Marc and Eddy were twin brothers who worked as cobblers in Belgium, where they shared an apartment. They were 45 years old when they decided to have a doctor kill them under Belgium’s liberal euthanasia laws. The state of Oregon, where I am living now, has also legalized euthanasia – Belgium takes it a step or two (or three or four) further and allows doctors to euthanize a patient without their participation in “pulling the trigger” to end their own life.
These brothers were not terminally ill, nor in constant pain. They were deaf and going blind, which a Belgian doctor deemed sufficient reason to put an end to their impending misery.
Helen Keller, a blind and deaf inspiration, died some fifty years ago. Is her legacy now dying in Europe?
Wow. We have come a long, long way down since Helen Keller died some 50 years ago after became a deaf-and-blind author, activist, world-wide traveler and world-wide inspiration. I wonder what she would say about this turn of events. Because of Helen Keller and people like her, blind-deaf people such as these brothers can lead rewarding, fulfilling, productive, and God-honoring lives.
What a tragedy! When a culture rejects God, that culture inevitably rejects the idea of people as God’s image-bearers. When God is rejected, He is not around to remind us that He looked at people and pronounced us “very good.” God is not around to remind us that He is making all things right. And He obviously can’t remind us that He has asked us – deaf and blind and sick and sinners all – to participate with Him in making all things right. When God isn’t around, these things happen. When we keep God in the picture we have an ever-present reminder that life, from it’s conception to God-appointed end, is invaluable and inviolable.
I hate to be a pessimist, but it seems like things are heading further downhill:
- A long-term prisoner took his life by euthanasia, rather than serve out his term.
- A right-to-die group launched a mobile euthanasia program aimed at helping to kill the people turned down by their doctors.
- Belgium’s ruling party put forth an amendment to extend euthanasia to children and Alzheimer’s sufferers
Since I hate to be a pessimist, I will say this: Thank God that the center of Christian faith has left Europe and North America! Thank God that His church is flourishing all over Latin America, Africa, and increasingly in Asia!
As he so often does, Philip Yancey says it best: “As I travel, I have observed a pattern, a strange historical phenomenon of God ‘moving’ geographically from the Middle East, to Europe, to North America to the developing world. My theory is this: God goes where he is wanted.” The great graphic below shows, God is increasingly wanted – and increasingly moving – in the Global South. The geographic center of world Christianity – which 100 years ago was still in Europe – has moved to Africa.
Philip Jenkins reminds us in his seminal work The Next Christendom, Christianity was Middle Eastern and African long before it became associated with European civilization: “Only after 1400 did Europe (and Europeanized North America) decisively become the Christian heartland. This account challenged the oddly prevalent view of Christianity as a white or Western ideology that was foisted on the rest of an unwilling globe.”