Church

This is the first of two week five discussion questions from my Spring 2022 courseMaking Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What role has the church played in your life? How would you respond to the young person who asks, “Do I have to belong to a church to be a Christian?”

One of my early memories is my dedication. It was Christmas Eve and I was 5 or 6. In our church at the time, part of dedication is the adult members of the church pledging to be there for the child growing up and I remember being impressed that all these adults cared for me. My family weren't always regular church goers, but whenever we went, I still felt part of the community. As an adult, I worked weekends and started attending my denominations church by mail and joined a then 'experimental' mailing list, which became a very active small group for almost 20 years, and several of us are still in contact. Even when I started getting weekends off, I found such satisfaction in my small group that I continued with that church. More recently I joined an online church start and we have an amazing community via Discord, with an almost daily . I am also part of my mom's regional small group from the denomination I grew up in, at 52, I'm the baby. They meet once a month and that's the weekend I usually visit her. I love hearing from my elders and I'm trying to get one of my mom's friends to write her autobiography, because she has had some amazing experiences, particularly around the UU denomination, her father was a groundbreaking minister and as a result she got to meet all sorts of people who came to visit him, she also went to Europe after World War 2 with the Universalist Service Committee to work in a refugee camp. I love my church families and they have helped me and my family through a lot of rough times.

However, as valuable as my church community has been to me, if asked whether you have to belong to a church to be a Christian, my response would be no. While my church experience has been almost uniformly good, I know not everyone is that lucky. In fact, I know many people for whom church has been a source of pain or even spiritual abuse. It's easy to say, well, those are just bad churches, but I think it's important that we as Christians take more responsibility for such things and acknowledge that church is not always a healthy experience and that every church has the possibility of being a bad experience for someone. All it takes is one leader behaving badly or even looking away when members treat others badly to do damage. As I said, my church experiences have been good, but I refused to attend youth group in high school and if I went to church, went to the regular services after being bullied in Sunday School as a middle schooler and not feeling like I had any other options to avoid it. In the UUA, youth group is actually older than our denomination, because the two main denominations that consolidated had a combined youth group for decades. While attending church as a teen and college student opened opportunities for me (I was co-director of social concerns for our church and teaching adult Religious Education at 19 or 20), not attending youth group also closed some. If I had just quit participating at all, it would have closed more. (Ironically, I'm the only person from my middle-school Sunday School class who still has ties to the UU church.) For people whose experiences are mostly bad, finding a better church may be too painful or they may need to heal first. However, Brown is right, the community that we participate in does influence who we are. I think it is necessary to have a spiritual community to be a Christian, but what that community is can vary. It might be a church, it might be a small group, it might be a Bible study. It may be in person, by phone, on Zoom or Google Meet or in some sort of social media. It might be extremely interactive or only slightly (in her later years, my grandmother's main spiritual community was being part, with some of her in-person friends of a large group of listeners to a radio Bible study.) What the community is is unimportant, that it is community is what matters.

Brown on Sin and Salvation

This is the first of two week four discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What insights from this week’s readings (Stone and Duke, Ch 6, "The Human Condition" and Brown, Chs 6, "Sin" and 7 "Salvation") were most helpful or inspiring for you? What aspects, if any, where troubling or challenging for you?

I found Brown's discussion of sin to be very useful and on target with my experiences. He points out pride is "excessive self-regard in relation to others" and taking more than your fair share. "Sensuality" is not about taking excessive joy in things of the body, but rather thinking less of yourself than yourself than you should. Traditional definitions of sensuality mean that you have to do some fancy footwork somewhere to draw a line between appreciating God's good creation with our bodies and senses and viewing sensuality as a sin, the fact that this avoids that problem is a mark in its favor that doesn't depend on the fact that defining sin in this way might make me personally less of a sinner. (One of my Bible school professors taught than when you read something and it feels difficult and you just want to dismiss it, you should sit with that idea for a while and think about whether it's wrong or you're wrong; but I think it's just as or more important to sit with things that just sound good and align with our prejudices for a while too.) While it is easy to come up with examples of people who harm others because they think they deserve more, I was also reminded of kids I saw in the 90's who had been taught that their self-esteem was so important they had trouble doing any self-reflection that wasn't positive because they hadn't had that experience. This isn't to say that they'd never been told they were bad or wrong, but they had only been taught to look at what in their life they were doing well, never what they could improve or were unhappy with. (That's also setting kids up for failure.) And I certainly know plenty of people who never ask for what they need and always give to others. As I think about this, I'm having trouble thinking of examples of things that don't fit this framework, which I think is a good sign. Most of us, of course, fall in the middle, sometimes taking too much, sometimes not taking enough. I have previously heard the definition that sin is "falling short" and I like that definition, but I think this one has more depth.

