The following is from Ethics: Alternatives and Issues, by Norman L. Geisler. The book was originally published in 1971, by the evangelical publishing house Zondervan. This is from the third printing, in 1975.
Later, we can discuss the substance of this and unpack it in greater detail. For now, I just want to put this out there and to note that Geisler was, and still is, regarded by himself and by others as a conservative white evangelical. When this book came out, he was Chair of Philosophy of Religion at Trinity Evangelical Divinity School, which is to say he was very much representative of the institutional mainstream of white evangelicalism.
This book was not perceived, in 1975, as in any way controversial. It was perceived and received as a straightforward articulation of what conservative white evangelicals then believed and what was generally accepted as what such conservative white evangelicals ought to believe.
This is from pages 218-219 (italics original). The book’s discussion of abortion continues for several more pages, and I’ll be posting more of it for future reference, trying to stick to under-500-word chunks so as to avoid any potential copyright concerns. That further discussion includes Geisler’s reflections on “When Abortion Is Justified” as well as “When Abortion Is Not Justifiable.”
II. An Ethic of Abortion
Birth control is essentially an attempt to prevent more life from occurring. Abortion is an attempt to take life after it has begun to develop, which is a much more serious affair. Birth control is not murder (i.e., the taking of a human life), but what about abortion? Is it murder? What does the Bible have to say on the subject?
A. Abortion Is Not Necessarily Murder
The one clear thing which the Scriptures indicate about abortion is that it is not the same as murder. For when a natural abortion was precipitated by fighting, the guilty was not charged with murder.
1. An Unborn Baby Is Not Fully Human — According to the law of Moses, the killing of an unborn baby was not considered a capital offense. “When men strive together, and hurt a woman with child, so that there is a miscarriage, and yet no harm follows, the one who hurt her shall be fined …” (Ex. 21:22). In the case of killing a baby, child, or adult there was more than a fine exacted — the life of the murderer was demanded (Ex. 21:12). Apparently, the unborn baby was not considered fully human and, therefore, causing its death was not considered murder (i.e., the taking of an innocent human life).
2. An Unborn Baby Is Not Sub-Human — If an embryo is not fully human, then what is it? Is it sub-human? Can it be treated like an appendix — an expendable extension of the mother’s body? The answer to this is no. An unborn baby is a work of God which He is building into His own likeness. It is a being with an ever increasing value as it develops. The Psalmist wrote, “For thou didst form my inward parts, thou didst knit me together in my mother’s womb … Thou knows me right well; my frame was not hidden from thee, when I was being made in secret, intricately wrought in the depths of the earth” (Ps. 139:13-15). Perhaps too much should not be made of this poetical description of an embryo, but it seems reasonable to conclude that there is a big difference between an unborn baby and an appendix. The former can become a fully human being; the latter cannot. A human embryo is a potentially human being, and an appendix is not. There is a vast difference between that which can develop into an Einstein or a Beethoven and an appendage of the human anatomy. The former has immortality in the image and likeness of God before it; the latter is merely an expendable tissue of the human body. Indeed, Christ was the God-man from conception (Luke 1:31, 32).
For my birthday I bought myself a book that’s almost as old as I am. It’s from 1975, as you may be able to tell from the groovy cover design. Even Zondervan Press covers were groovy in the ’70s.
This is one of more than 100 books written and published by Norman Geisler who, at 84, is still remarkably prolific. Most of his focus over the years has been on “apologetics.”
The titles of his books give a pretty good sense of how he understands that — what it is he’s defending, and how he goes about defending it: Inerrancy; The Creator in the Courtroom; Is Man the Measure?; To Drink or Not To Drink; Christianity Under Attack; False Gods of Our Time; The Infiltration of the New Age; When Cultists Ask; I Don’t Have Enough Faith to Be an Atheist; Twelve Points That Show Christianity Is True; Biblical Inerrancy: The Historical Evidence; The Atheist’s Fatal Flaw; ‘The Shack’: Helpful or Hurtful?
Et cetera, et cetera.
