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LCMS 2026 Convention Workbook: Reports and Overtures, PDF page 231

2026 Convention Workbook
196 
THEOLOGICAL DOCUMENTS  —COMMISSION ON THEOLOGY AND CHURCH RELATIONS
INTRODUCTION
5
In 2016, LifeWay Research conducted a major study of American attitudes.25 /T_heir 1,000-person survey sample strat-
i/f_ication mirrored the most recent U.S. Census data for gender, age, race/ethnicity, region, metro/non-metro, education 
and income. /T_he following are among the most relevant /f_indings: 67% agree that it is morally acceptable for a person to 
ask for a physician’s aid in taking his or her own life, and 69% affirm permitting physicians to assist terminally ill patients 
in ending their life. Signi/f_icantly, nonreligious persons are more likely to agree (84%) than Christians (59%) and other 
religions (70%). /T_hose de/f_ined as having “evangelical beliefs” were less likely to agree than those without evangelical beliefs 
(38% vs. 73%).26
C. Dying in America
Death for most Americans will not take place in a hospital. A 2018 Harvard report stated that “although more than 700,000 
people die in hospitals each year in the US, the trend is toward fewer in-hospital deaths” even during a time of increasing 
hospital admissions. In fact, between 2000 and 2015, a sharp turnabout occurred in the places where people died. In 
comparison with a 2000 survey, those who died in 2015 were more likely to die at home or in a community-based setting 
(31% vs. 40%) and less likely to die in an acute care hospital (20% vs. 33%).
27 Linda D. Bartlett and Karen Rehder claim 
that death for most Americans is “peaceful, painless, and with family. ”28 /T_hey note that “most Americans spend their last 
days in their own homes with family and friends; most are alert and in control of their bodily functions; one-third die 
at home while one-half transfer to a hospital shortly before death; most maintain active interest in the world; most are 
not depressed; and many report a feeling of hope, believing they have something to live for. ”
29 M. Powell Lawton of the 
Philadelphia Geriatric Center reported that, “On the day of death 51 percent had no difficulty with orientation or recogni-
tion of family; 61 percent had no pain; and 52 percent could breathe freely. ”
30
Nevertheless, despite the reality for the aggregate of persons, signi/f_icant numbers of individuals do die in hospitals 
amid various technological interventions. /T_he resulting emotional strains and /f_inancial costs of hospital care for dying 
patients are signi/f_icant burdens. As a result, such factors continue to drive changes to law and custom that permit physi-
cians to intervene in ways that ostensibly “relieve misery, ” but do so by hastening or even causing death.  
Recent years have witnessed an explosion of debates in the literature on end-of-life issues. A wide variety of voices are 
heard: medical researchers and physicians, philosophers and ethicists, theologians, attorneys, journalists, disability activist 
groups, and even presidential commissions. 
25 “ American Views on Assisted Suicide — Lifeway Research, ” LifeWay Research, http://lifewayresearch.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/12/Sept-2016-American-Views-Assisted-Suicide.pdf.
26 /T_hose with “evangelical beliefs” “strongly agree” with these statements: /T_he Bible is the highest authority for what I believe; it is very important for me personally to encourage non-Christians 
to trust Jesus Christ as their Savior; Jesus Christ’s death on the cross is the only sacri/f_ice that could remove the penalty of my sin; and only those who trust in Jesus Christ alone as their Savior 
receive God’s free gi/f_t of eternal salvation. /T_hese doctrinal markers are shared by faithful members of the LCMS. Polling organizations frequently identify the LCMS as “evangelical” because of 
such shared beliefs. 
27 Robert H. Shmerling, “Where People Die, ” Harvard Health (Oct. 31, 2018), health.harvard.edu/blog/where-people-die-2018103115278.
28 Linda D. Bartlett and Karen Rehder, “Ventilators, Feeding Tubes, and Other End-of-Life Questions, ” Lutherans for Life (Feb. 28, 2020), lutheransforlife.org/article/ventilators-feeding-tubes-and-
other-end-of-life-questions/. /T_he study surveyed 4,000 people age 65 and older.
