“I know what you are against — what are you for?”

-- Emile DeBecque (Rossano Brazzi), in South Pacific (1958)¹

Beginning about 250 years ago, liberalism -- a view of the Bible as a purely natural book that gutted Christianity of its historic beliefs -- began developing and growing in influence. Today it is culturally and politically the most influential form of Christianity, even as the actual membership in liberal churches continues to decline. Although theologians are beginning to speak about “postliberalism” and other theologies supposedly departing from liberalism, in reality such approaches to the Bible assume the general validity of the liberal paradigm.

Liberalism has many facets, but for the purpose of this chapter we will focus on the following defining distinctives of the liberal tradition. (1) A “literal” approach to the Bible is rejected. (2) The miraculous or supernatural aspects of the biblical history are denied or reinterpreted to fit a naturalistic world view. (3) The Bible is said to endorse an archaic and backward morality. We will consider each of these liberal claims in order.

Liberalism and Literalism

According to liberalism, “literalism” — interpreting the Bible literally — is dead. Ironically, liberals are typically unclear as to what it is they are rejecting and why.

Often, liberals criticize literal interpretation as if it were some new and strange way of reading the Bible invented by twentieth-century fundamentalists. John Shelby Spong, the liberal Episcopal bishop of Newark, for instance, maintains that fundamentalists are abusing the Bible by “literalizing” it.² It is often claimed by liberals that the fundamentalist view of the Bible as “literally” true is a novelty in history. Presumably, the error of “literalizing” would occur when a person interpreted a statement as literal that was not intended to be taken that way by its author. For example, to interpret the psalmist’s cry, “Praise him, sun and moon! Praise him, all stars of light!” (Ps. 148:3), to be a request for astronomical bodies to verbally honor God would be to take words literally that were meant figuratively. Of course, fundamentalists recognize that there are many such statements and expressions in the Bible, and they also warn against literalizing the Bible in this sense.

What liberals are really criticizing, and what in some cases they plainly admit to be criticizing, is the practice of reading the Bible in the traditional fashion. When orthodox and conservative Christians (“fundamentalist” or not) speak of taking the Bible literally, what they mean is to interpret the texts of the Bible according to ordinary canons of interpretation — reading the words of the text in their proper literary and historical contexts. In this sense, to interpret the Bible “literally” means that one accepts its historical narratives as descriptions of actual past events and its statements about God as conveying meaningful truths about God’s nature, actions, and moral standards. For example, on this method one accepts the biblical assertions that Jesus really was born in Bethlehem, that he really did rise from the dead, that God really does know everything, that God really is in control of the number of hairs on our heads, and that God really does disapprove of adultery.

Interpreting the Bible “literally” in this way is said by many liberals to be a backward, unenlightened approach to the Bible. Obviously, this criticism is incompatible with the claim that taking the Bible literally is a modern novelty of American fundamentalism. On this view, it is liberalism that offers a new way of reading the Bible. The historical or factual claims of the biblical records and doctrines, we are told, simply cannot be believed today by modern, educated people. Besides, liberals say, whether the miracles of the Bible actually happened is completely unimportant and irrelevant. (Why, if this is so, liberals feel it important to call the Bible’s historicity and factuality into serious question is something of a mystery.) What is important is the underlying message, which must be found by peeling back the layers of miracles and other objectionable aspects of the text. (This peeling away is called demythologization.) In order to find anything of value in the Bible at all, they insist, then, we ought to give up on the “literal” meaning and look for a meaning that in some way goes “beyond” or “behind” the literal.

This call for the abandonment of the “literal” meaning of Scripture for a demythologized meaning has many problems, but one that is especially fatal. If the Bible is no longer believable as it was written and as it has been understood for millennia, then why try to hold onto it at all? Why not simply admit that they don’t believe the Bible and move on with their lives?

The problem is easier to see if we consider another book. No one today believes that Ptolemy’s Almagest (in which he developed the earth-centered view of the universe into a system that was not seriously challenged until Copernicus and Galileo) provides a true explanation of the movement of the heavenly bodies. While we may read Ptolemy for historical interest, we would never think of claiming to “believe” Ptolemy or of using his book as a textbook of astronomy.

Or, let’s consider another religious book. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (whose members are more popularly known as Mormons) have a book called the Book of Mormon which they regard as a collection of ancient prophetic writings originating from the pre-Columbian Americas. If I do not accept the Book of Mormon for what it claims to be, and for what Mormons throughout their history have claimed it to be, why should I claim to believe in the Book of Mormon at all? Why try to find some “positive value” in a book that I consider to be historically fraudulent?

The answer, of course, is that such efforts to salvage books we believe to be basically false make no sense. Why, then, would anybody do it? The answer is not hard to find. Some astronomers in the decades after Copernicus continued to use Ptolemy’s Almagest even though they knew its geocentric system was wrong because they were part of an establishment that had not yet admitted that fact. A few Mormon scholars defend a “liberal” view of the Book of Mormon as a pious nineteenth-century fiction with valid religious insights because they can’t bring themselves to leave the Mormon church. Bishop Spong and many, many people like him stay in the mainline churches and develop their liberal reinterpretations of the Bible because they don’t wish to give up their positions of power and influence in the church.

The real question that must be answered is whether these liberals are right in claiming that the factual truth of the Bible cannot reasonably be affirmed. If they are right, then we should close up the churches or convert them into lecture halls (or maybe movie theaters). We should certainly not continue to “play church” if we no longer believe that the foundational beliefs of the church are true. On the other hand, if there is no sound basis for the liberal rejection of the Bible’s teachings, then we should insist that the church continue to uphold the Bible and to interpret it “literally” — and to ask those who reject the church’s beliefs to admit that openly and honestly.

Christianity — Without Miracles?

As has already been indicated, one of the main objections liberals have to a “literal” (that is, ordinary) interpretation of the Bible is that the Bible is full of accounts of miracles. Underlying liberal theories about the origins of the Bible and liberal reinterpretations of the Bible is the assumption that miracles are unbelievable.

The assumption has worked itself throughout the biblical scholarship of liberal seminaries and colleges throughout Christianity. The whole account of the Exodus, the deliverance of the Israelites from their bondage to Egypt, is rejected, since it contains miracles from beginning to end (most notably the ten plagues and the parting of the Red Sea). The references to God speaking to the patriarchs and the prophets throughout the Old Testament cannot be allowed to stand. The miracles performed through Elijah and Elisha, Isaiah and Daniel, are viewed as legends. Isaiah’s book is partitioned to circumvent his clear predictions of the Babylonian Exile and the return of the Jews. Daniel is dated in the second century BC rather than the sixth century BC because it too obviously predicts the rise of the Greeks. The first three Gospels are dated after AD 70 (or Mark perhaps just before that date) because in it Jesus predicted the fall of Jerusalem in AD 70. Jesus is allowed to perform exorcisms and healings (since these can be explained as psychosomatic cures), but the Gospel accounts of Jesus walking on water, changing water into wine, feeding thousands of people with one boy’s lunch, and similar miracles are interpreted in naturalistic terms or as later legends. His resurrection is interpreted as the ongoing life of his spirit or the embodiment of his ideals in his disciples. The book of Acts is dated as late in the first century as possible because (among other reasons) it reports such dramatic miracles through the apostles.

Why this systematic questioning of the miraculous in the Bible? Liberals rarely explain the reason in a straightforward manner, but it is very simple. The thinkers who pioneered this way of reading the Bible for the most part simply did not believe in God. I do not mean that they were all atheists — in fact, very few of them were — but that they did not believe in the kind of transcendent, all-powerful, Creator God of which the Bible speaks. They were mostly deists (according to whom there is a Creator but he does not or cannot do miracles), although some of them were pantheists (according to whom God is a divine reality that undergirds or pervades the cosmos).

In short, the liberal reconstructions of biblical history and literature assume that the God of the Bible does not exist. This was the premise of the investigation, not its conclusion. A hundred years after liberalism gained control of most of the major theological institutions in the United States, the order has been forgotten. Liberals now sometimes appeal to their theories of two (or more!) Isaiahs, a second-century BC date for Daniel, the legendary development of the Gospels, and so forth, as evidence that the miracles of the Bible did not literally occur. But these theories in large measure were inspired by a disbelief in miracles and logically assume that miracles do not happen.

On the basis of this anti-supernatural presupposition, liberalism rejects not merely the occurrence of miracles per se but the whole world view and basic belief system of orthodox Christianity. We may again refer to Bishop Spong as an example. Spong claims to have discovered “that our central Christian affirmations make assumptions based upon a literalized view of the biblical narrative that are no longer believable.”³ The list of Christian affirmations Spong explicitly says are no longer believable is quite long:

• God as the creator distinct from the creation
• Adam as a special creation and historical figure
• The Devil as an actual entity
• The historical fall of humanity from innocence into sin
• Israel as ever having been God’s chosen people
• The doctrine of the Trinity
• Christ as preexisting in heaven before his human life
• Christ as the incarnation of God, as the God-man
• The virgin birth of Christ
• Christ performed miracles
• The bodily resurrection of Christ
• The ascension of Christ
• The Atonement — Christ’s death as delivering human beings from sin
• Salvation through faith in Christ alone
• Eternal punishment for the unbelieving or the wicked⁴

The obvious question is, what’s left? Take all these doctrines away from Christianity, and you have nothing left that distinguishes Christianity from humanism. Indeed, at the end of his book Spong makes his adherence to humanism explicit:

Religion is but one more mask that insecure people put on to cover their sense of personal inadequacy. The call of Christ is an eternal call to the affirmation of what is. In the words of a popular commercial, it is a call to be all that one can be. . . . True Christianity ultimately issues in a deeper humanism. . . . To be a humanist is to affirm the sacredness of life.⁵

It is astonishing that this interpretation of the Christian message is endorsed by a bishop of an orthodox Christian denomination. Bishop Spong believes virtually nothing that he professed to affirm when he was ordained in the Episcopal church, whose ministers are required to uphold the creeds of the early church as well as the Episcopal church’s own quite orthodox confession. His beliefs are far, far closer to Buddhism or even secular humanism than to Christianity. So what is he doing in the church? And this question can be asked of thousands of ministers and professors in most of the mainline denominations today.⁶

Again, those who wish to reject Christian beliefs have the freedom to do so. But then they ought to be honest enough to admit that they aren’t Christians.

Is Biblical Morality Out of Date?

Liberals regard much if not most of the Bible as unacceptable morally. They are scandalized by the biblical doctrine of eternal punishment, by the Old Testament claim that God commanded Israel to destroy the Canaanite peoples, by alleged anti-Semitism in the New Testament, by biblical toleration of slavery, and so forth. In short, they believe that we ought to regard ourselves as having advanced (or “evolved”) beyond the morality and spirituality of the Bible.

A complete refutation of these criticisms of the Bible is obviously beyond the scope of the present discussion. However, there are four important points that need to be made about the reasoning used by liberals in the course of making these criticisms.

First of all, liberals make their moral sensibilities the standard by which they judge the Bible. That is, they assume that their moral judgment is superior to that of the Bible. That would be all right if they had some other good reason to deny that the Bible was revelation from God. If there was no good evidence for the Bible’s inspiration, or if there was substantial evidence against it, then there would be no reason to accept its moral guidance. On the other hand, if there is good evidence that the Bible does communicate revelation from God, then it is hazardous to reject that evidence because of the Bible’s moral standards. After all, one of the major claims made by the Bible is that our moral sensibility is out of whack — that we deceive ourselves in matters of right and wrong to justify our sinful desires. If there is good reason to believe the Bible is a revelation of God, it is irrational to set aside such evidence because the Bible doesn’t agree with our preconceived notions of what is morally acceptable or proper.

The point can be put another way. Suppose the Bible is right and our inner moral compass is misaligned, as it were. If that were true, and if it were also true that in the Bible the God who made us tells us what is right and what is wrong, we would expect the Bible to disagree with our moral beliefs at least on some points. Unless we assume that our moral sensibility is perfect, we should be suspicious of any allegedly inspired book that merely confirms our own moral intuitions.

A second and directly related point is that liberals underestimate the moral and spiritual depravity of humanity. The liberal credo is that human beings are basically good, and it is on this basis that liberals reject much of the biblical revelation. For example, the doctrine of eternal punishment makes no sense if human beings are basically good — but it makes fine sense if fallen human beings are incorrigibly depraved and rebellious against God in their hearts apart from the transforming grace of God in Jesus Christ. God’s command to destroy the Canaanites makes a lot of sense when you realize that the whole culture was permeated with such gross evils as bestiality and child sacrifice (which is also why the Israelites were repeatedly warned not to engage in such practices).

Third, liberals inconsistently appeal to those parts of biblical morality they like to criticize the parts they don’t like. The ethical principle of the essential equality of the sexes and races, for example, was learned by the liberals from the Bible (e.g., Acts 17:26; Gal. 3:28; Col. 3:11), and liberals will often quote such passages and pit them against those they imagine teach sexism or racism. Liberals almost invariably elevate love as the supreme ethical value and on that basis criticize Old Testament morality, quoting Jesus to back up their argument — but fail to notice that Jesus was quoting the Old Testament when he said that love of God and neighbor were the greatest commandments (Mark 12:29-31; cf. Deut. 6:4-5).

Finally, liberals fallaciously criticize biblical ethics by pointing to its abuses. This is perhaps one of the most common errors in the misinterpretation of biblical teachings. The use of passages in which God commanded Israel to kill Canaanites by people seeking to justify wars of aggression against neighboring nations is an obvious abuse of those passages. Never is anything said in the Old Testament that would encourage such a generalized application.

The fact that some white Southerners in the nineteenth century quoted the Bible to justify the enslavement of blacks does not mean that the Bible actually endorsed that practice. In fact, the Bible forbids kidnapping human beings as well as buying or selling stolen or kidnapped persons (Ex. 21:16; Deut. 24:7). Thus, the Old Testament clearly condemns the slave trade in which African people were kidnapped from their homes and villages and sold in America.

