Does Life Have Value?

I have always assumed that life has value. Every life. Yours, mine. It's a standard assumption, culturally.

 

But is it true?

 

I certainly don't behave as though it were true. Certain people in my life are more valuable to me than other people. My family is the most valuable of all. I am willing to sacrifice myself for them in ways that I will not do for a stranger. I have friends in my life who have become close enough to be like family, and I have done nice things for strangers in my life, but I'd guess that you are like me--some lives are more valuable to you than others.

Are you still comfortable saying that all lives have value when some have more value to you than others?

Perhaps we mean to say that all people are due certain rights by function of their being human. Every human life is due certain protections, every life is valuable enough to be protected.

But we don't really mean that, either, do we? I do not act as though every life is entitled to certain provisions. I have no idea what those provisions would be, do you? Protection from bodily harm? Shelter? Enough to eat? The freedom to self-determine one's life course?

These are abstractions. Our culture does not empower us to act on the belief that all lives have value. Instead, in our culture, the value of a life is primarily economic. If a life can produce something of value, it is valuable. If it cannot, it is devalued. This becomes especially clear when you consider the lives of the sick, the frail, and the prisoner.

We live in a world in which lives are cheap and our way of life demeans our professed value of life.

As a Christian, all this troubles me. I know that I am supposed to value all people as bearers of the imago dei--the image of God. But I find that in my own walk through the world, I am not able to value all people equally. Futher, I confess on behalf of my culture that we don't value all people as we might.

Recently, I wondered if it weren't the case that the metaphor of the human life as having "value" might be played out. Perhaps that metaphor is a description of what we have--a culture that really does accord people respect and rights according to their productive values. Perhaps the metaphor is done--it's been taken.

I wondered if the better image of the "imago dei" in each human person is captured by the word "mystery." Every huamn life has mystery. After all, the image of God in scripture is largely invisible. You are not allowed to see it. You can perceive it if it reveals itself to you. And you are changed by that revelation when you do perceive it. Is that not a better way to capture the essence of a human life? Human lives do have value, but that's a crude economic concept and we should let it be that. The divinity found in a human life is not measured in value but in its mysterious, elusive, revelatory nature.

Every human life is accorded with dignity not because it has value, but because it is unknown... a treasure to unearth... a light to uncover.

In a world that treats people like blunt material objects, we could use more ideas that treat people like things that can hardly be perceived, let alone managed.