I wanted to write about the discussion in Brown about the problem of our not doing what we should, which is similar to "falling short", but mostly, I've sat with the fact that I need to think about that more for almost a week now and don't actually have anything to verbalize. I've finally settled on putting a note on my calendar to read it again in month, because I feel like there is more there for me.

I also have some concern with Brown's discussion of salvation. I very much like it. I tend to want to agree with it, but I have reservations because it is very rational and I think we lose something important about Christianity when we ignore the transcendent too much. (This definitely goes the other way too, we lose something important when we forget the practical parts of Christianity.)

 

Salvation

This is the second of two week four discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

Compare and contrast the Trimble's experience (Stone and Duke, Chapter 5) of “re-finding” themselves to that of Zacchaeus’ experience of salvation? How do these experiences relate or not relate to your life?

So, I'm not sure we are comparing apples to apples here. If you read the story of Zacchaeus' interaction with Jesus in the CEB translation (https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2019%3A1-10&version=CEB), the verbs use the present tense when Zacchaeus talks about giving to the poor and paying back those he wrongs four-fold. So the story perhaps is not that of Zacchaeus' salvation, but Jesus's public acknowledgement that he already is. (And the notes in The Jewish Annotated New Testament point this way as well.) Read this way, the story goes like this:

Jesus is coming to town, and Zacchaeus is excited about the opportunity to see him. (And this excitement itself may be a sign of the fact that Zacchaeus is already saved.) Because he is short and the crowds are large, Zacchaeus finds a tree to climb for a good view. Jesus sees Zacchaeus in the crowd, recognizes him and speaks to him. (Again, Jesus recognizing Zacchaeus may also be a sign that Zacchaeus is already saved.) The crowd, not Jesus, identifies Zacchaeus as a sinner. Zacchaeus defends himself, explaining why he believes he is not a sinner. Jesus acknowledges this and tells the crowd that he (Salvation) is there because Zacchaeus is already a member of the community. In this reading, Zacchaeus was only lost because the community wasn't including him.

The Trimble story, on the other hand, is fairly straight forward. People find something that helps them and isn't (obviously) in conflict with their faith and they attribute it to being a necessary or important tool for faith for everyone. Sometimes, whatever it is that is actually a helpful tool for some people. (I'm reminded of the planner fad - a planner can help me do my daily prayer and bible reading along with my other daily tasks, one of my friends finds it essential for staying on track with that, other people may find it useful for their secular life only, or not useful at all.) Sometimes, it's pretty much unrelated - I've seen this happen with diets, workout plans, even business opportunities, but self-help books and programs are super common sources of this type of confusion.  I think we even do this with things we would all agree are part of Christian life. I think we'd agree that things like church attendance, Bible reading and study, and prayer are all tools for being Christian, but we can get caught up in the details of doing those things instead of loving our neighbor, loving God, forgiving, ...

I think the main difference between these two situations, regardless of whether we interpret Zacchaeus' experience as salvation in that moment or acknowledgement of existing salvation, is that Zacchaeus' salvation involves action. He does more than the average person to make sure he sees Jesus. He gives generously to charity. He makes amends in a concrete way. The Trimbles' renewal is about attitude. The only actions they mention are holding hands and giving thanks. Zacchaeus' salvation moves him to do differently. The Trimbles are only thinking differently.