Yet another example has to do with the alleged anti-Semitism of the New Testament. Virtually everything said about the Jews in the New Testament of a critical nature had some precedent in the Old Testament. All of the New Testament authors were Jewish except for Luke. The New Testament authors did blame the Jewish leaders for the death of Jesus (along with the Roman procurator Pontius Pilate), but they do not encourage violence or hatred against the Jews. Indeed, the apostle Paul expressed deep dismay over their rejection of Jesus as their Messiah and instructed Gentile Christians to regard the Jews as beloved despite their opposition (Rom. 9:1-5; 10:1-4; 11:28). Gentiles who use the New Testament as a pretext for their hatred and violence toward Jews (or anyone else, for that matter) are in clear violation of New Testament teaching.

Again, in some cases we may continue to puzzle over the reason for isolated statements or specific ethical teachings in the Bible that run against the grain of our own moral intuition — even for those of us who take biblical morality seriously. These difficulties remind us that our moral sense, even as Christians, remains imperfect, as does our knowledge of the Bible. But in general those who submit their minds and values to the Bible and accept its evaluation of the human condition find its moral teachings far superior to anything that human philosophies or other religions have devised.

The Challenge of Liberalism

The problem of liberalism has been complicated in our churches by the fact that it has gained acceptance in varying degrees. There are many mainline church members who accept some of the biblical miracles and some of the church’ s distinctive beliefs, but who take an essentially liberal view of the Bible and who do not accept all of its historical and doctrinal claims. There are not two neatly divided camps with clearcut differences, but instead something more like a spectrum of views from thoroughly conservative and orthodox to thoroughly liberal and heretical. Thus, one of the ongoing challenges in the mainline churches as we enter the third millennium of the history of the church is to make the issues clear to the laity in the mainline churches. Many Christians simply do not understand what is at stake in the liberal revisionist interpretations of the Bible and of Christian faith.

¹ A Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II play and film.

² John Shelby Spong, Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism: A Bishop Rethinks the Meaning of Scripture (San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 3, 35, 64, 72, etc.

³ Ibid., 35.

⁴ Ibid., especially 17-20, 33-35, 81-82, 104-5, 123-33, 141-46, 180-83, 204-7, 217-24, 232-36, 241-42.

⁵ Ibid., 242.

⁶ See further Robert M. Bowman, Jr., “A Summary Critique: Rescuing the Bible from Fundamentalism,” Christian Research Journal 14 (Fall 1991):36-38.

“You must remember this . . .
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.”

-- Sam (Dooley Wilson), “As Time Goes By,” in Casablanca (1942)

The spread of liberalism throughout the various denominational traditions of Christianity and the rise of the cultic sects espousing heretical versions of the Christian religion have not gone unanswered in the church. The Christian faith revealed in Scripture has been remembered and proclaimed in churches all over the world throughout the modern era. Yet the onslaught of criticism and attacks against biblical Christianity have not left its adherents unchanged. If we are to carry on the mission of proclaiming and defending Christian faith and values into the third millennium, we must be aware of how the various religious and cultural challenges to our faith have shaped the church as it seeks to hold fast its confession.

While there are tens or even hundreds of millions of Christians worldwide who are seeking to uphold the Christian faith in a way that resists its corruption by liberalism and other heretical movements, the ways in which they seek to do this vary dramatically. Each of these arguably has its strengths as well as its weaknesses. In this chapter we will consider several closely related approaches to upholding the biblical Christian faith. Along the way we will look at some of the major challenges facing biblical Christianity from within as we enter the third millennium.

Catholicism: Faith of Our Fathers?

By far the largest segment of Christianity in the world is Catholicism, by which we mean primarily the Roman Catholic Church.¹ Liberalism, or modernism as it is generally called in Catholic contexts, had a delayed impact on Catholicism as compared to Protestantism (where liberalism originated). While mainline Protestant denominations were being overwhelmed with naturalism and liberalism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Roman Catholicism remained relatively stable theologically. During the postwar years Catholic scholars began exploring liberal theories and interpretations of the Bible more freely, and after Vatican II in the 1960s the conservative consensus of faith in the Catholic Church began to break down, notably in the United States.

The primary mechanism by which the Catholic Church seeks to preserve authentic Christianity is the Church’s exercise of authority to interpret tradition. Catholicism places great emphasis on its sacred tradition, and claims that its teaching office (headed by the Pope) is guided by God to interpret that tradition infallibly.

Not all Christians, of course, accept the Catholic Church’s authority claims. The Eastern Orthodox churches hold to a similar theological system and church structure, except that it does not acknowledge the Roman claim that church authority is centralized in the Papacy. Protestants question the whole notion of an authoritative church teaching and argue that Christians have the right and the responsibility to question church institutions and teachings in the light of Scripture. The Protestant Reformation began as a movement to reform the Catholic Church in the light of a fresh understanding of the biblical gospel, and led to the formation of new church bodies only when the Church institution refused to acknowledge its error.

In the 1960s the Catholic Church held its landmark council Vatican II and instituted sweeping ecclesiastical reforms and reformulated its theology to create more openness to Scripture and the Protestant churches. Since then Protestants have been debating what they ought to think about Rome. The views range from fierce denunciations of Catholicism as a cult or false church to calls for Protestants and Christians to put their old differences aside and to worship and evangelize side by side.

All Christians should commend the efforts of the Catholic Church to resist the onslaught of modern naturalism and other philosophies at odds with the biblical revelation of God working to redeem humanity through the supernatural saving work of Jesus Christ. The Catholic Church continues to maintain the historic faith in Christ as the eternal Son of God, born of a virgin, crucified and risen for our salvation. To the extent that the Catholic system of authority and tradition has worked as a conserving force in Christianity, even Christians outside that Catholic system should be appreciative.

What keeps non-Catholic Christians (and especially Protestants) from giving unqualified praise to the Catholic Church is the fact that its use of authority has not been limited to efforts to conserve the historic Christian faith. During the late nineteenth century, when confidence in the Christian faith began to be assaulted from all sides in Western culture, the Catholic Church strengthened the authority of the Pope by declaring at the first Vatican Council (1870) as dogma the claim that the Pope could speak infallibly for the whole Church. The purpose of this declaration was not to strengthen the Pope’s hand to uphold the essential truths of the Christian gospel but to warrant papal pronouncements that exalted Mary. Already in 1854 the Pope had declared that the Immaculate Conception of Mary (the idea that she was conceived without original sin, and so never sinned) was to be received as dogma. At the same time the Pope elevated to the level of dogma the belief that Mary served as “Mediatrix,” an ongoing role in salvation by which she mediates between Catholics and Jesus Christ. In 1950 the doctrine of the Bodily Assumption of Mary (the idea that she was taken up into heaven and did not suffer death) was also pronounced dogma by the Pope.

It is true that these ideas existed within Catholicism before the Pope made them dogma. What is disturbing, though (beyond the fact that these dogmas are not warranted by Scripture),² is that the Church’s authority has been used to promote excessive devotion to a creature (as truly great a creature as Mary was and is).

If, despite these controversial pronouncements and dubious authority of the Pope and the Catholic Church hierarchy, the Church was in other respects succeeding in propagating the biblical gospel, Protestants would on balance be obliged to commend the Catholic Church. But this does not appear to be the case. For one thing, the Catholic teaching and preaching of the gospel from a Protestant reading of the Bible is woefully inadequate. We may gratefully acknowledge that the Catholic Church has an accurate view of the person of Jesus Christ as the eternal Son of God incarnated in human flesh for our salvation, and that the Church faithfully preaches that Jesus Christ died on the cross for our sins and rose from the dead. The Catholic Church also teaches that salvation is ultimately a work of God’s grace, not the result of our efforts. But the Church’s claim that this salvation is appropriated not simply or even necessarily through personal faith in Jesus Christ, but essentially through participation in the rites and disciplines of the Church (especially the sacraments), greatly obscures and distorts the biblical doctrine of grace (see John 3:16-18; Rom. 11:6; Eph. 2:8-10; Titus 3:3-8). It is all too easy, and common, for Catholics to trust in their religious observances rather than in Christ for their salvation, and this is an error which Catholic doctrine inadvertently encourages.

Setting aside the differences between Catholics and Protestants on the doctrinal content of the gospel, the fact is that the Church’s authority has not proved effective in preventing apostasy from Christian convictions within its own walls. Millions of Roman Catholics are Christian in name only and Catholic in formal affiliation only. In the last third of the twentieth century the Church has been rocked by heretics of all kinds, from New Age mystics like Matthew Fox to blasphemous humanists like John Dominic Crossan (a defrocked priest who openly denies the Resurrection of Christ and is a leading member of the ultraliberal “Jesus Seminar”). Although the Church has disciplined such teachers, it has not been able to prevent them from swaying many Catholics (and Protestants) and contributing to the general unbelief which is increasingly prevalent in Western society.

By no means are we denying that Catholics and Protestants can make common cause on issues on which they agree. For example, Catholics and Protestants who affirm an orthodox view of Scripture as divinely inspired and historically reliable can stand together against radical biblical criticism which denies the truth of the Bible and offers revisionist theories about the life and teachings of Jesus. Conservative Catholics and Protestants also share many ethical convictions and concerns, especially on such issues as abortion, homosexuality, euthanasia, and religious expression in public life. Some of the most important work being done in these areas today is the work of Catholic Christians. But we cannot agree with Catholics when they urge us to look to the Catholic Church’s authority as the key to defending Christian faith and values. That authority appears to be neither effective nor valid. Not only does Scripture not accord such authority to the Pope or to the Roman teaching office, but the Catholic Church uses that authority to promote dogmas that are not taught in Scripture and which widen the divide between Catholic Christians and Protestant Christians.

Calling on Christians to respect tradition and Christian leaders and to honor the Mother of our Lord is legitimate; demanding that Christians bow to tradition, ascribe infallibility to their leaders’ doctrinal pronouncements, and to venerate Mary as the Mediatrix between Christ and all Christians is not legitimate. Such teachings, if anything, work against the laudable efforts of the Catholic Church to uphold “the faith once for all delivered to the saints” (Jude 3).

Fundamentalism: Not Just That Old-Time Religion

The term fundamentalism has been widely used and abused, and numerous definitions have been offered, most of them abusive and some of them only slightly tongue in cheek (e.g., a fundamentalist is an evangelical who’s mad about something, or a Christian who’s more conservative theologically than we are).

The most careful analysts of church history seem to be in broad agreement that fundamentalism per se is a development in early twentieth-century American Protestantism. It was not merely a movement that affirmed the “fundamentals” of the Christian faith (although it certainly did that), but one whose affirmation of those fundamentals was characterized by its opposition to the modernist or liberal teachings which threatened or denied them. In short, the basic impulse of fundamentalism was reactionary. The point is not that the fundamentalists rejected liberal, antisupernatural views of the Bible — all orthodox Christians rejected such views — but that the fundamentalists’ reaction against those views became a major, and often consuming, aspect of their religious identity.³

One of the five “fundamentals” commonly identified in the early years of the movement was the inerrancy of Scripture — the doctrine that the Bible, as the word of God, is completely true in all matters on which it speaks and therefore does not contain substantive error in any of its teachings, statements of fact, or ethical principles. The doctrine as such is actually not new; it can easily be shown to have been the view of most or all of the major Christian theologians prior to the nineteenth century (e.g., Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, John Calvin, to name but a few). What was new was that fundamentalists began more and more to equate commitment to the inerrancy of Scripture with acceptance of particular interpretations of Scripture, about which orthodox Christians had honest and legitimate disagreements.

For example, fundamentalists generally insist that the Bible must be interpreted “literally” to teach the creation of the universe no more than about six to ten thousand years ago. The issue here is not the specific conclusions that fundamentalists reach: for example, many evangelicals who are not fundamentalists also believe that the universe is only a few thousand years old. What is distinctive about fundamentalists is that they typically believe that those who do not reach these conclusions do not “really believe the Bible.” Christians who understand the Bible to allow for a billions-old universe, or who do not hold to the same views about the end-times events as they do, are commonly said not to believe the Bible literally — which is to say, as fundamentalists see it, not at all.

The motive and concern that drives this emphasis on literal interpretation of the Bible is itself noble and Christian. Fundamentalists rightly recognize that liberals often claim to believe and respect the Bible while systematically dismantling its teachings by “interpreting” the Bible “in the light of modern knowledge.” They quite properly repudiate efforts to reinterpret the Resurrection as communicating a spiritual truth or timeless insight. Jesus literally came back to life, just as he was literally conceived in the womb of a virgin, was literally crucified, and will literally return to the earth to bring eternal judgment on the wicked and eternal life to those who trust in him. A “literal” reading of these biblical teachings is quite proper and is in fact the historic Christian way of understanding the Bible. Where fundamentalism is distinctive and new is in its absolutizing the principle of literal interpretation and its condemnation of Christian understandings of secondary doctrinal issues as unbiblical because they do not follow such absolute literalism.

Fundamentalists typically prefer to separate themselves from denominations if a significant portion of the denomination does not accept their understanding of the Bible. In one major case, that of the Southern Baptist Convention (SBC), fundamentalists were able to gain control of the denomination away from the “moderates.” While the fundamentalists in the SBC regard the moderates as really liberals, for the most part the moderates appear to be Christians who hold to an orthodox theology but do not accept the literal approach and interpretations of the Bible mentioned earlier.

From a cultural and sociological perspective, fundamentalism is generally marked by a reactionary approach to a wide range of issues and in a variety of ways. Fundamentalists have often resisted cultural changes that were for the better, such as the civil rights and racial integration movement of the 1960s (though most fundamentalists today support minority civil rights). In general, fundamentalists all too often react to new developments in the culture with initial suspicion if not hostility, and eventually come to terms with those developments after they have become a fait accompli.

