Southern Baptist Heritage of Life. Part I
by Timothy George Vol. VII, No. 2, February 1994
[Dr. Timothy George is founding dean of Beeson Divinity School, Samford University. He delivered this message to the Christian Life Commission's 26th Annual Seminar, "Life at Risk: Crises in Medical Ethics" in Nashville in March 1993. Copies in booklet form are available from the SBC CLC, 901 Commerce Street, #550, Nashville, TN 372033696. For publication in the Banner the address has been divided into two parts. The second will appear in our next issue. Italics are Dr. George's own. Bold print in the text has been added for emphasis.]
A Major Omission
The date was March 1980. [Note: This occurred before there had been any impact upon SBC trustee boards by the conservative resurgence that began in the SBC with the election in June 1979 of Adrian Rogers as president. His influence could not be reflected in trustee board composition until June 1981.] The place: the Roosevelt Hotel in New York City. The occasion: the annual seminar of the Christian Life Commission of the Southern Baptist Convention. Some 400 registrants from 25 different states gathered ... to discuss "Ethical Issues for the Eighties." The speakers addressed a host of concerns which they felt would be on the front burner of the ethical agenda in the decade ahead. Kirby Godsey, president of Mercer University, was there to talk about the crisis in education. Benjamin Hooks addressed the issue of race relations. Barry Commoner spoke about energy. Frances Lappe addressed the question of world hunger. Kurt Waldheim, the sitting Secretary General of the United Nations, talked about the prospects for peace in a world of conflict. There were papers on church-state tensions and personal lifestyle issues. And yes, Sara Weddington, special assistant to President Jimmy carter, also made an appearance and gave a lively speech on women in the eighties.(1)
Looking back now on this seminar 13 years later, one is struck, almost thunderstruck, by an omission of gargantuan proportions. In a conference intended to delineate the most pressing ethical issues to be faced by the American people in the 1980s, not one single speaker addressed the issue of abortion. Not even Sara Weddington, who had successfully argued the case of Roe v. Wade before the Supreme Court seven years before, made any reference to her historic role in this landmark decision. She spoke only in the code language about the eighties being a decade of increasing choice for women.
No one will dispute the urgency of the issues which were discussed on that occasion: racism, the nuclear arms buildup, the energy crisis, and so forth. But how can we account for the total lack of prescience on the part of the planners and participants of this conference that produced a conspiracy of silence on what would prove during the 1980s to be one of the most explosive, unnerving, and divisive moral struggles in the history of the American Republic?
Shifting Perspectives
Looking back now, we can see that at least part of the explanation is related to the fact that the 1980 CLC seminar occurred on the eve of a decade of denominational turbulence in the SBC. While the controversy in the SBC was a complex phenomenon involving serious theological, institutional, and cultural dimensions, it was, especially in its early stages, generated by a widespread reaction of the grass-roots constituency against a denominational bureaucracy from which they felt deep alienation. As evidence of this disjunction, the Southern Baptist Convention, meeting in St. Louis a mere three months after the CLC seminar in New York City, passed a resolution condemning the use of tax money for abortion on demand and calling for a constitutional amendment prohibiting abortion except to save the life of the mother. There was at least an intuitive awareness of this grass-roots insurgency among some of the participants at the CLC conference in New York. Dr. Jimmy Allen, at that time the immediate past president of the SBC, preached a sermon in which he expressed his concern about the direction of a new and restless activism which he sensed was growing among the rank and file. "There is a sign of [God's] visitation in the confrontation with the whole conscience as we are moving into our society.... I have moved among the folks now called Baptists for about 20 years, urging everybody to get involved with my understanding of values. And now they are all marching down to get involved and take charge of things, and I'm getting nervous about that" [my italics. TG].(2)
Many of the changes which Dr. Allen presaged and obviously feared have indeed come to pass, at least within the denomination over which he presided as the last moderate president. At the 1982 SBC in New Orleans the substance of the 1980 resolution on abortion was expanded to declare "...all human life, both born and pre-born, is sacred, bearing the image of God, and is not subject to personal judgments as to ‘quality of life' based on such subjective criteria as stage of development, abnormality, intelligence level, degree of dependency, cost of medical treatment, or inconvenience to parents." (3) This resolution also criticized infanticide, child abuse, and active euthanasia. Two years later in Kansas City, the Convention went beyond a stance of negative opposition to abortion to encouraging Southern Baptists "to provide counselling, housing, and adoption placement services for unwed mothers."(4) Three years later, in 1987, the Christian Life Commission sponsored its first national conference on abortion. The theme was "Choosing Life: Southern Baptists and Abortion." At the same time, the Home Mission Board began to train churches for ministry in crisis pregnancy centers. In January 1988, the Sanctity of Human Life Sunday was placed on the denominational calendar for the first time.
