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Creed
Death & life
Middle East
5 min read

How much is a human life worth?

Concerned by the conditional responses to deaths in the Israel-Hamas war, Ryan Gilfeather considers why we should value all human lives.

Ryan Gilfeather explores social issues through the lens of philosophy, theology, and history. He is a Research Associate at the Joseph Centre for Dignified Work.

A line of people, some old, some young, wait to cross a road.
Palestinian life near the Damascus Gate in Jerusalem, Israel, 2021.
Levi Meir Clancy on Unsplash

The horrors of recent weeks have bought a disturbing reality to the surface: human dignity, the unearned and basic worth of all people, is up for negotiation. As I write these words, a dire conflict rumbles on in Israel and Gaza; the latest horrifying flashpoint in an intractable and brutal conflict. A cacophony of voices in the West are espousing histories, interpretations and solutions. Many of them reveal an implicit sense that only certain lives have an inherent dignity.  

Some praised Hamas’ brutal attack as a just act of decolonisation. The lives lost were not to be mourned, because, in their words, these Israelis were fair game for violence because they are colonisers. They asked for it. They have given up their right to the preservation of life. Implicitly, these voices suggest that human dignity is conditional; their actions have taken away their inherent value.  

Just as troubling is the apathy as thousands of Palestinian men, women, and children in Gaza are slain in their homes. Many of our leaders are silent about this unimaginable loss of life, as if it does not represent a tragedy, and as if they are just the collateral damage of war. The implicit message is that human dignity has preconditions, that only certain kinds of people get to have it in the first place, and that these particular Palestinians do not.   

Why should our rational autonomy or other capacities mean that we have an unearned worth? 

It is, in some ways, unsurprising that human dignity is up for negotiation in this way. Secular discussions of human dignity often ground it in the human person.  

In the philosophical tradition, following Kant, many consider our inherent dignity to be grounded in our capacity to make choices, be autonomous, and exercise reason. In other words, the capabilities which separate us from animals give us all an unearned worth or status.  

Others will point to our sentience, our capacity for creativity, empathy and caring relationships, or our membership of the human species. Hence, our inherent dignity is grounded in something that we do or possess, over and above the rest of creation. The problem with this grounding is that it can, at times, seem arbitrary. Why should our rational autonomy or other capacities mean that we have an unearned worth? It is little surprise that dignity is so often overlooked in practice.  

To respect this dignity, we must allow each person to live out this gift. Each person must be allowed to be free to think and act, without having their life violated or cut short. 

In contrast, Christians root the dignity of every human person in something altogether outside of them: the unbreakable love of God. It is a cornerstone of Christian belief that God loves every person who has ever lived and will ever live, regardless of what we have done or will do. “Nothing can separate us from the love of God”, as St Paul put it. God’s love for us is so profound that he became human and died for our sins so that we might be reconciled to Him.  

Central also, is the belief that God is omniscient, he knows everything that can ever be known, and he does not make errors of judgement. For Him to love us without any conditions of who we are or what we do, is to affirm that we are all inherently worthy of love.  

Our inherent dignity, is, therefore, grounded in something far more fundamental than something we do. It is rooted in the love of the creator of the whole universe. If we believe in the Christian God, therefore, we also accept the supreme value of every person. 

God’s gift to all of us expands on this picture. Genesis, the first book of the Bible, tells us that God made all humans in His image.  In this, God gives us the gift of reflecting his goodness and love here on this earth. He has granted us the capacity to use our minds to think about God and abstract things, to live lives marked by His love, joy, peace, justice, and courage. He calls us to use these capacities to nurture and care for creation just as He does. Since God is infinitely valuable; those made in His image are too. Hence, this gift gives us an inherent dignity. To respect this dignity, we must allow each person to live out this gift. Each person must be allowed to be free to think and act, without having their life violated or cut short. Crucially, this gift is unconditional. No matter what we do, we can always turn back to God and accept his gift of reflecting His goodness. There are no preconditions for who God gives it to. He freely offers this gift to all.  

Returning to Western responses to Israel-Gaza, we see that the Christian vision of human dignity does not countenance celebration of or apathy toward this loss of life. Some people saw Israeli deaths as unworthy of grief because they believe their actions forfeit their right to life. They implicitly see human dignity as conditional. In contrast, Christians believe our inherent value is unconditional, God will never cease to love us and will never take away our ability to reflect His goodness. Indeed, the death of Palestinians has been met with apathy and silence by many in the West, much as human tragedies in the Middle East often are. Implicit to this response is the sense that human dignity has preconditions, it is only extended to certain groups, those who live similar lives to us. The Christian vision objects here. God’s gift has no preconditions, it is freely offered to all. All possess an inherent dignity. This is not to pre-judge the complex questions of how to deal with the heart of the Israel / Palestine conflict, but it is to say that as we do so, the value and dignity of every human life must be paramount in the decisions taken   In the midst of this darkness the Christian message offers hope: every death is a tragic loss beyond all imagination and measure because all are infinitely valuable in God’s sight.  

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Belief
Creed
Wisdom
5 min read

Mapmaking our meaning in a modern world

Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another.
A hand holds a pen over a map, at the side is closed journal and colour pencils.
Oxana v on Unsplash.

