Published: December 9th, 2016
As we continue to celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ this Advent season,
Wilberforce Director Joe Boot offers a sobering reminder that thousands of
babies are being robbed of their chance at life, as society increasingly rejects
Christian ethics.
In
the first of this three part series, he urges us to make our case for Christ
"cosmologically" - understanding God's creation order. Social norms and
practices (including abortion) "manifest our religious commitments", he
says.
There is no time more appropriate to remember life in the womb than the
advent season. Christmas is almost upon us when we will celebrate the
Incarnation; the marvel that God the Son, the maker of heaven and earth, took
flesh. Tiny and vulnerable, the saviour was carried in the womb of a virgin and
was born a helpless baby in need of his mother’s love, nurture and protection.
As the lights, tinsel, and Christmas trees go up to ostensibly celebrate this
reality, thousands of abortions are taking place across the world every
day.
In a time when the ethical standards of Christianity are increasingly
rejected, objections to the immorality of this scourge upon our culture are
typically seen as mere moralising -
the outdated values of social or political conservatives; little more than
background noise. As such, Christian morality is often seen as judgmental,
self-righteous, or even an expression of hatred. In such a context we need to
re-learn to understand our faith and make our case as the early apologists did
amongst the pagans - cosmologically, not simply pragmatically. Cosmology simply refers to order
or structure. It is the way in which we look at and understand the order of
our world. It considers the big picture of reality and the implications which
flow from it. The one who ordered all reality, who called it into existence,
hallowed the womb by his incarnation, and the implications which flow from this
fact are profound indeed.
Typically, those of us deeply concerned with the preservation of innocent
life in the womb, reflecting the compassion and concern of our maker, start by
coming at the issues the way most do, with pragmatic considerations. We speak of
the negative health consequences of abortion, or reason scientifically by
showing that the unborn child is a human life from conception and that killing
the child is merely a form of murder. Important and significant as these
arguments are (and they must be made) many modern pro-abortion intellectuals
increasingly do
not attempt to deny these charges
and are unconcerned by them. For example, Camille Paglia, a social commentator
and pro-abortion writer has stated: "I
have always frankly admitted that abortion is murder, the extermination of the
powerless by the powerful, which results in the annihilation of concrete
individuals and not just clumps of insensate tissue." [1] For
such people there is a new cosmology, a new order - the autonomy of choice and
the absoluteness of man’s will and desire that is beyond good and evil (which is
to say it is a denial of transcendent law). Such a perspective of absolute
autonomy for man is informed by essentially religious considerations. It is
insufficient then for us to approach the issues and argue them only
pragmatically (and be accused of mere moralism). We must begin theologically and
philosophically. This is the way in which we can show that abortion is not
simply a war of words or wills, it is a dispute about the nature of all reality
itself.
In recently reading articles from a massive offering on Religion
and Ecology published by Oxford
University Press, I was reminded of two things that are clear in Scripture.
First, there really are only
two religions in which all people
of necessity participate - the worship and service of the creator or of the creation.
And second, that as a consequence, we are in a cosmic spiritual conflict that
manifests itself in the ideas and practices of every social order. Social and
cultural norms and practices are not neutral, coincidental or peripheral to
fundamental beliefs (cosmology); rather they manifest our religious
commitments.
Over the last fifty years in particular the religious sensibilities of
the modern Western world have turned eastward to inform our self-understanding.
Today the all-pervasive message conveyed in the culture is that mother-nature is all there is and all we have. There is no
infinite, personal, transcendent God separate from the universe, rendering the
Incarnation an impossible myth. The human person is insubstantial and socially
constructed. We occupy a shared biosphere that is characterized by a
finely-balanced interdependency rooted in the foundational oneness of all
things. Tragically, we are told that today human beings constitute a threat to
that balance as they reproduce. In all classical Eastern thought (once called
paganism, and which also dominated the West prior to Christianity), the first
premise of cosmology is the fundamental unity or oneness of everything that
exists - that unity has many names in paganism.
For the Chinese religions all things are constituted of ch’i;
in Hinduism everything participates in Brahman;
in Buddhism Anatta (no-soul or self) is reality and Nirvana is
that realization, and so on. In this oneist world of illusions there is no
transcendent God separate from the world (being in general), so we must live
harmoniously with all
things as our kith and kin and
maintain the right balances, karma and order. We do not look then to the
Incarnation for salvation, but to ourselves and our ideas. Thus, in all forms of
paganism, abortion is basically pragmatics, to be tolerated and at times even
promoted depending on the needs of nature or those of the state expressing the
divine will. For example, in Buddhism, abortion is not a termination (there is
no self) but a waiting room - life returned to nebulous sacred realms to bide
time before another rebirth.
Currently in the West the dominant thinking is that human numbers are a
threat to the delicate balance and unity of all things. It is suggested that the
earth can only sustain 4-16 billion depending on our consumption patterns -
obviously meaning that for some intellectuals the earth is already
overpopulated. Such people invariably do not see their own departure as part of
the solution. Harold Dorn has put it: "There
are two biological checks upon a rapid increase in numbers – a high mortality
and a low fertility. Unlike other biological organisms [humans] can choose which
of these checks shall be applied, but one of them must be." [2] In
short, one way or another, the human population, only one minor part of the
great cosmic chain of being, must be culled for the sake of nature’s well-being.
As a result, abortion is now promoted as a matter of human rights and autonomous choice, and a responsible one at that, contributing
to the well-being of the planet and preserving ‘freedom’ for the self-realizing
new god – man himself. In such a world, the virgin birth is not a sign of hope,
life and salvation, but a further harbinger of doom and an impediment to
freedom. Christian Concern.