If Catholicism places too much confidence in ecclesiastical authority and traditions, fundamentalism tends to give too little credence to the role of the church and the importance of Christian tradition. Most fundamentalists are suspicious of denominations (perhaps because of the widespread liberalism of the mainline bodies) and insist on the autonomy of the local church — a position especially associated with Baptists but held by numerous other fundamentalist church associations and independent churches. Fundamentalists also tend to downgrade or deny the importance of the early creeds, such as the Apostles and Nicene creeds, and regard church history and tradition as irrelevant to the understanding and application of the teachings of Scripture. This seems to be itself contrary to Scripture, which speaks of Christ through his Spirit working in and with his church continuously until his second coming (Matt. 16:18; 18:20; 28:18-20; Eph. 4:11-16; 5:25-27).⁴

Despite its tendencies toward excessive dogmatism and narrowness and its reactionary cultural spirit, fundamentalism is an orthodox Christian movement whose people have often exhibited strength of conviction and fidelity to the gospel when everyone else around them was exhibiting neither. As the movement matures, many Christians who are part of institutions that are historically fundamentalist have transcended the movement’s cultural and temperamental limitations even if they hold to its usual distinctive doctrinal conclusions. For this reason fundamentalism may be better thought of as a particularly narrow and reactionary approach to the Christian faith that characterizes some institutions and individuals in a larger orthodox Protestant tradition in varying degrees. That larger orthodox Protestant tradition is known as evangelicalism.

Evangelicalism: In Search of a Biblical Balance

Although the term evangelical (from the Greek euangelion, “good news” or gospel) was used as early as the sixteenth century to express the Reformation emphasis on the gospel, the movement that bears its name originates in 1942, the year when the National Association of Evangelicals was formed in the United States.⁵ It has been associated from its early years with evangelist Billy Graham and such theologians as Carl F. H. Henry. By the late 1940s evangelicalism had clearly distinguished itself from its fundamentalist roots as a movement that sought to defend the gospel without being reactionary.

Billy Graham became known internationally by the 1950s as an evangelist who preached a simple, old-fashioned gospel of salvation through faith in Jesus Christ, and who would work in his crusades with all Christian denominations (even with Catholics) in order to bring the gospel to as many people as possible. A quick and dirty, but fairly accurate, rule of thumb to distinguish evangelicals from fundamentalists might be that American evangelicals generally commend and support Graham, while fundamentalists (even if they acknowledge his contributions) generally criticize Graham for his openness to Catholics and the mainline denominations.

The larger point is that evangelicals, while they reject liberalism, do not typically insist on complete separation from churches or church bodies that include or tolerate liberalism in varying degrees in their midst. Evangelicals are much more likely to support efforts to renew the mainline denominations than to abandon them (although some evangelicals can also be found in historically fundamentalist churches).

Again, the line between fundamentalists and evangelicals is a blurry one. There are denominations that split away from their mainline parent bodies but which see themselves as simply carrying on their historic denominational tradition. These include the Orthodox Presbyterian Church and the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, both of which are extremely conservative theologically but which do not fit the usual fundamentalist profile in certain respects. For example, these denominations use and respect the ancient creeds and are more appreciative of Christian history than most fundamentalists. They tend to be less literalistic in their interpretation of Scripture than fundamentalism. Yet they also tend to be fairly intolerant of theological differences from their doctrinal distinctives on the part of other evangelical denominations, a trait common in fundamentalism. It is therefore somewhat arbitrary whether one classifies these denominations as fundamentalist or not.

Evangelicalism, then, is a broad term referring to Protestants who uphold an orthodox theology, maintain a conservative view of Scripture as the word of God, and emphasize the importance and centrality of the gospel of Jesus Christ for the Christian faith. Fundamentalism shares the evangelical doctrine and evangelistic focus of evangelicalism, but takes a more hard-line, separatist, and generally reactionary approach to the evangelical faith.

While evangelicalism in theory avoids some of the extremes found in fundamentalism, there are plenty of problems associated with the evangelical movement. Most of these have to do with the question of how Christianity is to relate to the larger culture or cultures in which it finds itself. American evangelicalism in particular has all too often mirrored the American obsession with success and power, while at the same time other evangelicals live in virtual isolation and retreat from “the world.” While many evangelicals appear preoccupied with doctrine, both essential and speculative, most seem to have lost their passion for truth and to be more interested in self.⁶

Perhaps one of the most basic pitfalls into which some evangelicals fall is to define themselves primarily as an alternative to fundamentalism. To do so is to become reactionary in the opposite direction, with the potential result an accommodation of the evangelical message to the pressures of appearing “contemporary” and anything but “fundamentalist.” Such a danger can be avoided only by seeking to learn from the positive contributions of fundamentalism and by incorporating the sound biblical principles and motives that it embodies at its best.

Nathan O. Hatch has identified three “pressing challenges for American evangelicals on the eve of the 21st century.”⁷ The first is the “rampant pluralism” of evangelicalism, with “its populist and decentralized structure, and its penchant for splitting, forming, and reforming.” As such renowned leaders as Carl Henry and Billy Graham are expected soon to pass on, it is unclear who will emerge as the new leaders of evangelicalism and what new shape the movement will have. The second and related challenge is the need “to recover a higher view of the Church as an institution” — the need for evangelicals to gain a higher respect for the historical institutions and traditions of Christianity. The third challenge is the need for “nurturing first-order Christian scholarship.” This last challenge is difficult for evangelicalism because its decentralized structure has resulted in its lacking such institutions as a major research university and in its developing its own evangelical publishing houses and associations within which its research efforts are largely directed at internal disputes.⁸

Evangelicals, then, have much learning and growing to do. What they have going for them is their adherence to Scripture as the source and standard for faith and values. Whatever the shortcomings of evangelicals individually and as a movement, the answers will surely be found in the word of God.

To allow one’s ideas and values to become controlled by anything or anyone other than the self-revelation of God in Scripture is to adopt an ideology rather than a theology; it is to become controlled by ideas and values whose origins lie outside the Christian tradition — and potentially to become enslaved by them. . . . The only way Christianity can free itself from subservience to cultural fashion is to ensure that it is firmly grounded in a resource that is independent of that culture. The traditional evangelical approach is to acknowledge the supreme authority of Scripture as a theological and spiritual resource, and the contemporary task as interpreting and applying this resource to the situation of today.⁹

It is this question of the application of the authoritative revelation of God in Scripture to the cultural issues of our changing world that will occupy our attention in the remainder of this book. As McGrath warns us, it is all too easy for evangelicalism to become corrupted by the culture instead of working as salt and light to the culture.

¹ There are a number of Catholic church groups, such as the Old Catholic Church, which have broken from the authority of the Pope and the Roman Catholic hierarchy. At present all such groups probably number in the hundreds of thousands worldwide, whereas the Roman Catholic Church counts roughly a billion members worldwide.

² See Elliot Miller and Kenneth R. Samples, The Cult of the Virgin: Catholic Mariology and the Apparitions of Mary (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1992).

³ See George Marsden, Fundamentalism and American Culture: The Shaping of Twentieth-Century Evangelicalism, 1870-1925 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980). There is a recent helpful discussion in Alister E. McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1995), 27-35.

⁴ One way of solving this problem is to argue that the Spirit’s guidance of the church is more intense and effective at some times than at others, and that the Holy Spirit is guiding the church today in an unparalleled and dramatic fashion. This is the claim traditionally made in Pentecostalism, a movement closely related to fundamentalism but differing in its emphasis on new experiences and manifestations of the Spirit in the church today. Nearly a century old, Pentecostalism runs the gamut from biblically sound, mildly experiential churches to thoroughly heretical sects and churches exhibiting the most bizarre and offensive behaviors.

⁵ McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity, 22.

⁶ Cf. Mark A. Noll, The Scandal of the Evangelical Mind (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans; Leicester, England: Inter-Varsity Press, 1994); David F. Wells, No Place for Truth: Or, Whatever Happened to Evangelical Theology? (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1993).

⁷ Nathan O. Hatch, “Response to Carl F. H. Henry,” in Evangelical Affirmations, ed. Kenneth S. Kantzer and Carl F. H. Henry (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1990), 97.

⁸ Ibid., 97-100.

⁹ McGrath, Evangelicalism and the Future of Christianity, 62, 63.

“When I was a boy, world was better spot,
What was so was so, what was not was not,
Now I am a man, world have changed a lot,
Some things nearly so; others nearly not. . . .
O-ho! Sometimes I think that people going mad.
A-ha! Sometimes I think that people not so bad. . . .
But — is a puzzlement!”

— The King of Siam (Yul Brynner), “Is a Puzzlement,” in The King and I (1956)

So far we have argued that morality must be based on absolute truths about human nature and that these truths are determined by the fact of our creation by God as beings designed for relationships with God and one another. Furthermore, we have claimed that a reliable, definitive expression of these absolute moral truths is to be found uniquely in the Christian revelation preserved in the Bible.

All this talk of moral absolutes based on absolute truths is, to use the usual expression, politically incorrect. Those who dare to suggest that there are absolute truths that apply to all people in all cultures are usually deemed narrow minded and culturally imperialistic.¹ The charge is made even more vehemently when the absolutes which are upheld find their normative expression within the context of the biblical, Christian world view. Belief in Jesus Christ as the only way to God is associated by almost all non-Christians, and even by many within the Christian church today, with “Eurocentrism” — a cultural mindset that exalts the perspectives and achievements of white male Europeans (and their descendants in North America) at the expense of other cultures and traditions. As Islam and the Eastern religions have come into greater cultural prominence and acceptance in the West, belief in the absolute truth of the religious and moral teachings of Christianity is now commonly viewed as arrogant, intolerant, and unrealistic in today’s pluralistic society.

How shall we respond to this increasingly common sentiment? How can we call on all people to submit to Jesus Christ as Lord and Savior and to embrace the faith and values of Christianity in a society zealous for cultural diversity?

Understanding Multiculturalism

Multiculturalism can be thought of as a reality or as an ideal. As a reality, multiculturalism is a historical phenomenon that emerged in the last half of the twentieth century. As an ideal, it is a highly controversial view of human society that has become a source of contention and conflict in the last decade of the twentieth century.

Multiculturalism: The Reality

The roots of multiculturalism as an historical reality are to be found in the turbulent years of the 1960s. The counterculture movement of that decade sharply challenged the seeming cultural superiority and homogeneity of Western civilization. Young people protested against the materialism and militarism of the West in a variety of ways. They staged rallies against the Vietnam War. Men burned their draft cards, women burned their bras. Both men and women “turned on” to sex, drugs, and rock music that glorified both. Millions pursued spiritual enlightenment through alternative religions: TM, Scientology, the Hare Krishnas, Rev. Moon’s Unification Church, the Baha’i, the Nation of Islam, a dozen major Hindu gurus and uncountable minor ones, and many other paths.

The civil rights movement laid a foundation for the multicultural emphasis on racial diversity, although arguably the multicultural form of civil rights in the 1990s is very different from that of the 1960s. Martin Luther King, Jr., the most visible leader of the civil rights movement, was one of several icons of the idealism of the 1960s who were assassinated, martyred for the cause: President John F. Kennedy, his brother Robert (“Bobby”) Kennedy, and former Nation of Islam spokesman Malcolm X were the others.

After 1968, the year in which both King and Bobby Kennedy were killed, the idealism seemed to give way to a more pragmatic pursuit of economic and political power. In the 1970s, American politics began to be seen increasingly as a struggle between various disparate groups, each complaining of oppression, each seeking to achieve political power as a voting “bloc” that could not be ignored: besides every racial group, there were women (emerging in the 1970s) as well as gays and lesbians (a notable force by the 1980s). None of these blocs were or are really monolithic: the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) does not speak for all black Americans, nor does the National Organization for Women (NOW) speak for all American women. But such organizations have played an ever more important role in the cultural and political drama of American public life.

The multicultural reality has been enhanced by the increased ethnic and religious diversity of Western society. American and European society has been transformed through the immigration of millions of people from all over the world, especially from the Indian subcontinent and Southeast and East Asia. These people have brought with them their religion, philosophy, music, art, dress, and food. At the same time, advances in technology have brought us into increasingly close contact with the rest of the world. Television has led the way in this regard, allowing us to see other cultures; now, at the end of the 1990s, the computer appears to be taking us the next step, allowing us to interact with other cultures anywhere in the world.

In this rapidly changing and shrinking world, the idea that one culture is inherently superior to all others has all but disappeared. Certainly the notion of a monolithic culture in the West based on a single stream of tradition is no longer viable. We live in a multicultural world — one in which peoples of disparate cultural heritages and traditions live and work together. In this sense, multiculturalism is a reality — a present fact of life.

Multiculturalism: The Ideal

But multiculturalism can and is also thought of as an ideal — as a goal toward which we ought to be moving and progressing. This is the controversial meaning which has become a focal point of conflict in our society — the focal point of what has been called the culture wars. Granted that we live in a world of varied cultures, ideally how should we come to terms with this multicultural reality?

Two prevalent tendencies in contemporary society certainly must be avoided. The first might be called polyculturalism. The relativistic belief that all cultures are equal and that there can be no ideal or standard in culture implies that people of disparate cultures cannot really learn from one another. All individuals, families, and institutions may be free to express whatever cultural heritage they choose, or to mix and match different elements of various cultures, but all cultural expression will be seen merely as a matter of taste. A society that actually embraced such a polyculturalism would have no basis for achieving real results in the ongoing struggle for liberty and justice for all people. Polyculturalism makes for a colorful display, but it is impotent to solve the real problems caused by the selfishness, greed, ambition, fear, anger, and mistrust which people of different nations, races, languages, religions, and cultures have exhibited in their dealings with each other throughout human history.

A good example of the multicultural ideal degenerated into polyculturalism was provided by the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1996 Centennial Olympic Games in Atlanta. These ceremonies mixed artistic expressions of the culture of the American South with tribal pagan symbols and explicit references to the “spirits” of the different continents. John Lennon’s mystical song Imagine and Beethoven’s Ode to Joy were two of the more jarringly disparate musical selections. The most reverential tribute imaginable was paid to Martin Luther King. The modern Olympic Games were heralded as a symbol of the world coming together on the basis of a humanistic belief in the inherent goodness and self-sufficiency of humankind — a not so subtle repudiation of the Christian view of humanity as a God-created race corrupted by sin. Yet this proud celebration of human goodness could not completely hide the darker reality of human nature, a reality brought vividly into view by the bombing of Centennial Park in downtown Atlanta during the Games.

