Suicide And Hell

Human life is neither inherently pleasurable nor inherently crushing, as personal circumstances and subjective psychological reactions to those circumstances inevitably determine if someone feels like life offers promise or despair.  Whether human existence is meaningful is a separate issue from that of whether it is perceived positively or negatively by a given individual, and thus, either way, not everyone will necessarily have the same emotional and volitional reactions to the same approximate experiences.  Christians, being people, are not exempt from having various distinct feelings and attitudes towards their own lives.

Even Christians might feel so overwhelmed by or dissatisfied with their lives that they consider whether they even wish to continue living at all.  For some who have no inherent desire to press on through the trials and uncertainties of human life, a longing for death could drive them to directly think about killing themselves.  Misconceptions they may have heard from other Christians could easily make their personal trials far worse, especially the idea that suicide somehow disqualifies even an otherwise committed Christian from eternal life.  This unbiblical myth potentially makes certain people feel trapped between the threat of hell if they kill themselves and the threat of "hell" on earth if they continue enduring their circumstances.

First of all, the Biblical theology of hell has been thoroughly distorted by the majority of Christians: the Bible does not teach that all unsaved humans spend eternity in conscious torment.  It teaches that the opposite is the true fate of unsaved persons [1], with a handful of potential exceptions [2].  Thus, the way that hell is described to Christians as a whole is already problematic.  The arbitrary association of suicide in particular with hell only compounds the theological problems.  Never once does the Bible define suicide as some "unforgivable sin" or insist that there is another unforgivable sin in addition to the one Jesus said is the only one holding that status.  In fact, the very notion of more than one sin being unforgivable contradicts what Jesus states in passages like Matthew 12:30-32 and Mark 3.

If the so-called "unforgivable sin" is in its own category, it follows that every other sin, including suicide, cannot be an automatic damnation to hell if a person truly has a restored relationship with God (and I say this as someone who knows moralism is more important than salvation ever could be).  This is, of course, if salvation is not forfeited by sin in general, something the Bible does not clarify one way or another--but suicide in particular is not described as having some especially vile nature that would undo salvation itself.  Indeed, there are far worse sins that could be committed according to Biblical ethics, such as a number of deeds that express far more disregard for others than merely murdering them, which itself might be far worse than the unjust killing of oneself.

Nothing at all in the language of the gospels hints at suicide equating to blasphemy against the Holy Spirit for either Christians or non-Christians.  Moreover, damnation to hell for a failure to commit to Christ means that this is the one sin that God deems unforgivable, or else blasphemy against the Holy Spirit would be a second unforgivable sin, an idea that contradicts Matthew 12:30-32 as described above.  Suicide is nowhere close to having the status of an act that irrevocably condemns a person to destruction in hell and the simultaneous forfeiture of eternal life according to the Bible.  If anything, there are other sins that merit a far graver and harsher reaction than the self-killing often sought out of sheer desperation and deep exhaustion.

[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2017/02/the-truth-of-annihilationism.html

[2].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2020/03/revelation-149-11.html