9/2 Flashback: On abortion

September 2, 2022 By Fred Clark

From September 2, 2020, “I am a Christian. Here is what I believe about abortion.”

Subsidiarity, mofos.

I want to talk about abortion with my fellow white evangelical Christians.

More specifically, I am addressing those evangelicals who have not sworn their full allegiance to Donald Trump. We might refer to this group as the “19 percent” — meaning the minority of white evangelicals who did not vote to elect Trump in 2016, but I am hopeful that the share of those willing to read or to listen here will be somewhat larger than that.

We might describe my intended audience here as a spectrum ranging from Michael Wear to Russell Moore, which is to say those of my fellow American evangelical Christians who are Trump-resistant or at least somewhat Trump-reluctant. Some of you are emphatically opposed to Trump while others may be ruefully supportive of him due primarily to his support for judges and policies more likely to end legal abortion.

Wherever you fall on that spectrum, you and I disagree on the meaning and the morality of abortion. This post is not an exercise in persuasion or in condemnation. Nor does it involve the suggestion of any sort of compromise or “middle ground” or “third way.” All I want to do here is to explain, as simply and clearly as I can, what it is that I believe about abortion and what the political implications of that are for me.

The abortion discussion in the 1975 edition of this book was scrupulously biblical, but it wasn’t an effective means of producing an absolutizing partisan faith based on a foundation of political support for white-/Christian-nationalism, so that section on abortion was rewritten, and reversed, in order to produce that result.

The difference between what I believe and what you believe is, in some ways, a lot smaller than you might imagine. The implications of that difference expand outward, producing very different responsibilities and obligations for the law, for citizens, and for all of civil society — including the church.

Here is that difference: You believe that full human personhood begins at the moment of conception, which is to say that a fetus, an embryo, a blastocyst, a zygote possesses an equal moral standing to that of any child or adult. To end a pregnancy, therefore, is to take a human life — an act indistinct from taking the life of any other child or adult.

I do not believe that. I make a distinction between the potential human personhood of a fetus/embryo/blastocyst/zygote and the actual human personhood of actual infants, children, and adults. I believe that potential human personhood has great value and great moral significance, but not as great as that of any and every actual human person. Abortion is a serious and significant matter, but it is not at all like “murder.”

The prolific evangelical apologetics writer Norman Geisler put it this way:

The one clear thing which the Scriptures indicate about abortion is that it is not the same as murder. … Murder is a man-initiated activity of taking an actual human life. Artificial abortion is a humanly initiated process which results in the taking of a potential human life. Such abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.

That distinction, which Geisler argued was derived from biblical teaching and biblical prooftexts, led him to conclude that abortion was justified and even obligated in some cases:

When it is a clear-cut case of either taking the life of the unborn baby or letting the mother die, then abortion is called for. An actual life (the mother) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life (the unborn). The mother is a fully developed human; the baby is an undeveloped human. And an actually developed human is better than one which has the potential for full humanity but has not yet developed. Being fully human is a higher value than the mere possibility of becoming fully human. For what is has more value than what may be. …

Birth is not morally necessitated without consent. No woman should be forced to carry a child if she did not consent to intercourse. A violent intrusion into a woman’s womb does not bring with it a moral birthright for the embryo. The mother has a right to refuse that her body be used as an object of sexual intrusion. The violation of her honor and personhood was enough evil without compounding her plight by forcing an unwanted child on her besides. … the right of the potential life (the embryo) is overshadowed by the right of the actual life of the mother. The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.

The crucial point here is that final sentence, so let me repeat it: “The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.”

Please note what this does not say or mean or imply or entail: It does not mean that the potentially human embryo has no rights, or no value, or no meaning, or no significance, or no dignity. To regard “the potentially human embryo” as meaningless or worthless would be wrong — wrong both in the sense of immoral and in the sense of inaccurate.

How, then, ought we to account for and to honor the moral claims and moral value of the potential personhood of the unborn? How do we, as you all often say, “protect the unborn”?

The problem with that question is the word “we.” Who is we?

That is always an essential question in Christian ethical teaching and Christian political thought: “Who is ‘we’?” And the way that Christians, for centuries, have tried to answer that question — to clarify and differentiate all of the potential meanings of “we” — fall under the heading of subsidiarity.

