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One sided. That's the abortion stance of most
Christians -- one sided. We hear the
Christian Coalition speak against abortion. We hear
Focus on the Family tell Republican candidates it will not
support them unless they state their opposition to
abortion. We hear Operation Rescue's Christian members
praying God will turn back the clock and make abortion
illegal again. Over and over we are bombarded with the
"Christian" perspective that abortion is outright wrong, no
exceptions.
With all these groups chanting the same mantra, there must
be some pretty overwhelming biblical evidence of abortion's
evil, right?
Wrong. In reality there is merely overwhelming evidence
that
most people don't take time to read their own Bibles. People
will listen to their pastors and to Christian radio
broadcasters. They will read the easy-to-read pamphlets and
perhaps look up the one or two verses printed therein, but
they don't actually read their Bibles and make up their own minds
on issues such as abortion. They merely listen to others who
quote a verse to support a view they heard from someone
else. By definition, most Christians, rather than reading
for themselves, follow the beliefs of a Culture of
Christianity -- and many of the Culture's beliefs are based
on one or two verses of the Bible, often taken out of
context.
This is most definitely the case when it comes to
abortion.
Ask most anti-abortion Christians to support their view, and
they'll give you a couple of verses. One, quite obviously,
is the Commandment against murder. But that begs the
question of whether or not abortion is murder, which begs
the question of whether or not a fetus is the same as a full-term human child. To support
their beliefs, these Christians point to one of three bible verses that refer to God working in the womb. The first is found in Psalms:
-
"For Thou didst form my inward parts; Thou didst weave me in
my mother's womb. I will give thanks to Thee, for Thou art
fearfully wonderful (later texts were changed to read "for I
am fearfully and wonderfully made"); wonderful are Thy
works, and my soul knows it very well. My frame was not
hidden from Thee, when I was made in secret, and skillfully
wrought in the depths of the earth. Thine eyes have seen my
unformed substance; and in Thy book they were all written,
the days that were ordained for me, when as yet there was
not one of them."
- Psalm 139:13-16
Although this passage does make the point that God was
involved in the creation of this particular human being, it does not
state that during the creation the fetus is indeed a full human person.
According to Genesis, God was involved in the creation of
every living thing, and yet that doesn't make every living
thing a full human person. In other words, just because God was involved in its creation, it does not mean terminating it is the same as murder. It's only murder if a full human person is destroyed.
But even if we agreed to interpret these verses the same
way
that anti-abortion Christians do, we still have a hard time
arguing that the Bible supports an anti-abortion point of
view. If anything, as we will soon see, abortion is
biblical.
Anytime we take one or two verses out of their context and
quote them as doctrine, we place ourselves in jeopardy of
being contradicted by other verses. Similarly, some verses
that make perfect sense while standing alone take on a
different feel when seen in the greater context in which
they were written. And we can do some rather bizarre things
to the Scriptures when we take disparate verses from the
same context and use them as stand-alone doctrinal
statements. Some prime examples of this come from the same
book of the Bible as our last quote. Consider these verses
that claim that God has abandoned us:
-
"Why dost Thou stand afar off, O Lord? Why dost Thou hide
Thyself in times of trouble?"
- Psalm 10:1
- "How long, O Lord? Wilt Thou forget me forever? How long
wilt Thou hide Thy face from me?"
- Psalm 13:1
- "O God, Thou hast rejected us. Thou hast broken us; Thou
hast been angry; O, restore us.
- Psalm 60:1
Not only can we use out-of-context verses to support that
God doesn't care for us anymore, we can even use them to
show how we can ask God to do horrible and vile things to
people we consider our enemies. In this example, King David
even wanted God to cause harm to the innocent children of
his enemy:
-
"Let his days be few; let another take his office. Let his
children be fatherless, and his wife a widow. Let his
children wander about and beg; and let them seek sustenance
far from their ruined homes. Let the creditor seize all that
he has; and let strangers plunder the product of his labor.
Let there be none to extend lovingkindness to him, nor any
to be gracious to his fatherless children."
- Psalm 109:8-12
Are we indeed to interpret that God, speaking through
David
in these Psalms, is saying we have been abandoned by God and
that when wronged we can ask God to cause our enemies to die
and cause our enemies' children to wander hungry and
homeless? Indeed, it would seem the case.
