At the heart of the Terri Schiavo tragedy is the question of assisted suicide and euthanasia. There is no proof-text of Scripture which explicitly forbids suicide. Libertines and liberals will justify suicide by claiming that “only God gets to define sin, and nowhere does the Bible expressly forbid suicide... therefore, whatever is not expressly forbidden is allowed.”

The problem with this reasoning is both moral and hermeneutic. The moral spirit of personal rights which is the hallmark of the libertine results in a theological rejection of the Bible as an all-sufficient Word revelation. The result is essentially a proof-text approach to hermeneutics, rather than a careful evaluation of the totality of Scripture along with appropriate analysis of precepts to the patterns and principles of Holy Scripture. All who take seriously the sufficiency of Scripture and thus believe that the Bible speaks authoratively to everything (at least in principle) are deemed legalists and Pharisees by the libertine and the liberal. Consistent libertines with such a proof-text approach to hermeneutics must at least make allowances for the legitimacy of suicide.

In contrast, the near-universal message of orthodox Christianity for two thousand years has been that the Bible teaches that suicide, though not condemned by name in biblical precept, is self-murder and thus a violation of the Sixth Commandment. Furthermore, we are reminded of two examples of suicide presented in Scripture (Saul in I Samuel 31:4 and Judas in Matthew 27:5) in which the suicides were the culmination of a pattern of wickedness and rebellion.