I think this lines up with my own life. When I really change my mind about something, it almost always somehow results in changed behavior. It might not be as drastic or impressive as Zacchaeus' behavior, but there is a difference over time. For beliefs I'm serious about, I can point at behaviors I do as a result (and sometimes, honestly, places I know I fall short in changing behavior to line up with new beliefs - behavioral changes are hard sometimes, you can't just believe them into being or we wouldn't have problems like addiction.)

God's Nature, Will, Power, Presence, and Activity

For purposes of this blog, I almost left this in draft forever mode, because I'm not happy with it but had to finish something to turn in. But in the end, I decided to hit post because there is value in doing the best we can today.

This is the second of two week three discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What is your understanding of God’s nature, will, power, presence, and activity in the world? 

My first thought on reading this prompt was "Wow, that's asking A LOT!" On further thought, my reaction is just to say "I don't know." And while I actually am going to try to answer to the best of my current thought and ability, I think it's important to sit with that "I don't know" a bit. Out of those things, I only need to know a subset of two of them. I need to know that God's nature is fundamentally good  and I need to know God's will to the extent that it is a factor in my actions. I address the bit about God needing to be good to be relevant more in my reflection paper, but in general, if we don't believe God is good (or I guess powerful and evil), I think God is or should be irrelevant in our lives. Once we determine God is relevant, I think actions (living in accord with or doing God's will) are more important than theory. I do believe loving God (or anyone) should inspire me to want to get to know them better, but as Christians, I think sometimes we use following that desire (and plain old human curiosity) as an excuse to avoid the hard parts of doing what loving God calls us to do. Similarly, I think eschatology is often used in the same way, it's not that we shouldn't study these things, but we should study them because our love of God and love of the Bible make us want to know more, not because the study is more interesting to us than other less fun parts of our Christian walk. I also think theory can help us act or know how to act. I also think that "I don't know" is an underrated answer to a lot of these questions or any question about God.

Because I think it's the most important of these, I'm going to start with God's will. I believe Micah 6:8, "Only to do justice; And to love goodness; And to walk modestly with your God;" (JPS85), is a good start on God's will.  I think it is also God's will that we love God with everything we've got and love our neighbor as ourself.  As I talked about last week, I think forgiveness is part of God's will, both for us to forgive and for God to forgive us. I know that people often say that things like praise and worship, prayer, or Bible study is God's will. I haven't seen any arguments for that that are particularly compelling. I think those are things that (hopefully) help us do God's will, but I think they are more means than ends. I'm aware I'm leaving open a lot of questions in terms of the big picture of why God created the cosmos in the first place, but I am content to leave those as open questions, in part because as I discuss with God's nature, I think it's beyond human understanding. But also, I don't find a lot of mystery in having a desire to create. If humans are made in God's image, it's not surprising that God too would have an impulse to create. I do not think God has everything planned out in advance and we are only puppets acting on God's will, nor do I think our having free will (which I both think is overrated and a doubtful assumption) is a valid explanation for, well, really anything, but especially not any real or perceived shortcomings in any of the factors we are discussing here.

I think God's nature is beyond human understanding. I believe there will be a future time, which I refer to as the next life, where that will change, but in the meantime, my understanding is by definition going to be incomplete and approximate and I'm mostly content with that. I also think that we (different people) can hold different (incomplete) understandings of God's nature, possibly even seemingly incompatible understandings of God's nature and they can both be right. Just as we read that the Gospels are different witnesses' views of Jesus and we can learn from that, we should also be able to learn from differences in how we each see God's nature, rather than insist that we must all think the same way. (That's not to say there can't be false views, but disagreements don't necessarily imply falsehood.) I do believe that God is good and God works from a place of love (or as my grandma's favorite Bible verse puts it, God is love.) I think my friend's pastor puts it well when he says "It's not 'everything that God does is good', but 'God uses everything for good.'" When I was a child, my neighbor showed my sister and I her white carnations and told us that you will never find an all white carnation, they always have a little bit of red or another color hidden underneath (or even obvious) and that this is a message from God that nothing is or can be perfect. I've always taken a lot of comfort in that. I think perhaps, it may also be a message that applies to God. God is also not perfect (and by extension not all powerful or maybe power and perfection are unrelated.) Or maybe something about perfection breaks the universe. 

