The Sanctity of Human Life

by David P. Gushee

Perhaps the most compelling Old Testament demonstration of God’s compassion on humans takes place when he delivers his people—the Hebrews—from slavery and genocide in Egypt. This intervention is the most important narrative of the entire Old Testament.

The Israelites groaned in their slavery and cried out, and their cry for help because of their slavery went up to God.

God heard their groaning and he remembered his covenant with Abraham, with Isaac and with Jacob. So God looked on the Israelites and was concerned about them. (Ex. 2:23-25)

This story reveals God’s heart of compassion and justice. Compassion is empathetic sorrow for suffering persons. Justice is a commitment to right relations between people and to the right treatment of all people. Both are dimensions of God’s character and demonstrate his recognition of human dignity.

This foundational story of God’s compassionate deliverance has been fundamental to Jewish (and Christian) life and thought for three thousand years or more. Its echoes resound through later Old Testament writings and in every generation. This memory instructs God’s people about their God: one who keeps his covenant promises to his people, one who looks with compassionate love on them, and one who delivers them when it appears that all is lost. This text also pushes us toward a kind of partiality amidst an impartial dignity ethic. God demonstrates special concern not just for each and every person but especially for the enslaved, the suffering, the victimized, those whose groans too deep for words rise up to a just God who compassionately delivers them.

The Law. The Old Testament narrative moves from Exodus to Sinai, from God’s miraculous deliverance of his covenant people to God’s articulation of the laws that shall govern them. God is depicted as the ultimate source of law in human life. Thus, the Law carries a sacred holiness and authority that guides human life—in contrast to an ethic based primarily on personal preference, social power, human reason, or communal tradition. This transcendent nature of the Law means that all stand equal before God and his Law, that rulers and those in power are not above the Law, and that therefore the dignity of all human beings—even those who are weak and without political power—is upheld. Consequently, human courts of law are charged with enforcing and protecting God’s ultimate authority over human life.

The narrative framework in which God’s Law is given to Israel reinforces God’s authority and the sanctity of human life it asserts. Law begins in the Old Testament with these words: “I am the LORD your God, who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery” (Ex 20:2). Every subsequent word of command carries an implicit “therefore.” Simple gratitude on Israel’s part will require that love, mercy, and justice must characterize Israel’s life as a people and must be felt in her legal system. The dignified treatment of all will become paramount.

The Demand and Yearning for Shalom. Before we turn to the New Testament, I want to suggest that one of the most foundational understandings for holding human life sacred comes from the demand, and the yearning, for justice and peace primarily communicated through the Old Testament prophets. It’s here that we see God’s heart for the restoration of human dignity, and our role in that process, in the face of a broken and fallen world.

The Hebrew concept of shalom names that beautiful but elusive state of affairs in which the dignity of every human life finally occurs. Shalom, as Walter Brueggemann so memorably put it, is “the dream of God” for a redeemed world and an end to our “division, hostility, fear, drivenness, and misery.”⁷ The prophets both demand shalom now and yearn for it then, whenever the time comes when God (and therefore shalom) finally prevails. For Christians, this dream, this yearning must continue to direct our entire outlook today.

The Old Testament demand/yearning for shalom begins with Israel’s particular experiences of wrenching violence and injustice. Prophets speak about shalom for Israel, from within the cataclysm of war and exile. They yearn for a new Jerusalem, from within the experience of Jerusalem’s destruction. These prophetic writings leave a legacy both of particularity and universality—they speak to specific events, injustices, and dreams of the Jewish people while also evoking powerful human demands and yearnings for the kind of world that they, and we still, envision.

The narrowest translation for the Hebrew word shalom is “peace,” as in the opposite of violence/war. Peace as commonly understood is certainly an ingredient of it. The prophets demand peace from the covenant people Israel when they decry Israel’s violence, murder, and dependence on military alliances and military might.⁸ They yearn for peace as an end to war when they envision a time when “there will be no end” to peace (Isa 9:7) and “they will beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks” (Mic 4:3; Zech 9:910). Shalom means peace, as in straightforward security from physical threats to bodies, homes, and communities. This begs a question for us. Do we yearn for that kind of peace in our neighborhoods, cities, and world today? Do we pray and fight for that kind of peace in places like Colombia, Darfur, and the Middle East—seeing it not as a political issue but a sanctity of life issue?

Shalom doesn’t only happen when humans stop killing each other, but it also means the rebuilding of human community. The prophets of exile speak of the liberation and return of the dispersed Jewish people who had been scattered, exiled, imprisoned, and enslaved by Assyria and Babylon (e.g., Isa 60-61; Jer 16:14-15; Eze 34:11-13; Amos 9:14-15). The victims shall be set free at last. The prophets dream of the rebuilding of a glorious Jerusalem and the return of a growing and vibrant community to Israel’s most important city (Jer. 30:18-22). Thus, shalom means both the human and the material rebuilding of community where individuals and families not only survive but flourish. Moreover, shalom means not just rebuilt community but inclusive community where ethnic divisions are overcome, all are welcomed on the same basis of human dignity, and the original unity of humankind is restored. Today, are we about the business of creating these kinds of communities?

Shalom means that everyone has enough to eat and drink, in a world (and land) so often full of desperately hungry and thirsty people. It is abundant material well-being and prosperity (Isa 60:5-7, 66:12; Jer 31:12; Eze 34:14-15, 29; Joel 2:23-24; Amos 9:13-14; Zech 9:17) fairly distributed to all, in a flourishing land of ecological health and wellbeing (Isa 32:15-20, 45:8). Thus shalom means economic justice— everyone has the means necessary to work successfully to meet their material needs, and no one is permitted to take away from anyone either the means of production (mainly land) or the goods it produces. Do Christians work for this kind of economic justice?

Shalom means the healing of broken bodies and spirits. This healing is both spiritual and physical, individual and collective: “Then will the eyes of the blind be opened and the ears of the deaf unstopped. Then will the lame leap like a deer, and the mute tongue shout for joy” (Isa 35:5-6a); “I have seen their ways, but I will heal them; I will guide them and restore comfort to them,” (Isa 57:18). The result is that after endless suffering, humans will receive “a crown of beauty instead of ashes, the oil of joy instead of mourning, and a garment of praise instead of a spirit of despair” (Isa 61:3). In fact, shalom is like a party for the restored: “From [the broken] will come songs of thanksgiving and the sound of rejoicing” (Jer 30:19); “Their children will see it and be joyful; their hearts will rejoice in the LORD” (Zech 10:7). Are we agents of this kind of healing and restoration in our world?

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