Subsidiarity is both a prudential principle and an ethical one. To violate or to reject subsidiarity, then, is both immoral and ineffective. Subsidiarity clarifies the varied and various roles that different people, different actors, different institutions and agencies have — the varied and various responsibilities and obligations we all share in different and differing capacities. It describes what the epistle calls the “inescapable network of mutuality” that binds us all together directly and indirectly. Our various places and roles in that network shape our various responsibilities and duties to one another. To abdicate the responsibilities that are rightly ours, or to usurp the responsibilities that are not rightly ours, is both imprudent and immoral.

Subsidiarity teaches that those closest to a given situation have the greatest responsibility for that situation. Every other actor and agency in the network of mutuality also bears responsibility, but their indirect responsibility takes the shape of supporting those closest, who hold the primary and most direct responsibility.

I believe in subsidiarity. It seems clear to me that the primary responsibility for “protecting the unborn” is given to those whose bodies are literally transforming for that very purpose, which is to say with the actual human persons, the women* whose bodies are carrying and have carried every potential human person who has ever later been born. They are the most direct actors here, exponentially closer and more responsible than anyone else, and the responsibility and obligation of everyone else is to ensure they have all the moral and material support they require to fulfill that role.

I trust those women. I trust them more than any indirectly responsible actor who would trample on their subsidiary obligations by trying to usurp the responsibilities entrusted to those women by nature and nature’s God.

Will 100% of those women make 100% of the best choices 100% of the time? Of course not. They are, like all of us, human, and no human or group of humans is ever always capable of always making only the very best choices. But their humanity is all the more reason to affirm their agency and dignity to choose, not a license to strip them of that humanity by stripping them of their responsibility, dignity, agency, and freedom.

It is not my job — not my ethical duty nor my capacity — to usurp their primacy here. Not as their neighbor, not as their relative, not as their congressional representative or as their pastor or as their president or as their appellate-court judge. Every other actor, agency, institution, civil society organization, magistrate, and pastor does have an indirect role to play — the role of supporting these women to make the best choices and to have the best choices available to them.

What does that mean in practical terms? It means, for most of us, working to create a context for their choices in which they are never constrained by desperation or duress, by the market-worshipping coercion of penury, by fear or want or threat. It means working to establish a context in which financial support, vocational opportunity, human potential, human thriving and human dignity are not contingent or conditional or inconstant. It means creating a context which is hospitable to welcoming new life, and therefore a context in which the choice of hospitality is possible and promising. (If I were to choose a text for a sermon on the politics of abortion, it would be the story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath.)

Sometimes, when I describe this role and this obligation, those who wish only to deny subsidiarity by a top-down decree criminalizing all abortion will accuse me of just trying to change the subject. But this is the subject. Subsidiarity teaches me that what is best for “the unborn” will be what is best for their mothers. The only way to “protect the unborn” is by protecting those carrying them — protecting their health, dignity, wellbeing, financial security, agency, and freedom.

My uncle was an obstetrician in the 1960s. He was hired to reform a regional hospital in central Pennsylvania that was struggling with one of the worst infant mortality rates in the state. He took the job only on the condition that he could, instead, address the crisis that hospital hadn’t recognized — that it also had one of the worst maternal mortality rates in the nation. Some thought that he, too, was trying to change the subject, but he insisted that if they took better care of those mothers, the infant mortality problem would also be resolved. And it was.

If “we” want to “protect the unborn” then “we” must trust those entrusted with that duty. Erasing or outlawing their central role, their humanity, and their agency is both imprudent and immoral. “We” — for any given value of “we” — need to center them, support them, and provide for them a larger context in which they are best able and equipped to do what is best for themselves and for those potential and actual human persons in their care.

This is what I believe. This is my “abortion politics.” The sectarian nuance and the detailed working out of this may vary somewhat, but this is, in broad terms, what tens of millions of other American Christians who are also Democratic voters also believe.

Again, I am not telling you this in an effort to persuade or to convince. I have done that elsewhere and will do it again, but that’s not what this post is about. I am not here attempting to create any compromise or debate and would not welcome either one. (Although I’m sure the DEBATEME!-boi reply guys will still show up in comments, because fish gotta swim.)

I am telling you this only because I think it is something you should know. What you decide to do with that knowledge, what you feel you’re allowed to do with that knowledge, I leave up to you.

– – – – – – – – – – – – – –

* Mostly women, but not only women. That needs to be said here, for accuracy’s sake and not for the sake of what many of my fellow evangelicals might dismiss as “political correctness.”

