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Part l: Scientific Ontologies, or Three Guys Walk Into a Bar and Talk About Abortion
This article has emerged in pieces, but began as a wing-special discussion at one of my favorite bars.
I’ve been thinking for some time about how pro-life people of good will and intention might frame their case in progressive terms. With regards to protecting animals, for example, the progressive view is that which recognizes and protects animals who can’t protect, defend or speak for themselves. When computers gain sentience, the stance we’ll call progressive will be that which argues robustly for individual rights for thinking machines. So too for human clones.
A few thoughts, which will be developed more fully later, follow.
1) Pro-lifers (especially Christian pro-lifers) need to abandon theological ontology as a touchstone of their argument. The argument as to when life begins is fraught with religious claims not likely (and probably not able) to be resolved in a pluralistic national polity, and that’s a good thing.
2) The right-to-life argument should be made from an appeal to science. Let’s throw the religiosity right out of the public discourse and pretend for a moment that science involves no value judgments. Let’s then build an argument for fetal rights from the scientific understanding of the developing fetus as genetically other viz-a-vis her parents.
3) The argument, then, should not be based on defining when life begins, but rather on defining scientifically when a new individual with human potentialities is formed. Can a developing fetus (or zygote) with DNA different from her mother be in any way rightfully considered an extension of that mother? If not, the right to privacy basis of legal abortion is undermined.
Part II: An Emerging Ethic of Life
In this election cycle, talk about an emerging evangelical political center abounds. Much of the discussion is about how conservative and liberal Christians can work together to realize Christ-commanded essentials and their corollaries: care for the poor, for example, and its extensions regarding access, justice, and health care.
Along different but related lines, I’ve been wondering about understanding the pro-life movement in progressive (or, one could argue, even libertarian) terms.
It’s intuitive, at least to me, that pro-life Christians (even if they’re “conservative” on other issues) would find natural allies within the ranks of Christian progressives, because while there may be disagreement on things like just war and pacifism, politically active Christians of certain strains would have some natural convergences around their dedication to protecting the most vulnerable. I haven’t seen much evidence, though, that this is actually happening, Frank Schaeffer’s recent essay (”Why I’m a Pro-Life Obama Supporter”) aside.
If anything, missives like Schaeffer’s underscore the point: there is no progressive Christian cohesion around abortion as a crisis of rights, ethics, and ontology even though such cohesion does exist on other ethic of life issues. The Christian Left is, for example, increasingly normative and vocal about their stance against the Iraq war, much to the mistrust, I’m sure, of some conservative or traditionalist pro-lifers. There’s a more monolithic view about social reform as well, exemplified by the emerging truism that Obama will do more for the downtrodden in general than, say, any Republican, and he will do so in a way, the argument goes, that will reduce the reasons for abortion in the first place. This mitigates his decisions to vote against the Infants Born Alive Act, the narrative claims, because his approach to the field of issues is nearer to the seamless garment ethic of life that Christian pro-lifers claim to support.
Anti-war (I’m not an out-of-hand pacifist), anti-death penalty (I am), pro-environment (I am) and pro-life Christians, then, should stop trying to change abortion policy and start trying to change other social policy, the center is saying. This is essentially the “legal, safe, and rare” argument first proffered and recently affirmed by Bill Clinton.
What Clinton missed in his campaign-trail comments a few months ago (”tell the truth, I was the president that reduced abortion the most”) was that if there’s nothing wrong with abortion, that is, if it ought to be legal based on the nonhumanity of the aborted, why should we care whether or not it’s rare? I can understand wanting something like war, which clearly involves combatants we define as “human” to be rare, but why abortion? Put another way, American slavery was predicated on the notion, codified in the Constitution, that blacks were not human persons. Progressive Christians lead the charge against that vulgar definition. Can you imagine if they’d appealed to socioeconomic arguments and concluded that slavery should be legal but rare? Today that’s unthinkable, and rightly so. In the end, abolitionists refused that convenience. To borrow an image from the contemporary Christian pacifists, they concluded that the answer to “Who Would Jesus Enslave?” was “no one.” Who would Jesus abort?
The center is right about paying more attention to other social issues and large social policy, but that does not excuse us from the abortion discussion.