This shift has produced a new alignment between denominational programs and the Southern Baptist constituency. At the same time, Southern Baptists have also reached out in partnership with other evangelical groups on issues of life and death. This new alliance has produced quizzical looks on the part of many veterans of the moral and cultural wars that rage in our society. As Fred Loper, a family practice doctor, has expressed it: "Southern Baptists ... have been conspicuous until the last few years only by their relative absence from the field. That makes us stand out. There are other people in the field at least. We may not necessarily like what they do, but they are at least out there. That is the criticism of us: ‘Where have you been?"'(5) As a matter of fact, Southern Baptists were not completely absent from the abortion conflict prior to the eighties. Individual Southern Baptists served on groups such as the Christian Action Council and the National Right to Life Committee. In addition, Baptists for Life, chaired by John Holbrook, a Baptist pastor in Texas, circulated literature and sought to raise the consciousness of Southern Baptists on issues of life and death.
All the same, in an historical survey of Catholic and Baptist positions on abortion done in 1975, McLeod Bryan could find no prominent Baptist ethicist who had contributed significantly or written extensively on behalf of the pro-life position. Bryan's study was part of a ground-breaking dialogue between Catholics and Baptists on abortion ... Bryan began his study by asserting that opposition to abortion was a common position shared historically by these two diverse Christian traditions. "We could almost present the historical positions of Catholics and Baptists in a single sentence," he said. "Abortion is murder and altogether forbidden at any stage and under any circumstance – a position endorsed historically by both Catholics and Baptists.(6) However, Bryan went on to show how this consensus, which he perhaps overstated a bit too starkly, had already begun to break down by the mid-1970s.
On the one hand, he noted a growing ferment among Catholic moral theologians toward a more laxist, contextual approach to issues of sexual ethics including homosexuality and abortion. Among the advocates of this growing plurality of methodology and a more permissive stance on abortion were scholars such as Charles Curran, Daniel Maguire, Thomas O' Donnell, Daniel Callahan, and the feminist theologian Mary Daly. From various perspectives all of these writers were challenging the historic Catholic consensus against abortion and the magisterial authority of the church which had promulgated it.
On the Baptist side, of course, there was no such comparable body of highly developed tradition nor a superimposing magisterial hierarchy to undergird it. For this very reason, the slippage of Baptist leaders away from the historic consensus Bryan noted was accomplished much more easily and with less public fanfare. Thus, Baptist leaders were among the early supporters of the Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights, whose stated purpose was "to encourage and coordinate support for safeguarding the legal option of abortion; for insuring the right of individuals to make decisions in accordance with their consciences; and for opposing efforts to deny this right of conscience through constitutional amendment, or federal and state legislation."(7) Similarly, American Baptist pastor Howard Moody welcomed theRoe v. Wade decision in this way: "I am delighted. This is a landmark in relation to woman's rights."(8) With other abortion-rights activists, Reverend Moody had pioneered a clergy abortion counselling service near his congregation.
Among Southern Baptists, this position was represented by Dr. Andrew Lester, who published an article on "The Abortion Dilemma" in the Baptist journal, Review and Expositor, in the spring of 1971. Although written two years before Roe v. Wade, this article utilized the same terminology of Justice Blackmun in referring to the unborn child as "potential human life." Arguing from a contextual ethical perspective, Lester asserted that whatever rights might be accorded to the conceptus were perforce overridden by the rights of "those human beings who are actualized – functioning in the world with responsibilities, developed talents, and active relationships – all of whom should be given higher value than the potential human life residing in the fertilized egg."(9) Following this logic, he claimed the decision to abort should include as valid considerations the physical and/or psychological health of the mother; the welfare of the family and/or society; and the kind of physical, psychological, and social existence the fetus would experience when born.
Lest we think the view presented in this article was an isolated opinion on the margins of SBC life, it is well to remember that in this same year – 1971 – the Southern Baptist Convention meeting in St. Louis passed its first resolution on abortion. While this resolution included a perfunctory tribute to the "sanctity of human life," it was in essence a strong call for the liberalizing and legalizing of abortion in this country. The resolution called for the legitimizing of abortion not only for the hard cases of rape, incest, fetal deformity, and threat to the life of the mother, but also [for] "carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, as well as physical health of the mother."(10) The language used in this resolution adopted by America's largest Protestant, and arguably most conservative, denomination was nearly identical to that of a similar resolution passed by the Unitarian Universalist Association some eight years before.(11) Thus two years prior to the Supreme Court decision of 1973, which opened the floodgates to abortion on demand in the United States, the Southern Baptist Convention was on record advocating the decriminalization of abortion and extending the discretion of this decision into the realm of personal, privatized choice. The simple fact is that Roe v. Wade did little more than place a stamp of approval on what America's largest, most conservative Protestant denomination had already agreed to.
Lessons from History
The complicity and/or blindness of Southern Baptist leadership on such a critical moral front cannot be fully explained in terms of social, cultural, or church political trends. At the very heart of this ethical collapse was a profoundly theological failure of nerve. To illustrate this thesis, I want to refer to two episodes in the history of German Protestantism in the early twentieth century, both of which, I submit, form a gripping parallel to our own Southern Baptist situation on abortion.