The Olympic Games illustrates not only the disjointed and disunited character of polyculturalism, but the fact that it cannot provide a stable basis for all cultural options to enjoy full expression. Any cultural tradition which affirms a universal standard for all cultures, whether it be Muslim or Christian, must and is given short shrift in the polycultural festivities. In such a setting the courageous struggle for civil rights by a black Baptist preacher or the brilliant music of a German composer are cut off from their Christian, theological roots. The polyculturalist is like the polytheist who is willing to add Jesus to the pantheon of gods, but is shocked and outraged when told that Jesus is the only God and demands the elimination of all idols. There is no room in the cultural pantheon for a God who is the Lord and Judge of all cultures.

If polyculturalism is not an acceptable option, neither is replacing the Eurocentric cultural dominance with another form of monoculturalism. Islam has always been intrinsically monoculturalist, in a way that makes the cultural gaffes of Christian missionaries in Africa or the Pacific seem innocuous. The treatment of women in countries ruled by Islamic regimes, particularly in the Middle East, demonstrates this fact in disturbing fashion. The continued growth if Islam and its unceasingly militaristic approach to expansion and control makes Islam, not Christianity, the main enemy of multicultural cooperation and appreciation.

If there is a serious alternative to Islamic monoculturalism, it is a new paganism. Many people are discovering that the paganism of pre-Christian Europe (with its magic, astrology, witchcraft, and the like) has more in common with the ancient religious beliefs and rituals of Native American religion, tribal African religion, and Chinese folk religion, than with the monotheistic faiths of Judaism and Christianity. Since polyculturalism is inherently unstable, the push for multiculturalism is in many respects turning into a movement toward a new pagan monoculturalism in which all religious and cultural expressions of a mystical, earth-based, humanistic kind are embraced and woven together. Again, though, this is not true multiculturalism, since it excludes traditional beliefs and values of Christians, Jews, and Muslims — religions whose members account for roughly one-half of the world’s population!

What, then, is — or should be — the multicultural ideal? What people seem to be trying to achieve in the name of multiculturalism seems to be fairly clear. We may identify three goals of the multicultural ideal.

First, multiculturalism means recognizing the rights of people of varying ethnic, racial, geographical, linguistic, and social roots to political freedom, economic opportunity, and societal toleration. It means bringing to an end the specter of race-based conflicts in such different places as Bosnia and Los Angeles.

Second, multiculturalism means rectifying political and economic injustice by pursuing policies that ensure freedom and opportunity for all people. Where laws or social structures systematically deprive people of freedom and opportunity, they must be changed. This does not mean pursuing an impossible ideal of equal results for all groups or classifications of people, but it does mean continuing to pursue the ideal of full opportunity for all people.

Third, multiculturalism means fostering a genuine respect for diverse cultural expressions such as music, art, literature, and dance, and diverse cultural traditions in such matters as education, the family, and work. Such respect does not mean ignoring moral or spiritual failings reflected in these cultural expressions and traditions (since these can be found in any culture, including European). It does mean recognizing that certain constants of human life — love, growth, need, aspiration, suffering, hope — find expression in all cultures.

Jesus and Multiculturalism

Is the claim that Jesus Christ is the Lord and Savior of the world relevant to a world in which so many cultures coexist in such close proximity, a world weary of conflict between peoples and nations of disparate cultures? Not only should Christians not be embarrassed to make this claim, we should see in the cry for a multicultural ideal a tremendous opportunity to present the claim of Christ to all people.

Jesus in His Cultural Setting

Who was Jesus? Well, Jesus was at the most obvious and visible level a Jewish rabbi and prophet. He spoke in parables (as did the rabbis) and interpreted the Jewish Torah. He taught disciples and debated Jewish authorities, including other rabbis.

Although Jesus was a rabbi, he was by all accounts no ordinary one. Jesus was in crucial respects a religious and cultural revolutionary. He taught that although God had revealed himself uniquely to the Jews (John 4:22), Jewishness alone was no guarantee of favor with God (Matt. 8:10-12). He taught that the temple would be destroyed (Matt. 24; Mark 13) and that worship of God would be centered in the heart, not in Jerusalem (John 4:21-24). He taught that a kind Samaritan or a repentant tax-collector was better than a pious but proud or heartless Pharisee (Luke 10:29-37; 18:9-14). He invited women to be his disciples (Luke 10:38-42). He granted healing to Gentiles (Matt. 15:21-28) and ate in the homes of outcasts (Luke 19:1-10).

Jesus was remarkable in everything he said and did. He taught like no man ever had or has since — an evaluation that has been voiced by Christians and non-Christians alike who have read the Gospels. Jesus spoke with absolute authority — “but I say to you” — yet few find his words arrogant. He spoke to the sick and the sinner with compassion yet without sentimentality. He spoke in terms that challenged the factions of Judaism of his day that might be loosely described as the “fundamentalists” and “liberals” of that culture. His own position was theologically closest to the Pharisees, yet his teaching defied simple categorization.

Nor was Jesus “all talk.” He performed miracles of healing, restoring health and even life to children and adults, men and women, Jews and Romans. Even most critical scholars of a skeptical bent today acknowledge that Jesus at least performed some works of healing, however they might explain them. Rather than parading the healed before the public as many faith healers do today, Jesus usually healed people in relative privacy and discouraged people from looking to him merely for miracles. His miracles were profound signs of God’s love and mercy that were remembered by his disciples as proof, not merely that he was a wonder worker, but that he was God’s beloved Son.

Surprisingly, despite the tremendous inspiration of his teaching and the impressive power of his miraculous works of healing, Jesus was remembered primarily for the way he died than for the way he lived. All four of the Gospels focus on Jesus’ death, with his teachings and miracles serving more as preludes than the main point. Jesus’ death itself was unusual: he died on a Roman cross, convicted of treason by claiming to be the King of the Jews. Crucifixion was viewed universally in the ancient world with such revulsion that the Christians would never have made Jesus’ crucifixion part of their faith if it had not really happened, and if they had not seen in it a transcendent significance. The New Testament implicates everyone in the death of Jesus — Jewish religious leaders, Roman political authorities, even one of Jesus’ own followers. Thus, to use the Crucifixion as a pretext for anti-Semitism contradicts the New Testament, which implicates all groups of people and whose authors were, with only one exception (Luke), Jewish. Indeed, by implicating all groups of people in Jesus’ death, the Gospels present his death as redemptive for all people.

The story of Jesus does not end with his death, however. The unanimous witness of all of the New Testament writers and of the church from its earliest days was that Jesus had risen from the dead. Since the traditional Jewish expectation was that all people would be resurrected at the end of history, the notion of an individual being raised from the dead in the midst of the historical process would hardly have occurred to the disciples, even as a myth. That the story was not a myth is made plain by the fact that all four Gospels report that the first ones to see Jesus alive from the dead were women. Since this was an honor that Jewish men of the first century were not likely to bestow on women in a fictional story, evidently this is how it really happened. By appearing first to women, Jesus affirmed their dignity and once again challenged traditional first-century cultural prejudices. Of course, Jesus made several appearances to men as well, appearances that are reported in independent sources in Scripture — to individuals (Peter, James), to the eleven men disciples, and to even larger groups. Jesus’ resurrection, a documentable historical fact, established the truth of his claim to be God’s Son and the meaning of his death on the cross as a redemptive work of God.

Jesus in His Multicultural Significance

In a classic work of theology, H. Richard Niebuhr asked about the relationship between Christ and Culture.² Does Christ transform culture? Does Christ stand against all culture? Does Christ reveal himself through culture? Niebuhr identified five distinct approaches to the relationship between Christ and culture — and the corresponding relation between the church and the world — which he correlated with distinct Christian traditions (e.g., Lutheran, Calvinist, and Anabaptist).

While Niebuhr’s analysis was and is illuminating, various theologians have noted some weaknesses in Niebuhr’s approach. Perhaps the major problem was Niebuhr’s assumption of culture as a single, unitary reality whose relation to Christ and the church could be defined in one way.³ In an increasingly multicultural world, we must now ask about Christ and cultures: How does Christ relate to the diverse cultural traditions and expressions in our world? And how do these diverse cultural traditions relate to one another in Christ?

We suggest that the relation between Christ and our plurality of cultures may be understood from at least three perspectives. First, Christ is the Reconciler of cultures — he is the one who can bring people of different cultures together. Second, Christ is the Redeemer of cultures — he brings wholeness and hope to people of all cultures. Third, Christ is the Ruler of cultures — he is the one who establishes the standards by which all cultures are ultimately to be judged. We will elaborate on each of these perspectives.

Christ the Reconciler of Cultures

By both his life and his death, Jesus offered reconciliation to all cultures. By his teaching Christ called Jew and Gentile together; both were offered a place in God’s kingdom, with the ethnicity of the Jews giving them no advantage whatsoever. While Jesus modeled this reconciliation in his own life and ministry, it took his followers some time to put this aspect of his message into effect. When they did, however, the results were revolutionary. The Jewish disciples of Jesus were taught to reach out with love and acceptance to the Gentiles, whom they had come to think of as beasts. The Gentiles were invited into fellowship with the Jewish disciples without having to become Jewish.

Christ even more decisively brought about reconciliation between Jews and Gentiles through his death. Both Jews and Romans found themselves implicated in the death of Christ, but also forgiven through the death of Christ. One’s relationship with God was now based on the experience of God’s love through Christ as shown supremely in his death, not on one’s Jewish identity. Gentile believers came to see that the God of Israel, of the Jews, was the true God. Jewish believers came to see that their God was to be made known to all people.

Christians have certainly failed to embody the full potential of reconciliation which Christ came to bring to all cultures. Throughout most of church history the Gentile nations that have professed the Christian faith have created deep wounds of division between Gentiles and Jews, culminating in the devastation in this century of the Holocaust. To our shame, Christians have made Blacks their slaves instead of their brothers. The still largely segregated churches in America testify to the continuing need for reconciliation between white and black Christians.

But there have been positive signs as well. Christian conviction was a primary factor in the abolitionist movements in England and America, and was also prominent in the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Although churches still tend to be quite segregated, Christians of all races and nations regard one another as brothers and sisters, and have come together in parachurch settings such as the many college campus ministries or the recent phenomenon of Promise Keepers.

By his death Christ offers reconciliation between all peoples today. He offers reconciliation between Jew and Arab, Jew and German, and Jew and black. He offers reconciliation between whites and blacks in America and in South Africa. He offers reconciliation between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. He offers reconciliation between the descendants of European colonialists and Native Americans. He offers reconciliation between Croats and Serbs. He offers reconciliation between men and women, rich and poor, criminals and victims. There are no ethnic, national, cultural, or social barriers that Christ cannot tear down.

Christ the Redeemer of Cultures

What can Christ do to bring reconciliation between peoples and cultures which have historically regarded each other with suspicion if not hatred? Christ effects reconciliation between people of different cultures by bringing redemption to those people. Only those who have experienced the redemption which Christ provides can know the reconciliation which he brings. This redemption is of multifaceted significance for the cultures of the world.

First of all, Christ offers forgiveness to people of all cultures. Christ forgave the worst sinners of his own culture; he also forgave those who professed him but then denied him. Christ teaches us to forgive others as he forgives us (Matt. 6:14-15) — and this must include forgiving the sins of the past as well as of the present.

Second, Christ offers healing to people of all cultures. Christ’s physical healing of Jews and Gentiles symbolized his spiritual healing for all. He offers spiritual healing to all individuals who come to him, and for cultural institutions that honor him. Christ offers healing of relationships between people of differing cultures — a healing that comes as people forgive each other and accept each other in Christ’s name.

Third, Christ offers cleansing to people of all cultures. He challenges all cultures to accept the transforming power of his redemptive love. Christ challenges traditionally Christian cultures to repent of their sins and to make restitution to peoples they have wronged. At the same time, he challenges cultures largely untouched by him to trust themselves to him — not to European culture. It is as they both seek to know the cleansing and transforming power of Christ in their lives and cultures that European and non-European cultures will eagerly and sincerely come to learn from each other.

Fourth, in his work as redeemer Christ offers hope to people of all cultures. He promises an eternal future for people of all tribes, nations, and languages. But the hope is not exclusively future: Christ offers people of all cultures spiritual power now for personal and community transformation.

Christ the Ruler of Cultures

Christ’s work of reconciling people of all cultures to himself and to one another through himself, then, is effected by Christ’s redeeming work of bringing forgiveness, healing, cleansing, and hope to all who believe in him. By his death Jesus Christ brings people of all cultures together to confess their need of redemption and to place their trust in him instead of in the false self-sufficiency of their proud cultures. Part of entrusting ourselves to Christ is submission to him as the Ruler of cultures.

The claim of Christ’s universal authority over all cultures is undoubtedly the most troubling and “politically incorrect” aspect of the Christian faith, but it is non-negotiable (Matt. 28:18). On what basis do we claim that Christ is the Lord to whom all cultures must bow — that he is for all people and not only for some? Is this not simply a bit of cultural imperialism, to exalt one religious founder over all others?

We have already discussed the radical universality of the message and ministry of Jesus. What is not often considered, however, is the importance of his cultural identity. The fact that Jesus was a Jew makes him ideally suited to bring people of all cultures together. For one thing, the Jews are a people whose numbers have always been relatively small and who have never been politically dominant — unlike the Arabs, Europeans, Chinese, and other such ethnically related peoples. Indeed, the Jewish people’s experience of oppression can be appreciated by people of many other cultural and ethnic histories. Moreover, by coming in a people of such distinct cultural heritage, Christ affirmed the value of particular ethnic and cultural traditions. Jesus was not a bland Everyman, representing a homogeneous ideal for humanity, but a man of distinct racial appearance, language, customs, and history. It is also striking to note that the Jewish people in Jesus’ time had lived for over a millennium at the crossroads of the three continents of the Eastern Hemisphere — Europe, Africa, and Asia. Thus, in many and surprising ways the cultural heritage of Jesus makes him an ideal figure to unite people of every culture. This is one reason why it is so important to recognize and understand the Jewishness of Jesus.