I do believe God is active in the world in some way. I'm not entirely sure how. I found the approach discussed in Brown that God is moving along with us, changed by us as we are changed by God, all living in relationship together, to be compelling. I also subscribe to the embedded theology that God does change in relationship to God's experience with us, because I fairly regularly point to the places in and around the story of Noah where God regrets or thinks better of past behavior and acts as a result. I need to think more about how this affects other beliefs. For instance, I think it conflicts with the "official" story of why it is completely acceptable for my international, multi-time zone church to do communion on Zoom (which involves the timelessness of God.) I'm not actually personally invested in that, because my personal theology of sacraments is that meaning and intention are more important than anything else and that for communion in particular we should probably either be doing more often and more casually (every time we eat - splitting the stable of the meal and sharing it with everyone around us) or only rarely and even more formally (to make it more meaningful.) However, as part of the church council I'm invested in having something that works for our congregation and doesn't make life overly difficult for our volunteer, bi-vocational minister.

I do think that when God intervenes in the world it is more likely to be small promptings than large flashy miracles. Maybe the age of miracles is over or maybe they just weren't that effective and God has learned better. I don't think prayer prompts God to act as much as it acts as a support of one another and prompts us to act as the people of God.

I'm sure I've left some things out here, because again, it's a big question.

Jesus

This is the first of two week three discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What do you believe about Jesus and how does this affect your life?

The most important thing I believe about Jesus is that trying to follow his example, the words and deeds that we know about, makes me a better human being. This would be true regardless of anything else about him: He could be no more (less) the child of God than I am. He could be only mortal and not divine. He could be just a prophet, (as one of my dearest high school friends, a devout Muslim believes.) He could have stayed dead. I would still be better at the essential task of being human for following him. That doesn't mean that I don't believe in the parts that "transcend materialistic views of reality", to quote the CUA statement of beliefs, it's just that they aren't necessary for a lot of what I think is important about Jesus and how Jesus affects my day to day life. Jesus modeled a way of living and preached a society where we treat each other justly and was so committed to it that he was willing to die rather than break his principles. All of that is compelling in an of itself. But then, beyond that, we have the supernatural parts that add emphasis in ways I know I haven't fully explored yet. In a recent week's commentary in Wil Gafney's Year W lectionary, she says "Each of Jesus's miracles is an epiphany."(p. 63) She's talking about how his miracles link him back to prior miraculous events and the prophets involved. I'm thinking that they are also epiphanies as to how we should be in the world. Jesus can create something from nothing, he uses it to feed hungry people. A lot of the resurrections and healings that we see Jesus committing (and several of the ones they remind us of) are about propping up the community. In my Bible study this week we were looking at the story of Tabitha using Gafney's Year W and the Women's Bible Commentary (2nd and 3rd editions). This isn't a Jesus miracle, it's Peter following in Jesus's footsteps. At first glance, Tabitha is important because she's a disciple and she's bankrolling things. It's easy to say, well, she's important because she's the financial support. But then you look in more detail and Tabitha is supporting the widows of the community who are the mourners and supporters of those who are grieving, which is time is everyone. There are whole layers of community support where Tabitha is central. That's who gets restored to the community.

Unlike a lot of my friends, I wasn't raised with an embedded theology of hell and damnation, although as an American, I was certainly raised in a society where theologically suspect images that owe more to Dante than the Bible are everywhere and places queer kids are likely to hang out are going to be targeted by people preaching that they will go to that hell. And I've seen that death can be a friend or a comforter as much as something to be feared. My personal thoughts about the end of this life are not fear, with or without a promise of a better life ahead. So, to me, Jesus's resurrection to give his community hope and pointers to continue is more compelling than the fact that he has defeated death. That's not to say those things aren't important to my / our / the community, I think they really are. It's that that is not where I ever needed to be restored to community. 

