New Testament scholar N.T. Wright recently weighed in on questions surrounding suicide and the afterlife, stressing he does not believe suicide is an unpardonable sin that cuts a person off from salvation.
In a recent episode of the “Ask N.T. Wright Anything” podcast, host Justin Brierley read a question from Andrew Mason in Newcastle, England, who once led a religious education class for 11- to 12-year-olds.
During a spontaneous Q&A, Mason was asked, “Why does God let people commit suicide?” A similar and more personal question followed another child, who asked, “Do you go to Heaven if you commit suicide and you are a born-again Christian?”
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“These are obviously hugely tragic questions,” Wright, the former Bishop of Durham in the Church of England, responded. “People ask them when they’ve been affected in their family or whatever, by somebody who’s taken their own life.”
He noted the issue had touched his own family as well.
“It’s happened once in my own family, in my own memory, and I remember still the shock,” he said. “I know where I was standing when I got the phone call.”
While affirming the gravity of the issue, Wright said the phrasing of the questions required deeper reflection on broader theological themes.
“The first one, ‘Why does God let that happen?’ is part of the much, much larger question of, ‘Why is there evil and suffering in God’s world?’ ‘Why does God let people die in car accidents?’… God’s world is a much stranger and darker place. And it isn’t that God is pulling puppet strings and just making people do certain things and making sure they don’t go anywhere dangerous.”
Rather than viewing God as a micromanager of human actions, Wright emphasized divine intention for human maturity and responsibility.
“God wants us to be grown-up and responsible and take responsibility for who we are and what we do,” he said. “And sometimes extraordinary things, nasty things happen, for which there is no obvious explanation.”
Turning to the second question — whether a Christian who dies by suicide would still “go to Heaven” — Wright pushed back against the framing of the afterlife as mere soul migration.
“The phrasing of that implies that the point of Christianity is for somebody’s soul to go to Heaven, whereas in the New Testament … the point is actually for God to come and be with his people in the new heavens and new earth.”
The more accurate question, he said, would be: Will that person be in the loving presence of Jesus, in the power of the Holy Spirit, until the time when God makes new heavens and new earth and raises us from the dead?
Wright rejected the notion that suicide is an unpardonable sin that cuts someone off from salvation.
“To turn around and say, ‘Oh, that was very wicked. God would never forgive you for doing that,’ is just victim blaming,” he said. “Which, as I think we’ve learned these days, is a very bad and cruel thing to do.”
He acknowledged that some people engage in self-destructive behaviors flippantly, but stressed that most suicides result from deep and complex suffering.
“This is the result of a very serious, what we probably should call an illness of some sort of depression, of anxiety, of worry, of feeling of failure,” he said.
Wright offered a picture of divine compassion, referencing Psalm 139: “If I climb up to Heaven, thou art there. If I go down to Hell, thou art there also.” He added, “There are people who really do seem to go down into the pit, into a personal Hades, and please God, will they discover that God is there too — and in Jesus, who descended into Hell.”
“In such cases, I see the arms of Jesus wrapping around such a person with love and consolation and tenderness,” he said. “Jesus is able to receive them, to rescue them, to console them, to refresh them, and if they belong to Him in the first place, then I would say, to raise them from the dead at the time when all tears will be wiped away.”
Reflecting on the cry of Christ from the cross, Wright noted, “When Jesus said, ‘My God, My God, why did you abandon me?’ that is precisely how many suicides feel. … But I think we shouldn’t then soften the quote from Psalm 22. … Jesus on the cross and in His descent into Hell has come to the place where the suicide ends up in order, then, to hold on to them.”
“If they have known Him and loved him even partially or muddledly, and we are all muddled to a lesser or greater extent, then I think Jesus, and in the power of His Spirit, will look after such a person, and we will find, when we are raised from the dead into the new creation, that they will be with us … in the place where there are no more tears.”
According to statistics from the U.S. Centers of Disease Control and Prevention, suicide is one of the leading causes of death in the United States, with one death occurring every 11 minutes.
In a recent episode of his podcast, John Piper, chancellor of Bethlehem College and Seminary in Minneapolis, Minnesota, challenged the misconception that Heaven can be lost due to future sin or diminished capacity.
“My answer, and I’ll try to show that it’s biblical, is no,” Piper said. “The good works of a true Christian will never be canceled out, not by anything. The good deeds will always have their reward that God considered fitting when we did them.”
For true believers, however, every genuinely good deed remains secure in God’s memory and judgment regardless of when it was done. Piper emphasized God’s omniscience in discerning the motives behind each act: “God sees a good deed, he sees it exactly for what it is, and he deems it appropriate to reward.”
Quoting 1 Corinthians 4:5, he said, “Do not pronounce judgment … before the Lord comes, who will bring to light the things now hidden in darkness and will disclose the purposes of the heart. Then, each one will receive his commendation from God.”
Piper presented three main arguments to support his view that heavenly rewards are not canceled out by later failures in life. First, he cited God’s promises in Matthew 10:42 and Ephesians 6:8: “Whatever good anyone does, this he will receive back from the Lord.”
“These are unqualified promises,” he said. “We’d better be careful lest we cancel God’s promises by some kind of theology of reward-loss.”
Leah M. Klett is a reporter for The Christian Post. She can be reached at: leah.klett@christianpost.com