Part III: A Hermeneutic of The Least of These
I think a tenable, amicable opposition to abortion from a place of progressive faith and progressive politics can and needs to be articulated by people from both parties who may disagree about other ethics of life issues. In this emerging discussion, Christian moral opposition to abortion needs to take its cues from some of the more radical appeals to Christian ontology (”Who Would Jesus Bomb?”) rather than from failed and wrong-headed attempts at imposing Christian deontology (”the Bible says x, so we must do y”) onto our nervous and rightly protected Constitutional pluralism.
The difference between ontology (being) and deontology (duty) in this exchange is largely one of moral suasion. The bumper sticker “Who Would Jesus Bomb?” takes for granted that readers have some visceral understanding of Jesus and his ethic, and whether they know it or not, it forces them to consider the repercussions of war from a hybrid understanding (the pacifists’ and their own) of Christian ontology through the common vision of Jesus as a moral person. Even people who dismiss WWJB as a strawman proposition are forced to carry on this dialectic more fully than are unsympathetic readers of proof-texted biblical commands.
That said, the ethic of life must also include a vigorous defense of the living poor. That doesn’t necessarily mean we must always elect Democrats; another regrettable strawman is the proposition that Republicans (even Christian ones) just don’t care about the poor, a point to which Senator Obama alluded in his acceptance speech a few nights ago. It does mean, though, that pro-life Christians with conservative political affiliations must work harder to show that their concern for the unborn doesn’t stop at the uterus. Strawmen are appealing for a reason. Though reasonable people will disagree until the eschaton about whether the government or private sector is better suited for making poverty history, pro-life Christian conservatives need to assert in action and deed that their ethic of life really is precisely that and pro-life Christian liberals need to own the fact that a vote for an avowed pro-life Republican isn’t always or necessarily a vote against this ethic among the born.
We can also disagree, it seems to me, about the pacifism and just war theory, and still agree about abortion as a crisis of ontology as was slavery before it. We can agree, most likely, that preemptive war is as wrong as is the strain of thought justifying the abortion of the potentially unwanted and uncared for (I’ll call this preemptive euthanasia).
If we choose, with Jesus, the hermeneutic of the least of these, our political choices come into focus; we either vote with pro-lifers with whom we may disagree on other issues, or we force Democrats to come to terms with their own lofty rhetoric and extend the audacity of hope to the most vulnerable. In both cases, the tents do seem to be widening. Many Republicans have warmed in impressive ways to the Millennium Goals and to finding better solutions to helping the working poor and share the common wealth. Democrats have made overtures toward pro-life people of good will in ways we’ve never seen before. It’s important that Bob Casey Jr., a high-profile pro-life Democrat, was tapped to speak in Denver years after his late father was famously denied that some honor because of his pro-life views.
In my own political economy, voting for a candidate publicly committed to affirming that the unborn are the least and most vulnerable human persons and deserve protection as such is the biggest and most radical kind of politics going. I say this fully aware that the GOP relied (often cynically) on well-meaning pro-life evangelicals as a firewall for 30 years and fully wary that Democrats may make similar use of well-meaning (and perhaps guilt-ridden) anti-war, pro-environment, common weal mainline Christians and former evangelicals for 30 more.
Will John McCain be as big a friend to the poor as Barack Obama? Maybe yes and maybe no, but people of faith should be making that point moot in their service, giving, and living. So should we be making the question about fetal personhood redundant.
Moral suasion comes before all great political change, and if pro-life progressives throw our support entirely to one side or the other without somehow making both parties feel our provisional anxiety and waning patience, we will have lost something important. Voting is a feature of our dual Christian and civic deontologies, but persuading our neighbors and leaders to embrace a compelling, liberating, elevating and radically progressive ontology is as well.
Part IV: The Fetal Gospel
Under [Don] Jones’ mentorship, [Hillary] Clinton learned about Reinhold Niebuhr and Paul Tillich—thinkers whom liberals consider their own, but whom young Hillary Rodham encountered as theological conservatives. The Niebuhr she studied was a cold warrior, dismissive of the progressive politics of his earlier writing. “He’d thought that once we were unionized, the kingdom of God would be ushered in,” Jones explains. “But the effect of those two world wars and the violence that they produced shook his faith in liberal theology. He came to believe that the achievement of justice meant a clear understanding of the limitations of the human condition.” Tillich, whose sermon on grace Clinton turned to during the Lewinsky scandal, today enjoys a following among conservatives for revising the social gospel - the notion that Christians are to improve humanity’s lot here on earth by fighting poverty, inequality, and exploitation - to emphasize individual redemption instead of activism.