The first incident involves the reaction of the Swiss pastor Karl Barth to the outbreak of the First World War on August 1, 1914. On that very day 93 German intellectuals issued a manifesto publicly identifying themselves with the war policy of Kaiser Wilhelm II, including the brutal violation of Belgian neutrality. At the time, Karl Barth was a minister in his first full-time church in the rural town of Safenwill in Switzerland. He was shocked to find among the signatories of the manifesto the names of almost all of his great German teachers, the theological masters with whom he had studied at Marburg and Berlin. From these great scholars he had imbibed the tradition of theological liberalism, which had hitherto guided his life and ministry as a pastor. "It was like the twilight of the gods," he said, "when I saw the reaction of Harnck, Hermann, Rade, Eucken and company to the new situation," and discovered how religion and scholarship could be changed completely "into intellectual 42 c.m. cannons."
The result was an experience of shattering disillusionment for the young Barth. "I did not know what to make of the teaching of all my theological masters in Germany. To me they seemed hopelessly compromised by what I regarded as their failure in the face of the ideology of war." Their "ethical failure" indicated that "their exegetical and dogmatic presuppositions could not be in order. Thus, a whole world of exegesis, ethics, dogmatics and preaching, which I had hitherto held to be essentially trustworthy, was shaken to the foundations, and with it, all the other writings of the German theologians."(12) It was precisely this experience which prompted Barth to break with the liberal theology in which he had been trained so thoroughly and to begin to search for a new doctrinal orientation, a quest which led him to what he called "the strange new world within the Bible." While it may be true, as his evangelical critics have claimed, that Barth was never quite able to sever the umbilical cord which bound him to the very liberalism against which he protested, his realization that ethical outcome is directly related to theological foundation remains as true today as it was in 1914.
And what is true of individual believers, pastors, and theologians is also a fortiori true of the church as a corporate entity in its public witness. To move forward in German history from World War I to World War II, from Kaiser Wilhelm II to Reichsfuhrer Adolf Hitler, is to raise the question of the resistance, or lack thereof, of the Christian churches in Germany to the Jewish policies of National Socialism. James Burtchaell, among others, has studied the record and motivation of the movement that effected the Holocaust with its eight million victims. They have discovered in the rhetoric and rationale of this movement a chilling analogy to the movement advocating elective abortions in our own culture, a movement which can boast over 30 million victims in the past 20 years. For example, both movements are characterized by the depersonalization of the victims. The Jews in Germany were referred to as Unternenschen, subhumans. Other antisocials – the mentally ill, the physically deformed, the racially impure – were also denied the designation human [Mensch]. They were referred to by the German justice ministry [!] as the Missgeburten den Holle, "the miscarriages of hell," fit only to be eliminated.(13) We are all too familiar with the euphemistic and derogatory nomenclature applied to the unborn in our own society today. The unborn have been designated as "protoplasmic rubbish," "a gobbet of meat protruding from the human womb," "the fetal-placental unit," " fallopian and uterine cell matter," "the products of pregnancy," "sub-human nonpersonhood," and so on.(14)
It is not our purpose to pursue this analogy further, but rather to point out the glaring silence and line of least resistance put forth by the major culture-shaping Christian traditions in the face of both holocausts. As Nazi anti-Semitism moved from theory to praxis, Christian leaders of Germany were reluctant to speak against this state-sponsored, legally sanctioned policy of violence, although many of them feared the worst. While there were halting protests along the way, most of the were theologically unfounded and politically ineffective. For example, the Nurember laws were objected to not on the grounds th all Jews were fellow human beings created i the image of God and thus entitled to a basi right to life, but rather on the self-serving and expedient grounds that certain Christian Jews would be swept along in the general persecution of all Jewish ethnics. As has been noted by others, "when the liquidation program moved East, turned genocidal, and swept away millions, it was then beyond the ability of the churches to oppose Hitler publicly and effectively. Nor did they try."(15)
The one major exception to this trend was the witness of the confessing church and its theology of resistance expressed in the Barmen Declaration of 1934. Here it was declared that the impregnable foundation of Christian church is the gospel of Jesus Christ revealed in Holy Scripture and reflected in confessional heritage of the Reformation. As the signatories to the Barmen Declaration put it: "precisely because we want to be and to remain true to our various confessions of faith, we may not keep silent, for we believe that in a time of common need and trial (Anfectung) a common word has been placed in our mouth."(16) The framers of Barmen rightly saw that the ethical nightmare which was about to seize the German people in 1934 was directly related to the dissolution of fundamental theological and confessional integrity among the churches. Here they took their stand, suffering the consequences of exile (Barth), imprisonment (Niemoeller), and death (Bonhoeffer).