What I do find more personally compelling (and more difficult) than the idea that through Jesus death has been overcome, is the promise of radical forgiveness. I take seriously Jesus's words that we should forgive as we have been forgiven and his actions in doing the same. (One can argue that this is Jesus defying sin for and with us, I don't generally find that a useful label, even if I generally think it's true.) I strive (and fail) to forgive for more than trivial things, but Jesus's example shines through as how to do that.

A bit of an aside, I think that one of the reasons we don't bring people into community - and I would include things like the fact that there are people sleeping on the streets of my town and we, as a community, seem to think that's not worth changing our ways in order to change, has to do with forgiveness (and also sin as Brown talks about it, thinking too much or little of ourselves). On a group level, when we don't take care of people in our community, it means either we think too much of ourselves and think we deserve to have more than they do or it means that we can't forgive them if they are given something that we have to work for. (It gets a little more complicated on an individual level as we interact with the constraints of the group.)

Authority of The Bible

This is the first of two week two discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

What is your understanding about the authority of the Bible? How do you respond to those close to you who have a very different understanding? What role does the Bible play in your life?

This line from chapter 2 of Brown completely changed my thinking on the authority of the Bible:

The Bible is the progressive Christian’s authority because in our engagement with it we are authored as Christians.  (p. 25)

 This really speaks to me because it allows us to embrace the Bible, faults and all, without having to specifically address and explain away those faults, except on our own time as it supports us to do so. It also leaves room for acknowledging in our lives the very real ways the Bible may have harmed us or been used as a tool for  harm. I regularly refer people to Mandy Rice's Queerituality and the lesson that "You can’t just unthink religious harm. You have to live your way beyond it." and I think this way of looking at the authority of the Bible supports following her research that focusing on gotcha verses is unlikely to improve your spirituality. And as Robin Perry (writing as MacDonald) says in the Evangelical Universalist "Virtually all the key Christian beliefs have some texts that run against them." (p 37), so pretty much whatever you believe, someone can find a gotcha verse if you let things devolve to proof texting. The Bible is the instruction book and history book of our faith. It isn't always clear and it's often contradictory (I would say on purpose, to remind us that we need to always take things in context.) The idea of our engagement with the Bible authoring us as Christians makes more obvious the role of the Holy Spirit in our reading. It also gives us agency, we can choose our level of interaction with the Bible at any given time.

How I deal with people who have a different understanding of the Bible than I do varies depending on the situation. Just because I don't find an understanding compelling doesn't mean that it isn't valid and I try to keep that in mind. I've noticed that in many of the situation where I meet people with a different viewpoint than I have, they aren't actually interested in having discussions about the Bible, they want to give Bible polemics and I just don't participate. (Although I wouldn't rule out chanting over some of the hateful polemicists who show up as "street preachers" on the University campus and at events.) In the church groups I moderate online, people who only want to give polemics and not have discussions or only discuss ideas with the intent of convincing others and are not open to the possibility of learning something themselves are referred to other places (usually a Facebook blog post sharing group started by some people in my denomination) and then heavily moderated and eventually blocked from posting at all if they continue to treat the group as their audience not their conversation partners. If I want to read the Bible in community, we don't necessarily have to agree on how we see the Bible to read together, share verses we found meaningful, and attempt to help each other with confusing passages. We don't have to agree to help each other pick up references to other books and stories or to act as accountability partners for actually reading. If people are trying to discuss but get stuck on only discussing gotcha verses, I usually point to Rice or Perry (depending on the person and the topic). If people are trying to discuss but get too stuck on literalism or inerrancy, I like to get them talking about "swords into plowshares" and "plowshares into swords". I have noticed that in spending more time talking with people with a more literalist viewpoint than I have, I have become more willing to assume something might be literal rather than metaphorical than I was before. 

My life tends to be better when it includes regular Bible study, though I am not always regular about it. I'm not sure if that is something innate to the Bible or because it implies a routine of some sort. There is also something compelling about wrestling with a text that so many others have and are wrestling with. I also think it is our best source of knowledge about Jesus and his words and actions. Aside from the supernatural and miraculous aspects of Jesus's life and deeds, I think learning and following his example is a really good way to be a better human both alone and in community. I think you might be able to argue that the rest of the Bible could be replaced with tradition and the Holy Spirit (although we would lose so much, including the rich well of knowledge from the Old Testament to Jesus references) and we could still have something valuable that is recognizable as Christianity, but I think those stories are crucial.