That was from this Mother Jones article. This post isn’t actually going to be about Clinton, but the part about the Christian reformers is important.
Regarding Tillich, bear in mind that the progressive Christians of the abolition and suffrage era (the first real Christian activists) always predicated their social vision on individual redemption, aggregated, to be sure, but individual to start with. This is worth mentioning because in the current political climate, there is certainly much value to the “changing hearts” paradigm vis a vie fetal rights and abortion, and I see that paradigm branching in two equally important ways:
1) Public education and debate focusing on the ontological (philosophical and scientific) arguments for fetal personhood; that is, winning people’s hearts by winning their minds, and
2) Changing the public perception that fetal rights advocates don’t care what happens to children once they’re born. That’s a strawman that can be overcome with the kinds of things people of faith should be doing anyway (ie, making poverty, including poverty of spirit from cyclical disenfranchisement), history.
While the 19th century Christian reformers were motivated out of personal religious experiences with roots in the frontier circuit and Second Great Awakening, they also understood that Christian ontology had truth to speak to power in systemic ways. There’s were always two-front movements geared toward changing policy by changing hearts on one hand and changing policy by sound appeals to reason and fundamental principles of freedom (also a feature of their Christian ontology) on the other.
Because ours is a pluralistic society where freedom is valued as transcendent even outside of religious circles (though for many otherwise non-religious Americans this transcendence is, of course, itself religious, isn’t it?), it’s not necessary that we agree on who or what we call the author of our liberty (for the ever-deft Jefferson it was both nature and nature’s God) to come to sound conclusions about fetal rights. The American metanarrative, to an extent, does its own converting. For fetal rights advocates, changing minds and hearts is, then, about connecting ontological dots and pledging a sincere ethic of life to the born.
Christopher Cocca blogs here.
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Well said. From my Christian point of view and understanding of Jesus, it is exactly what He did. The "least of these" was not just a sound bite, it was where He lived and moved and changed lives...and exactly to what spiritual and moral responsibility He called His followers. Not just that we are to believe in this ethic, but that we are to be the agents of its application. The cliche` "no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care" is especially true in a society where the 'least of these' do not see enough living out of Jesus' mandate and example. So, they look to whomever promises "HOPE" in the here and now. The Church should be the best source of hope, the best example, the best possibility for life changing care. When it is not, the government becomes the only hope some people see. It's a failure on a grand scale, and one that any national spiritual revivalists should confess. With confession comes repentance, and with repentance comes change that leads to making a difference, one heart at a time. The Church being The Church--the Body of Christ--is the mandate handed to Peter (Do you love me? Feed my sheep.) and the mantle of responsibility for all who call Jesus the Lord of their lives. Too bad the WWJD movement became a hackneyed sound bite and a commercial craze. You could buy anything in the world you wanted emblazoned with WWJD--but it couldn't make you live the life it called into question. What a time it is now for God's people to be real, sacrificial, and committed.
Until very recently I would have absolutely agreed.
I was the president of a local, non-profit organization called Birth Choice. It was a pregnancy resource center that was a very 'rubber-meets-the-road' way to deal with unplanned pregnancies with Christ's love.
I was particularly influenced by an article in Christianity Today that said something like this:
"The mantra 'It's a child, not a choice' is flawed because it is answering a question that no one is asking. We can win over hearts and minds with appeals to justice and choice on their playing field using their own logic and have a greater impact.'
What's got me all discombobulated recently is studying Stanley Hauerwas. In short, he's saying that appeals to Democracy, Science, or anything but Christ is a form of worship. In other words, if you need 'Objective Truth' in order to 'prove' the claims of Christianity, then don't worship Jesus...worship Objective Truth.
(at least, this is what I think he's saying. I can't say I've been able to parse this yet)
The point I'm saying is this: what if our appeals to scientific rationalism, or some type of universal principles, undermine (in the long run) the claim that Jesus is Lord?
I'm still trying to figure that out.
In the meantime, I'm that pro-life guy that votes for Obama.
You know, when I said I would have 'absolutely agreed', I did not mean that I absolutely disagree now. I'm not sure that was clear in my last comment.
What is clear, the second time through this article, is how much you have helped me in my own political journey start to make sense of the churning inside my own heart and mind. This is a fantastic article.