Others chose to play it safe. Apart from Barmen, there was no concerted, public, official stand taken by any major Christian church in Germany against the Holocaust. Thus after the war the Protestant Evangelische Kirche in Deutschland confessed: "Before the God of mercy we share in the guilt for the outrage committed against the Jews by our own people through omission and silence."(17) The Baptist Union of Germany has recently issued similar statement of contrition. Nor are Southern Baptists exempt from this incrimination. Many Southern Baptist leaders attended th Baptist World Alliance Congress in Berlin in 1936. They met under the banner of the swastika, received greetings from Hitler, and returned to America with glowing reports on the great things happening in Germany. They specifically minimized the totalitarianism and glaring anti-Semitism which was obvious even in 1936.
A Loss of Vision
With these historical lessons in mind, let me state the central thesis of this pamphlet: The failure of the Southern Baptist Convention to make a timely and prophetic response to the holocaust of abortion on demand reflects the loss of theological vision, resulting in the malign neglect and distorted understanding of the most basic doctrinal affirmations we profess to believe. It is beyond the scope of this presentation to give an account of how this slippage came about. Elsewhere I have suggested that it is related to the loss of intentional Christian instruction and congregational discipline within our churches together with a pervasive philosophy of pragmatism in church life which has produced quantitative success at the expense of theological identity.(19) Put otherwise, the problem is not merely that we have had a few theological liberals in our seminaries and denominational bureaucracy. That is the mere outcropping of a more basic and systemic problem; namely, the erosion of doctrinal substance and the failure to think through theologically the great issues of our time. Only this kind of slippage can account for the fact that the entire convention in 1971 was willing to follow willy-nilly the directives of its denominational elites on an issue of such profound moral and social consequence.
If this line of reasoning is at all valid, it has important implications not only for the analysis of recent trends in SBC life, but also for the future directions we must take. I, for one, regard the reversal of the denominational trends of the sixties and seventies as a providential moving of God in our midst. Had we continued along the so-called progressive trajectory we had set during those turbulent decades, we undoubtedly would have become just another mainline Protestant denomination, bereft of our missionary and evangelistic zeal and tossed and turned by every new-wave ideology that comes down the pike. For this rescue, all of us who care deeply about the great heritage which has shaped our beloved denomination can give thanks to God. However, a word of warning is also in order: The mere replacement of one set of bureaucrats with another does not a Reformation make. Unless there is genuine spiritual and theological renewal within our churches, the very pro-life views we have come lately to espouse could well be eroded under the pressures of an increasingly hostile political environment.
It is well to remember that the pro-life position gained wide acceptance across Southern Baptist life in the context of a political climate that was at least partially favorable to the protection of the unborn. Today we face the very real possibility of the passage of the Freedom of Choice Act, militant abortion rights lobbying within every level of society, and the probability of a Supreme Court which will likely back further and further away from the Webster decision with a reversal of Roe v. Wade, seemingly a real possibility just a few months ago, becoming more and more remote in the foreseeable future. Unless our ethical decisions are grounded in something more enduring than the shifting sands of Realpolitik, we may well pass on to the rising generation the same kind of vacuous mind-set which produced our denominational paralysis at the beginning of the pro-life struggle some 30 years ago. What is called for is a more thorough grounding of the ethics of life in the basic theological fundamentals of our evangelical Baptist and Christian heritage. The Christian Life Commission, together with the Sunday School Board and the Home Mission Board, have a special role to play as agencies charged by our Convention with developing resources and opportunities for ministry in this area. However, the theological renewal that must come cannot be a trickle down phenomenon. It must arise from conscientious commitment of every pastor, every Sunday School teacher, every student minister and social worker, every professor in every seminary and college classroom across our beloved Convention. What we need is not only social awareness and political activism but theological revival!
1. Ethical Issues for the Eighties. 1980 Christian Life Commission Seminar Proceedings.
2. Ibid., 59. See Timothy George, "Toward an Evangelical Future," Southern Baptists Observed: Multiple Perspectives on a Changing Denomination, ed. Nancy Ammerman (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1993), 276-300.
3. Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1982, p. 65.
4. Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1984, p. 66.
5. Choosing Life: Southern Baptists and Abortion. Proceedings of the 1987 National Conference on Abortion, 11.
6. Seminar on Abortion. Proceedings of a Dialogue between Catholics and Baptists (November 10-12, 1975), 10. In the 1940s theology professor Harold W. Tribble openly referred to abortion as murder in his classes at Southern Seminary. Personal Conversation with Fred M. Wood, May 27, 1993.
7. "A Call to Concern," Religious Coalition for Abortion Rights.
8. Seminar on Abortion, 17.
9. Andrew Lester, "The Abortion Dilemma," Review and Expositor, 67 (1971), 233.
10. Annual of the Southern Baptist Convention, 1971, p. 72.
11. George Huntson Williams, "Religious Residues and Presuppositions in the American Debate on Abortion," Theological Studies, 31 (1970), 51.
12. Eberhard Busch, Karl Barth (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1976), 81.
13. James T. Burtchaell, Rachel Weeping: The Case against Abortion (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1978), 148.