Death With Dignity

This is the second of two week two discussion questions from my Spring 2022 course Making Sense of Theology through Pathways Theological Education.

Read and respond to the case: “Proposed Death with Dignity Referendum.”

Imagine that your state has a referendum on the ballot legalizing physician-assisted end of life, a.k.a. euthanasia, similar to laws passed in Oregon and California.

Content Warning: Obviously this isn't an easy topic, but my discussion of it ended up being way more graphic about causes of death and murder than I expected would be necessary.

 I'm going to start with the fact that since I'm from Oregon, where we twice voted as a state to allow death with dignity, I am seeped in an embedded theology that of course this is good. Since part of that embedded culture is that we often use the word suicide, usually with modifiers, to refer to choosing one's time of death when we know painful death is coming soon, I'm going to use that term here. Rather than the argument given in the assignment that "this is not suicide because something else, often cancer, is the true cause of death," what I hear is simply an acknowledgement that people "died of cancer" or "had cancer and died." I know that my Catholic family members, who do, in general, consider suicide a sin, do not consider this to be sinful. (Also, while it is entirely off topic, I don't think there is any Christian excuse to treat suicide as anything other than a death due to illness regardless of whether it was due to an attempt to avoid a quickly advancing painful death due to cancer or mental illness, that just ends up being hurtful to survivors and keeps those who are struggling from reaching out to religious community.) And, honestly, I think death with dignity passed in Oregon and Washington because we already had a culture where suicide (and in some cases infanticide) in the face of painful death was considered a valid choice. The main issue was we didn't have access to processes that were reliable, didn't leave the family with extra trauma and could still be carried out when patients were physically very weak from their illness. I won't go into the stories I've heard from the 50's, 60's  and 70's, but I personally have never heard condemnation of someone who choose their time of death rather than waiting for "natural death." When I asked a friend who grew up in a rural area if this was the same in their area, he immediately told me that it was called "shotgun therapy" in his area and several of his grandparents' friends made that choice. My dad was essentially offered euthanasia as an option at his brain cancer diagnosis in 1985 in a Catholic hospital by an oncologist who straight out told him that whether or not he choose the treatment he was offering (out of several options), to keep his number as he was available for end of life care and was specifically willing to give as much pain meds as necessary to keep someone comfortable even if that dose came with a risk of stopping breathing if that was what the patient wanted. If I recall correctly, this conversation took place in full hearing of my whole family and several family friends. At least in Oregon, we have a long tradition of individuals being able to choose euthanasia.

My thoughts on this are mostly pragmatic, which probably qualifies as anthropologically based, but I'll go into that in further detail later. Reflecting on what I know about the differences in how people died and whether or not I know anyone who used legal assisted to suicide to die, has actually convinced me that regardless of what I believed divine revelation to say, I would be generally in favor of the law allowing people to choose euthanasia legally. This is because when I reflect on my grandparents generation, almost all of whom died before physician assisted suicide was available in Oregon, Washington and California; I know of several people who choose to end their life on their own, knowing that a painful death was coming. All of these people choose a method that was messy and traumatic for their family. Of my parent's generation, many of who are dying now, I only know of one who choose euthanasia, the father of a friend. Statistics in Oregon show that a significant number of people who get a prescription for assisted suicide, either do not fill the prescription or do not use it. This is believed to be, in part, because for some people, just having the option makes them less stressed and more comfortable waiting as long as they have any good times. I suspect that the reason the numbers of suicide in the face of coming deaths I hear about now that assisted suicide is legal is that most of the methods people used in the past required them to be much more well and fit when they took action than physician assisted suicide does today. People today can wait longer and may die naturally in the meantime in a manner they still find to be good. (I would be remiss if I did not note that people whose illnesses do or are likely to involve swallowing problems regularly show up in the media asking for further assistance to be legal for them, because they don't want to have to choose between ending their life earlier than necessary and having to take whatever pain their body chooses to dole out after they cannot swallow anymore.)  