And this paragraph takes the cake:
"Moral suasion comes before all great political change, and if pro-life progressives throw our support entirely to one side or the other without somehow making both parties feel our provisional anxiety and waning patience, we will have lost something important."
Thanks again.
I especially liked your question "I can understand wanting something like war, which clearly involves combatants we define as 'human' to be rare, but why abortion?" I have said for years (and my late wife was coming around to the belief) that in simple scientific terms, we cannot say that an unborn fetus is NOT an individual at any time in its gestation. That kind of argument of children as property of the parents was done away with long ago. And yet, we still had a decision right at the height of the so-called "sexual revolution" that said just that: an unborn child is the property of the mother to dispose of as she sees fit. Ouch!
We voters of conscience, we pro-lifers really do need to take a stand, and we need to let the people we vote for know that we really are concerned about this. Obama's evasions just demonstrate either (A) his political maneuvering to avoid being locked into feminist debates, or (B) his outright ignorance of the core of the issue: the ontology of the unborn. I think it is a combination of both, and so long as he continues to court the women voters who favor abortion as an option for themselves, he will never admit to being pro-life, whether he is or not. McCain has pulled a fast one by not making it an issue for himself but handing it off to a VP pick who is a woman pro-lifer. Canny choice, that one!
Senator Obama himself made the argument in a 2006 speech that religious conservatives need to be ready to argue from humanist grounds, and I agree. By arguing for the right to life of the unborn without resorting to strictly Biblical language, we are opening up dialog that can change minds even among non-Christians. But so long as we crouch behind the Bible and open fire with "Thou shalt not..." then we only invite defeat in today's social and political climate. However we choose to vote, our voices need to be heard.
"Will John McCain be as big a friend to the poor as Barack Obama? Maybe yes and maybe no, but people of faith should be making that point moot in their service, giving, and living. So should we be making the question about fetal personhood redundant."
Well said! From start to finish, my time in the voting booth takes 10-15 minutes out of my life. But in the end, I am responsible for my actions the other 525,585 minutes of the year (yes, I'm a Rent-head!), and who is elected President should have no bearing on my actions. Galations 5:23, "...against such [the Fruits of the Spirit] there is no law"
(I realize that wasn't the overall point of this article - that was just one sentence that caught my eye!)
RE: Part I
1) Everyone's argument is fraught with faith claims, "not likely (and probably not able) to be resolved in a pluralistic national polity." Those claims are variously Christian, constitutional, feminist, libertarian, nihilistic, etc., but they're all faith claims. It doesn't make them invalid, it makes them potentially incompatible and incomprehensible. Faith claims (ours included) should be translated and universalized to some degree for the secular arena, but not abandoned.
2) and 3) And here's the heart of the matter. The fight over abortion has next to nothing to do with "science." IT'S ABOUT NARRATIVE. The science is the same in everyone's argument, the difference is in the narrative that the science is being marshalled to support. Making progress in ending abortion is going to look much more like conversion than like reasoned debate.
Joey,
When you said that appeals to anything but Christ is a form of worship (and then, though unsaid, a form of idolatry), I had to ponder that one a little. Within the Christian context, that would be a correct statement. To the extent that we allow something besides Christ, scripture, the Spirit, to be the reason for our faith, actions, way of living, etc., we argue against those ultimate truths and rely on man’s constructs and reasoning for our morals and direction.
But for a discourse outside of the Christian arena, such as discussing arguments against abortion in the broader arena of society and politics, the facts we accept by faith are of no value because society at large does not accept those facts. But if it is ultimately true, then besides holding together within the context of Christian faith and literature, it should hold together within the sound reasoning that the world undertakes. Christopher is saying that within that context, we have been missing the truly sound arguments.
God does not make things true simply to be mocked by their apparent falsity when viewed outside the Christian context. The problem is that the way to view those truths is consistently missed, or willfully ignored. To argue the separateness of the DNA of the mother, father, and the zygote does not cause us to worship something apart from God. Instead, it underpins the truth that Christians have held that an unborn child is not simply part of the mother. While the fact will not necessarily lead someone to salvation, it does shine “secular” light on truth that Christians have accepted because it is written in different ways within the scriptures. We can all see that, even if the scriptures are not accepted by all, its proclamation is correct. God, who knows all, said it was so centuries before man knew enough to observe the truth of those statements with his own eyes.