14. Ibid., 196.
15. Ibid., 183.
16. Creeds of the Churches, ed. John H. Leith (Atlanta: John Knox Press, 1982), 519.
17. Burtchaell, Rachel Weeping, 183.
18. Cf. William Lloyd Allen, "How Baptists Assessed Hitler," The Christian Century, (Sept. 1, 1982), 891-92.
19. Timothy George, "Conflict and Identity in the SBC: The Quest for a New Consensus," Beyond the Impasse?: Scripture, Interpretation, and Theology in Baptist Life, eds. Robison B. James and David S. Dockery (Nashville: Broadman Press, 1992), 195-214.
[Though this article originally appeared in two parts in the February and April 1994 Banner issues, here they are presented together for the convenience of the reader. TCP]
Southern Baptist Heritage of Life, Part II
by Dr. Timothy George Vol. VII, No. 3, April 1994
[This is the second half of an article begun in our last issue. Timothy George is founding dean of the Beeson Divinity School at Samford University and gave this as an address to the Christian Life Commission's 26th Annual Seminar, "Life at Risk: Crises in Medical Ethics," in March 1993. Italics in original; bold print added for emphasis.]
Theological Roots
... I will turn now to examine briefly three major doctrinal loci, each of which is crucial for an ethics of life that is both grounded in the witness of the Holy Scripture and faithful to the evangelical heritage of the Baptist tradition. We shall look briefly, then, at the doctrine of God, the Incarnation, and the mission of the church.
For the past decade and a half, theological controversy among Southern Baptists has focussed almost exclusively on the authority and inspiration of the Bible. This issue became a matter of public concern because the total truthfulness of God's Word had been compromised in certain quarters by blatant concession to a destructive form of historical-critical methodology. On numerous occasions since 1963, when the Baptist Faith and Message was adopted, Southern Baptists have affirmed an unswerving commitment to the divine inspiration and inerrancy of Holy Scripture, the Word of God revealed in written form. Those Southern Baptists who have argued for the moral acceptability of abortion have chosen not to challenge this basic Baptist commitment. Rather, they have argued that their own position is really more, not less, biblical than that of their pro-life opponents, citing the fact that the Bible nowhere specifically says, "Thou shalt not have an abortion." Of course, it is also true that the Bible nowhere says thou shalt not commit uxoricide, the murder of one's wife, nor infanticide, the murder of a post-born child. However, behind the hermeneutical squabble over biblical evidence for or against abortion looms a larger, often unnoticed, theological premise; namely, the nature and character of the very God who inspired the Bible in the first place.
1. The Doctrine of God. The doctrine of God is the cornerstone of Christian theology. Historically, Baptists have affirmed, along with other believers in the classical Christian tradition, the sovereignty and ascetic of the one eternal God of Holy Scripture who both knows Himself and has made Himself known to us as Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. We confess that God is infinite in all perfections, which means that He is all-sufficient, neither standing in need of any creatures He has made, nor deriving any glory from them, but rather manifesting His own glory in, by, unto, and upon them. This God is the fountain of all being. He alone is the inexhaustible source of all life, glory, goodness, and blessedness. He is all-knowing, all powerful, and omnipresent. God is utterly transcendent, graciously beneficent, and immutably just in all His dealing with humankind.
It is precisely this God, and not another, who has created human beings, males and females, in His own image, only in virtue of which do they possess "the right to life." An ethic of life encompasses both the doctrines of creation and providence. Human beings derive their origin by a direct act of God initiated in the divine counsel ("Let us make man in our own image..."). The imago dei signifies that every human being stands in a direct and inviolable relation to the Creator. What is important to recognize here is that in creating human life and endowing it with His own divine image, God was moved by no necessity nor constraint either internal or external to His own being, but solely by what the new Testament calls the eudokia, the good pleasure, of His divine will. This means quite simply that at the most basic level human beings are not necessary in an ontological or metaphysical sense. God would have been not one whit less God had He chosen not to create the world or human beings within it.
However, rather than mitigating the significance of human life, this truth underscores its abiding validity and unique importance. Since God has chosen to invest His own glory in creatures made in His own image, then the inviolability and independent integrity of that life must be protected even, nay especially, in its embryonic development. The assault upon the unborn is nothing less than an attack upon the Creator of life itself.
An example of the theological confusion related to this very basic point is seen in David Hughes' recent claim that we should ditch the term "sanctity of human life" in favor of the more general "respect" or "reverence for life."(20) This latter term, of course, is associated with Albert Schweitzer, the great philanthropist and liberal theologian, whose radical biblical scholarship led him to abandon every vestige of orthodox, supernaturalist Christianity in favor of a kind of pantheistic spirituality. While we may all applaud Schweitzer's sacrificial exploits as a missionary doctor in Africa, we dare not follow his rejection of the central biblical and Christological affirmations of the Christian faith. The word sanctus means not only "holy" but also "set apart." In the biblical perspective, human life is both holy and set apart from all other forms of finite life by virtue of its capacity to bear the image of the Triune God.