I am a Christian. Here is what I believe about abortion.

September 2, 2020 By Fred Clark

I want to talk about abortion with my fellow white evangelical Christians.

Quotes below are from the 1975 edition of this book (left).

The prolific evangelical apologetics writer Norman Geisler put it this way:

The one clear thing which the Scriptures indicate about abortion is that it is not the same as murder. … Murder is a man-initiated activity of taking an actual human life. Artificial abortion is a humanly initiated process which results in the taking of a potential human life. Such abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.

That distinction, which Geisler argued was derived from biblical teaching and biblical prooftexts, led him to conclude that abortion was justified and even obligated in some cases:

When it is a clear-cut case of either taking the life of the unborn baby or letting the mother die, then abortion is called for. An actual life (the mother) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life (the unborn). The mother is a fully developed human; the baby is an undeveloped human. And an actually developed human is better than one which has the potential for full humanity but has not yet developed. Being fully human is a higher value than the mere possibility of becoming fully human. For what is has more value than what may be. …

Birth is not morally necessitated without consent. No woman should be forced to carry a child if she did not consent to intercourse. A violent intrusion into a woman’s womb does not bring with it a moral birthright for the embryo. The mother has a right to refuse that her body be used as an object of sexual intrusion. The violation of her honor and personhood was enough evil without compounding her plight by forcing an unwanted child on her besides. … the right of the potential life (the embryo) is overshadowed by the right of the actual life of the mother. The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo.

How, then, ought we to account for and to honor the moral claims and moral value of the potential personhood of the unborn? How do we, as you all often say, “protect the unborn”?

The problem with that question is the word “we.” Who is we?

Subsidiarity teaches that those closest to a given situation have the greatest responsibility for that situation. Every other actor and agency in the network of mutuality also bears responsibility, but their indirect responsibility takes the shape of supporting those closest, who hold the primary and most direct responsibility.

I am telling you this only because I think it is something you should know. What you decide to do with that knowledge, what you feel you’re allowed to do with that knowledge, I leave up to you.

* Mostly women, but not only women. That needs to be said here, for accuracy’s sake and not for the sake of what many of my fellow evangelicals might dismiss as “political correctness.”

6/8 Flashback: 1975 Ethics Text

June 8, 2022 By Fred Clark

From June 8, 2017, “A groovy relic of the forbidden evangelical past“:

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 the remarkably prolific Norman Geisler [who died at 86 in 2019]. 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.

In a series of later posts, we looked at the text of Geisler’s not-at-all-controversial chapter on abortion in that 1975 biblical ethics textbook:

And I cited Geisler’s now-anathema position in summarizing my own pro-choice belief here: “I am a Christian. Here is what I believe about abortion.”

Sister, won’t you tell me where I went so wrong

May 9, 2019 By Fred Clark

• “Georgia Just Criminalized Abortion. Women Who Terminate Their Pregnancies Would Receive Life in Prison.”

And anyone who has a miscarriage in Georgia — around a quarter of all known pregnancies — will be subject to criminal investigation:

A woman who miscarries because of her own conduct — say, using drugs while pregnant — would be liable for second-degree murder, punishable by 10 to 30 years’ imprisonment. Prosecutors may interrogate women who miscarry to determine whether they can be held responsible; if they find evidence of culpability, they may charge, detain, and try these women for the death of their fetuses.

Drug-use by a pregnant person who miscarries is only the tip of the iceberg here. Drinking alcohol, smoking, not exercising, exercising too much, working through a pregnancy, financial stress due to not working through a pregnancy — any of those could, at the discretion of Georgia police and prosecutors, become grounds for criminal prosecution.

The grieving process for many people who lose a wanted pregnancy involves coping with the tormenting anxiety of “What if somehow this is my fault? What if I had done something different? Could I have prevented this?” That anxiety and torment and grief will now be compounded in an American state by the meddling of armed men with guns who are now empowered, by law, to interrogate these grieving people, and to treat such natural fears as grounds for criminal suspicion and criminal intent.

This law is sick and cruel and unjust. And so is everyone who supports it.

• St. Antoninus, pray for us.

• “What Are [White] Evangelicals Afraid Of?” John Fea on white evangelicals’ anti-immigrant views.