But rather than interpret that God is with us as a fetus,
but forgets us as adults, and yet will allow us to plead for
the death of our enemies, we need to look at the greater
context in which all these verses are found: songs.
Called Psalms, these are the songs of King David, a man of
great faith who was also greatly tormented. He was a man of
passions. He loved God, lusted for another man's wife, and
murdered him to get her. He marveled at nature and at his
own existence. All his great swings in emotion are recorded
in the songs he wrote, and we can read them today in the
Book of Psalms. What we cannot do is take one song, or one
stanza of a song, and proclaim that it is indeed to be taken
literally while taking other stanzas from David's songs and
claim they should not be taken literally.
Yet that is exactly what anti-abortion Christians are
asking
us to do. They use those few verses from the Psalms to
support their dogma that abortion is wrong. They proclaim
those verses as holy writ and the other verses as poetry that we should not be following. Clearly,
this is a perfect example of taking verses out of context.
And it leads us to only one conclusion: if we cannot trust
that God wants to kill our enemies and abandon us, we must
also conclude that we cannot trust that God has defined the
fetus as being human.
For indeed, if we allow that kind of thinking we could
also
make an argument that God is willing to maul children to
death if they make fun of a bald guy who just happens to be
in God's favor. You think I'm joking, but I'm not. In the
book of Second Kings, our hero, the Prophet Elisha, who was
quite bald, so it seems, was taunted by a group of young
boys. Elisha's response was bitter and cruel:
-
"...as he was going up by the way, young lads came out from
the city and mocked him and said to him, 'Go up, you
baldhead; go up you baldhead!' When he looked behind him and
saw them, he cursed them in the name of the Lord. Then two
female bears came out of the woods and tore up forty-two
lads of their number."
- 2 Kings 2:22-24
Did God kill those forty-two kids for making fun of a bald
prophet? We can certainly make an argument for that if we
use the anti-abortionists' kind of thinking.
Likewise we can also use the anti-abortionists' methods to
establish that God approves of pornography, as seen in these
following verses by Solomon as he pondered the female body:
-
"How beautiful are your feet in sandals, O prince's
daughter! The curves of your hips are like jewels, the work
of the hands of an artist. Your navel is like a round goblet
which never lacks for mixed wine; your belly is like a heap
of wheat fenced about with lilies. Your two breasts are like
two fawns, twins of a gazelle."
"Your stature is like a palm tree, and your breasts are like
its clusters. I said 'I will climb the palm tree, I will
take hold of its fruit stalks.' Oh, may your breasts be like
clusters of the vine, and the fragrance of your breath like
apples, and your mouth like the best wine."
- Song of Solomon 7:1-3,7-9
Pretty steamy stuff. Taken by itself, it would appear God is indeed promoting a written form of pornography. But just like Psalm 139:13-16, we cannot take it by itself. Instead we must take it within the context it was written.
The same is true with the other two verses used by anti-abortion Christians to defend their cause. From the book of Jeremiah, these Crusaders are fond of quoting the phrase, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee," from the first chapter. But they never quote the entire passage, which changes the meaning considerably:
-
"Then the word of the Lord came unto me, saying, Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee; and before thou camest forth out of the womb I sanctified thee, and I ordained thee a prophet unto the nations. Then said I, Ah, Lord GOD! behold, I cannot speak: for I am a child. But the Lord said unto me, Say not, I am a child: for thou shalt go to all that I shall send thee, and whatsoever I command thee thou shalt speak. Be not afraid of their faces: for I am with thee to deliver thee, saith the Lord. Then the Lord put forth his hand, and touched my mouth. And the Lord said unto me, Behold, I have put my words in thy mouth. See, I have this day set thee over the nations and over the kingdoms, to root out, and to pull down, and to destroy, and to throw down, to build, and to plant."