If his Jewish cultural identity ideally positioned Jesus to bring people of all cultures together, what authorizes him to be the Ruler of all cultures is his resurrection from the dead. Jesus is the only major religious figure in history who is even reputed by his followers to have risen physically from the grave. As we have seen, the evidence clearly shows that Jesus’ resurrection really happened and was not a myth that developed some time after Jesus’ death. The Resurrection makes Jesus Christ a unique figure among all the religious teachers, prophets, sages, and leaders of world history. It shows that he has the power of life and death, and is the proof of his claims to uniquely reveal God (Acts 2:36; Rom. 1:3-4; Rev. 1:18).

The near-universal appeal and attraction which Jesus Christ has evoked even outside Christianity confirms the claim that only he can truly unite people of all cultures. It is notable that the three largest non-Christian religions all have sought to come to terms with Jesus in some way. Islam, which numbers roughly a billion people, views Jesus as a great prophet and miracle-worker. Hinduism, numbering roughly 750 million, often views Jesus as an avatar of Vishnu — one of many incarnations of one of the many Hindu forms of God. Buddhism, which accounts for about 300 million people of the world, typically regards Jesus as an enlightened one for the West. What these religions unwittingly attest by extending such honors to Jesus is that he is the one religious figure in history that simply cannot be ignored.

What does it mean to honor Christ as the Ruler, the Lord of all cultures? It means, first of all, to accept him on his own terms, as he has revealed himself. It means to accept the revelation of Christ given through his own disciples. We should not be embarrassed to say that Christ calls upon all people to become Christians. This does not mean, of course, that everyone should become culturally European, any more than in the first century all Christians had to become culturally Jewish. But if European culture was at all influenced for the better by its acceptance (however flawed) of Christ as Lord, surely those who submit to Christ as Lord of whatever culture will not find it necessary to despise or reject all things European.

Honoring Christ as Ruler of cultures means, further, to accept his rulership over every aspect of one’s life, including one’s culture and one’s relationship to people of other cultures. It means to accept his offer of redemption — forgiveness, spiritual healing, and hope — and to place our hope for redemption in him only. It means to accept his teachings on all subjects on which he speaks in the Gospels (Matt. 28:18-20).

Thus, if we honor Christ as Ruler of cultures, we will do as Christ taught and place our faith in God as Creator, Provider, Father, and King over all cultures. We will love and respect people of all cultures. We will critically examine the beliefs and practices of our own culture to see if they conform to the teachings of Christ. We will seek to submit every area of life, including culture, to the will of the God revealed to us in Christ. This God, according to Christ himself, has revealed his will definitively in Scripture (Matt. 5:17-18). And so it is on the basis of the teaching of Jesus Christ, the Ruler of cultures, that we call upon all cultures — including our own — to submit itself to the will of God as revealed in Scripture.

Yet this view of Scripture as preserving an unchanging and absolute will of God for all people has fallen on hard times, even within the church. In the next chapter, then, we will consider key objections to the absolute moral authority of Scripture.

¹ One of the rare examples in American politics in recent years of a speech emphasizing moral absolutes that was generally very well received was General Colin Powell’s keynote address at the 1996 Republican National Convention.

² H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper & Row, 1951).

³ Cf. Robert E. Webber, The Church in the World: Opposition, Tension, or Transformation? (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1986), 262-64.

“You think the only people who are people
Are the people who look and think like you. . . .”

— Pocahontas, “Colors of the Wind,” in Pocahontas (1994)

Ask most Americans to name the most controversial ethical issue of our time, and the chances are most will answer with one word: abortion. It may not be the most important ethical issue in most people’s minds (although it is for some people), but it has probably been the most contentious issue in American politics for the past quarter of a century. It is also an issue relating to virtually every area of life and touching on a variety of other controversial social, political, philosophical, and religious questions, including the relationship between sex and procreation, feminism, the relationship between church and state, contraception, euthanasia, biotechnology and bioethics, the meaning of life and the meaning of personhood.

In this chapter we will look at the issue of abortion from the perspective of defending the Christian approach to values discussed in the previous chapters. That is, we will be using the question of abortion to illustrate our claim that there are moral absolutes known to all humanity by our creation in God’s image and definitively revealed to us by God in Scripture.

Abortion from the Bible to the Present

We begin by surveying the history of the abortion question from the Bible to the present. Our purpose here is to see if there are moral absolutes which Christians have upheld throughout church history, and to set the stage for the modern abortion debate.

The Old Testament and Judaism

It is well known that the Old Testament does not specifically mention abortion. In one passage it does appear to speak about a miscarriage caused accidentally during a fight (Ex. 21:22-25). Recent interpreters have made a good case for understanding this passage to have allowed a fine if the fight caused a premature live birth and a more serious punishment if either the child or the mother died.¹ On the other hand, it must be admitted that most interpreters have understood this passage to allow a fine if a miscarriage takes place and a more serious punishment if the woman is injured or killed. This was how most of the Jewish rabbis understood the passage by New Testament times, and it was the view held by the first-century Jewish historian Josephus.² This does not mean the Jews approved of abortion: the rabbinical view of Exodus 21 related to the question of accidental miscarriage, not deliberate abortion. While the evidence is sparse (since deliberate abortions except to save the mother’s life were extremely rare in ancient Judaism), it appears that the Jews generally regarded the unborn as human beings and deliberate abortion as akin to infanticide.³ Thus, modern defenders of abortion who cite Exodus 21 in support of a pro-choice viewpoint⁴ are certainly placing more on the passage than it can bear, even if the rabbinical interpretation is assumed.

The Septuagint (the translation of the Old Testament used by Greek-speaking Jews in the New Testament period) paraphrased Exodus 21:22-23 to say that a fine would be imposed if the child was miscarried while unformed while death was the punishment if the miscarriage resulted in the death of a fully formed child. As Michael Gorman notes, the distinction between an unformed and fully formed child originated from the Greek philosopher Aristotle, who thought male children were formed in 40 days while female children were formed in 80 days.⁵

The Jewish heritage, then, was generally opposed to abortion, but not adamantly so. The rabbis were uncertain when the soul became joined to the body of a human being (conception, formation, and birth were all suggested), and no definite position was set forth in the Talmud. The result is that Orthodox Judaism generally discourages abortion except to save the life of the mother, while more liberal forms of Judaism allow abortion for a variety of reasons.⁶

The New Testament and Historic Christianity

The New Testament also does not specifically mention abortion, although some biblical scholars have suggested that passages condemning the use of certain drugs (e.g., Gal. 5:20; Rev. 21:8)⁷ are referring to the practice of using abortion-inducing drugs. Again, the silence of the Bible should not be construed as approval or permissiveness. It is difficult to find any discussion of the ethics of infanticide in the Bible, but it is clear enough that infanticide is a form of murder.⁸

As soon as the Christian church became predominantly Gentile and had to deal with the practices of the pagan Greco-Roman culture, Christian writings began specifically mentioning and condemning abortion. The Didache, for example, probably written close to AD 100, prohibited abortion and compared it to infanticide: “You shall not kill the fetus by abortion or destroy the infant already born.”⁹ The early second century Epistle of Barnabas also prohibited abortion and classified it as a form of murder.¹⁰ In the late second century, the apologists Athenagoras and Tertullian and the theologian Clement of Alexandria all explicitly stated that Christians considered abortion to be a form of murder.¹¹ Similar views were taken by the third-century church fathers Hippolytus and Cyprian.¹²

One of the first Christians to make use of the distinction between the unformed and the formed unborn child was Origen, an Alexandrian theologian heavily influenced by Greek philosophy.¹³ The distinction was accepted in the late fourth century by the biblical scholar Jerome and the early church’s greatest bishop and theologian Augustine of Hippo, both of whom concluded that abortion prior to formation, though immoral, was not murder. The acceptance of this view by Augustine in particular assured it a permanent place in Christian thought, although other fourth-century church fathers, such as Basil of Caesarea, rejected that view.¹⁴ The thirteenth-century theologian and philosopher Thomas Aquinas, for example, accepted the view that the unborn were not persons prior to formation. Thomas sought to interpret Christian theology and ethics in light of Aristotle’s philosophy and science, and he accepted Aristotle’s view that unborn males were formed at 40 days and unborn females at 80 days. Again, Thomas regarded abortion at any stage of pregnancy as immoral, but viewed abortion as murder only after the baby was fully formed in the womb. Thomas’s view prevailed in the Roman Catholic church until the late nineteenth century.

Some pro-choice advocates point to the medieval Catholic view as represented especially by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas as evidence that the pro-life position is not the solidly traditional Christian view that pro-lifers imagine it to be.¹⁵ When pro-lifers claim that Christians have always regarded abortion as murder at any point after conception, such a claim is admittedly overstated. But it would be an even greater mistake for defenders of abortion to read their position into church history.

First of all, the medieval view clearly regarded abortion as immoral at every stage of pregnancy. This was not merely because abortions were commonly linked to adultery, as is sometimes emphasized (although in the medieval period that was also true), but because abortions even during the earliest stage of pregnancy destroyed a life which God was forming into his image.¹⁶

Second, abortion after “formation” was uniformly regarded as murder, and this means that abortions after the sixth week (for boys) or possibly the thirteenth week (for girls) were regarded as murder. In modern terms, all abortions after the first trimester were uniformly regarded by Christians as murder throughout church history until modern times. Such a position is entirely unacceptable to the pro-choice movement.

Third, the distinction between abortions performed before formation and those performed after formation was introduced into the church’s thinking from a pagan source (the Greek philosopher Aristotle) and was accepted somewhat hesitantly by Augustine. There is no biblical basis for the distinction, and it was accepted because it was as close as medieval thought could get to a “scientific” understanding of when the body growing in the womb was actually human. That is to say, the medieval view was that as soon as the unborn attained human nature, they were human persons and their destruction was murder. Accepting what Aristotelian “science” told them about the development of the unborn — that they were not human until they were “formed” — the church qualified its earlier blanket condemnation of all abortion as murder while holding firmly to its conviction that abortion at any stage of pregnancy was a serious sin.

If we were to follow the medieval church’s lead, then, we would take the best scientific information available to us regarding the humanity of the unborn and regard the destruction of human life in the womb as murder. Presumably no one today thinks that the unborn are human at 40 days if they are male but do not become human until 80 days if they are female. That is a bit of ancient scientific theory which no one in the abortion debate accepts today, and therefore it makes no sense for pro-choice advocates to criticize pro-lifers because they have abandoned the medieval view.¹⁷

The Roman Catholic church, committed to a strong view of church authority and tradition, accepted the medieval view until the late nineteenth century. Increased knowledge about fertilization gradually led the Catholic church to abandon the medieval view in favor of its present position that the unborn are human persons from the moment of conception. Some pro-choice writers have suggested that the real reason for the Catholic church’s change was its new emphasis on the idea of the Virgin Mary’s “immaculate conception” (the idea that she was conceived in her mother’s womb without original sin).¹⁸ While this doctrine may have contributed to Catholic sensitivity to the significance of conception, it does not appear to have been the driving reason for the church’s change on the abortion question. In any case, the attempt to dismiss the church’s new position because of some debatable aspect of the historical origins of that position is a classic instance of the genetic fallacy — the mistake of reasoning that a person’s view is wrong because of how he or she happened to come to that view.

Protestant thinking on abortion took a somewhat different history. Since Protestants placed more emphasis on the Bible and less on tradition, they quickly reverted in the earliest years of the movement to the pre-Augustinian view that all abortions destroyed human lives and were therefore always tantamount to murder except when performed to save the mother’s life. Martin Luther and John Calvin both strongly condemned abortion as murder, as did Protestants after them uniformly for centuries.¹⁹ It was only the rise of liberalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that made it possible for some Christian theologians to entertain any other view of abortion.

The Modern Abortion Problem

Although testimonies to the Christian judgment of abortion as at least immoral and typically as murder are not wanting throughout church history, the subject came up rarely until modern times because abortion was quite rare. Abortion was almost always an act of desperation by unmarried women which risked their own lives as well as killing their unborn. The method of choice throughout the centuries was essentially drinking some form of poison and hoping that it would expel the fetus but not kill the woman. Women were therefore more likely to commit infanticide than abortion, and of course infanticide was uniformly regarded by Christians of all traditions and denominations as murder.

It was not until the nineteenth century that abortion became a major social issue. Several factors contributed to the rising importance of the issue during that period, all of which have been ably discussed by Marvin Olasky in his history of abortion in America.²⁰ We will highlight two of the major factors.

First, the urbanization of the West, especially in America and Western Europe, produced a social environment in which abortion became more popular. As men traveled in their business more, and as cities became larger and society more anonymous, both adultery and prostitution became far more common than previously. Prostitutes in particular were likely to have multiple abortions over their short careers. The most reliable estimates suggest that by the mid-nineteenth century there were tens of thousands of prostitutes (working mostly from brothels of various kinds) in America, including about 6,000 in New York City alone.²¹ Because the crude methods of contraception available at that time were ineffective, prostitutes made frequent use of abortion. Olasky estimates that prostitutes during this period may have been averaging 1.8 abortions per year, resulting in roughly 100,000 abortions per year total.²² Such a high rate of abortions may help to explain why the life expectancy of a full-time prostitute was only about four years (since abortion often resulted in the death of the mother).