Despite the fact that ultimate truth can be seen in natural things, and in sound non-Christian reasoning, does not diminish Christ. It enforces His word as a bulwark of truth. We worship Christ more. It is not just true because He says it is, but because it really is. We continue to hold so much of our belief by faith. But the portions that are eventually established as observably true do not make God less. They prove Him as true.
Mike...Thank you. What a thoughtful response.
And, for much of my life, I was right there.
I guess where I'm at now (which, admittedly, might not be any better) is that I've figured that by arguing on the world's terms, we're giving them a privileged position.
I like Mother Teresa's response: If you don't want your baby, please give it to me. I want it.
We can practice radical hospitality, hope for the future and welcoming the least of these without arguing on the world's terms. Like Paul said, against such thing there is no law.
They will see our good deeds and glorify our father in heaven. I guess I'm just exploring a more radical praxis and might agree with Stanley Hauerwas and others that the whole "pro-life" "pro-choice" debate is being argued from a modernist mindset that, ultimately, demands our allegiance to powers and principalities other than the kingdom.
Can we be salt and light without playing by the rules? I'm all for being in the world...but if our arguments are predicated on philosophies that are but teachings of me, then maybe we're being of the world.
Just trying to figure it all out. Thanks for listening.
It is a scientific certainty that human life, like canine and feline life, begins at the moment of fertilization. Religious faith has nothing to do with this fact. You may value life from the moment of fertilization or not value it, but the fact that life begins at fertilization is beyond all legitimate dispute. Those who don't know that life begins at fertilization (aka conception) are biologically ignorant.
Two thoughts, Obama clearly come out as a pro-choice candidate, no need to parse that. Secondly, this comment is one worth focusing on - To (”tell the truth, I was the president that reduced abortion the most”) B. Clinton If Bill Clinton is right why aren't we heading down that path with all due haste instead of lovingly supporting administrations and whose economic policies create more the climate of increased numbers of abortions, minimumum wage jobs, poverty, bankruptcies, foreclosures, unemployment and corporate welfare. The church seems to be convinced that the only good governement is one where 'their own annoited' people are in charge. For the last eight years this very scenario has been played out in spades and once again there is nothing to show for it - unless you count that the current party in power and the church now both look like they love war and hate minorities, love ignorance and hate education, despise the law, the will of the people and love bad governance. After 40 years of Repubs doing nothing to reduce abortions, pro-lifers are still voting for Repub party with the crazy hope that this time, finally, they'll do something. I'm a patient person, but after 40 years of failure we might do well to consider a different approach. Maybe? SO If Bill Cinton is has done the most, why doesn't the church consider promoting economic policies, education and secondary education policies where in abortion does seems less likely to be a choice? Why is it that the church seems to believe that the our best choice is not to teach, inspire or promote "all sound policies of conscience" but rather to get government to legislate a "single policy value of conscience"?
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Well said. From my Christian point of view and understanding of Jesus, it is exactly what He did. The "least of these" was not just a sound bite, it was where He lived and moved and changed lives...and exactly to what spiritual and moral responsibility He called His followers. Not just that we are to believe in this ethic, but that we are to be the agents of its application. The cliche` "no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care" is especially true in a society where the 'least of these' do not see enough living out of Jesus' mandate and example. So, they look to whomever promises "HOPE" in the here and now. The Church should be the best source of hope, the best example, the best possibility for life changing care. When it is not, the government becomes the only hope some people see. It's a failure on a grand scale, and one that any national spiritual revivalists should confess. With confession comes repentance, and with repentance comes change that leads to making a difference, one heart at a time. The Church being The Church--the Body of Christ--is the mandate handed to Peter (Do you love me? Feed my sheep.) and the mantle of responsibility for all who call Jesus the Lord of their lives. Too bad the WWJD movement became a hackneyed sound bite and a commercial craze. You could buy anything in the world you wanted emblazoned with WWJD--but it couldn't make you live the life it called into question. What a time it is now for God's people to be real, sacrificial, and committed. Posted by Karen Williams | Posted at 09/01/2008 9:07 AM
Until very recently I would have absolutely agreed.
I was the president of a local, non-profit organization called Birth Choice. It was a pregnancy resource center that was a very 'rubber-meets-the-road' way to deal with unplanned pregnancies with Christ's love.
I was particularly influenced by an article in Christianity Today that said something like this:
"The mantra 'It's a child, not a choice' is flawed because it is answering a question that no one is asking. We can win over hearts and minds with appeals to justice and choice on their playing field using their own logic and have a greater impact.'