Certainly we must reject the kind of myopic logic that sees obligations to life in utero but fails to accept responsibility for the quality of life extra uterum. However, it is the sanctity of human life and not a mere reverence for life in general that underscores the integrity and eternal value of the humanum from inception to death, a death which we cannot believe the gracious God intended to occur by violent human intrusion even prior to birth. Thus, the sanctity of human life extends back to one's beginnings, deriving as it does from the holy and set apart God, maker of heaven and earth, in whom we live, move, and have our being.
It is significant that Southern Baptist advocates of pro-choice have themselves identified the doctrine of God as the crucial theological divide on the issues of abortion. For example, Paul Simmons has written: "One of the most glaring weaknesses in the fundamentalist theology regarding abortion is its doctrine of providence. What is at issue is the way in which God is related to the entire process of conception and birth or the processes of nature such. For fundamentalists, God is the cause and power of all that is; God governs all natural processes. This is important for them in supporting the absolutism of their stance against abortion.... What is at stake in the fundamentalist's posture is a Calvinistic stress on the sovereignty of God."(21) Dr. Simmons then proceeds to identify three profound problems caused by this skewed view of God's providence: (1) The goodness of God is compromised in favor of God's power. This turns God into a cruel deity and prompts fundamentalists to reject "scientific notions of chance and randomness that work in the creative process and thus react strongly to any notion that God is not totally in control." (2) Human beings are seen as passive victims who can only bear whatever tragedy may befall. "It is unthinkable to argue that people, made in the image of God, may have to make some godlike decisions regarding our stewardship of procreative powers, as in abortion. (3) A limited and inadequate view of grace does not give permission "to act with boldness in spite of ambiguity."(22) Taken together these arguments clearly show how the abandonment of the historic Baptist doctrine of God and His providence made possible the justification and acceptance of a pro-choice ideology among various leaders within the Southern Baptist Convention.
The biblical doctrine of providence, affirmed by historic Baptist confessions, refers to God's daily care for all creatures, His divine guidance of the course of human history, and indeed His infallible ordering of the entire cosmos so as to accomplish what He has proposed for all of eternity to do. Put otherwise, God's providence encompasses His preservation of creation, His direction of all things toward their ultimate goal, and His governance of every event, circumstance, and process toward the consummation of all things which will be accomplished in God's own time. God's sovereignty and providence does not entail fatalism since God works in such a way that human free will is sustained and human responsibility is required. On the other hand, the pro-choice theology of providence seems to involve a mixture of deism and chance. God appears as the deus otiosus, the lazy god who observes human events from a far distance, leaving the world he has made to run its course more or less on its own. Within this world randomness or chance is at work wreaking havoc throughout the created realm.
Over against this view, Baptists have historically confessed, with orthodox Christians everywhere, that the God we worship and serve is the omnipotent Lord of time and eternity. There is no random force, no gaping chaos, no spiritual black hole, over which He is not the supreme Lord and ultimate victor. This view of God's providence does not solve all the hard cases related to abortion. But it does provide a theological foundation for affirming God's sustaining presence and overcoming grace in every tragic situation which occurs in our fallen world. In the face of suffering and tragedy and questions which submit to no easy answers, true piety will realize that behind the hurt we experience, God remains in His justice, wisdom, and love the Father who has promised never to leave or forsake us. Far from inspiring passive resignation or bitter outrage, this doctrine of providence has sustained countless men and women in moments of crisis, danger, and death.
2. Incarnation. While historic Baptist theology affirms without compromise the sovereignty and providential governance of Al mighty God, this God is not to be equated with the First Cause, Unmoved Mover, or Final Force of Aristotelian metaphysics. At the heart of the Christian message, indeed that which characterizes it as gospel, good news, is the proclamation that this omnipotent, eternal God has chosen not to spend eternity with Himself, "the alone with the alone," as Arius puts it. The God of creation is also the Lord of redemption. In the person of His Son Jesus Christ, God has intimately identified Himself with the human condition, as a baby in a manger, as a man on a cross. It is part of the offense of particularity that when God became man, He did not bypass our humanity but came into the very thick of it with genes and chromosomes and a fingerprint of His own.
Advocates of elective abortion, including some Southern Baptists, have seized upon the fact that the New Testament nowhere explicitly condemns this practice. As one of them has recently put it: "The biblical writer's silence on abortion reveals a becoming reticence to judge too quickly concerning the morality of another person's choice. It is eloquent testimony to the sacredness of this choice for women and their families and the privacy in which it is to be considered."(23) Indeed, we are tempted to think we would be spared many useless debates had the Holy Spirit seen fit to inspire one of the biblical writers to include a prohibition of abortion among one of the various lists of sinful vices in the ancient world. We should be careful, however, in jumping too hastily to this conclusion since the repeated condemnation of homosexual behavior in the New Testament has done little to prevent certain Christians, including some Southern Baptists, from ignoring and circumventing its plain meaning.