As you can probably tell from that small sample, Geisler tends to approach every subject through this same “apologetic” lens, treating all of them as an opportunity to confirm that, as he sees it, God’s truth is plain, clear, evident and certain. As with his writings on theology or philosophy or various popular subcultural controversies, his discussion of ethics takes a methodical, almost arithmetical approach. Proof-text for X, plug X into formula, calculate conclusion. (This makes parts of this book read a bit like the student handbook for a strict Bible college — so much that I was almost expecting to find a section in there on “dress code.”)
But I didn’t buy this book so much for what it says as for what it no longer says — for what it is no longer allowed to say. That’s why I needed this particular edition, because it’s a valuable artifact of white evangelical history. Collecting such artifacts is important because they provide tangible counterweights to the revisionism and collective amnesia that claims such things never existed.
Briefly, Geisler’s Ethics: Alternatives and Issues was first published in 1971. This August 1975 edition is the third printing. The book is still technically in print, but it underwent major revisions and got a new title back in the 1980s. This wasn’t simply an updating but, in several key ways, a retraction, rebuttal and reversal. The new edition — which is used as a textbook in some evangelical seminaries and Bible colleges — is, as now required, strictly anti-abortion. The old edition — which was also used as a textbook in some evangelical seminaries and Bibles colleges at the time — was not.
That reversal did not occur in between the 1971 and 1975 editions of the book, which suggests that it had nothing to do with a “backlash” or a recoiling in moral horror at the 1973 Supreme Court decision in Roe v. Wade. It wouldn’t have made any sense for this book to have changed in response to Roe, since that ruling is based on the same moral and ethical reasoning found in Geisler’s original edition (minus the proof-texts).
We’ll come back to this later to look in more detail at the specific arguments Geisler makes in the original book for when evangelical Christians ought to view abortion as permissible (and for when they ought to view it as obligatory). For now I’ll just point out the strangest aspect of that argument: Nobody thought it was a big deal.
Geisler’s explicitly evangelical and explicitly pro-choice argument, in 1975, wasn’t in any way seen as remarkable. He was a very conservative white evangelical writing for other very conservative white evangelicals and his brief section on abortion in this book didn’t raise any eyebrows. It wasn’t controversial. It didn’t, in any way, threaten or alter his reputation or regard as a staunch conservative evangelical and defender of the authority of a high view of the authority of a literal, inerrant, authoritative Bible.
In 1975 — two years after Roe — Zondervan Press published a book for white evangelicals in which Norman Geisler wrote: “Abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.” And nobody freaked out. Nobody even imagined freaking out. This was simply a restatement of what most white evangelicals believed — a belief that was widely held because it has the advantage of being true.
It’s still true, of course, but white evangelicals are no longer allowed to say so. That’s a huge change.
And that, more than any other single factor, is how we arrived in 2017 at the extremely un-groovy circumstance of 81 percent of white evangelicals for Trump.
So let’s talk a little bit more about some pastors’ determination to attribute the end of a pregnancy due to sin, rather than to biology.
The word “miscarriage” can be misleading and misinterpreted here. As the Mayo Clinic puts it, “Miscarriage is a somewhat loaded term — possibly suggesting that something was amiss in the carrying of the pregnancy.” Thus it is misunderstood that someone who was supposed to be “carrying” a pregnancy made a mistake of some kind and mis-carried — and thus a heartbreaking biological event gets cruelly twisted into a personal failure.
That gets coupled with our defensive tendency to moralize misfortune. Something bad happens to others and we don’t want to think about the possibility of that same bad thing happening to us, so we reassure ourselves by choosing to assign blame. They must have done something that caused this. If I don’t do that thing, then this won’t happen to me. After all, I know that I don’t deserve to have this happen to me, and the thought that it could happen to me regardless is unbearable. So rather than accept that heartbreaking misfortune is always a possibility near at hand, it’s easier for me to believe that others suffering such misfortune must have done something to deserve it.
Thus she miscarried because she made a mistake. Something dietary or exercise-related. Or she didn’t take those folic acid supplements like she should have known she was supposed to. She must have done something. It must be her fault.