29 Bartlett and Rehder, “Ventilators, Feeding Tubes, and Other End-of-Life Questions, ” 7.
30 Quoted by Bartlett and Rehder, “Ventilators, Feeding Tubes, and Other End-of-Life Questions, ” 7.
THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
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II. Theological Foundations
A. Christian Basis for Human Dignity and the Sanctity of Life 
Christian discussions of end-of-life issues must begin with the doctrine of creation.31 Created by God, accountable to God, 
we live as perpetual recipients in relation to His perpetual giving. Secondly, Luther reminds us that the commandment 
against taking life also obligates us to be protectors and sustainers of life, for ourselves and for others. Lutheran theolo-
gians call this a theology of “receptivity and vocation. ”
32 All end-of-life conclusions are predicated on the premise of God’s 
superior claim to us and are bounded by the limits of creation as He designed them. As Luther put it, “/T_he First Article is 
given for the purpose that we should know and learn where we come from, what we are, and to whom we belong. ”
33 Indeed, 
Luther’s comments on the First Article of the Apostles’ Creed use a form of “all” nine times to emphasize God’s role. 
What does this mean? I believe that God has made me and ALL creatures; that He has given me my body and 
soul, eyes, ears, and ALL my members, my reason and ALL my senses, and still takes care of them. He also gives 
me clothing and shoes, food and drink, house and home, wife and children, land, animals, and ALL I have. He 
richly and daily provides me with ALL that I need to support this body and life. He defends me against ALL 
danger and guards and protects me from ALL evil. ALL this He does only out of fatherly, divine goodness and 
mercy, without any merit or worthiness in me. For ALL this it is my duty to thank and praise, serve and obey 
Him. /T_his is most certainly true.
34
/T_he doctrine of creation, speci/f_ically the teaching of creation out of nothing (ex nihilo), confesses that everything in 
the cosmos owes its existence to the divine will. /T_his sets orthodox Christianity apart from pantheism, panentheism and 
open theism.
35 It also establishes the qualitative distinction between Creator and creature.
/T_his idea of the primary differentiation between the Creator and the creature does not exist merely in the realm of 
dogma. It is central to the Genesis narrative, the Old Testament teachings about idolatry, and Paul’s theology and soteriol-
ogy. /T_he language of Genesis reinforces the consistent teaching of radical differentiation. /T_he verb “create” (bara — אָרָּבin 
the Hebrew Scriptures has God alone as its subject—only God creates.
36
31 While Christian discussions of this topic begin with a doctrine of creation, this is not to say that one can only mount a defense against suicide and euthanasia on Christian grounds. Arthur J. 
Dyck of the Harvard School of Public Health put forth a case based on “logic and facts” to demonstrate that one might argue for a natural and inalienable right to life, a natural love for life, and 
as a belief in life’s sacredness or “incalculable worth” without committing oneself to the Christian faith tradition on the basis of “the moral structure of life’s worth and protection. ” In his Life’s 
Worth: /T_he Case against Assisted Suicide (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2002), before showing the importance of the “incalculable worth” of life in Christianity, he argues that such views are compat-
ible with, but not dependent on, one’s adherence to the Christian tradition or its doctrine, 73.
32  Charles Arand, “Personal Autonomy versus Creaturely Contingency: /T_he First Article and the Right to Die, ” Concordia Journal (October 1994), 388.
33  Cited by Arand, “Personal Autonomy versus Creaturely Contingency, ” 388.
34 Luther’s Small Catechism with Explanation (St. Louis: Concordia Publishing House, 2017), 16, emphasis added.
35 Simply de/f_ined: Pantheism identi/f_ies God with the universe; panentheism holds that God and the universe are distinguished, but the universe in/f_luences and changes God; open theism distin-
guishes God and the universe, but because of human freedom God’s knowledge of the future is limited and His current governance is limited by human cooperation with Him. 