On the other hand, Michael J. Gorman, among others, has argued that the silence of the New Testament on this issue, far from implying neutrality or ambiguity, simply reflected the continuation of the pro-life norm inherited from Judaism. Moreover, when the abortion temptation did arise as a specific problem, the church answered with an unequivocal no. This is clearly borne out in early Christian writings such as the Didache, the Epistle of Bamabas, the Apocalypse of Peter, not to mention the more explicit condemnations of later church fathers such as Minucius Felix, Tertullian, Cyprian, Chrysostom, Jerome, Augustine, and others. That the anti-abortion stance of the early church was a matter of public witness, and not merely private belief, is borne out by the statement of Athenagoras, a second-century apologist, who addressed this statement to the emperor, Marcus Aurelius: "How can we kill a man when we are those who say that all who use abortifacients are homicides and will account to God for their abortions as for the killing of men? For the fetus in the womb is not an animal, and it is God's providence that he exists."(25)
Other scholars have pointed to various stands in the literature of the New Testament which, when taken together, certainly anticipate the consensus of the early church teaching on the sanctity of human life. For example, when Joseph discovered the unexpected pregnancy of his teenage fiancee, he contemplated divorce but not abortion. Jesus' concern and identification with the "least of these," including the vulnerable, the helpless, "the little ones," offense against whom He warned would surely bring divine judgment; the listing of Pharmakeia in Gal. 5:19-21, arguably a warning against the use of abortion-inducing drugs; the love commandment; and the Golden Rule together with the extraordinary interest in the fetal and infant life of Jesus Himself as reflected in the infancy narratives. (26)
While all of these texts have important implications for a contemporary ethic of life, to my mind the central New Testament text on this issue is John 1:14: "And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth." This verse has tremendous implications for Christian anthropology for, as John Calvin wisely noted, the full meaning of the image of God can be nowhere better recognized than in the restoration of our corrupted nature in the incarnate son of God, the second Adam, in whom alone our true and complete humanity is restored (Institutes, 1.15.4).
Fundamental to the reality of the Incarnation is the unity of body and soul, as distinct from various kinds of Greek and Eastern dualism. The eternal Word, Logos, could not have become flesh, sarx, if this unity were not the distinctive reality of human beings. The God-man is at once the true pattern of authentic human personhood and the divine Word of life itself.
The Johannine text asserts what to the Greek mind was unthinkable, ho logos egeneto sarx, "the Word became flesh." It does not say merely that the Word assumed a human person. That would have been conceivable and more palatable to the Greek mind, as the gods of Olympus often masqueraded as human characters. However, to assert so boldly that the Word became flesh is to claim that God Himself has entered the human arena at its most vulnerable point. So central was this affirmation to the New Testament church that Christians are admonished to regard as antichrist anyone who denies that Jesus Christ has come in the flesh (1 John 4:2-3).
Over against the doctrine of the incarnation stands the docetic Christology of Gnosticism with its disparagement of matter. In this view the body is beyond redemption; the true self is the spirit or soul within. We are witnessing the revival of gnostic anthropology in the modern movement for elective abortions. One advocate of this position has claimed: "Humans are actually spirits. The spirit exists prior to birth and will go on existing after the body dies. I propose that the spirit of a particular human enters the body along with the first breath of air. Not until the first voluntary breath of the child is the full-fledged human present .... (27) In the face of the gnostic disparagement of human reality, the early church pointed to the centrality of the Incarnation, confessing that Jesus Christ was truly (alethos) conceived in the womb of the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit; He was truly born in the manger of Bethlehem; He truly lived, truly died on the cross, and truly rose from the grave. In like manner, He will truly come again and thus we confess our faith in the resurrection of the body, not just the reabsorption of the spirit into the divine Pleroma. In the face of contemporary theories of human development which marginalize the sacred value of unborn human life, we can do no better than to echo the words of the apostle Paul, "When the time had fully come, God sent forth His Son, born of a women" (Gal.4:4).
The Christological consensus which sustained the confessing church in Nazi Germany must undergird our own efforts to bear a faithful witness in the midst of our Kirchenkampf [Literally "church-battle," refers to the spiritual struggle going on within our culture and even our denomination. TCP] today. In solidarity with Barmen, we too confess: "Jesus Christ, as He has testified to us in the Holy Scripture, is the one Word of God, whom we are to hear, whom we are to trust and obey in life and in death .... Just as Jesus Christ is the pledge of the forgiveness of all our sins, just so – and with the same earnestness – He is also God's mighty claim on the entirety of human life; in Him we encounter a joyous liberation from the godless claims of this world to free and thankful service to His creatures."(28)
3. The Mission of the Church. The erosion of theological and Christological foundations in our common life as Southern Baptists has also called into question our identity and mission as a corporate people of God called to bear witness in a culture of decline. Again and again, Southern Baptist advocates for abortion rights have appealed to traditional Baptist notions of soul competency, religious liberty, and the priesthood of all believers as a rationale for relegating the decision to abort to the realm of privatized morality. For example, in a recent article published by Americans United for Separation of Church and State, it is boldly stated that abortion should be legally available to every woman, "the moral agents whose rights are uniquely at stake. Gestating life should be seen in terms of its value to the woman, the couple or society itself, and not in terms of obvious or intrinsic personhood."(29) Still another Baptist ethicist has written, "Our Baptist heritage is clear on this matter. We must stand for the liberty to choose: whether to bear a child or withdraw life support from a fetus .... The freedom of the individual to choose is paramount and must not be sacrificed to rhetoric that deifies the conceptus making personal freedom [subordinate] to biological determinism."(30)
Baptists do indeed have a splendid history as champions of religious liberty, a record from which we dare not retreat, especially in a time and nation where this precious freedom is increasingly under attack. The Baptist commitment to religious liberty, however, has never been a pretext either for doctrinal indifference or moral laxity. The doctrine of religious liberty claims the right of every congregation to order its own internal life, its doctrine and discipline, in accordance with its own perception of divine truth. It requires that there be no external political monitoring of the internal religious life of voluntary associations. However, historically this principle has never meant, and it must not now be twisted to mean, that Baptists must wink at theological heresy in the name of tolerable diversity, or that they must be silent in the face of outrageous moral evil within the environing culture which surrounds them.