That tendency only gets amplified when it gets mixed up with theodicy and with half-formed ideas about the sovereignty of a benevolent God. That’s why, I suspect, the awful stories we discussed here recently involving pastors blaming miscarriage on specific personal sins both involved Calvinist pastors. At a popular level, Calvinist/Reformed teaching tends to be understood (or misunderstood) as belief in a God who is intimately, specifically, minutely sovereign. Add to that an emphasis on depravity and utter human worthlessness, and a fierce notion of original sin as an intrinsic state, and you’ve got a recipe for the kind of thing that John Turner witnessed, with a minister praying publicly “that a congregant would recognize the sin that had caused her to have a miscarriage.” Or the awfulness from John Piper that Ben Corey discusses, “No, John Piper, God Doesn’t Kill Babies Because Their Dad Looked at Porn.”
But this isn’t exclusively a pop-Calvinist horror. This same tendency to blame miscarriage on specific personal sins can be found in white evangelical churches from non-Reformed traditions, in churches where a tulip is just a flower. And they do this despite a rather long discussion right there in the Gospel of John reminding us that “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?” is always the wrong question to be asking.
Again, I think a lot of this is the just-world fallacy business discussed above. Others’ misfortune is deeply unsettling as a reminder that we are all vulnerable to the same woes, so we have an urgent emotional need to reassure ourselves of our own security and safety by blaming those others for whatever has happened to them. But I also think this cruel reflex specifically involving miscarriage is widespread among white evangelical churches because those communities do not know or understand much about the biology involved.
And I think that’s because those communities cannot allow themselves to know or understand much about it.
Here’s a bit more from that Mayo Clinic page on miscarriage: “About 10 to 20 percent of known pregnancies end in miscarriage. But the actual number is likely higher because many miscarriages occur so early in pregnancy that a [person] doesn’t realize [they’re] pregnant.”
Known pregnancies, or recognized pregnancies, are those far enough along to be recognized. These are pregnancies that have already survived past the tenuous early days and weeks. Get past that first early stage and there’s still a 10-to-20 percent chance of miscarriage.
The term chemical pregnancy sounds like a false positive pregnancy test as if you were not really pregnant at all. But the truth is that a chemical pregnancy was indeed a conception and is actually a very early miscarriage; the pregnancy just ended before there was any other evidence of the pregnancy except biochemical changes (ie., increases in hcg levels [detectable on pregnancy tests]).
… Usually, the term “chemical pregnancy” refers only to an early pregnancy loss and not the early stages of a viable pregnancy. In a chemical pregnancy, the hCG levels never rise very high and the [person] usually begins to have bleeding less than a week after having a positive pregnancy test. Doctors believe that chemical pregnancies never fully implant properly and they suspect that most involve chromosomal abnormalities.
… Thus, a chemical pregnancy would be a miscarriage before the fifth week of gestation — or within about week after your missed menstrual period.
This is simply what sometimes happens. It is what is — a matter of fact independent of political or theological interpretations that any of us might wish to decorate it with before or after.
Because most unrecognized pregnancies go unrecognized, we do not have a precise measurement of how many end in a “chemical pregnancy” miscarriage. But the best and most informed estimates are that this occurs in more than half of all conceptions. It may be as high as 70 percent.
That statistic has pastoral implications, because it’s not simply a statistic for the people and families involved. There’s human pain here that pastors should be addressing with something other than cruel condemnation, accusations of sin, and shameful ignorance.
But white evangelicalism has, over the past generation, rendered itself incapable of facing that. It has chosen to render itself unwilling and unable to face that. Because over that past generation — with staggering abruptness and a fiercely enforced dogmatism — white evangelicalism adopted as a central, defining doctrine the belief that human personhood begins at the moment of conception.
Styles of cover design weren’t the biggest change in white evangelicalism between 1971 and 1989.
We’ve discussed that change here before — see “The ‘biblical view’ that’s younger than the Happy Meal.” As Jonathan Dudley showed in his book Broken Words, we can trace this change in the various editions of prominent evangelical author Norman L. Geisler’s ethics textbook. The current edition teaches that human personhood begins at the moment of fertilization and that therefore abortion is morally indistinguishable from murder and should be illegal.* Geisler’s first edition, published in 1971, said something very different. That edition — written before abortion arose as a partisan political issue — argued that abortion should be permissible, and that “The embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.”