People first began to think about theology not because they were looking for intellectual stimulus or solutions to abstract problems, but because they found themselves living in an unsettling and vastly expanded ‘space’. They were conscious of new dimensions in their connection with each other, new dimensions in coping with their own fear, guilt, despair, a new sense of intimate access to the limitless reality of God. They connected these new experiences with the story of Jesus of Nazareth, executed by the Roman colonial government, reported by his closest friends as raised from death and present with them and their converts in the communication of divine ‘spirit.’ As we read Christian scripture, we are watching the first generations of Christian believers trying to construct a workable map of this unexpected territory. 

When I started writing the assorted pieces that make up the little book on Discovering Christianity (published earlier this year), my hope was above all to convey something of this sense of Christian thinking as a process of mapmaking in a new and bewildering landscape. That’s why one chapter – originally drafted for a Muslim audience – tried to list some of the things that an interested observer might spot in looking from outside at the habits of Christian believers: not first and foremost their spectacular and uniform embodiment of unconditional divine love (if only), but just the sorts of things they said and did, the sort of language used about Jesus, the rituals of induction and belonging. Indeed, if there is one biblical text I had in mind in virtually all the chapters, it is the simple phrase, ‘Come and see’ that Jesus uses in St John’s gospel when he is first followed by those who will become ‘disciples’, literally ‘learners.’ 

‘Come and see’. When we use language like that in everyday life, we’re encouraging others to share something that has excited or troubled us (or both). It’s not a proposal for solving a problem. It’s not even a recruitment campaign. It’s an invitation to stand where someone else is standing and look from there. In the rich symbolic context of John’s gospel, it’s about sharing Jesus’ ‘point of view’ – which is, as we’re told right at the start of the gospel, a point of view unimaginably close to the heart of eternal life and reality itself.  

We can only see in this way when we move away from our ordinary perceptions a bit. Just as we can only learn to swim when we have jumped into the water, so we shan’t learn what faith is all about until we have been prodded by whatever forces around us to take the risk of trusting that (so to speak) the ground is going to hold beneath us if we step forward (I like to speak sometimes about discovering what images, ideas, perspectives and relations are ‘load-bearing’ in our lives).  

So part of the invitation is also about telling the stories of those who have taken that kind of risk and what sort of lives they have shaped for themselves in the light of it. There is little point in summoning others just to share my individual set of feelings. But there is perhaps more weight is saying, ‘A lot of people have felt this shape beneath the surface, this grain running through things.’ Which is why – as the book seeks to explain – theology works with the ‘classical’ shared texts that most Christian communities found themselves reading together in the first hundred years after Jesus; and works also with the history of the arguments and diverse perceptions that reading brought into focus.  

We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair.

It's not unknown outside theology. We have become so much more interested over the last few decades in how to understand works of art not just in terms of what the artist ‘meant’, but in terms of what the actual work does or makes possible. What world does it create? So we read the Bible, obviously, but we also read the readers of the Bible (think of the Jewish Talmud, with the original text of its classical legal discussions literally surrounded on every page by the arguments that this text has generated). We read and think in company; our theological reflection like the rest of our lives of faith is a shared, ‘conversational’ affair. And so along with reading the Bible and immersing ourselves in the history of what sense others have made of the basic text and story, we also bring to bear the sorts of things that are part of our current conversations in society and culture – the habits of ‘reasoning’ that we have picked up.  

There is an important difference between talking about ‘reason’ as a sovereign, detached capacity and talking about ‘reasoning’, the range of processes and practices that carry forward a common life of intelligent learning (and that learning may be at any level of supposed ‘intellectual’ capacity; once more, it’s not about abstractions). Our society these days is fairly comprehensively confused about this: we have a mythological picture of some supremely obvious way of arguing that allows for no final dispute; we call it ‘science’; and then we expect the impossible of it and are disillusioned and sceptical when it can’t give us absolutely certain answers. One of the many ironies of our society is that we are besotted with ‘science’ and at the same time fascinated by the idea that there are many ‘truths’, or else suspicious that apparently objective sources are actually controlled by other interests. Real ‘reasoning’ happens only when we have learned to trust one another’: a long story, but an all-important element in our human discovery. 

Bible, tradition, human reasoning – those are the tools we bring to this job of mapmaking. The book is really just a meditation on those words, ‘Come and see’, as the basis of Christian thinking. At the centre of everything is a set of very ambitious claims about what God is like – and what we are like. Part of what we’re invited to ‘come and see’ is ourselves. Once again it’s not unlike what happens in a really good play or film, when we go away conscious that we have seen not just someone else’s story but something fresh about our own selves. 

And my greatest hope for the book is that it may prompt someone to look a bit harder, to listen in to how Christians talk – and in that moment find that they recognize what’s being said in some complicated and untidy way. One of the most vivid characters in the gospel I’ve been quoting says of Jesus that he has told her everything she has ever done. I hope that those who are moved to investigate a bit further will come to that same unsettling and exciting point where they see themselves freshly, and the new landscape begins to unfold.  

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