Abortion is a Touchstone Issue

Spare Us the Faux Outrage

One cannot help but be sardonically amused at the amount of heat (sans light) generated amongst Athenians over the issue of abortion. It is one of those issues which seems to get them all in a blather, yet one is left bemused as to why this ought to be the case.

We have been treated recently to yet another eructation on the issue--this time over a tragic case in Brazil where the following has been reported (assuming accuracy and truth in the reports): a nine year old child conceived twins through the sexual perversion of her stepfather, who raped her repeatedly. The doctors advised an abortion to terminate the pregnancy. It was subsequently done. The Roman Catholic church excommunicated the doctors, the mother, but not the rapist father. These are the facts as stated and they do not seem to be in dispute.

The Roman Catholic church has been vilified as an institution of medieval ignorance, unfit for the twenty-first century. People who have attempted to present an apologia for the ecclesiastical decisions have been imprecated to Hell.

This is rather ironic. Adam Smith, normally an urbane and reasoned commentator, is obviously very wound up about this issue. He actually excommunicates his opponent (but only if they call themselves a Christian). Presumably damning an opponent to "rot in Hell" is only of meaning to a Christian since an Unbeliever does not believe in the existence of Hell--the place where the Living God punishes sin and unrepentant sinners for ever. Strange. Hell is only existentially relevant to Unbelievers. Christians have been delivered from its maw.

So, let's get this straight. The Roman Catholic church excommunicates some people it believes are complicit in murder and actual perpetrators of murder. This so enrages folk that they in turn excommunicate those who support the action by calling down curses and imprecations upon them, consigning them to damnation.

We at Contra Celsum are not seeking to defend or approbate the ecclesiastical sentence of excommunication nor its administration in this particular case. We do not know enough about it. As for the practice of excommunication itself, the Scriptures command it--so that is sufficient. It neither needs nor requires human approbation. It requires obedience. The Scriptures direct that excommunication is to be applied to notorious public sinners who continue in their rebellious flagrant lifestyles, refusing to repent, yet insisting on remaining in the fellowship of the Church in good standing.

Particular sins do not disqualify one from being in the Body of Christ; persistent, stubborn, wilfulness in public sin does. After all, the Apostle Paul was a murderer; David was both a murderer and an adulterer; Peter was a cowardly denier of the Lord. All repented of their sin and because they were restored to fellowship with God Himself, the Church welcomed them.

So, in the case at hand, we do not know whether the doctors or the mother were repentant or were flagrantly rebellious. Nor do we know whether the step-father was repentant. Clearly incest is explicitly a matter for excommunication, since the man taken in sin in the Corinthian church was guilty of just this gross evil (I Corinthians 5). But these are matters for the Church, not the world; one does not know (and ought not to know) the attitudes and beliefs and testimony of those involved. But from the ground of Scripture, unless one knows those vital components, judgement in the matter is impossible.

Now, Athens gets itself in a tizz over how the Church is populated with sinners--with people who have done terrible things and (to their minds) are unworthy of eternal life. There is an implicit self-righteousness in this. "Since I have not done terrible deeds, the Christian Church is beneath my contempt if it lowers its standards to admit such notorious sinners." Athens cannot get its head around the fact that the Church is a society of repentant, forgiven sinners--many of them gross or terrible sinners.

Athens still works on the principle of human self-righteousness--the false belief that somehow their good works will outweigh their minor peccadilloes and that if indeed there is a god, they will be ok in the great assizes to come. They have closed their mind to the declaration of the Living God that "the soul that sins, it shall die", period. They have probably never realised that "Whoever keeps the whole Law (of God) and yet stumbles in one point, he has become guilty of all." (James 2:10) One sin is sufficient; no amount of righteousnesses will ever make up or atone for that which offends the Living God. Sin is "any want of conformity unto, or transgression of the Law of God," and it is infinitely offensive to the Living God.

So wound up has Athens become over these things that the Dominion Post would excommunicate the entire Roman Catholic church, declaring it to be unfit for the world. Others would imprecate and curse people to Hell who seek to defend the actions of the church.

Jerusalem is not phased by this. It is to be expected. Abortion is one of those issues which highlights the divide--the great, unbridgeable divide between the two Cities. Athens is built on the assertion of human rationalism: that which is true is that which can be rationally established where the mind of man is the ground, the arbiter, the determiner, and the interpreter of truth.

In Athens, man establishes the gods. Jerusalem, however, is built on the presuppostion of the Living God. Men can only think rationally and truthfully if they think their thoughts after Him. In Jerusalem, God establishes man.

Thus, in the issue of abortion, Athens seeks to establish rationalistically whether the babe in the womb is a human being or not. It largely concludes that the babe is not a human being; to kill the unborn child, therefore, is not murder. All its outrages and imprecations from that point on depend upon the religious conviction that the unborn child is not a human being. How do we Athenians know that? Because we, Man, assert that it is true. We, Man, are gods, knowing good and evil for ourselves.

Imagine how less strident, less vitriolic and self-righteous would be the pronouncements on the Brazil case if Athens entertained for a nono-second that the unborn twins were actually human souls. "A terrible crime has been committed, the result of which has been the conception of two innocent human beings. Terribly, regrettably, horribly in dealing with the consequences of the crime, we have had to kill two innocent people." At best, if this were the case, Athens would be claiming that it was compelled to do evil that good might come. (As an ethical proposition of course, such utilitarianism would itself stink--but that is another discussion.)

No, the stridency, the indignation, the religious self-righteousness is grounded in the emphatic, undoubted belief that the children in the nine year old's womb were definitively and most certainly not human beings. Why? One what grounds? Because we say so; we assert so; we insist that it is so. We can determine life and death for ourselves. We are the champions of the world! That is Athens in a nutshell. Tawdry? Yes. Stupid? Yes. Irrational? Yes. But in Athens, that is as good as it gets.

So, spare us the faux outrage over the tragic events in Brazil. Spare us your curses, imprecations, and excommunications. We, in Jerusalem, do not belong to your Church of Divinised Human Rationalism. To be sure, and to be truthful, once we did. We used to be card carrying members. We raged and fulminated with the best of them. But we were made to see that it was all terribly wrong. It was nothing more than a subterfuge; a vain attempt to cover over our own hatred and rebellion against the Living God, Who created all things of nothing, and in Whom we live and move and have our being.

Thanks be to God Who sent His only begotten Son to take our place and be imprecated and cursed and sent to Hell for our sin, that He might be justified in forgiving our sin and granting us the gift of eternal life. Thanks be to God that He delivered us from the evil irrationality of human rationalism.