Saturday, May 25, 2013
About Mars Hill Audio
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| In the mid-1980s professor Darrel Amundsen was asked to present a paper about early Christianity's views on euthanasia and suicide. The widespread distortions of those views that he came across while researching the paper eventually led him and Edward Larson to write A Different Death: Euthanasia and the Christian Tradition. The majority of the information that Amundsen came across asserted that, for sundry reasons, the early Church approved of and supported acts of suicide, and that it only changed its position because of the influence of St. Augustine. One reason that scholars are able to believe this, Amundsen explains, is because they accept Emile Durkheim's vacuous definition of suicide. In the late 1800s Durkheim, the father of French sociology, published a definition of suicide that disregarded the motivations and intentions of the one involved in the suicide; this neglect rendered the term broad enough to include both those who intend to kill themselves, and those who do not intend to kills themselves, but, nevertheless, do not resist being put to death. |  A Different Death: Euthanasia and the Christian Tradition (InterVarsity Press, 1998) |
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| Church History Durkheim, Emile Suicide |