That’s too charitable and too abstract to describe what is really being measured and demonstrated and witnessed here. “Anti-immigrant” views makes this sound like a mere matter of policy disagreement. What we’re contending with here is not that. It is, as Fea says, fear — fear manifested as hate and a willingness, or an eagerness, to do harm. What pollsters are finding is that roughly two thirds of white evangelicals in America are about half an inch away from marching with Tiki torches and chanting “You will not replace us.”

• “Norman Geisler retiring from Southern Evangelical Seminary over health issues”

The Charlotte, North Carolina-based Seminary sent out a press release on Monday announcing the 86-year-old Geisler’s retirement, explaining that it was “due to health reasons.”

SES President Richard Land, who also serves as executive editor of The Christian Post, said in the press release that Geisler was “the pre-eminent Christian apologist of the past half-century.”

“If they ever construct a Christian apologists’ Mount Rushmore, they would unquestionably start with Dr. Geisler’s visage. He has truly been one of God’s great gifts to His church,” stated Land.

I have one of Geisler’s books at hand right here on this desk. It’s the 1975 updated edition of his Ethics: Alternatives and Issues — “A groovy relic of the forbidden evangelical past.”

I’ve posted excerpts from this book several times (see here, here, here, etc.) because it explains the pro-choice argument that “pre-eminent Christian apologists” and all other leading white evangelicals taught and believed in 1975, well after Roe v. Wade.

Murder is a man-initiated activity of taking an actual human life. Artificial abortion is a humanly initiated process which results in the taking of a potential human life. Such abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person.

In 1975, this is what Geisler and Land and Billy Graham all believed. In 1985, they believed the opposite — declaring that abortion is murder. The reasons for this reversal have still not been articulated. The fact of the reversal has scarcely been acknowledged.

Here’s the thing: Geisler was right in 1975. Today, white evangelicals are not permitted to be right about that.

• Here’s something I only learned recently: Maria McKee sings two songs on a 1996 album by the Maranatha! Praise Band. That album was titled “Come As You Are” because the Nirvana song by that name came out four years earlier and that’s about what the lag time was back then between pop-culture events and derivative white evangelical subculture attempts to exploit them.

McKee provides subdued backup vocals on the song “Cover Me” and offers a lovely rendition of “At Your Feet.” It’s all quite pleasant and if you like ’90s “worship music” then you’ll probably like this. (But you shouldn’t like ’90s “worship” music. It’s bad for you.)

The oh-so Maranatha! (exclamation point original) videos linked there are far, far better in audio quality than the shaky, grainy video below, from a 1993 London gig, in which Maria rips through the MC5 classic “Sister Anne” (source of this post’s title) and then her own “You Gotta Sin to Get Saved.” But I still prefer this one:

White evangelicalism, 1975: Before the change (4)

September 21, 2017 By Fred Clark

We’re continuing in Norman Geisler’s 1975 discussion of “When Abortion Is Justified.” Geisler, a conservative white evangelical, first wrote this in 1971. The book was so well-received by other conservative white evangelicals that it had a third printing in 1975.

Nothing at all occurred between those two dates to cause Geisler or any of his fellow conservative evangelicals to regard any of this differently. If there were, for example, any notable Supreme Court decisions involving any of this, they were not seen as significant enough to be mentioned or to require this section to be revised.

The book was updated with a then-futuristic, oh-so 1975 cover, but not with any response to Roe v. Wade.

Geisled5

This is from pages 222-223 of the 1975 printing:

3. Abortion in Conception Without Consent — Should a mother be forced to give birth to a child conceived by rape? Is there a moral obligation to generate a child without consent? This raises the whole question of the moral duty of motherhood. Can one be forced to be a mother against her will? Is her womb a mere tool for the tyranny of outside forces of life? This is a delicate question but it seems to involve a negative answer. Birth is not morally necessitated without consent. No woman should be forced to carry a child if she did not consent to intercourse. A violent intrusion into a woman’s womb does not bring with it a moral birthright for the embryo. The mother has a right to refuse that her body be used as an object of sexual intrusion. The violation of her honor and personhood was enough evil without compounding her plight by forcing an unwanted child on her besides.

But what about the right of the child to be born despite the evil way in which it was conceived? In this case the right of the potential life (the embryo) is overshadowed by the right of the actual life of the mother. The rights to life, health, and self-determination — i.e., the rights to personhood — of the fully human mother take precedence over that of the potentially human embryo. A potentially human person is not granted a birthright by violation of a fully human person unless her consent is subsequently given.