36 /T_homas E. McComiskey, “278 אָרָּבed. R. Laird Harris, Gleason L. Archer Jr. and Bruce K. Waltke, /T_heological Wordbook of the Old Testament (Chicago: Moody Press, 1999), 127.
THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
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Y et our history from the time of the Garden of Eden until the present has been marked by our rejection of God’s 
rightful place as Creator and ourselves as His creation. As early as 1517, Luther declared: “Man is by nature unable to want 
God to be God. Indeed, he himself wants to be God, and does not want God to be God. ”37 In the New Testament, Paul 
concludes his discussion in Romans 1:19–25 with the divine consequence of ignoring that created order: “/T_herefore God 
gave them up in the lusts of their hearts to impurity, to the dishonoring of their bodies among themselves, because they 
exchanged the truth about God for a lie and worshiped and served the creature rather than the Creator, who is blessed 
forever! Amen. ” 
Finally, the truth of Scripture affirms more than this. Unlike a sculptor who would have an instrumental relation-
ship between himself and what he fashioned or a painter who would leave something of his genius in the paintings he 
produced, God is related to His creation as “ Absolute Giver to absolute receiver. ”
38 Put another way, God gives life; we 
receive life. We are stewards, not owners, of the lives God entrusts to us. If our lives are given from God, we certainly have 
no authority over the lives and deaths of others. Since God is the absolute Giver and our nature hardwires us to be receiv-
ers, “the most uncreaturely thing that a person could do is to refuse God’s gi/f_t of life. ”
39 Oswald Bayer helpfully explains 
that human dignity lies in the “indissoluble intertwining of element and instituting word” by the One who has “bestowed, 
given on loan—by the One who promises and gives himself unconditionally to humankind: namely, God. ”
40 Because my 
human dignity does not develop out of my own works or merit, neither can any other human being rip it from me. It 
belongs neither to me nor to those in power in society. Rather, it remains that which is on loan from God. /T_he relationship 
of Creator to creature as “ Absolute Giver to absolute receiver, ” is developed biblically by Paul in 1 Corinthians 6 where he 
teaches that “you are not your own, for you were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body” (
1 COR. 6:19/endash.case20).
Since we are both dependent and /f_inite, necessarily creature rather than Creator, any effort to arrogate to ourselves 
rights that properly belong only to God (e.g., giving or taking life) can only be counted as foolish in the extreme or, more 
properly, an act of cosmic treason. Continuing Sayer’s analogy of God’s creation to human artistry, we have no reason to 
believe that our efforts to seize power from the Artist would be any more successful than if a painting refused to be painted. 
In Psalm 139, verses 7–12 re/f_lect upon the impossibility of evading the searching presence of the Creator, regardless of the 
strategies or designs followed by the creature. David then explains: 
13 For you formed my inward parts; 
you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. 
14 I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. 
Wonderful are your works; 
my soul knows it very well. 
15/uni00A0My frame was not hidden from you, 
when I was being made in secret, 
intricately woven in the depths of the earth. 
16 Y our eyes saw my unformed substance; 
in your book were written, every one of them, 
the days that were formed for me, 
when as yet there was none of them.
37 LW 31:10.
38 Arand, “Personal Autonomy versus Creaturely Contingency, ” 380. See also Oswald Bayer, “Self-Creation? On the Dignity of Human Beings, ” Modern /T_heology 20, no. 2 (April 2004), 275–290. 
Bayer opens with the provocative sentence: “/T_he absurd desire of humans to become self-creators — be it in an individual or a collective way — is as old as humanity itself, ” 275.
39 Arand, “Personal Autonomy versus Creaturely Contingency, ” 392.
40 Bayer, “Self-Creation?” 279. Bayer calls this an unconditional “categorical gratuity. ”
THEOLOGICAL FOUNDATIONS
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/T_hinking of ourselves as radically dependent on a Creator for our lives and identity bears critical implications for our 
understanding of the topic of human dignity, so much discussed by the advocates of “death with dignity. ” Charles Arand 
couples the First Article of the Creed with the assertion of ex nihilo creation as the radical counter-cultural confession 
of second-century orthodoxy. It confuted the idea that the material was intrinsically tainted with evil and notions of an 
imposed chaotic order of creation popular in such Greek philosophies as Stoicism, Epicureanism and Platonism.