The point here is to consider what this new doctrine of human personhood from the moment of conception means in light of the fact that more than half of all pregnancies do not survive the first five weeks, and the additional fact that 10-20 percent of all pregnancies fail thereafter.
This means that most “people” die long before they’re ever born. And abortion has nothing to do with that — this is just what happens naturally, all the time.
So evangelicals believe that most people die without ever being born. And for evangelical Christians, death means Heaven or Hell. Evangelicals don’t have the comforting elastic consolation offered by some notion of Limbo or Purgatory for unbaptized Pagan Babies. It’s simply Heaven or Hell. So where do these “people” go?
Again, this is most people — the majority of all the “people” who’ve ever lived. They were never born — never spoke, never inhaled, thought, chose, acted, heard, remembered. They never had a brain capable of entertaining a sinful thought or a body capable of committing a sinful deed. Consigning them all to Hell would seem monstrous (even for those who don’t believe that consigning anyone to Hell would be monstrous). But sending them all off to Heaven would also be unthinkably strange. Entertaining the thought of what that would mean sends us off in a host of wild, baselessly speculative directions.
My point here is not to pursue all the threads of that weird speculation, but only to highlight that one glaring alternative to all of them — the one obvious thought that can be derived from reason rather than wild guessing and that actually has a great deal of biblical and theological support. And that alternative, of course, is to say that human personhood does not begin at the moment of fertilization. To say that an embryo is not a fully human person, but an undeveloped potential person. That status and that potential bears great import. It is ethically and emotionally significant, but not in the same way or of equal status with that of a fully developed, fully human person — a newborn infant, a baby, a toddler, a teenager, or an adult.
Recognition of that can shape — and improve — our ability to respond pastorally to the heartbreak of miscarriage. But recognition of that is not permitted. And so our pastors become cruel.
Better to have cruel pastors than to abandon our cruel politics.
– – – – – – – – – – – –
* And that therefore criminalizing abortion is the pre-eminent and paramount political obligation of all Christians, and that voting for Republicans is mandatory because it is our Christian duty to pack the Supreme Court with anti-abortion justices, and that this duty is paramount and inescapable even if the Republican nominee in question is a lying demagogue, an ignorant buffoon, the son of a Klansman endorsed by the Klan, a corrupt kleptocrat, a promoter of anti-Semitic and racist conspiracy theories, and a philandering sexual predator with a fondness for torture and a contempt for the entire Bill of Rights.
Sometime after that, it was decided that the Bible teaches that human life begins at conception.
Ask any American evangelical, today, what the Bible says about abortion and they will insist that this is what it says. (Many don’t actually believe this, but they know it is the only answer that won’t get them in trouble.) They’ll be a little fuzzy on where, exactly, the Bible says this, but they’ll insist that it does.
That’s new. If you had asked American evangelicals that same question the year I was born you would not have gotten the same answer.
That year, Christianity Today — edited by Harold Lindsell, champion of “inerrancy” and author of The Battle for the Bible — published a special issue devoted to the topics of contraception and abortion. That issue included many articles that today would get their authors, editors — probably even their readers — fired from almost any evangelical institution. For example, one article by a professor from Dallas Theological Seminary criticized the Roman Catholic position on abortion as unbiblical. Jonathan Dudley quotes from the article in his book Broken Words: The Abuse of Science and Faith in American Politics. Keep in mind that this is from a conservative evangelical seminary professor, writing in Billy Graham’s magazine for editor Harold Lindsell:
God does not regard the fetus as a soul, no matter how far gestation has progressed. The Law plainly exacts: “If a man kills any human life he will be put to death” (Lev. 24:17). But according to Exodus 21:22-24, the destruction of the fetus is not a capital offense. … Clearly, then, in contrast to the mother, the fetus is not reckoned as a soul.
Christianity Today would not publish that article in 2012. They might not even let you write that in comments on their website. If you applied for a job in 2012 with Christianity Today or Dallas Theological Seminary and they found out that you had written something like that, ever, you would not be hired.
At some point between 1968 and 2012, the Bible began to say something different. That’s interesting.
Even more interesting is how thoroughly the record has been rewritten. We have always been at war with Eastasia.
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