White evangelicalism, 1975: Before the change (3.1)

September 19, 2017 By Fred Clark

Norman Geisler’s use of the term “therapeutic” in this section turned out to be unfortunate. Back in the early 1970s, when he was writing this summary of the common accepted “stance” for conservative white evangelicals on “When Abortion Is Justified,” that term was entirely benign. He had no way of knowing that, decades later, it would become something of an epithet.

That was a strange and unforeseeable development. “Therapeutic,” after all, was then a word with only positive connotations. It had to do with healing. These days, however, it carries strange new weight when it gets tossed around in conservative evangelical circles. It has come to substitute for their once common mocking caricature of Everybody Who Isn’t Them, whom they portrayed as guided by no beliefs or principles other than “If it feels good, do it.” This dismissal of EWIT didn’t go over well. People didn’t like being told that they had no morals — that they were all thoroughly unprincipled “relativists” and/or nihilists — and they pushed back against that refrain, not because it offended them, but because it simply wasn’t true.

That push-back sent the conversation in a direction that the evangelical defenders of Moral Absolutes vs. Relativism weren’t eager to go. “The rest of the world isn’t just saying ‘If it feels good, do it,'” they were told. “We also have principles and standards and values and, yes, even absolutes, but we also need to be able to know what to do when two or more of those absolutes are in conflict.” And the evangelicals, after a bit of furiously flipping through the dog-eared pages of their Francis Schaeffer books — because he had convinced them that it was always all about Moral Absolutes (Us) vs. Relativism (Them), and so they were sure there must be something in there to address this — they eventually stopped accusing everyone else of being relativistic relativists who just went around saying “La-ti-da, if it feels good, do it.” I mean, they kept making the accusation, but they learned to rephrase it with a new euphemism.

And that is, more or less, why the word “therapeutic” isn’t one that Geisler would use nowadays, unless he was getting lathered up railing against mainline Protestants and atheists and Millennial Nones and the like.

Back in 1975, “therapeutic” still meant mostly positive things. His discussion of justified abortions “For Therapeutic Reasons” referred mainly to abortion performed in order to save the life and health of the mother. It’s somewhat fascinating that white evangelicals in 1975 referred to such a procedure for such a reason as “therapeutic,” then meaning that it was a proper, moral step in the direction of healing, while today they might still use the word “therapeutic” to describe the same situation, only now that word would be an accusation — dismissing the decision to value the life and health of the mother as little more than an expression of the “therapeutic spirituality” that means nothing more than “If it feels good, do it.”

I would say they were correct about both the word and the morality of the procedure in 1975. And I would say they’re wrong about both of those things today.

White evangelicalism, 1975: Before the change (3)

September 14, 2017 By Fred Clark

Here’s the next little bit from Norman Geisler’s 1975 Zondervan publication, Ethics: Alternatives and Issues.

Let me be clear here that I’m not intending to single out Geisler. Quite the opposite. The point is that there is nothing at all unusual about the views he expresses here or the reasoning he offers. This is what most white evangelicals believed at the time — people who regarded themselves, and who were regarded by others, as conservative.

Nor am I posting this material as any kind of point-scoring gotcha! game. It is not specifically meaningful that conservative white evangelicals have changed their mind and changed their way of thinking since 1975. Changing your mind is often a good thing. It can be evidence that learning and thinking have taken place. We’ll discuss this in more detail later to examine the causes and explanations for this particular change of mind, and to evaluate whether or not this change was a positive one. (Spoiler alert: It wasn’t done for good reasons, and the outcome has been a disaster — spiritually even more than culturally and politically.) But that’s not what I want you to see here, today.

The point of posting this material is just to show that the change happened. What conservative white evangelicals believe and say in 2017 is very different from what they believed and said in 1975. And what they said back then is, in their circles, no longer allowed to be believed, no longer allowed to be spoken, and no longer even allowed to be considered or entertained as a possibility.

This change has become so paramount for white evangelical doctrine and practice that they needed to rewrite the Bible to accommodate it. That happened. The most Bible-y Bible Christians who ever Bibled took on a new core belief that was such a departure from their previous outlook that they took it upon themselves to change the words of their inerrant, infallible sacred text.

It’s impossible to overstate how huge that is. Even more so, it’s impossible to overstate the enormity of the fact that this was done — the Bible itself was changed — without anyone bothering to notice that it happened.

