By: Terry Schlossberg

Recently, The Wall St. Journal’s editorial board wrote in opposition to physician-assisted suicide. The occasion was New York State’s newly adopted legislation allowing for it. The editorial concluded with these words: “A healthy society treasures the value of life….It doesn’t abdicate that responsibility by helping [people] kill themselves….”

The Journal’s words reflect the Biblical position on life. And, because they are written in response to new law, they also reflect a hotly-contested cultural debate over the value of a human life.

If the subject of the editorial had been legislation on abortion, it’s not so clear that we’d get the same certainty. While I’ll address life at its beginning this afternoon, life at its end has become increasingly part of the conflict.

Abortion is commonly regarded today as a polarizing social and political issue, and often said to be one the church should steer clear of. A seismic shift in attitudes and policies in the culture have been successful in changing the subject of abortion from a moral evil into an issue of rights and law.

Abortion has a very old history; it did not begin with Roe v. Wade in 1973. And in a most profound sense, abortion is not about abortion. That is, at its core, it is not an issue about law and rights. If we are clear about what abortion is, we can see that it is an act that follows a judgment about the meaning and value of a human life. It is at heart a deeply spiritual, moral and theological matter. And for all the protests that the Bible does not have the word “abortion” in it, the Bible speaks very loudly and plainly to this matter.

Today, I invite us to think together about this as Christians and as a church. To explore it as a matter that divides truth from falsehood, right from wrong, and Church from the World. And as a matter to which the Gospel responds.

Abortion is not at all peripheral to the Gospel. It goes to the heart of the Gospel, and who we are that God sent his son to die to redeem us. It is intimately tied to the “faith once delivered” and to our practice of that faith.

The visible church is a distinctive institution in a society. Sixteenth and seventeenth century reformers identified the Church by its “marks”; that is, by what makes a church a church. What makes a church a church, they said, was the right preaching of the Word and the right practice of the Sacraments. We have two Sacraments: Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, or Communion.

No other social institution or body is distinguished by membership in and allegiance to a kingdom that is not of this world, and whose life is governed by Word and Sacrament. So, we will approach this subject by asking how the Word and the Sacraments inform our understanding of human life. When we do this, we will find a deep conflict of world views and systems of belief.

Voices of the modern scientific and medical disciplines have produced a muddle on questions of when a human life begins and on questions of the value of a human life.

Here’s an example of what I mean. Around the time of the decision in Roe v. Wade, when abortion was gaining respectability, an editorial appeared in a publication for physicians called California Medicine. The editorial recognized what it called “the old Western ethic of intrinsic and equal value for every human life regardless of its stage, condition, or status.” It noted “a trend toward replacing that ethic with a necessary new ethic of relative value of human lives based on the quality of a life.” With surprising candor, though, the editorial also noted what it called “a curious avoidance of the scientific fact, which everyone really knows,” it said, “that human life begins at conception and is continuous whether intra-or extra-uterine until death.” The editorial went on to say, that “The very considerable semantic gymnastics… required to rationalize abortion as anything but taking a human life would be ludicrous if they were not often put forth under socially impeccable auspices.” 

One of those “impeccable [medical] auspices” wrote that when you look at an unborn human at an early stage of development, you often cannot distinguish it from a dog or a monkey, or a pig. That may be true if you’re looking with your naked and untrained eye. But science—and theology—both know better.

Geneticist Jerome LeJeune and theologian-scientist Thomas Torrance represent well the voices of truth so often drowned out by agents of change.

LeJeune was a world-renowned pediatrician and geneticist who discovered the link between chromosomal abnormalities and conditions like Down syndrome. He was familiar with little humans early in their development. He wrote in the 1990s that if one of his students could not distinguish a four-cell human being from a four-cell chimpanzee, the student would flunk his course.

Thomas Torrance was a prominent Scottish theologian known for his work in Christian dogmatics, science and theology. Torrance explored the beginning of life scientifically, theologically, and spiritually. In a booklet titled “The Being and Nature of the Unborn Child,” published in 1999, he argued that scientific research reveals the unborn child as an active and aware human, who responds to stimuli from outside the womb—just as the unborn John leapt in response to the voice of the mother of his Lord. (Luke 1)

“Far from being little more than a bundle of living tissue,” Torrance wrote, “the unborn or preborn child early reveals evidence of a consciousness of his or her mother.” There is evidence now that babies in the womb are busy learning as they develop. They feel pain inflicted on them in the womb, and after birth they can recognize songs repeatedly sung to them while they were in the womb.