Second, in a small but growing minority in Western culture abortion was seen as a means of expressing freedom from the traditional, Christian world and life view. During the 1840s (often called the Mad Forties) and the 1850s spiritism (usually known then as spiritualism) became widespread, especially in the northern states. Spiritism was a movement that sought guidance from disembodied spirits — generally thought to be the departed — whose messages typically encouraged self-indulgence and extreme individualism (messages Americans in particular seemed to want to hear). Inspired by such messages, both men and women in the movement were encouraging women, married or not, to have abortions if having a child interfered with their pursuit of sexual pleasure and individual happiness. Typical was an 1858 book by spiritist Henry Wright entitled The Unwelcome Child, which argued that abortion was preferable to bringing “unwanted children” into the world. Wright reported women saying that they felt that “it would be a greater sin to give birth to a child” whom they could not love “than to kill it before it is born.”²³ The spiritists also argued that neither men nor women should be bound to marriage and that women should have complete control over their wombs, determining whether and if they will become pregnant or give birth. Olasky offers a “speculative” estimate of roughly 45,000 abortions per year performed on women in this spiritistic, free-love movement during its heyday in the mid-nineteenth century.²⁴

Combining the number of “free-love” abortions with the abortions obtained by prostitutes, in addition to the relatively few abortions obtained by young unmarried women, yields a very rough estimate of about 160,000 abortions in a single year during the mid-nineteenth century. Since the non-slave population of America at that time was about 27 million, Olasky concludes that the abortion rate in the mid-nineteenth century was roughly akin to what it has been since the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade (about 1.5 million per year in a population of over 250 million).²⁵

The swelling abortion rate led Americans to enact state laws specifying various punishments for women who obtained abortions and especially for persons aiding women in producing abortions. The first state law specifically prohibiting abortion was an 1821 Connecticut law authorizing sentences up to life in prison for any person intentionally giving a woman an abortifacient. The law specified that the law applied to women who were “quick with child” — not, as some have argued, because the unborn were not considered persons prior to quickening, but “because — in the absence of pregnancy and blood tests — fetal movement was the only legally established indicator of unborn life.”²⁶

By the end of 1868 thirty states had overcome all legislative and cultural obstacles to passing an anti-abortion law, and twenty-seven of them punished attempts to induce abortion before quickening. Twenty of the states had bitten the bullet and were punishing abortion at all stages equally, regardless of the added evidence given by quickening; others had an increased range of punishment.²⁷

These anti-abortion laws reflected the prevailing cultural abhorrence of abortion and the general belief that the unborn were human persons. Although various physicians were in the forefront of the public discussions of the blight of abortion, the American Medical Association did not exert inordinate pressure on legislatures to pass anti-abortion laws, as is sometimes claimed.²⁸ These laws did not stop abortion, although they probably helped to contain it.

During the first half of the twentieth century the abortion rate declined significantly, partly because contraceptive technologies became more efficient, more available, and generally more acceptable. The growing use of contraception, societal disapproval of abortion, and to some extent the legal penalties associated with abortion, made abortion comparatively rare during this period.

Although contraception (which prevents a new human being from being created) should not be confused with abortion (which ends the life of the new human being in the womb), the leading advocates of contraception in the first half of the twentieth century laid the groundwork for the modern abortion rights movement. Many of the leaders of the movement to promote contraception were heavily influenced by eugenics, the belief that society should try to maximize the procreation of the “well-born” (eu, “good” or “well,” and gen, “born”), typically meaning middle and upper class whites. In turn eugenics assumed the view of the Malthusians that population growth would be arrested by wars or other disasters if society did not take prudent steps to control population growth. Margaret Sanger (1883-1966), whatever her other motivations (some selfish, some perhaps noble), was also influenced by eugenics: “More children from the fit, less from the unfit — that is the chief issue of birth control.”²⁹ Sanger, founder of what became Planned Parenthood, generally opposed abortion, but after her death Planned Parenthood became the leading organization promoting abortion rights. The heightened concern about the population explosion in the 1950s was also frequently focused on the growth of non-white populations around the world.³⁰

Although contraception was becoming increasingly common, after World War II abortion rates appear to have begun rising again. In part this was made possible by the fact that medical technologies were making abortion much safer for women than in the past. Contrary to the rhetoric often heard from advocates of legalized abortion, during the 1950s and 1960s most abortions, even though illegal, were performed by physicians using ever more sophisticated and safe equipment and procedures.

Pro-life and pro-choice partisans disagree vigorously as to just what the rate of abortion was during the decades leading up to the legalization of abortion. Pro-choice advocates often claim that women sought between one to two million illegal abortions a year prior to the 1970s, a figure that is almost surely exaggerated. A somewhat more responsible estimate offered by James Mohr, whose research was generally oriented toward supporting abortion rights, was that illegal abortions in the late 1960s numbered somewhere between 200,000 and 1.2 million per year, with Mohr unable to be more precise.³¹ On the pro-life side a 1981 study is commonly cited which found that about 39,000 illegal abortions took place in 1950, with that number rising to a high of about 210,000 in 1961.³² Even if these figures are thought to be too low, it is almost certain that the abortion rate was significantly less prior to legalization, probably a lot less.

What is more important than the numbers is the fact that the abortion rate was rising during this period; most of the studies, whether biased toward pro-choice or pro-life interests, show an increase in abortion from the late 1940s to the late 1960s. Although medical technology made abortions safer for women during this period, the reason more women were seeking abortion was a social one: a dramatic growth in premarital sex among teenagers and young women in the context of a culture that was becoming increasingly materialistic and individualistic. These cultural changes were taking place under the surface during the 1950s, and only became more overt in the 1960s with the advent of the counterculture, its glorification of sex, and its exploration of Eastern mysticism and the occult.

Note that in many respects the 1960s resemble the 1840s when spiritism and free love prompted a sudden increase in abortion. As in the “Mad 40s,” advocates of abortion in the 1960s saw abortion as a symbolic declaration of the autonomy of women and their right to enjoy the sexual revolution without being “forced” to accept maternity as a consequence.

However, abortion advocates generally did not advertise sexual license as the reason for liberalization of abortion laws. Instead, they focused attention on the so-called “hard cases” to generate sympathy for women seeking abortions. The most celebrated such case in the 1960s was that of Sherri Finkbine, a married suburban mother of four children who discovered in 1962 that while pregnant with her fifth child “she had unwittingly taken the drug thalidomide, then surfacing in Europe as the reason why some children were born with phocomelia (flipperlike limbs) or without any limbs at all.”³³ When Finkbine was unable to obtain a legal abortion in her home state of Arizona, Planned Parenthood and other advocates of abortion seized upon her case as evidence of the need for “updating” America’s abortion laws. Finkbine rejected the offers that came from couples all over America offering to adopt the child, claiming, “It wouldn’t be fair to the child.” She eventually obtained an abortion by traveling to Sweden. The media handling of the Finkbine case evidently encouraged roughly a majority of Americans to accept the reasoning that abortion should be permitted in cases where the child is expected to be severely deformed or handicapped.³⁴

The other, even more famous “hard case” which changed abortion law dramatically in America was that of “Jane Roe” (Norma McCorvey), an unmarried Texas woman who filed a class action lawsuit in 1970 challenging Texas law which denied her a legal abortion. Roe’s case was regarded with sympathy because she claimed that she had sought the abortion on the grounds that she had been raped. (Years later McCorvey admitted that she had lied about the rape; recently she has publicly confessed to having become a Christian and now says she is pro-life.) In 1973 the Supreme Court decided the case of Roe v. Wade in Roe’s favor, with Justice Harry Blackmun arguing for the majority that the Texas anti-abortion law (and by implication all such state laws) was unconstitutional.³⁵

This review of the history of the events leading up to the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision makes it clear that the main issue in the abortion debate was sex, not saving women’s lives or their health or defending women from rape. (In most states abortion was permitted to save the mother’s life, and even before Roe v. Wade some states interpreted this exception broadly to allow women to have an abortion for reasons of physical and even mental health.) As Paul Savoy, a pro-choice attorney, has written:

What the Supreme Court, in effect, has recognized over the last quarter of a century in its rulings on birth control and abortion is a constitutional right of women to have sex for pleasure rather than procreation as part of a more general freedom from sexual subjugation. . . . the Court had legalized the sexual revolution without so much as a nod of acknowledgment that its rulings had anything to do with the liberation of women as sexual beings.³⁶

Roe v. Wade sparked a national debate about abortion that intensified in the 1980s and has continued to the present. Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants have been the largest and most visible opponents of abortion in America, though one should not ignore the fact that Muslims, Mormons, Orthodox Jews, and people of other religious beliefs have also opposed abortion. (Indeed, internationally the strongest opposition to abortion has come from nations dominated by Islam.) Liberal Protestants, liberal Jews, adherents of Eastern and New Age religious beliefs, and secular humanists have generally all supported abortion rights, though one can find occasional exceptions. The most vocal support for abortion rights in America has come from feminist groups which see abortion as a key element in securing equality and autonomy for women.

Opponents of abortion label their position pro-life, indicating that for them the issue is not really sexual immorality or women’s roles but the life of the unborn. Defenders of legalized abortion label their own view pro-choice, emphasizing their belief that the issue is the right of women to choose whether to continue their pregnancy or end it by abortion. We use these terms rather than the labels anti-abortion and pro-abortion, because these terms are generally used by the opposing sides against one another (although technically both terms seem accurate enough).

Although not all pro-lifers regard the entire Bible as the infallible word of God (since there are Orthodox Jews and Muslims who are pro-life), within Christianity nearly all pro-lifers accept the orthodox view of the Bible as God’s word, while most pro-choice Christians hold to a more liberal view of the Bible. There are some pro-choice Catholics and evangelicals who hold a high view of Scripture, but they are a small minority. It therefore seems reasonable to conclude that biblical values (at least some of which are shared by Muslims, Orthodox Jews, and Mormons) inform the pro-life position, while the pro-choice view is in some respects out of keeping with biblical ethics. In the rest of this chapter we will test this conclusion by examining the pro-life position and considering crucial objections to the pro-life view raised by Christians who do profess a high view of Scripture.

The Life of the Unborn

The pro-life argument is actually a very simple one. One of the most elegant statements of the argument has recently been set forth by Patrick Lee. He begins his book by summarizing the case against abortion with the following argument:

Intentionally killing an innocent person always is morally wrong.
Abortion is the intentional killing of an innocent person.
Therefore, abortion is always morally wrong.³⁷

He then explains that there are “only three ways of challenging this argument, and therefore only three ways of trying to justify abortion.”³⁸ (1) Deny the second premise by arguing that the unborn are not persons. (2) Deny the second premise by arguing that abortion is not intentional killing. (3) Deny the first premise by arguing that intentionally killing an innocent person for certain purposes is not morally wrong.

Although pro-life advocates usually give most of their attention to defending the second premise by arguing that the unborn are persons, in fact the most common pro-choice strategy appears to be denying the first premise. We will therefore start there and consider the premise that it is always immoral to kill an innocent person.

Abortion and the Sixth Commandment

The basic reason for the pro-life view is the Sixth Commandment, “You shall not murder” (Ex. 20:13; Deut. 5:17; Matt. 19:18; Rom. 13:9). The Bible does not specify all classes of human beings who may not be murdered — that is, it does not bother saying, “You shall not murder women, people of color, old people, infants, deformed people, retarded people,” and so forth; it covers all the bases by the universal prohibition against murder. Nor was it necessary for the Bible to say, “You shall not murder the unborn.” As Randy Alcorn puts it, “All that was necessary to prohibit an abortion was the command, ‘You shall not murder’ (Exodus 20:13).”³⁹

In biblical teaching, murder is prohibited because what is killed was created in the image of God. The classic text on this point is Genesis 9:6:

Whoever sheds the blood of man,
by man shall his blood be shed;
for in the image of God
has God made man.

This text is extremely important for the abortion debate because it makes certain crucial points explicit. First, all human beings are in God’s image. The word translated “man” is ’adam, a Hebrew word which simply means “human being” or “humanity.” The same word is used in Genesis 1:26-27, which says that God created ’adam in his image — and states specifically that this includes both male and female. In other words, if it is a human being, it is in God’s image. Thus, if the unborn are human beings, killing them is forbidden because it is an attack on the image of God.

Second, the prohibition against murder does not forbid killing non-human animals. In the immediate context of Genesis 9, God specifically gives humanity permission to kill animals and eat their meat (vv. 2-3). Pro-choice writer Stephen Asma is therefore mistaken when he claims that the person who opposes abortion on the grounds of the “sanctity of life” does not realize that on those grounds he “must now sin nightly as he devours his sacred sirloin.”⁴⁰ It is not all “life” that the pro-life movement regards as sacred, but all human life (as Asma presumably knows full well).

Third, the prohibition against murder forbids killing innocent human beings. In Genesis 9:6, human beings who are guilty of murder are themselves subject to having their life taken away by man. This makes it clear that the prohibition against murder is a command prohibiting the taking of life away from human beings who have not killed and are not threatening to kill other human beings. It does not forbid killing in self-defense or the use of lethal force by police, soldiers, or executioners. It is therefore not inconsistent for pro-lifers to oppose abortion but endorse capital punishment and military force. The essential pro-life claim is not that it is always wrong for human beings to kill other human beings, but that it is always wrong for human beings to kill innocent human beings. Some pro-lifers do oppose capital punishment and all warfare, and believe this position to be a more thoroughly ethical stance, but pro-lifers who do not take this approach are perfectly consistent with their own premise.

Whether or not it is ever morally right to kill murderers, it should be noncontroversial that in biblical ethics it is always morally wrong to kill those who are doing no harm to others. The pro-life position follows directly from this premise. It asserts that it is always morally wrong to kill the unborn except where they pose a danger to the mother’s life.

A key pro-choice objection to applying the sixth commandment to abortion is that it assumes that the unborn are persons. We should therefore consider the question of the personhood of the unborn as it relates to the morality of abortion.

Human Beings, Persons, and the Unborn

It is common for the abortion debate to be framed in terms of the personhood of the unborn. Pro-lifers routinely defend the claim that the unborn are persons, and many pro-choicers argue that abortion is morally permissible because the unborn are not persons. Patrick Lee uses the term “person” as the key term in the two premises of his argument against abortion, quoted earlier.

The trouble with making personhood the decisive issue in the abortion debate is that our culture no longer has a consensus view of what personhood is. Some people define personhood in terms of the developed characteristics of self-awareness, individuality, rational thought, the capacity for moral choice, and so forth. Defining personhood in this way virtually guarantees that the unborn will not be considered persons, but arguably six-month-old infants will not qualify as persons either.

Others define personhood as the possession of an individual soul or spirit distinct from the body. The trouble with this way of defining personhood is that there is no unanimity in our society as to whether such things as souls exist, let alone when they become part of the human being. Jewish thought has always been uncertain as to whether the soul is united to the body at conception, at formation, or possibly even not until birth. Christian theology has historically carried on a debate as to whether the soul is procreated along with the body or is specially created at some unknown point in time by God. Eastern religions believe in something like a soul, but it passes from body to body in reincarnation and may or may not have a unique individual personal identity. Atheists and skeptics generally do not believe in a soul or spirit at all. If the pro-life position were to depend on one particular theological view of the soul, the pro-choice side would seem to have a point in arguing that such a specific theological doctrine should not be made the basis for the claim that abortion should be illegal for people of all religious beliefs.