Geisled4

This is from pages 220-221.

C. When Abortion Is Justified

Abortion is neither the murder of a human person nor a mere operation on or ejection of an appendage of the female body. It is a sober responsibility to take the life of a would-be human being. The only morally justifiable circumstances for abortion are those in which there is a higher moral principle which can be served.

1. Abortion for Therapeutic Reasons — When it is a clear-cut case of either taking the life of the unborn baby or letting the mother die, then abortion is called for. An actual life (the mother) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life (the unborn). The mother is a fully developed human; the baby is an undeveloped human. And an actually developed human is better than one which has the potential for full humanity but has not yet developed. Being fully human is a higher value than the mere possibility of becoming fully human. For what is has more value than what may be. Just as the flower has more value than the germinating seed (a potential flower), so the mother is of more value than the embryo. She is a mature, free, autonomous subject, whereas the unborn has only the potential to become such.

The question may be raised here as to whether some potential humans are more valuable than some actual humans. What if the unborn will turn out to be an Albert Schweitzer and the mother is a derelict? What if the mother is a harlot and the unborn will turn out to be a missionary? One might be tempted to agree that a potentially good human life is better than an actually bad human life, if he could be sure in advance that the baby would turn out to be good. But this would require a kind of omniscience which only God has. Hence, only God could make a decision based on a complete knowledge of the end or results. Finite men must be content with the immediate consequences based on intrinsic values as they see them. On this basis an actual life (evil or not) is of more intrinsic value than a potential life.

Furthermore, God does not judge the value of an individual life by what a man does with it (evil or good) but by what it is. Jesus loved Judas even though He knew Judas would become infamously evil by his betrayal. A human life has value as such because it is made in the image of God — it has perfections and powers as God has, whether these are used to glorify God or not. Hence, when the choice is being made between the bad mother and a potentially good embryo, one must prefer the former to the latter on the grounds of intrinsic value, not pragmatic value.

If one were to carry through the logic that good men are better than evil ones, one could justify a host of inhumanities to criminals and so-called “lesser elements” of the race. Men who perform evil acts are not thereby intrinsically evil. Their intrinsic value as humans must not be judged by what extrinsic acts they have performed. They are not to be judged simply on the basis of what good they do for others but for the good that they are as God’s creatures. Hence, the higher intrinsic value of a mother must not be determined by what she does but by what she is. And the mother’s actual humanity is of more value than the unborn’s potential for it.

White evangelicalism, 1975: Before the change (pt. 2)

September 12, 2017 By Fred Clark

Here’s the next little bit from Norman Geisler’s unremarkable, unremarked on, conservative white evangelical book Ethics: Alternatives and Issues, 1975 edition. Guy could be a bit repetitive.

B. Abortion Is a Very Serious Activity

Abortion is not murder, but it is a very serious activity. Artificial abortion is a man-initiated process by which one takes a potential human life. Abortion is a much more serious question than birth control, which merely prevents a human life from happening.

1. Abortion Is Less Serious Than Murder — Murder is a man-initiated activity of taking an actual human life. Artificial abortion is a humanly initiated process which results in the taking of a potential human life. Such abortion is not murder, because the embryo is not fully human — it is an undeveloped person. By aborting, the human life is nipped before it buds (assuming birth begins the budding). If a life must be stopped, it is obviously better to stop it before it ever really gets started. But the question is this: should a human life ever be stopped before it really has a chance to get started?

2. Abortion Is More Serious Than Birth Control — Birth control is not essentially wrong, for it merely prevents some life from occurring. Abortion, on the other hand, takes an undeveloped life after it has occurred. Since God is the Author of life, it is a serious thing to stamp out a life which He has permitted to come to pass. Once must have a good reason for extinguishing what God has kindled. The human embryo will develop (all things being equal) into an immortal, never-dying person. To snuff out what could become a human being is not an amoral act. There are serious implications to an act of man which strikes at an act of God in initiating a life.

In begetting children parents are serving as a channel through which God can create life. It is wrong, of course, to block the channel completely so that no life can get through (as in complete birth control of the whole race). But it is not necessarily evil to limit the amount or kind of flow through the channel (as in proper birth control). However, once the flow of life has begun it can be definitely wrong to snuff it out without ever giving it a chance to develop. Conception is a prima facie case in favor of giving the undeveloped person a chance to develop. One must have some higher moral duty which demands abortion before he initiates it.