Professor Alasdair MacIntyre, called one of the world’s great Catholic philosophers, who was a convert from atheism. He was a critic of the bioethical concept that introduced the word “personhood.” In that view, humans determined to have certain abilities such as “active cognition” and “self-awareness,” may be found to be “persons” and qualify for legal protections. “Non-person-humans” do not qualify.

Attempts to cloud the reality of who is in the womb with judgments about value and worth, and who qualifies for “personhood” are aimed to rationalize decisions to end the lives of babies. And they have had a powerful effect. The rightness or wrongness of the act of abortion is now too often based entirely on an assessment of circumstances.

But the Church’s Word blows away the smoke and gives us clarity not only about our humanity, but also about its meaning and its value. Scripture turns the “quality of life” ethic on its head.

Genesis clearly identifies us as “Man,” meaning human—male and female. Here is what the Psalmist says: “It is he who has made us, and not we ourselves.” (100:3) As for value, made in God’s image: every single human an image-bearer. Very special creation. We learn even more about how special we are as the biblical account unfolds in the salvation story.

The Bible tells us that God relates to us even before we were in the womb:

God told Jeremiah: “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you; before you were born I sanctified you….” (1:5)

Paul told the Galatians that: “Even before I was born God [chose] me to be his, and called me….” (1:15,16)

One of the most beautiful descriptions of the development of the unborn in the womb is in Psalm 139: It says:

“For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them.”

Written long before the editorial in California Medicine, the rich words of Scripture respond to the crass materialism of the “quality of life” ethic.

Torrance reminds his readers that when God became human with the purpose of redeeming us, He entered the world just as each one of us does, as an embryo in the womb of his mother. Jesus spent nine months developing there just as we do—”a brother,” said Torrance, “to all embryos.”

Paul in the book of Acts says, “he himself gives to all mankind life and breath and everything….In him we live and move and have our being.” We belong first of all to God because He created and sustains us. And we belong to God because He shed his blood to reverse the effects of our sin. 1 Corinthians 6 says explicitly that we are not our own; we were bought at a price. God promises us new life in rebirth by the power of his Spirit because of his great love for us.

Ps. 127 asserts that “children are a heritage from the Lord, the fruit of the womb a reward. Like arrows in the hand of a warrior….Blessed is the man who fills his quiver with them!

Children are precious gifts bestowed on us by a loving, heavenly Father. We receive them as stewards of God’s gifts–not to destroy, but, rather to raise them in the nurture and admonition of the Lord.

The church gives testimony to this reality in its sacrament of baptism. Baptism is a visible sign of the covenant relationship between God and human beings. The Reformers affirmed the long history of the church’s baptism of our babies. The church has always recognized that even in the womb the new human is one of us. Paul in 1 Cor 7 declares the children of even one believing parent to be holy. Baptism of babies testifies that God knows and claims us as His before we can respond in faith.

Likewise, our sacrament of Communion celebrates the church’s life and oneness in Christ. Communion is the church’s promise that no one is alone. We proclaim in our Communion liturgy that “We join our voices with angels and archangels and all the company of heaven”—as well as with Christians throughout history and around the world– “to laud and magnify [God’s] glorious name.” The supper is the sign that we are not alone, and neither are we a collection of autonomous individuals who rule ourselves. Our participation in Communion declares and makes visible that we are a body, and we belong to the Savior. And through him, we belong to each other.

In Communion, together we declare our faith in God, and in his son Jesus Christ who was crucified for our sake, who overcame death—our last enemy—and rose again, and who is at the right hand of God now, interceding for us.

The Falls Church Anglican Rector Sam Ferguson, regularly reminds us that our union in Christ, celebrated in Communion, tells us who is our neighbor. Contrary to voices of the culture, we are not alone, we are not autonomous individuals, and we are not at liberty to choose who belongs. God has chosen. And God has chosen especially the least of us. Those who fail IQ tests, beauty contests, popularity contests, physical fitness tests, medical tests: they–all of them–belong to God, are loved and wanted by him, and are invited into his saving grace and thus to his table.

When our Lord teaches us to love the unlovely, we are reminded that He, too, in the words of Isaiah, was without “form or comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him”; that he was “despised and rejected of men; …he was despised, and we esteemed him not.” (Is. 53:3 and 53:2)

Deuteronomy tells us that God defends the cause of the fatherless…, and provides for them. Psalm 82 admonishes us to deliver the weak and fatherless from the hand of the wicked.” (Psalm 82:3-4) James 1:27 says that “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is… to look after orphans and widows in their distress. Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan teaches us the meaning of the second commandment to love our neighbors.