- Jeremiah 1:4-10
This is a special event -- the birth of a prophet. God brought the prophet Jeremiah into the world for a divine purpose, and because of that, God was planning Jeremiah's life "before" he was even conceived. God was preparing him to do miraculous things, such as speak on behalf of God while still a child and setting him up as an overseer of nations and kingdoms. But the anti-abortionists simply overlook this on their way to claiming that the one phrase they quote proves God sees us as individual people while still in the womb. God saw Jeremiah in that way, but to claim it applies to all of us is akin to saying that we were all prepared as children to speak for God, and that God has placed all of us "over the nations and over the kingdoms" of the world. In essence, to claim this verse applies to anyone other than Jeremiah is to claim that we are all God's divine prophets. We are not; therefore, we cannot apply these verses to our own lives.
Another problem in this passage is the phrase, "Before I formed thee in the belly I knew thee." In Psalm 139:13-16 the anti-abortionists claim that because God was active in the creation of King David in his mother's womb that we must conclude the fetus is recognized by God as being fully human. Here we see God stating that he knew Jeremiah "before" he was formed in the womb. By anti-abortionist logic, we would have to conclude that we are human even before conception. Since this is a ridiculous notion, we must, therefore, conclude that the anti-abortionist is interpreting these verses incorrectly.
The last verse most often quoted by anti-abortion Christians relates the story of Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, while both were pregnant. When they meet, the pre-born John the Baptist leaps in his mother's womb at Mary's salutation. Let's read the original:
-
"And Mary arose in those days, and went into the hill country with haste, into a city of Juda; And entered into the house of Zacharias, and saluted Elisabeth. And it came to pass, that, when Elisabeth heard the salutation of Mary, the babe leaped in her womb; and Elisabeth was filled with the Holy Ghost:"
- Luke 1:39-41
As much as the anti-abortion lobby would like this to mean that all fetuses are fully human because one is recorded as knowing Mary's words and then leaping inside the womb, the logic is as flawed as the Isaiah misquote. Again we have a miraculous event. Again we have a divine prophet, whom God had ordained since before he was conceived. And this time it's even more miraculous, because the gestating John the Baptist is reacting to the approach of Mary, who at the time was pregnant with Jesus. Unless we believe all of us are chosen before birth to be the divine prophet ordained by God to herald the arrival of Christ on earth, then we cannot claim this passage refers to us. And indeed, it does not. While gestating babies are known to move and kick as their nervous systems and muscles are under construction, only divinely inspired babies understand the spoken words of the mother of Jesus and can leap in recognition.
The point to all this is simple: we
cannot simply take the verses we like and interpret them to
support what we want to support. And, more to the point, we
cannot simply accept what some Christian leaders proclaim as
being God's word on a given subject without carefully
reading the full text of the book and taking into
consideration the entire context. We cannot, as we have
shown, simply interpret those few verses from Psalms, Isaiah, and Luke as a
reason to be against abortion. And, as we will see in a
moment, there are still other verses -- if interpreted in the sloppy manner demonstrated by anti-abortion Christians -- in the Bible that could
easily lead us to argue that indeed God, at times, supports
abortion. Let's take a look.
In the full context of Ecclesiastes, King Solomon makes
the
point that much of life is futile. Over and over he writes
that if life is good then we should be thankful. But when
life is not good, Solomon makes some interesting statements:
-
"If a man fathers a hundred children and lives many years,
however many they be, but his soul is not satisfied with
good things, and he does not even have a proper burial, then
I say, `Better the miscarriage than he, for it comes in
futility and goes into obscurity; and its name is covered in
obscurity. It never sees the sun and it never knows
anything; it is better off than he.'"
- Ecclesiastes 6:3-5
Clearly there is a quality of life issue being put forth
in
the Scriptures. And in this case, Solomon makes the point
that it is sometimes better to end a pregnancy prematurely
than to allow it to continue into a miserable life. This is
made even more clear in these following verses:
-
"Then I looked again at all the acts of oppression which
were being done under the sun. And behold I saw the tears of
the oppressed and that they had no one to comfort them; and
on the side of their oppressors was power, but they had no
one to comfort them. So I congratulated the dead who are
already dead more than the living who are still living. But
better off than both of them is the one who has never
existed, who has never seen the evil activity that is done
under the sun."
- Ecclesiastes 4:1-3
Here we have an argument for both euthanasia and abortion.
When quality of life is at stake, Solomon seems to make the
argument that ending a painful life or ending what will be a
painful existence is preferable. Now remember, we're not
talking about David's songs here. We're reading the words of
the man to whom God gave the world's greatest wisdom.