Although we believe that it is proper to defend the claim that the unborn should be regarded as persons from the moment of conception, it might be prudent to avoid the term “person” and make the simpler and more direct argument that the unborn should not be killed because they are human beings. After all, the Bible does not use the word “person” in Genesis 1:26-27 or 9:6 but speaks instead of human beings, ’adam, as created in God’s image possessing life that is not be violated. Nowhere in the Bible or in the legal traditions of our civilization is there any suggestion that only some classes of human beings are deserving of life. It is therefore unnecessary to defend a particular view of personhood or to argue its applicability to the unborn at any or every stage of development in order to argue that the life of the unborn should be protected by law. Rather, all that is necessary is to defend the claim that the unborn are human beings.

That claim, it turns out, is exceedingly easy to defend — which is why many pro-choice advocates are happy to keep the discussion on the more debatable concept of personhood. The claim that the unborn are human beings from conception is based on the scientifically certain fact that the event of conception (or, perhaps more narrowly, fertilization) is the first event in the history of the human organism — indeed, the event which constitutes it as a distinct human being. Fertilization is the initial event which produces an organism that can develop into what we all recognize and admit are human persons. Prior to conception, what exists is an egg which is genetically and functionally part of the mother’s body, and a sperm which is organically, genetically, and functionally part of the father’s body. When fertilization is complete a new organism is conceived which is genetically distinct from the mother and father and is functionally developing as a distinct organism. Specifically, from the moment of conception what exists is a human organism, a human being, with potential for development, growth, and full realization.⁴¹

The point here is not merely that the unborn are human. As pro-choice advocates never tire of pointing out, our fingernails are human, but we think nothing of cutting them off and throwing them in the trash. The unborn entity from the moment of conception is not merely human, but a whole human being — an entity that is a biologically individual and whole being, an individual member of Homo sapiens, distinct from the being of the mother, needing only time and nourishment to develop into a fully functioning adult human person. Again, this is a well-known and noncontroversial fact of biology which no one seriously denies or questions and which even many people on the pro-choice side freely admit.

Given that the unborn are human beings from the moment of conception, it follows directly that killing them for any reason other than in an attempt to save someone else’s life (that is, the mother’s life) is forbidden by the sixth commandment. It is unnecessary to prove that the unborn are “persons” in order to claim that their lives ought to be protected by law. All that is needed is to point out that they are human beings. Let those who would defend abortion as a legal right say, if they can (and if they dare), that it is permissible to kill some human beings. In fact a minority of pro-choice advocates are willing to say this, but most simply cannot bring themselves to say so — at least not directly and openly. Most proponents of the pro-choice position cannot even bring themselves to use the word “kill,” though most surely know that is what is involved. They hide the truth from the public, and perhaps from themselves, by speaking vaguely of “a woman’s right to choose” — without specifying what she is choosing — or euphemistically of a woman’s “reproductive rights” — without acknowledging that once a woman has conceived reproduction has already taken place, and that fact is not changed whether her child is killed after three months in the womb or three months after birth.

Note also that it is unnecessary, and in some respects possibly misleading, to base the pro-life position on the facts concerning fetal development. Many pro-lifers take great care to explain at what stage the unborn can feel pain, or at what stage the unborn have a heartbeat, and the like. These facts can be helpful in showing that those who try to justify abortions beyond the first trimester cannot reasonably appeal to the developed fetus’s lack of human functions (at least, not without also justifying infanticide). Such arguments also make sense if what one is seeking is a compromise in which abortions after a certain stage of development will be forbidden except to save the mother’s life. But placing great emphasis on the development of various capacities at fourteen days, twenty days, six weeks, and the like invites the question of whether the unborn deserve legal protection before those benchmarks of human development. If the unborn are human beings — even “persons” — from the moment of conception, then logically what functions emerge at various stages of gestation after conception is irrelevant to the humanity or the personhood of the unborn.

Ultimately many defenders of the pro-choice position base it on a kind of agnosticism about the moral status of the unborn. They acknowledge that some people find the arguments for the full humanity or personhood of the unborn persuasive, but maintain that so long as there is diversity of opinion on this question the law cannot “impose” the pro-life view of the unborn on the rest of society. Again, this argument seems to carry more weight when the argument is framed in terms of personhood rather than whether the unborn are human beings. But the agnostic defense of the pro-choice position can be answered regardless of how the question is worded. The standard pro-life response is that if we are unsure whether the unborn are fully human beings or persons, then it is surely wrong to permit people to kill them. One of the ablest expositions of this point has been developed by Peter Kreeft, a Roman Catholic philosopher. Kreeft sets forth a “quadrilemma” on the question of whether the fetus is a person:

1. It is not a person, and we know that.

2. It is a person, and we know that.

3. It is a person, and we do not know that.

4. It is not a person, and we do not know that.⁴²

In case (1), Kreeft argues, “abortion is perfectly permissible,” but there seems no way to know with certainty, or to prove, that the fetus is not a person. (Again, it is possible to find defenders of the pro-choice position who claim they do know with certainty that the unborn are not persons, but they are a very small minority.) In case (2), “abortion is murder,” because it is knowingly killing a person. In case (3), “abortion is manslaughter,” because it is an act of careless and irresponsible killing. In case (4), even though the fetus is not a person, abortion is “criminal negligence,” because one ought to ascertain whether the fetus is a person before killing it.⁴³

Kreeft’s analysis is helpful, not only because it is an effective response to the agnostic pro-choice argument that no one knows whether the unborn are persons, but also because it introduces important distinctions regarding the seriousness of abortion in criminal law. The sixth commandment says “You shall not murder,” a general statement that does not distinguish between “first-degree” murder, manslaughter, and criminal negligence. These distinctions, however, are biblical, since the Law of Moses clearly distinguished between cases of killing that were punishable by death, exile, and restitution (e.g., Ex. 21:12-14, 20-21, 28-29). Thus, it is not necessary for women who procure abortions to be judged as committing murder in the first degree in order for the pro-life position to be reflected in law. Nineteenth-century state laws in America prohibiting abortion made various qualifications that took into account the often miserable situation in which women sought abortions and the difficulty in making a case for deliberate homicide in abortion cases (since physical evidence, for example, was often lacking). Pro-lifers are not asking for the death penalty for women who have abortions, or even for abortionists. They are asking for reasonable punishments that reflect an understanding of the legal and social difficulties of prosecuting abortion cases (e.g., suspension of physicians’ licenses or possibly prison time for repeated illegal abortions, community service or other penalties for women who obtain abortions).

The argument presented here for the pro-life position has made open use of Scripture to define what we mean by “murder” and on what basis we oppose the destruction of the life of the unborn at any stage of development. But the argument clearly is serviceable outside the community of people who believe in the Bible, since the major premise of the argument is simply that killing innocent human beings is wrong and should be prohibited by law. Though for us who believe in Christ and in his Word this premise will be understood in light of the biblical teaching that all human beings are created in God’s image, it is not necessary for people to accept that understanding for them to see the moral force of the pro-life argument. The abortion issue therefore well illustrates our contention that Christian values are based on the revelation of God’s will provided in Scripture, but that these values can to a great extent be defended in the public realm by appeal to facts and moral principles that people of most religions, or even of no religion, can usually understand and accept.

Abortion and God’s Grace

Before we conclude this chapter, we want to examine some typical objections to the pro-life position that have been raised from within the conservative Christian community of Roman Catholics and evangelical Protestants. Our source for these objections is a recent book edited by Anne Eggebroten entitled Abortion — My Choice, God’s Grace.⁴⁴ The bulk of the book is taken up with testimonies from women, most of whom obtained abortions, all of whom try to explain how their obtaining an abortion made sense to them in a Christian context of belief in a God of love and grace.

Bunnie Riedel, in her Foreword to the book, makes it clear that she regards the pro-life position as setting an unrealistic expectation on women:

Almost half of the women in the U.S. will have an abortion at some time in their lives. . . . After all, women are fertile for 30 to 40 years of their lives and the likelihood of their having an unacceptable pregnancy during that period is quite high. How many of us can manage anything perfectly for 30 years? Yet many expect every woman to get through all those years without an unplanned pregnancy.⁴⁵

Of course, this is a caricature of the pro-life position. Everyone understands that many women through no fault of their own will find themselves pregnant in difficult or even wrenching situations. Women occasionally become pregnant as the result of rape or incest. Many women become pregnant by boyfriends or even husbands who then abandon them with no financial or familial support. Even happily married women often become pregnant “by accident,” perhaps before they felt ready to start a family, or perhaps after they had already had the number of children they had “planned” to raise. No doubt a large number of pregnancies are unplanned, but it is difficult to understand why this justifies abortion if the unborn are human beings. What pro-lifers expect is not that women will “manage anything perfectly for 30 years” but that they will not resort to killing their unborn children when things do not go exactly according to plan.

The testimonies from women who had abortions nicely illustrate that woman can often find a silver lining in their decision to have an abortion, but they hardly show that the pro-life position is wrong or that their abortions were morally justified. The first two stories are typical. The first testimony is from a woman who had sex with her Christian boyfriend in college and decided to have the baby and give it up for adoption (the boyfriend had urged her to have an abortion). She went through with this plan, although having to give up the baby was extremely painful.⁴⁶ Three months later, she became pregnant again (by another man), and this time decided to have an abortion. Her rationale: she had been trying to do what was “right” out of fear, and “trying to be right is a trap that springs from our pride.”⁴⁷ “For me, carrying a baby nine months and then giving it up is too horrible to recommend to another person. I might as well suggest that she burn her eyes out with branding irons, drink ammonia and sleep on razor blades — because that pain could not hurt as much.”⁴⁸ Ironically, such gruesome violence is just what abortion does to the unborn child, but this woman does not comment on that fact. She traded her supposed self-righteous concern to do right for a self-centered concern to feel good. Calling the latter “God’s grace” does not make it so.

The second story comes from a woman who was raped by her sister’s husband. The woman, a Catholic, believed that abortion was murder, but her doctor, she says, “was totally against my continuing the pregnancy. . . . She was very clear that by no means should I go through with the pregnancy. She said that if I did, there would be chances of my not living a normal life because the flashbacks from my terrible experience would continue.”⁴⁹ One wonders how many confused and emotionally vulnerable women are talked into abortions by such persons. Was there not also a chance of “flashbacks” not only to the rape but also to the abortion? Is killing an innocent child justifiable because of a “chance” that doing so might make it easier to forget the evil that someone else did? The woman eventually decided that in her situation abortion “was better for both the embryo and me.” No reason is ever given why abortion was a better choice for the embryo. The woman simply concludes that abortion “is certainly the best solution in a case of rape or serious deformity.”⁵⁰ So much for Eggebroten’s claim in her Introduction that “no one is pro-abortion.”⁵¹ This popular claim is empty rhetoric when so many people go right on to claim that abortion is the best choice.

In a concluding chapter, Eggebroten discusses “The Bible and Choice.” All of her arguments in favor of the pro-choice position would also support a “pro-choice” position on infanticide as well as abortion. Ten such arguments can be discerned in the chapter; we will consider each of them in turn.

1. Eggebroten argues that even if we view abortion as immoral, we should respect the rights of others to hold their divergent views and seek to persuade them of our view rather than forcing them through legislation. “Only those who do not respect the views of others try to implement laws forcing everyone to abide by their views.”⁵² By this reasoning, how would we object to those who argue that we should respect the views of those parents who opt to kill or abandon their newborn children? If we are convinced that the unborn are human beings, shouldn’t we do all we can to convince the government to extend legal protection to them? We may “respect” the rights of those who disagree with us to voice their views, but if we value human life we will act to protect it lawfully whether the human beings whose value is questioned by others happen to be newborn children, the very old, people of dark skin, or the unborn.

2. Eggebroten argues, as do all pro-choice Christians, that abortion is permissible because the Bible never mentions abortion and gives no clear statement on whether abortion is murder.⁵³ As explained earlier, the Bible rarely mentions infanticide, never discusses the question of whether parents should be allowed to make “hard choices” about the life of their infants, and certainly does not clearly condemn all infanticide as murder. Yet nearly all pro-choice advocates, Christians or not, agree that infanticide is contrary to the Bible and is covered by the sixth commandment. The point is that if the unborn are human beings, the Bible just as clearly condemns killing them as it does killing infants, senior citizens, blacks, Jews, or women.

3. Biblical texts that speak of God’s knowledge of the unborn (e.g., Ps. 139) are read by some Christians as ascribing value to unborn human beings “without ascribing full personhood to them. . . . The difference of opinion arises because the Bible is not explicit about the line between a person and a potential person.”⁵⁴ By this reasoning, there would be no way to show from the Bible that infants have “full personhood,” since the Bible never actually says that infants are persons. For that matter, the Bible never hints at a distinction between persons and potential persons. Even if we accepted such a distinction (which we do not), there is no basis in the Bible for denying life to a whole class of human beings on the grounds that they are merely “potential persons.”

4. Eggebroten argues that since people have different opinions about the status of the unborn, it does not make any sense to have laws establishing the unborn as persons from conception.⁵⁵ We discussed this objection earlier as the argument from agnosticism. If people disagree about the status of the unborn, then we ought to err on the side of caution and not allow people to kill the unborn. Regrettably, there are also people in our society who believe that newborn children and infants are not quite persons in the full sense either (since they cannot reason and do not appear to have any sense of personal identity). But from the fact that people have “different opinions” about the status of infants, it does not follow that we are wrong to have laws establishing infants as persons accorded equal protection under the law.