Jesus was the champion of little children. He welcomed them; he called them the greatest in the kingdom of heaven; He warned against doing any harm to them. He said, “See that you do not despise one of these little ones. For I tell you that their angels in heaven always see the face of my Father in heaven.” (Jesus in Matt. 18:10)

In one of his parables, Jesus taught that actions toward fellow humans is action taken for or against God himself: he said: “And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these my brothers [and sisters], you did it to Me.’” (Matt. 25:40) Abortion is an act that shakes its fist at God.

The church, in its Word and in its Sacraments, celebrates life, not death; hope, not despair. Everything in the Word and in our Sacraments values each human life from its earliest beginning until its natural end.

Our culture today afirms abortion as a choice, even a good choice. It is indeed a choice. It is a choice for death. The Church’s Word, its history, and its sacraments declare it to be an act of sin against a child, and an act of hostility toward God. It not only kills a living human, it also kills the soul of the one who chooses it.

The hope in such a situation as this cannot be found in social or political solutions. Hope comes from the Gospel: from God’s good purposes in his resurrecting power in the lives of those who have committed the gravest sins. Eph 2 says: “God, being rich in mercy, because of the great love with which he loved us, even when we were dead in our trespasses, made us alive together with Christ…For by grace salvation is ours through faith.” (Eph. 2:4-5) This is the church’s particular calling: to warn against sin and to minister to and offer God’s saving grace to those who fall.

In light of who we are as members of Christ’s body, the question for us is how we are to respond to this great evil of our time.

Our first response may need to be to search our own souls, to examine the ways in which we have been more influenced by voices of the culture than by the voice of Scripture. We may need to readjust our allegiances and look again at what we meant when in baptism we promised to “renounce the devil and all his ways.”

When we are clear about our own understanding and convictions about the being and nature of the unborn child, as Torrance put it, we are ready to consider our witness and ministry to the world, and especially to the world of our families, our church body, and our community. Putting feet to our convictions does indeed have social and political ramifications.

We follow in a long tradition of faithful witness and practice. The church’s history in responding to the Bible’s teaching on human life has been characterized by a reflection of God’s own concern.

Many voices of the church throughout history have spoken to the humanity of the unborn and against abortion. Beginning in the late 1st century AD, a document called the “Didache,” or “The Teaching of the Twelve Apostles,” said, “You shall not murder a child by abortion, nor kill what is born.”

Augustine and other church fathers recognized life in the womb and wrote in opposition to abortion. Martin Luther and other Reformers spoke explicitly in opposition to abortion and infanticide. John Calvin, in his commentary on Exodus wrote that the fetus is “already a human being,” and that “it seems more atrocious to destroy a fetus in the womb than to kill a [person] already formed.”

In its teaching on the duties of the sixth commandment—“Thou shalt not kill,” the Westminster Catechism–the classic doctrinal standard of Reformed Christians–adds the positive duty of “protecting and defending the innocent.”

In ancient times, it was the church that went in search of abandoned babies and took them in and reared them.

Resistance to abortion in our time is largely a movement of the body of Christ. Adoption ministries and pregnancy care ministries have their roots in Christian ministries spawned by the church. The Christian Church taught whole societies to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, and care for the weak and vulnerable. From beginning to end the Bible is in conflict with the “quality of life”–or autonomous decision making–ethic.

We are the body—the Church—who are called to speak for those who don’t yet have their voices, and to those led astray by false voices. We are the body called to love and care for all who bear the image of God, and to communicate that love and caring to our children and our grandchildren. We are the body—the Church—who are called to lead our neighbors toward life and hope, away from death and despair.

I close with a prayer from The Book of Public Prayer, published in 1857:

We praise and honor you Lord God Almighty, for all your mercy and loving-kindness shown to us your people. We bless you for the goodness that freely chose us to salvation before the world began. We thank you for creating us after your own image; for redeeming us, when we were lost, with the precious blood of Christ; for sanctifying us by your Spirit in the revelation and knowledge of your Word; for your help and support in our necessities, your fatherly comfort in our tribulations; for saving us in the dangers of body and soul, and giving us so long a time of repentance. We acknowledge, most merciful Father, to have received these benefits from your goodness alone, and we implore you to continue to be gracious to increase our thankfulness to you, kindling our hearts with pure and fervent love. Help us not to receive your Word in vain, but graciously assist us always, in heart, word, and deed, to sanctify and worship your holy name; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

Editor’s Note: Terry Schlossberg attends the Falls Church Anglican Church in Falls Church, VA. She served as the executive director of Presbyterians Pro-Life for 18 years and recently retired as Board Chair of the Alliance Defending Freedom.