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  A  Pastoral  T heology  of Suicide When suicide occurs—whether within the church or beyond it—it often leaves communities reeling and burdened with painful, unresolved questions. While theological reflection may offer frameworks for understanding, such answers rarely alleviate the profound sense of desolation experienced by those left behind.   Pastoral theology invites us to hold tenderly the tension between God’s justice and mercy, recognizing that our doctrinal convictions about salvation and judgment profoundly shape how we minister compassionately to those affected by suicide.   In this section, our aim is to explore some of these questions and offer pastoral insights that may help guide care, presence, and compassion in the face of such loss. Is  suicide a sin? Throughout church history, Christians have wrestled over this question. Another similar  issue  is  to wonder if  Christians who die  by suicide  forfeit t...

  A  H istorical  T heology  of Suicide S uicide in the  P atristic  p er iod  (AD  100  to 500) There was no sustained theological reflection on suicide during the early patristic period. One proposed reason for this silence is the assumption that suicide was fundamentally incompatible with the Christian moral framework. As such, it was not initially treated as a pressing ethical or theological issue requiring explicit engagement. The act was implicitly regarded as  untenable  for a believer. This changed with the work of Lactantius (c. 240–320), who, in his apologetic writings against pagan philosophy, offered a more explicit condemnation of suicide. He characterized it as not merely a sin, but a greater crime than homicide. Lactantius argued that the person who dies by suicide is guilty of murder and, more significantly, of usurping the divine prerogative, since God alone is the giver and taker of life (Roberts et al., 2022). In...

  Suicide in the Bib l e The Bible is fundamentally a theological text , chronicling God’s redemptive work across the grand narrative of creation, fall, redemption, and new creation . While it is not a psychiatric or psychological manual , it offers profound insights into the human condition, as it portrays God’s interaction with real people facing real struggles. Many of the emotional and existential experiences recorded in Scripture resonate deeply with the challenges faced by individuals today. In this way, although the biblical narrative is embedded within specific historical, cultural, sociological, and literary contexts, its theological message transcends these boundaries, remaining relevant and applicable across time and cultures. Nonetheless, caution is  needed  when interpreting the biblical text through the lens of modern psychological categories. It is important to avoid uncritically imposing contemporary Western psychiatric constructs onto ancient texts, lest ...

Introduction Suicide  is defined as an act with a fatal outcome that is deliberately initiated and performed by the person in the knowledge and expectation of its fatal outcome (De Leo et al.,2004).  Globally,  suicide is the third leading cause of death among 15- to 29-year-olds   (WHO, 2025 )  and  it is among the ten leading causes of death in most countries around the world ( Bertolote, & Fleischmann ,  2002) . Although often considered a problem of affluence, more than seventy percent of all global suicides occur in  low- and middle-income  countries ( Bantjes  et al., 2016 ) .  For every completed suicide, it is estimated that between twenty and thirty non-fatal episodes of self-harm occur  or suicide attempts occur  ( WHO, 2025; Harmer et al., 2024 ) .  In Nigeria, although suicide re porting is poor, the WHO has reported high suicide estimates ( 17.3 per 100  0 00 )   higher than both the African and ...