As I have argued elsewhere, the priesthood of all believers has more to do with the Christian's service than with his status.(31) It is not a prerogative on which we can rest; it is a commission which sends us forth into the world to exercise a priestly ministry not for ourselves, but for others – the outsiders – not instead of Christ, but for the sake of Christ and at His behest. To reduce the decision of abortion to the level of privatized morality is to equate Christianity with a kind of modern individualism which in its flight from community and responsibility is the very antithesis of the biblical metaphor for the church as the Body of Christ, a pilgrim people bound together in covenant one with another and with God, a prophetic company of called-out ones charged by Christ Himself to shine forth as lights and to season as salt in a world which has lost its moral bearings. There is, of course, another side to this kind of costly witness: the call not only to be against promiscuous abortions, but also the mandate to stand beside those caught up in the trauma of such an act, the proclamation of forgiveness, the extension of compassion, the love of Christ which reaches out to embrace, to restore, and to heal. If all we have to offer is a raucous protest to the evil about us, then we have not yet come to truly know our Savior in the koinonia of His sufferings and the power of His resurrection.
It is ironic, perhaps, that the church of Jesus Christ finds itself today in a position quite similar to one which prevailed at the beginning of the Christian era. In those days it was surrounded by a society in which abortion and infanticide were practiced frequently. Drawing on the biblical and theological substance of the Christian faith, Christians stood over against the culture and combatted this evil in word and deed. As my professor and mentor, George Hunston Williams of Harvard, has pointed out, it is anomalous that at the very moment when we know the most about the process of conception and prenatal life, we are witnessing the devolution of the moral conscience of society back toward a pagan, pre-Christian disregard for the sanctity of human life, a retreat led in many quarters by the very professions, medical and legal, and yes religious, which should be pledged to its protection.(32) If Southern Baptists are to maintain a consistent Christian witness on issues of life and death in this kind of increasingly hostile environment, then we must dig down to the deep roots and firm foundations of the faith that was once for all entrusted to the saints, to the end that we be no longer children, tossed by the waves and whirled about by every fresh gust of teaching, duped by crafty rogues and their deceitful schemes. Rather, we must speak the truth in love, and thus shall we fully grow up into Christ. May God help us so to live and so to act and so to speak.
20. David Hughes, "Paying Our Respects to Life," Global Discipleship. Published by the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship.
21. Paul D. Simmons, "A Theological Response to Fundamentalism on the Abortion Issue," in Abortion: The Moral Issues, Edward Batchelor, Jr. (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982), 180.
22. Ibid., 180-82.
23. Paul D. Simmons, Personhood, the Bible, and the Abortion Debate, quoted in Michael J. Gorman, "Why Is the New Testament Silent about Abortion?" Christianity Today, (January 11, 1993), 28. 24. Ibid.
25. Athenagoras, Patrologia Graeca 6.919.
26. See John T. Noonan, "An Almost Absolute Value in History," in The Morality of Abortion, ed. John T. Noonan (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970), 1-59.
27. Warren F. Metzler,"Why Abortion Isn't Murder," First Things 31 (March 1993), 4.
28. Creeds of the Churches, 520-521.
29. Paul D. Simmons, "Dogma and Discord: Religious Liberty and the Abortion Debate," Church and State (January 1990), 18.
30. Howard Moody, "Baptists and Freedom: Some Reminders and Remembrances of Our Past for the Sake of Our Present," American Baptist Quarterly vol. 3 (March 1984), 8-9.
31. Timothy George, "The Priesthood of all Believers and the Quest for Theological Integrity," Criswell Theological Review 3 (1989), 283-294. For a discussion of how the "right to life" has been overridden by the "right to privacy," see Larry R. Churchill and Jose Jorge Siman, "Abortion and the Rhetoric of Individual Rights," Hastings Center Report 12 (1982), 9-12.
32. George Hunston Williams, "The Sacred Condominium," in The Morality of Abortion, 171.