41 Arand 
proffers this truth as a potent affirmation of our belief in the worth of human life. Created by God, we do not have life on 
our own nor are we free to dispose of it as we will. 
Carl Trueman echoes these concerns in his discussion of dignity in /T_he Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self.
42 /T_he 
argument that we are created by God and radically dependent on Him has been eroded by the rise of what has been 
dubbed “expressive individualism. ” Philosophical trends from Rousseau through the Romantics, to Freud, and then to the 
New Le/f_t have altered the popular understanding of the relationship between Creator and creation. As the self-emerged 
triumphant, notions of volitional choice in countless arenas of life became the means for individuals to de/f_ine themselves, 
thinking that their identity is the sum total of their choices. Even being a Christian is viewed as a personal choice, together 
with whatever “/f_lavor” of Christian we elect to become. So also, morality is merely another choice. As Christians (and 
as confessional Lutherans), we are not exempt from this lamentable psychologizing of identity and dignity. As Trueman 
noted, “/T_he general culture of expressive individualism and of choice of identity is ours too. ”
43
We are not suggesting that the shi/f_t from rigidly hierarchical notions to the current emphasis on individual dignity 
was entirely wrong. /T_he democratizing of government and society has certainly been bene/f_icial in many ways. But such 
bene/f_its are most /f_irmly grounded in the fact that God has created and provided redemption for every person rather than 
in tenuous claims of human dignity. While human dignity is frequently ill-de/f_ined, it is certain that any authentic claim 
of human dignity must be centered in the worth and identity God gives by His creating, redeeming and sanctifying work. 
“/T_he problem with expressive individualism is not its emphasis on the dignity or the individual value of every human 
being. /T_hat is what undergirded the /f_ight against slavery in the nineteenth century and the civil rights movement of the 
1950s and 1960s. Rather, it is the fact that expressive individualism has detached these concepts of individual dignity and 
value from any kind of grounding in a sacred order. ”
44 In place of dignity based on a universal human nature bestowed by 
God, today’s psychologized expressive individualism grounds dignity in the sovereign right of every individual to deter-
mine his or her own identity and to act in ways that demand not mere tolerance but recognition by the society at large.
Lutherans do not stop with locating the nature of human dignity in the Creator-creature relationship. As Christ-
centered and cross-focused disciples of Christ, we cannot fail to describe our human dignity in terms of redemption as 
well as creation. As such, dignity is a gi/f_t conferred by the Creator who is also the Redeemer. Luther’s explanation of the 
First Article of the Creed in his Small Catechism de/f_ines human beings in terms of their original creation, but with a view 
to justi/f_ication when he writes: “God protects me against all danger and shields and preserves me from all evil. And all this 
is done out of pure, fatherly, and divine goodness and mercy, without any merit or worthiness of mine at all!”
45 Our lives 
41 Arand, “Personal Autonomy versus Creaturely Contingency, ” 393.
42 Carl R. Trueman, /T_he Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self: Cultural Amnesia, Expressive Individualism, and the Road to Sexual Revolution (Wheaton: Crossway, 2020). 
43 Trueman, /T_he Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 386. Trueman cites numerous authors, such as Michael Horton, Christian Smith and David Wells, who have demonstrated some of the ways 
expressive individualism and the choice of identity have had pernicious effects on the Christian church of our day. /T_he descriptor “therapeutic” in the term made famous by Smith, “/T_herapeutic 
Moralistic Deism, ” describes this emphasis upon the shi/f_t from helping persons adjust to the demands of their duties toward God or their accountability to a larger society to an agenda that 
makes the self-determining individual primary.
44 Trueman, /T_he Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self, 387.
45 Martin Luther, “Small Catechism, ” in /T_he Book of Concord, Robert Kolb and Timothy J. Wengert, eds. (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 354–355.