Are abortion and gay marriage in the Bible?

One of my readers has complained that abortion and gay marriage are not in the Bible, and this contradicts my saying that we should not preach about political questions that are not plainly spelled out in Scripture.  For yesterday I said we should not avoid these two issues in the pulpit.

But is abortion not in the Bible? Some NT scholars say that the Greek word pharmakeia (in Gal. 5.20; Rev. 9.21; 18.23; 22.15) refers to poisonous drugs that were abortifacients and are condemned in these passages.

But even if that is not so, the Bible refers to the unborn as a child–a little human being. It never refers to the fetus as anything less than human. In Psalm l39.l6 David used the term golem, “unformed substance,” to refer to God’s care for him during the embryonic state-—roughly the first trimester, before the mother can usually feel life in the womb. Jeremiah (1.4-5) claimed that God knew him as a person before he was conceived, and then consecrated him while he was still unborn. Isaiah spoke similarly, that the Lord called him when he was still in the womb. Luke wrote (1.44) that John the Baptist, while still inside his mother, leaped for joy. Incidentally, the word in Acts 7.19 for the children killed by Pharaoh (brephos) is the same word used here for John as a fetus. The Hebrew word yeled, used of children generally, is also used of the unborn child in Exodus 21.22. Paul wrote in Galatians (l.l5) that God set him apart “before [he] was born.”

Scripture therefore ascribes human personality to the fetus, and David’s statement that “in sin my mother conceived me” (Ps. 51.5) suggests that the humanity of the fetus goes all the way back to conception.

No one would deny that Scripture calls the killing of the innocent a grave sin. Hence the killing of the unborn is a grave sin. If we read the Bible with the newspaper in hand, as Barth and one reader suggested, then the pulpit should not ignore this common attack on innocent human life.

What about gay marriage? Is it in the Bible? Well, marriage itself is a structural theme of the Bible, as I mentioned in my post yesterday. It is the primary metaphor for God’s relation to his people–Yahweh with Israel and Christ with his church. Hence it is not marginal or tangential to the Bible.

Second, the Bible unequivocally presents marriage as between a man and a woman. Its basic definition is at the Bible’s very beginning, in Gen 2.24.

Third, the Bible condemns same-sex sexuality. Of all the sexual sins described in Leviticus 18 & 20, the only one said to be an abomination is a “male lying with a male.”

These two chapters were known by Jews in the first century to be the Bible’s catalogue of sexual sin. When Jesus condemned porneia (which was the Greek umbrella term for sex sin generally) in Mark 7 as “evil,” he was agreeing with the Jewish consensus that same-sex genital relations were off-limits. So Jesus himself talked indirectly about homosexuality.

Does this mean homosexual sin is the worst sin or unforgiveable? Certainly not. Sins of the spirit are greater than sins of the flesh.

But it does mean that the Bible implicitly condemns gay marriage. No plain-sense reading of the Bible can yield otherwise, as pro-gay-marriage scholars such as Walter Wink have conceded.

Should it be preached about? Yes. We cannot do otherwise, when a) marriage is central to the Bible and to human life, b) it is the central moral question in this culture, and c) it has profound effects on children.

Another reader said I should not have ruled global warming out of the pulpit, since an overwhelming majority of scientists think it is a critical problem. And after all, is it not a biblical mandate to care for the planet?

Well, some of us remember when a supposed majority of scientists warned us of a coming ice age. And not too many years ago.

But the best reply to this reader’s charge is to point him to the evidence that the supposed overwhelming majority may be far less than that. And the recent admission by scientists that global warming stopped before the beginning of this century.

Should we preach care for our planet? Of course. Should we also tell our parishioners they should join the latest crusade on global warming? I would say there are better ways to fill those precious few minutes of pulpit time on Sundays.