Continuing on a pragmatic basis, concerns about misuse of these laws are something I think everyone shares. But, unfortunately, neither allowing nor denying death with dignity stops the murders of seriously ill and disabled people in our communities. Yesterday (March 1) was Disability Day of Mourning, a day for mourning disabled people who were killed by a family member or caregiver. According to https://disability-memorial.org/, last year, 5 disabled people were murdered by their caregivers in Oregon, Washington and California. (I'm using those states because they line up with where all the incidents of suicide to prevent painful death I've mentioned above took place and all states with laws allowing individuals to choose euthanasia for themselves.) The numbers are likely much higher, because such deaths are often only investigated when they are obvious. I don't think this means we shouldn't worry about misuse of death with dignity laws, and such laws should continue to include checks and balances, but our concern for unnecessary deaths of sick and disabled people needs to start long before death with dignity laws. For instance, the COVID epidemic saw a push in England for all sorts of people with disabilities to be marked as DNR (Do Not Resuscitate), regardless of their feelings on the matter, solely on the basis of disabilities and not any differences in their likelihood of benefiting from advanced life saving measures. In the US, many states crisis standards of care for medical care when hospitals and medical professionals are overwhelmed were also found to discriminate against people with disabilities, deprioritizing their care for reasons unrelated to survivability or need.

I want to specifically address the argument suggested in opposition to "Only God decides when we die." If God can keep Daniel and his friends safe in the flaming furnace or the lion's den, God can certainly make some meds not work. I'm not saying we should tempt God, but I don't believe God is so limited that we need to avoid possibly getting in God's way. I also think this argument is not necessarily in good faith, because some of the same groups I see touting arguments like this also believe in trying to bring about events their reading of dispensationalism lists as necessary precursors to the second coming. You can't have it both ways. Also, I think arguments like this are often harmful to faith. If "Only God decides when we die", many of those who witness a painful, drawn-out death wonder why God would be so cruel as to wait. Avoiding this type of statement doesn't solve the problem of theodicy, it doesn't reinforce concerns about it either.

As far as my pragmatism about this issue possibly implying an anthropologically based rather than divine revelation based outlook, while I start with looking at how humans are affected, my reason for doing so is based on the belief that humans are made in God's image and all of the many teachings in the Bible about loving our neighbor. Our neighbor is not just our fellow Christian, not only Christians are made in God's image. When we make legal decisions based on ethics, certainly our Christian beliefs might inform them, but if our neighbor is not a Christian, we are not called to force them to behave as a Christian, we are called to love them. (We can argue separately how and when the great commission might call us to do more in the way of evangelism than love our neighbor.) When we try to legislate what we believe to be God's will, we are acting as if we believe our human laws can enforce behavior that God cannot. Treating law as stronger than God's will is idolatry.  This isn't to say that we shouldn't have any laws or any laws that align with God's will, but we should do so in the spirit of Article 3 of the Winchester Profession "We believe that holiness and true happiness are inseparably connected, and that believers ought to be careful to maintain order and practice good works; for these things are good and profitable unto men."  Additionally,  I believe that any type of harm reduction technique falls in the category of loving our neighbor and this does seem to be harm reduction. (I would argue that the "first do no harm" statement often attributed to the Hippocratic oath is not in fact followed, doctors regularly have to choose harm reduction. I am alive today because 9 months ago a doctor cut a huge chunk of infected flesh out of my leg, knowing that he only had about an 80% chance of success if he did and that even if he was successful I might not have full use of my leg, but also knowing that if he didn't I would surely die a painful death. That is harm reduction, not doing no harm.)

I will say that whether or not an individual Christian should avail themselves of assisted suicide in the face of certain and painful death is a separate question and while we can advise our fellow Christians on this topic, we also need to leave space for them to listen to the Holy Spirit, recognize that what the Holy Spirit tells us to do for us may not be what the Spirit tells them, and love them, not condemn them.