Welcome to Breakpoint, a daily look at an ever-changing culture through the lens of unchanging truth. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street. On a recent episode of 60 Minutes, interviewer Scott Pelley said to his guest, You don't have much time. Why are you spending time doing this? His guest, former U.S.
Senator Ben Sasse, who received a fatal diagnosis of pancreatic cancer back in December, replied with a laugh, well you invited me, so I assume you needed to fill some time. Short of a miracle, Sas will not see his 14-year-old son grow up. He won't walk his daughters down the aisle. And yet, he is right now teaching a nation a stunning lesson about dying with dignity. A former senator, Sas warns against the allure and the limits of political power while proclaiming what matters so much more.
Committed to free markets, he warns against the illusion that more consumption will make you happier. He is at the same time optimistic about what technologies might provide and also concerned about what's happened to our sense of self and happiness, especially among young people. In all of this, SAS is not being stoic, as though his death is not a big deal. He mourns what the loss means to his family. He regrets all that he missed while traveling for work instead of being at home.
And he talks about the pain that cancer has brought to him. But how he is dying is making right now a rare statement to the world. And it's being heard. As Dr. James Wood described in a recent world opinion piece, in a culture that kills to avoid harm, Hardship and hides death to avoid reckoning, a man dying well on high-profile platforms is a subtly radical act.
He is, without quite saying so, making an argument for life. for its dignity, its giftedness, its meaning even at the last. Indeed, his voice is especially powerful in a world like ours, one that continues to accept various forms of euthanasia and doctor assisted death. Across Europe, Canada, and a number of American states, advocates of what's often called medical assistance in dying or made market a promise of so-called death with dignity, unspoken in that terminology is an assumption that we need death with dignity because there's no such thing as dying with dignity. as if there's no value to be found in facing suffering or enduring pain to honor life until it's God given in.
So many speak to day as if giving up on life is what takes courage and compassion. And within a godless and hopeless framework of a naturalistic worldview, life is, as Shakespeare once put into the mouth of Macbeth, a tale told by an idiot full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
So why suffer to preserve such a meaningless existence, when no higher purpose or value is available to be found? To die is to escape from such a life. Once pleasure or plenty are no longer available to us, there's no dignity to be found in how we die. But the Christian view is centered on Christ's death. which restored the dignity to which God created us.
And because death is transformed, as Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote, there is dying with dignity. There is meaning and significance in the courage to face life's end and even the pain that so often accompanies it. In the Christian worldview, death and all of its pain and suffering is redeemable in the life of Christ because he defeated death. And that sort of courage is undeniable whenever it's witnessed in real life. As President Clinton, after being soundly critiqued by Mother Teresa on the issue of abortion at a national prayer breakfast, put it, it's difficult to argue with a life so well lived.
And in the same way, what we're now hearing and witnessing in these final days of Ben Sasse is that it's awful difficult to argue with one dying so well. As a wise pastor once observed to me, our children will remember all sorts of things about us, but the way in which we die. That's what they'll most remember about our faith. Death with dignity, that's a farce. It's a damnable idea that dehumanizes us both individually and collectively.
But dying with dignity, even as we pray for grace and peace for him and his family, that's a profound gift. God is giving all of us right now through then SAS. For the Colson Center, I'm John Stone Street with Breakpoint. Today's Breakpoint was co-authored with Dr. Timothy Padgett.
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