the right to choose is also religious in nature. It has a Christian pedigree to it, and it also relies on the image of God. Yval Noah Harari says, we've got the idea of equality from Christianity, which argues that every person has a divinely created soul and that all souls are equal before God. However, if we do not believe in the Christian myths about God, creation of souls, what does it mean that all people are equal? It is a theological view of the human person to say that we have a God to whom we are individually accountable, and that we have an inviolable worth and dignity that is given to us by that God. And our beliefs in equality and our beliefs in choice and our liberty to be in charge of our own lives stem from our belief in the image of God. I can't be bought and sold because I am the image of God. Gregory of Nyssa has taught me that. Frederick Douglass has taught me that. I cannot be bought and sold. I cannot be property. I must be to some degree in charge of my own life because I've been given that dignity from beyond me. It is Christianity that has invented human rights. Of course, in post-Christian society, the individual becomes a belief in individualism. And then you attach romanticism to that, and now we get expressive individualism. And belief in human rights first had a theological basis to them. They were a shield that we could use against society if society wanted to take away our rights. If you are an oppressed minority, then you have a shield called human rights, and the majority cannot trade away your rights even though they outnumber you. But in a post-Christian society, human rights are less of a shield, they're more of a sword now. And I claim my rights all the time, and I forget anything about obligation, duty, or responsibility. So welcome to the post-Christian West, in which we are expressive individuals who have rights that can be wielded like swords, who are not bound up in the fabric of a broader society, but stand on our own two feet, and my own deepest desires are what makes me a human. In that post-Christian world, we start to hold up the right to choose, and it's even more sacred now as a truth. That right to choose, if anyone infringes upon my right to choose, that's a blasphemy, right? The right to choose is also a religious truth claim. You can't prove anybody's right to choose. Go into a laboratory and tr and try and do the experiment that everybody has a right to choose. Well, says who? It is a metaphysical truth claim about what humans are like, about what the good life is and the good death. We hold a belief in the right to choose for some profoundly religious reasons, and you trace back the genealogy of those ideas and you do find the Bible. That's why I think Polly Toynbee is both blind and hypocritical to say that Christians aren't allowed to bring their Christianity into a debate about assisted dying. It's hypocritical because she has her own theological views, many of them borrowed from the Bible. But secondly, it's utterly blind to the fact that Christians enforcing their view of the sanctity of life has been for the great flourishing of humankind. And that the right to choose is derivative of the sanctity of human life. John Gray, the philosopher, has said that liberalism is a footnote to Christianity, and in particular Protestantism. He says all four of the defining ideas of liberal thought are continuations of Christian monotheism. The primacy of the individual is a secular translation of the belief that each human being is created by the deity, which has an authority over them which transcends any worldly power. The egalitarian belief that human beings have the same moral status reproduces the idea that all human beings are equal in the sight of God. Liberal universalism, the belief that generically human attributes are more important than particular cultural identities, reflects the idea that humankind is created in God's image. The belief that human institutions are indefinitely improvable replicates the theistic faith that history is a moral narrative of sin followed by redemption. Polly Toynbee, dismissing the sanctity of life, looks for all the world like a person on a branch of a tree soaring off the branch on which they are perched. But as I close, I just want to compare the two images that we have. The right to choose as a sacred value that trumps all other sacred values, or the sanctity of life. Earlier this week there was great controversy about one of the advertisements that was being put out there by Dignity in Dying. In The Guardian, it says, MPs traveling to Parliament have been targeted by a billboard campaign at Westminster Station, including posters that show a woman smiling and celebrating in pink pajamas, which says, My dying wish is that my family won't see me suffer and I won't have to. The Advert, which is one of a number in the concourse that runs under the road between Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament, features Sophie Blake, a terminally ill breast cancer patient. I think that's really important about this image. I think we have to recognise and acknowledge the image of God in Sophie Blake and her profound dignity. She can totally express her view here, and our hearts go