5. According to Eggebroten, if neither the father nor the mother is willing to commit themselves to love and provide for the child, and if they are not willing to trust others to make that commitment, then “no one should force the woman to continue the creative process.”⁵⁶ This doctrine that only love children should be allowed to live goes back to spiritist, free-love cultural notions, but Eggebroten attempts to give it a Christian theological basis: “The covenant basis of Judeo-Christian theology directs us toward bearing children only as part of a covenant, and that promise of commitment can be freely made only in the context of full procreative choice.”⁵⁷ As noble and biblical as the language sounds here, the idea has no substantial basis in the covenantal teaching of the Bible. Children of Israelites who found themselves born and raised under the Mosaic covenant, for example, could not “choose” to ignore the Mosaic law simply because they were unwilling to make a voluntary commitment to it. A choice is indeed required in biblical covenants, but God dictates the choice because he is the sovereign God who owns each and every one of us. Again, Eggebroten’s reasoning here leads to the justification of abandonment or even killing of one’s born children. If neither parent is willing to continue loving their newborn children, should they be “forced to continue the creative process” and continue raising their children? After all, the creative process that continues after conception is the process of bringing the unborn to full adulthood and independence from their parents — and this process is continuous from conception to adulthood.

6. Eggebroten’s next argument is similar. Giving birth should be something a woman does freely, not out of compulsion; the pro-life position would compel women who become pregnant to give birth. “To require a woman to complete a pregnancy against her will, dishonors her sacrifice. . . . Only when motherhood is freely chosen can its difficult work be valued — by the individual and society.”⁵⁸ To this line of reasoning it must be asked if it is wrong to require a woman to complete the “sacrificial task” of raising her child if at some point after the baby is born she decides she no longer wants to be responsible for the child. Does requiring her to continue caring for the child “against her will” dishonor motherhood? Shall we say that only when motherhood is freely chosen can its difficult work be valued?

7. Eggebroten’s next argument begins with the reasonable and biblically based assumption that God has given us free will⁵⁹ and allows us to make our own decisions and to bear responsibility for those choices, even though we make mistakes. But from this premise she jumps to the unwarranted conclusion that laws prohibiting abortion “would deny women whose birth control has failed the opportunity to weigh good and evil and to make a responsible moral decision.”⁶⁰ “If we respected women as a group. . . . We would understand how a woman, faced with a difficult situation, must decide how to handle it to the best of her ability — even if that decision means ending a human life in its beginning stages within her.”⁶¹ Actually, no laws prevent women, or men, from weighing the morality of their actions and making whatever decisions they choose. What laws do is threaten legal, state-imposed consequences if men or women make wrong choices. In this sense the state’s laws do discourage women and men from making a variety of choices, but the alternative is anarchy. In this context, laws prohibiting infanticide also deny women who find themselves in poverty or difficult social situations the “opportunity” to weigh good and evil and to make a “moral decision” to kill their infants with impunity. But would we have it any other way? It simply does not follow that if we respected women, we would grant them the freedom to make their own decision to kill their infant children. Nor does it follow that if we respected women we would allow them to kill their unborn children.

8. As the title of her book indicates, Eggebroten emphasizes the idea of God’s “grace” as somehow inconsistent with the pro-life condemnation of abortion. She argues that because we are saved by grace, not by works, our response to women who become pregnant out of wedlock should not be harsh condemnation and rejection but merciful love and support, whether they “keep their babies or choose abortion.”⁶² It is true, of course, that we are saved by grace, not by works. But while this means that those who have committed sin, whether it be having an abortion or cheating on income taxes, should be encouraged to seek God’s forgiveness and grace, it does not follow that abortion is morally permissible! Shall we say that our response to women who are abandoned by their partners after they have borne children should be to love and support them whether they keep their babies or choose infanticide? Such a position would make a mockery of grace. God’s grace extends mercy and peace to those who confess their sins, not to those who seek to justify and rationalize their actions and deny that they are sins. God’s grace certainly does not provide forgiveness to those who abuse the very concept of grace to justify killing the innocent.

9. Eggebroten also argues that anti-abortion laws are inconsistent with Jesus’ special concern for the poor and oppressed. This is because laws prohibiting abortions would oppress women by telling them they cannot end their pregnancies. “If abortion is made illegal in this country again, the weight of the law will fall only on poor women.”⁶³ Until we live in “an ideal world” in which all women have the economic resources to provide for all their children, abortion must remain legal.⁶⁴ One wonders if Eggebroten and other pro-choice advocates would allow laws prohibiting rich women to have abortions. The fact is that while many poor women do have abortions, overall the poor tend to be more pro-life than the middle class, and the rich tend to be more pro-choice than either the middle class or the poor. In any case, Eggebroten’s argument assumes that denying abortions to women is depriving them of some good — and that in turn presupposes that abortion does not involve killing innocent beings. One could just as easily (and erroneously) argue that laws prohibiting infanticide oppress poor women by forcing them to continue raising children for whom they cannot adequately provide. Since we do not live in an “an ideal world” in which all women have the economic resources to provide for all their children, should infanticide be made legal?

10. Finally, Eggebroten expresses the worry that laws that prohibit non-Christians from having abortions based on our Christian beliefs might make non-Christians bitter and impede our efforts to preach the gospel to them.⁶⁵ But if the unborn are human beings and deserving of life, this argument diverts attention from the real issue. Should we worry that laws that prohibit non-Christians from committing infanticide based on our Christian beliefs might make non-Christians bitter and impede our efforts to preach the gospel to them? So far the number of people in our society who openly favor legalization of infanticide is extremely small (but note that there are some).⁶⁶ If infanticide becomes a hotly debated subject in our society, shall we who oppose it as Christians timidly back away from the debate and allow infanticide to be legal because we don’t want pro-infanticide non-Christians to be bitter toward us? Nor do we need to pose the question in such a purely hypothetical fashion. There are thousands of pedophiles in America; shall we legalize pedophilia because we want pedophiles to be more receptive to the gospel?

There is one more objection to the pro-life position which we hesitate to mention, and which lies mostly under the surface of Eggebroten’s book (though it is made explicit by many others). That is the objection that we have no right to oppose abortion because we are men. Somehow many people have convinced themselves that the argument against abortion is a “male” argument and can therefore be dismissed. While such an objection is completely fallacious, on an emotional level we understand that those who favor abortion rights need to hear the pro-life case from women.

We would therefore like to recommend, as a counterpoint to Anne Eggebroten’s book, an excellent defense of the pro-life position by Terry Schlossberg and Elizabeth Achtemeier. The title itself is instructive — Not My Own.⁶⁷ Schlossberg and Achtemeier emphasize that the basic premise of the pro-choice position is that women have an absolute right to do what they choose with their own bodies. This premise is wrong, they argue, not only because the unborn child has its own body and is not part of the woman’s body, but also because our own bodies, both men and women, are not ours to do with as we please but belong to God who created us. Both our own lives and the lives of our children belong not to us but to the Creator:

In the Bible’s world-view, our children do not belong to us. . . . It follows, therefore, that to abort any child in the womb is to destroy a child who belongs finally to God.⁶⁸

Ultimately, the meaning of the abortion debate is that human beings are not autonomous beings free to do whatever they choose, but creatures created in God’s image and responsible to God and to each other in community. By offering legal sanction to the killing of millions of innocent human beings in the interests of women’s autonomy, we sacrifice the innocent for the sake of a principle that degrades women and men alike. Abortion is a grave problem in its own right, but it is also a symptom of an even greater problem. That is the problem of a society that values individual freedom over individual responsibility to the lives of others. It is the problem of a society that has deified choice and demonized restraint. What is all the more remarkable is that such attitudes have surfaced in the church. In opposing abortion, we must be honest that we are opposing not only abortion itself but also the self-centered, hedonistic, and autonomous spirit of the culture that not only tolerates abortion but enshrines it as an integral part of its revolutionary ethic.

¹ E.g., Gleason L. Archer, Jr., Encyclopedia of Bible Difficulties (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1982), 246-49; Meredith G. Kline, “Lex Talionis and the Human Fetus,” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society (1977); Francis J. Beckwith, Politically Correct Death: Answering the Arguments for Abortion Rights (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 142-44.

² Michael J. Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church: Christian, Jewish and Pagan Attitudes in the Greco-Roman World (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 1982), 40-41.

³ Ibid., 42-43.

⁴ E.g., John M. Swomley, “The Bible Does Not Prohibit Abortion,” in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Charles P. Cozic and Stacey L. Tipp (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1991), 113.

⁵ Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church, 35.

⁶ J. Gordon Melton, The Churches Speak On: Abortion: Official Statements from Religious Bodies and Ecumenical Organizations (Detroit: Gale Research, 1989), xix.

⁷ Some translations render the Greek words used here as “sorcery” and “sorcerers,” but the word pharmakeia can refer to the use of drugs in any negative sense, including sorcery and abortion; cf. Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church, 48.

⁸ Pharaoh’s ordering infanticide on Hebrew male infants (Ex. 1:15-16) and Herod’s ordering the slaughter of male children two and younger in the Bethlehem area (Matt. 2:16-18) are two notorious examples of infanticide in the Bible. One might also refer to the sacrificing of children to Molech, which was forbidden in the Law (Lev. 18:21; 20:1-5; Deut. 12:31). But nowhere in the Bible do we find a discussion of the morality of infanticide as a “choice” by parents.

⁹ Melton, The Churches Speak On: Abortion, xvii.

¹⁰ Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church, 49-50.

¹¹ Ibid., 50-58.

¹² Ibid., 59-60.

¹³ Ibid., 59.

¹⁴ Ibid., 66-73.

¹⁵ Notably Stephen T. Asma, “The Roman Catholic Church Historically Condoned Early Abortions,” in The Abortion Controversy, ed. Charles P. Cozic and Jonathan Petrikin; Current Controversies series (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1995), 59-65.

¹⁶ Gorman, Abortion and the Early Church, 68-73.

¹⁷ Asma, “The Roman Catholic Church Historically Condoned Early Abortions,” in his zeal to make the Aristotelian-Thomistic view seem more scientific than the modern pro-life view, completely ignores the Aristotelian view that males and females achieve form at widely different stages of gestation.

¹⁸ Melton, The Churches Speak On: Abortion, xviii.

¹⁹ Terry Schlossberg and Elizabeth Achtemeier, Not My Own: Abortion and the Marks of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 4-6.

²⁰ Marvin Olasky, Abortion Rites: A Social History of Abortion in America (Wheaton, IL: Crossway Books, 1992).

²¹ Ibid., 47, 57. By 1893 the number of prostitutes in New York City was estimated at 40,000; ibid., 189.

²² Ibid., 57.

²³ Henry C. Wright, The Unwelcome Child or The Crime of an Undesigned and Undesired Maternity (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1858), 117, quoted in Olasky, Abortion Rites, 70.

²⁴ Ibid., 77.

²⁵ Ibid., 291-92.

²⁶ Ibid., 93.

²⁷ Ibid., 102.

²⁸ Ibid., 109-30.

²⁹ Melton, The Churches Speak On: Abortion, xxii; the Margaret Sanger quote comes from Rosalind P. Petchesky, Abortion and Woman’s Choice: The State, Sexuality, and the Conditions of Reproductive Freedom (New York: Longman, 1983), 93.

³⁰ Melton, The Churches Speak On: Abortion, xxiv.

³¹ James Mohr, Abortion in America: The Origins and Evolution of National Policy, 1800-1900 (New York: Oxford, 1978), 254, cited in Beckwith, Politically Correct Death, 58.

³² Barbara J. Syska, Thomas W. Hilgers, M.D., and Dennis O’Hare, “An Objective Model for Estimating Criminal Abortions and Its Implications for Public Policy,” in New Perspectives on Human Abortion, ed. Thomas Hilgers, M.D., Dennis J. Horan, and David Mall (Frederick, MD: University Publications of America, 1981).

³³ Olasky, Abortion Rites, 278.

³⁴ Ibid., 280-81.

³⁵ Cf. Francis J. Beckwith and Norman L. Geisler, Matters of Life and Death: Calm Answers to Tough Questions about Abortion and Euthanasia (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1991), 53-55.

³⁶ Paul Savoy, “Abortion Is a Moral Choice,” in The Abortion Controversy, ed. Cozic and Petrikin, 47.

³⁷ Patrick Lee, Abortion and Unborn Human Life (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1996), 1.

³⁸ Ibid., 2.

³⁹ Randy Alcorn, Pro Life Answers to Pro Choice Arguments (N.p.: Multnomah, 1992), 239.

⁴⁰ Asma, “The Roman Catholic Church Historically Condoned Early Abortions,” 61.

⁴¹ Virtually any scientific textbook on human biology will corroborate these facts; an excellent resource is Landrum B. Shettles, M.D., and David Rorvik, Rites of Life (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 1983); see also the excerpt from this book in “Human Life Begins at Conception,” in Abortion: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Charles P. Cozic and Stacey L. Tipp (San Diego: Greenhaven Press, 1991), 17-22.

⁴² Peter Kreeft, Making Choices: Practical Wisdom for Everyday Moral Decisions (Ann Arbor, MI: Servant Books, 1990), 119.

⁴³ Ibid., 120.

⁴⁴ Anne Eggebroten, ed., Abortion — My Choice, God’s Grace: Christian Women Tell Their Stories (Pasadena, CA: New Paradigm Books, 1994).

⁴⁵ Bunnie Riedel, “Foreword,” in ibid., xiii-xiv.

⁴⁶ Eggebroten, Abortion, 30-31.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 32, 33.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 33.

⁴⁹ Ibid., 38.

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Ibid., 10.

⁵² Ibid., 210.

⁵³ Ibid.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 216.

⁵⁵ Ibid.

⁵⁶ Ibid., 217.

⁵⁷ Ibid., 218.

⁵⁸ Ibid., 219.

⁵⁹ The issue here is the faculty of volition or responsible choice, not whether human beings have “free will” in the anti-predestinarian sense. Thus, the premise is biblical regardless of what position one takes on the question of human freedom in relation to divine sovereignty.

⁶⁰ Ibid., 221.

⁶¹ Ibid., 222.

⁶² Ibid., 224.

⁶³ Ibid., 226.

⁶⁴ Ibid., 228.

⁶⁵ Ibid., 229-30.

⁶⁶ See Beckwith, Politically Correct Death, 174, for some representative quotations.

⁶⁷ Terry Schlossberg and Elizabeth Achtemeier, Not My Own: Abortion and the Marks of the Church (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995).

⁶⁸ Ibid., 27.