What's got me all discombobulated recently is studying Stanley Hauerwas. In short, he's saying that appeals to Democracy, Science, or anything but Christ is a form of worship. In other words, if you need 'Objective Truth' in order to 'prove' the claims of Christianity, then don't worship Jesus...worship Objective Truth.
(at least, this is what I think he's saying. I can't say I've been able to parse this yet)
The point I'm saying is this: what if our appeals to scientific rationalism, or some type of universal principles, undermine (in the long run) the claim that Jesus is Lord?
I'm still trying to figure that out.
In the meantime, I'm that pro-life guy that votes for Obama.
Posted by Joey Aszterbaum | Posted at 09/01/2008 11:16 AMYou know, when I said I would have 'absolutely agreed', I did not mean that I absolutely disagree now. I'm not sure that was clear in my last comment.
What is clear, the second time through this article, is how much you have helped me in my own political journey start to make sense of the churning inside my own heart and mind. This is a fantastic article.
And this paragraph takes the cake:
"Moral suasion comes before all great political change, and if pro-life progressives throw our support entirely to one side or the other without somehow making both parties feel our provisional anxiety and waning patience, we will have lost something important."
Thanks again.
Posted by Joey Aszterbaum | Posted at 09/01/2008 12:38 PMI especially liked your question "I can understand wanting something like war, which clearly involves combatants we define as 'human' to be rare, but why abortion?" I have said for years (and my late wife was coming around to the belief) that in simple scientific terms, we cannot say that an unborn fetus is NOT an individual at any time in its gestation. That kind of argument of children as property of the parents was done away with long ago. And yet, we still had a decision right at the height of the so-called "sexual revolution" that said just that: an unborn child is the property of the mother to dispose of as she sees fit. Ouch!
We voters of conscience, we pro-lifers really do need to take a stand, and we need to let the people we vote for know that we really are concerned about this. Obama's evasions just demonstrate either (A) his political maneuvering to avoid being locked into feminist debates, or (B) his outright ignorance of the core of the issue: the ontology of the unborn. I think it is a combination of both, and so long as he continues to court the women voters who favor abortion as an option for themselves, he will never admit to being pro-life, whether he is or not. McCain has pulled a fast one by not making it an issue for himself but handing it off to a VP pick who is a woman pro-lifer. Canny choice, that one!
Senator Obama himself made the argument in a 2006 speech that religious conservatives need to be ready to argue from humanist grounds, and I agree. By arguing for the right to life of the unborn without resorting to strictly Biblical language, we are opening up dialog that can change minds even among non-Christians. But so long as we crouch behind the Bible and open fire with "Thou shalt not..." then we only invite defeat in today's social and political climate. However we choose to vote, our voices need to be heard.
Posted by Glenn | Posted at 09/01/2008 11:53 PM"Will John McCain be as big a friend to the poor as Barack Obama? Maybe yes and maybe no, but people of faith should be making that point moot in their service, giving, and living. So should we be making the question about fetal personhood redundant."
Well said! From start to finish, my time in the voting booth takes 10-15 minutes out of my life. But in the end, I am responsible for my actions the other 525,585 minutes of the year (yes, I'm a Rent-head!), and who is elected President should have no bearing on my actions. Galations 5:23, "...against such [the Fruits of the Spirit] there is no law"
(I realize that wasn't the overall point of this article - that was just one sentence that caught my eye!)
Posted by Leanne | Posted at 09/02/2008 9:32 AMRE: Part I
1) Everyone's argument is fraught with faith claims, "not likely (and probably not able) to be resolved in a pluralistic national polity." Those claims are variously Christian, constitutional, feminist, libertarian, nihilistic, etc., but they're all faith claims. It doesn't make them invalid, it makes them potentially incompatible and incomprehensible. Faith claims (ours included) should be translated and universalized to some degree for the secular arena, but not abandoned.
2) and 3) And here's the heart of the matter. The fight over abortion has next to nothing to do with "science." IT'S ABOUT NARRATIVE. The science is the same in everyone's argument, the difference is in the narrative that the science is being marshalled to support. Making progress in ending abortion is going to look much more like conversion than like reasoned debate.
