The Sanctity of Human Life

by David P. Gushee

Most Christians 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 continue mouthing 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 have come 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 in its 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.³ Many have speculated that our resemblance to God includes “godlike” intellectual, spiritual, and moral capacities that set us apart from other creatures.⁴

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:

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 significance 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.

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