out to her. My heart goes out to her as she wrestles with breast cancer, and I wish her the very, very best. But her picture is being framed by this right to choose narrative. And I just want to press into the right to choose narrative. Because when that is divorced from everything else that the scriptures tell us about who human beings are and what the meaningful life is, the right to choose starts sounding incredibly dystopian, at least to my ears. The idea of bespoke deaths is a hideous idea because life is a gift to us. An expressive individualist society wants to have a unique and bespoke gender reveal party when we're about to have the kids. And an expressive individualist couple on their wedding day want to have vows that they've written for themselves that are different to everybody else's vows and a service that's different to everybody else's service. We want to have bespoke births, we want to have bespoke weddings, and we want to have bespoke deaths. And I just want you to choose a different vision. Because this post-Christian sacred value, the right to choose, has been divorced from some other values, and out of connection with those beliefs, it starts to shrivel and die like fruit cut from the vine. Here's another vision that I really want you to choose. Have a look at this man. Painted by a friend of mine, Paul Hobbes. This man had no family around him, this man had no friends around him. He was about to die in squalid circumstances. And my friend Paul gave him a halo. He has inviolable worth, he has inviolable dignity, and we can't trade him away. If you think it's all about choice, okay, well choose which vision do you want? Do you want a vision that elevates the sanctity of life, or do you want a vision that divorces itself from the sanctity of life and then elevates the right to choose so that we choose our births? And it elevates the right to choose, even to the extent of having bespoke deaths. There are things that as a society we don't let you choose. You cannot choose to do a duel to the death with your friend or enemy. You cannot choose to take certain drugs. You could not choose to volunteer for Squid Game if Squid Game was real. Because if Squid Game was legislated, if we allowed people to volunteer for Squid Game, we would not just be changing things about those participants in Squid Game. We would be saying something about humanity. We'd be saying that human life is something that you can throw away. Human life is something that you can gamble away, throw away, discard. You don't just change the law for those people, you change your vision of what people are more generally. And what are we like? Are we disposable? Can we can we so elevate the right to choose that we can dispose of our lives and choose self-destruction? We've already said in the law, no, you can't choose self-destruction in all sorts of different ways. The message to someone who wants to throw their life away is a uniform message of no, we will not allow you to do that. Love will not allow you to do that. We need you, we want you, you belong to us no matter what. That is the message that the UK law currently sends to the nation. If this legislation goes through, the message is changed. The message is you can throw away your life if you so choose. And we will allow you to do so. We will allow you to destroy yourself. If you want to explore the theological vision of God, the world, and you that we've got, it's called 321. You can go to 321course.com and discover life according to Jesus. Start an account at 321course.com and you're in. We won't spam you, there's no charge, but we want you to have a different vision of life, the vision that Jesus alone gives you. Please do subscribe to us so that we can catch you on the next one. Bye-bye. From now until the 3rd of December, you can join the joy and double your impact. That's right. If you set up or increase a regular monthly donation, your generosity will be matched by some amazing faith-filled partners. In its first year, well over 300 churches have run a 321 course.
SPEAKER_00Churches like Hey, I'm Seth, I'm a pastor in Arizona, and we just ran our first 3-2-1 course and we're gonna do it again. We saw it really valuable for a few reasons. One, the hospitality of the course. It built towards a natural progression that we thought really served people and welcomed people who came in as skeptics. They felt seen and understood by the material. Number two, it really enabled us to create an environment where volunteers who are maybe not skilled public speakers, but they're really hospitable, naturally curious evangelists, are able to play a video and then facilitate a conversation round tables. We promoted it as an exploring Christianity course and put it into our pipeline of classes that we offered, and we thought it was really helpful to people who were kicking the tires on church, sitting on the fringes, but weren't yet committed or even sure what commitment would look like to the Christ of the Bible. And so I highly encourage you to check out the material and use it in your environments. We saw seven people come to faith, and we're excited to run the course again this next semester.
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