Posted by forestwalker | Posted at 09/03/2008 3:22 PMJoey,
When you said that appeals to anything but Christ is a form of worship (and then, though unsaid, a form of idolatry), I had to ponder that one a little. Within the Christian context, that would be a correct statement. To the extent that we allow something besides Christ, scripture, the Spirit, to be the reason for our faith, actions, way of living, etc., we argue against those ultimate truths and rely on man’s constructs and reasoning for our morals and direction.
But for a discourse outside of the Christian arena, such as discussing arguments against abortion in the broader arena of society and politics, the facts we accept by faith are of no value because society at large does not accept those facts. But if it is ultimately true, then besides holding together within the context of Christian faith and literature, it should hold together within the sound reasoning that the world undertakes. Christopher is saying that within that context, we have been missing the truly sound arguments.
God does not make things true simply to be mocked by their apparent falsity when viewed outside the Christian context. The problem is that the way to view those truths is consistently missed, or willfully ignored. To argue the separateness of the DNA of the mother, father, and the zygote does not cause us to worship something apart from God. Instead, it underpins the truth that Christians have held that an unborn child is not simply part of the mother. While the fact will not necessarily lead someone to salvation, it does shine “secular” light on truth that Christians have accepted because it is written in different ways within the scriptures. We can all see that, even if the scriptures are not accepted by all, its proclamation is correct. God, who knows all, said it was so centuries before man knew enough to observe the truth of those statements with his own eyes.
Despite the fact that ultimate truth can be seen in natural things, and in sound non-Christian reasoning, does not diminish Christ. It enforces His word as a bulwark of truth. We worship Christ more. It is not just true because He says it is, but because it really is. We continue to hold so much of our belief by faith. But the portions that are eventually established as observably true do not make God less. They prove Him as true.
Posted by Mike | Posted at 09/09/2008 11:52 AMMike...Thank you. What a thoughtful response.
And, for much of my life, I was right there.
I guess where I'm at now (which, admittedly, might not be any better) is that I've figured that by arguing on the world's terms, we're giving them a privileged position.
I like Mother Teresa's response: If you don't want your baby, please give it to me. I want it.
We can practice radical hospitality, hope for the future and welcoming the least of these without arguing on the world's terms. Like Paul said, against such thing there is no law.
They will see our good deeds and glorify our father in heaven. I guess I'm just exploring a more radical praxis and might agree with Stanley Hauerwas and others that the whole "pro-life" "pro-choice" debate is being argued from a modernist mindset that, ultimately, demands our allegiance to powers and principalities other than the kingdom.
Can we be salt and light without playing by the rules? I'm all for being in the world...but if our arguments are predicated on philosophies that are but teachings of me, then maybe we're being of the world.
Just trying to figure it all out. Thanks for listening.
Posted by Joey Aszterbaum | Posted at 09/09/2008 10:33 PMIt is a scientific certainty that human life, like canine and feline life, begins at the moment of fertilization. Religious faith has nothing to do with this fact. You may value life from the moment of fertilization or not value it, but the fact that life begins at fertilization is beyond all legitimate dispute. Those who don't know that life begins at fertilization (aka conception) are biologically ignorant. Posted by Jerry C. Stanaway | Posted at 09/26/2008 11:23 AM
Two thoughts, Obama clearly come out as a pro-choice candidate, no need to parse that. Secondly, this comment is one worth focusing on - To (”tell the truth, I was the president that reduced abortion the most”) B. Clinton If Bill Clinton is right why aren't we heading down that path with all due haste instead of lovingly supporting administrations and whose economic policies create more the climate of increased numbers of abortions, minimumum wage jobs, poverty, bankruptcies, foreclosures, unemployment and corporate welfare. The church seems to be convinced that the only good governement is one where 'their own annoited' people are in charge. For the last eight years this very scenario has been played out in spades and once again there is nothing to show for it - unless you count that the current party in power and the church now both look like they love war and hate minorities, love ignorance and hate education, despise the law, the will of the people and love bad governance. After 40 years of Repubs doing nothing to reduce abortions, pro-lifers are still voting for Repub party with the crazy hope that this time, finally, they'll do something. I'm a patient person, but after 40 years of failure we might do well to consider a different approach. Maybe? SO If Bill Cinton is has done the most, why doesn't the church consider promoting economic policies, education and secondary education policies where in abortion does seems less likely to be a choice? Why is it that the church seems to believe that the our best choice is not to teach, inspire or promote "all sound policies of conscience" but rather to get government to legislate a "single policy value of conscience"? Posted by daniel | Posted at 10/31/2008 7:13 PM