And Solomon was not alone in this argument. Consider the
words of Job, a man of great faith and wealth, when his life
fell upon the hardest of times:
-
"And Job said, 'Let the day perish on which I was to be
born, and the night which said, "a boy is conceived." May
that day be darkness; let not God above care for it, nor
light shine on it.'"
"Why did I not die at birth, come forth from my womb and
expire? Why did the knees receive me, and why the breasts,
that I should suck? For now I would have lain down and been
quiet; I would have slept then, I would have been at rest,
with kings and with counselors of the earth, who rebuilt
ruins for themselves; or with princes who had gold, who were
filling their houses with silver,. Or like the miscarriage
which is discarded, I would not be, as infants that never
saw light. There the wicked cease from raging, and there the
weary are at rest. The prisoners are at ease together; they
do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the
great are there, and the slave is free from his master."
- Job 3:2-4,11-19
And again a few chapters later Job reiterates the greater
grace he would have known if his life had been terminated as
a fetus:
-
"Why then hast Thou brought me out of the womb? Would that I
had died and no eye had seen me! I should have been as
though I had not been, carried from womb to tomb."
- Job 10:18-19
Clearly there is a strong argument here that the quality
of
a life is as important if not more important than the act of
being born. Indeed, we could claim that the Bible supports
ending a pregnancy in the face of a life without quality.
And, if I wanted to be bold, I could claim that this
interpretation is in fact a biblical mandate to support the
use of abortion as a way to improve our quality of life. And
taking these verses to their extreme, I could claim that
abortion is not just a good idea, it is a sacrament.
Actually, I will stop short of making that claim. In fact,
I
will stop short of making the claim that the Bible condemns
or supports abortion at all. It does neither. The condemning
and supporting comes not from the words of the Bible but
from leaders within our Culture of Christianity who use
verses out of context -- the same way I just did to support
abortion -- to support their views against abortion. The
condemning
and the supporting comes not from the Scriptures but from
average Christians who take the easy way out, accepting one
or two verses of the Bible as proof that their leaders are
speaking the gospel truth. The condemning and supporting
comes not from God but from those who do not take the time
to read the Bible, in its own context, and decide for
themselves the meanings therein.
For indeed, there is one passage in the Bible that deals
specifically with the act of causing a woman to abort a
pregnancy. And the penalty for causing the abortion is not what
many would lead us to believe:
-
"And if men struggle and strike a woman with child so that she
has a miscarriage, yet there is no further injury, he shall be
fined as the woman's husband may demand of him, and he shall pay
as the judges decide. But if there is any further injury, then
you shall appoint as a penalty life for life, eye for eye, tooth
for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burn for burn, wound for
wound, bruise for bruise."
- Exodus 21:22-25
This is a very illuminating passage. In it we find a woman losing her child by being stuck by men who are fighting. Rather than it being a capital offense, however, it is relegated to a civil matter, with the father-to-be taking the participants to court for a settlement. But, as we read on, if the woman is killed, a "life for a life," then the men who killed her shall be killed. Some have claimed that the life for a life part is talking about the baby. But from reading the context we can see this is not true. It also states a tooth for a tooth and a burn for a burn. Babies don't have teeth when they are born, and it is highly unlikely a baby will be burned during birth. It is pretty clear that this part refers to the mother. Thus we can see that if the baby is lost, it does not require a death sentence -- it is not considered murder. But if the woman is lost, it is considered murder and is punished by death.
It is time to stop the one-sided view of abortion being
proclaimed by Christian leaders. These leaders do not --
despite their claims -- have a biblical mandate for their
theologies. It is time to stop preaching that the Bible
contain an undeniable doctrine against abortion. It is time
to stop the anger and hatred being heaped on abortion
doctors and upon women who have abortions, especially when
it's done in the name of a God who has not written such
condemnations in his Bible. It is time to stop, because the
act of making a judgment against people in God's name, when
God is not behind the judging, is nothing short of claiming
that our own beliefs are more important than God's. We must
stop, because if we don't, then indeed the very type of
theological argument being used against abortion can be
turned around and used to proclaim that abortion is
biblical.
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