Theopedia

Suicide

You shall not murder.

— Exodus 20:13

Definition

Suicide is the deliberate act of ending one’s own life. It is a form of self-murder, forbidden under the same sixth commandment that forbids killing another person,1 since life belongs to God, who alone has the right to take away what he gave.2

Confessional Witness

The 1689 London Baptist Confession has no chapter naming suicide specifically. It does teach that mankind was made “after the image of God, in knowledge, righteousness, and true holiness,” with reasonable and immortal souls,3 and that the moral law given at Sinai “doth for ever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof.”4 It does not itemize the Ten Commandments one by one, the way the wider Reformed catechetical tradition does.

That wider tradition names the sin directly. The Westminster Larger Catechism asks what the sixth commandment forbids and answers that the sins forbidden include “all taking away the life of ourselves, or of others, except in case of public justice, lawful war, or necessary defense.”1 Its positive counterpart requires “all careful studies, and lawful endeavors, to preserve the life of ourselves and others.”5

Biblical Basis

The sixth commandment, “You shall not murder” (Ex. 20:13), extends to the taking of one’s own life as much as another’s.6 Genesis grounds the wider prohibition on killing in humanity’s creation “in the image of God” (Gen. 9:6; Gen. 1:26-27), a status that does not depend on a person’s usefulness or circumstances.

Scripture records several suicides without ever commending one. Saul and his armor-bearer killed themselves at the end of a losing battle (1 Sam. 31:3-6); Ahithophel hanged himself after his counsel was rejected (2 Sam. 17:23); Zimri burned his own house down around himself after a seven-day reign (1 Kings 16:18); and Judas hanged himself after betraying Christ (Matt. 27:5). Abimelech’s death, brought about at his own request after a fatal wound, is possibly a further instance (Judg. 9:54). Each of these deaths came at a point of rebellion against God, and Scripture nowhere holds any of them up as an example to imitate.6

Samson’s death is a harder case. He pulled down the temple of Dagon on himself and the Philistines gathered there, killing more in his death than in his life (Judg. 16:29-31). Gill judged this was not suicide: Samson had no intention “to destroy his own life, but the lives of the enemies of God,” his own death fell out as a consequence of that aim rather than as its object, he prayed to God as he did it, and he acted “not as a private man, but as a civil magistrate, and judge in Israel.”2 Branch reaches the same conclusion by a narrower route, treating Samson’s death as an act of war rather than suicide because he took many Philistines with him.6

Scripture is also candid about the temptation toward suicide without treating the temptation as license. Job, under his own suffering, considered hanging himself (Job 7:15), and the text records this without holding up death as a legitimate escape from unbearable pain.6

Historical Development

Reformed catechetical tradition, seventeenth century

The Westminster Larger Catechism (1647) named the taking of one’s own life among the sins forbidden by the sixth commandment: “all taking away the life of ourselves, or of others, except in case of public justice, lawful war, or necessary defense.”1

Particular Baptist systematics, eighteenth century

John Gill treated suicide twice in his Body of Doctrinal Divinity (1769). In his chapter on actual sins, he classed it among “sins against a man’s self,” alongside fornication and drunkenness, and set it against the Stoic tradition that praised self-killing as heroic.7 In his later chapter on the death of the body, he returned to the question at greater length, arguing that only Christ, who alone had the power to lay down his human life and take it up again, had any right of disposal over a life; “none besides has” that right.2

Nineteenth-century Presbyterian systematics

Charles Hodge gave suicide its own subsection under the sixth commandment in Systematic Theology (1873), grouped there with dueling as a further violation of the same command. Hodge linked the act to unbelief, writing that suicide “is most frequent among those who have lost all faith in religion,” and describing it as “the desertion of the post which God has assigned us.”8

Opposing Views

Gill sets his own argument against a position he attributes to the Stoics: they “applaud it as an ‘heroic’ action” rather than judging it cowardly.7 A modern version of the same argument grounds the choice in personal autonomy rather than Stoic virtue, treating the timing and manner of one’s own death as a matter for the individual alone to decide.9

Objections and Responses

Isn’t ending one’s own life sometimes an honorable response to disgrace or unbearable suffering, as the Stoics held? Gill calls this “a base, mean, and cowardly” act rather than a heroic one, betraying “want of fortitude of mind to bear up under present adversity.”7 Against the premise that a person may dispose of his own life as he judges best, Gill answers that “no man has a right to dispose of his own life; God is the giver, or rather lender, of it, and he only has a right to take it away.”7

Isn’t martyrdom just suicide for a cause? Both involve embracing death, but Magnuson distinguishes them by aim and motive rather than outcome: “Suicide despairs of life and aims at death. Martyrdom does not despair of life, but accepts death (caused by someone else) as the result of faithfulness.”10 A martyr is killed by another for refusing to renounce the faith; a person who takes his own life brings about his own death directly. Magnuson adds that a Christian who deliberately courts death under the name of martyrdom has, at that point, crossed into suicide.10

Doesn’t a Christian who dies by suicide forfeit salvation? Salvation rests on grace received through faith, “not a result of works” (Eph. 2:8-9), not on the moral standing of a believer’s final act.6 Branch does not treat suicide as therefore acceptable: God does not approve of the act. But a genuine believer can reach, under sufficient desperation and brokenness, a point where suicide looks like the only way out, and Branch holds that such a believer remains within the scope of God’s grace even so.6

Related Doctrines

References

  1. The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 136. ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  2. John Gill, A Body of Doctrinal Divinity; or, A System of Evangelical Truths, Deduced from the Sacred Scriptures, 2 vols. (London: Printed for the Author, and Sold by George Keith, 1769), book VII, chap. 1, “Of the Death of the Body”: “No man has a right to take away his own life, nor the life of another… suicide, of all the kinds of murder, is the most unnatural and execrable.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3

  3. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1689), chap. 4, “Of Creation,” para. 2. ↩

  4. The Second London Baptist Confession of Faith (1677/1689), chap. 19, “Of the Law of God,” para. 5. ↩

  5. The Larger Catechism (London, 1648), Q. 135. ↩

  6. J. Alan Branch, 50 Ethical Questions: Biblical Wisdom for Confusing Times (Bellingham, WA: Lexham Press, 2021), chap. 18, “Should Christians Affirm Physician-Assisted Suicide?” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4 ↩5 ↩6

  7. Gill, book III, chap. 12, “Of Actual Sins and Transgressions.” ↩ ↩2 ↩3 ↩4

  8. Charles Hodge, Systematic Theology, vol. 3 (New York: Charles Scribner and Company, 1873), chap. 19, “The Law,” 364-65. ↩

  9. Ken Magnuson, Invitation to Christian Ethics: Moral Reasoning and Contemporary Issues (Grand Rapids, MI: Kregel Academic, 2020), chap. 13, “Euthanasia and Physician-Assisted Suicide.” ↩

  10. Magnuson, chap. 13. ↩ ↩2