How Christians and the Right have it Wrong on Abortion
Christians and the Right have it wrong on abortion. They are not the only ones who have it wrong. But they do have it wrong. Let me be clear. I am a Christian too. I think abortion is wrong. I support banning it. Let's get to the specifics.
The conservative right tries to argue against abortion as though this is not a religious issue. This is exactly where the problem lies. This is absolutely a religious issue. 100%. End of story. Get over it.
A cow that is slaughtered for hamburgers or a sheep for mutton has a larger and more developed brain than a baby in the early stages in the womb. You cannot scientifically claim that these animals which are murdered by the thousands daily have less of a thought life than a fetus. Speaking for myself, and probably for pretty much everyone else, there is nothing evil about killing cows for food. I am literally eating a hamburger as I am writing this.
An early fetus has a smaller less developed brain than a sheep or cow. It's tiny. This is why abortion is legal up to a point after which it becomes illegal. Science can only deal with what we can physically observe. From the perspective of an atheist, there is no soul. All of your thought life, choices, emotions, desires, hopes and consciousness is in your brain. Therefore, an early fetus has less of this than a cow or sheep in the slaughterhouse. If you aren't concerned about the destruction of the animal's consciousness, then you shouldn't be concerned about the destruction of the early fetus' consciousness.
Except of course for one thing, the soul. According to the Bible, God has gifted humans with the blessing of a rational soul. The Bible is very smart for saying this. It says we are spiritual beings that are embodied in a physical form that is our first possession in this world. One day we will shed this body and be given a new one.
If we introduce the concept of souls, then life begins at conception. Since we know souls inhabit bodies, then once there is a distinct and new human body, then there is an individual, sacred unique soul embodied there.
So let's move on to the next question. Should abortion be banned? Since you cannot ban it without belief in a soul, then what about atheists? They don't believe in anything supernatural like souls. Should they be forced to obey the teachings of the Bible? To get at an answer, let's look at three basic truths taught by the Bible. These truths are inescapable and immovable.
Truth 1)
Christianity is not to be forced on people.
Proof:
Paul taught believers to obey the Roman government even though he and they were breaking the law by being Christians. Paul often wrote from jail. Therefore, Paul doesn't mean do whatever the government says. But he does mean go along with it as much as you can. If you were going to force people to be Christians, then you would need to get an army together.
Furthermore, Paul doesn't set out to end slavery politically. Rather he tells slaves to obey their masters as though it is Christ. Then he tells the masters to do the same thing to the slaves. Thus slavery would end once the household was converted. But to tell masters to free their slaves would have been illegal. It was against Roman law to do this before the slave reached 30, which few people reached at that time, especially slaves. Telling masters to free slaves would have been a military rebellion against Rome.
As Jesus said, His kingdom was not of this world. If it was, then His followers would fight to prevent his arrest. The Kingdom of God is a spiritual invasion. Therefore, people are not to be forced to be Christian. This is an immovable truth of the Bible.
Truth 2)
The government has a God given responsibility to punish evildoers with violence.
Paul tells the young believers not to eat meat sacrificed to idols. This was illegal. But in the previous chapter he tells them to submit to the government. Coming from a man who was often jailed for spreading the message of Jesus, we can safely say that he means obey the government as much as you can. He then justifies this by saying that even evil governments are put in place by God to punish evildoers with violence. It is a God given responsibility. He is quite clear on this.
Truth 3)
Christians are to obey God.
Finally, this simply means that what to do and what not to do is a religious question for Christians. It always is. Peter says to set apart Christ in your hearts as Lord. Paul says that he takes every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. John tells us that if God's Spirit is in us, then we will obey God. This means that if a Christian does anything, then she must do what God says.
So let's combine all 3 of these and see what we get.
Christianity is not to be spread by force.
The government has a God given responsibility to punish evildoers with violence.
Christians are to obey God.
The conclusion means that if a Christian is running the government, the she must enforce what God has commanded. But she must not force people to be Christian. Therefore she can only enforce some of what God commands. For example, God commands us not to steal or murder. She must punish this or else she punishes nothing. But she cannot make a law requiring people to devote their lives to Christ. This would be spreading Christianity by force.
So there are two extremes. On one side, you have to punish some things. You can't let people get away with any evil deed. But you cannot punish people for disobeying everything God commands. So where do you draw the line? We can return to the slavery issue here for an answer. It is helpful here.
Paul didn't tell everyone to start a war to free all the slaves. Rather he taught submission to the government. But he also taught that Christian slaves and masters are to treat each other as equals. Over time, Christianity was the thing that ended slavery in the world. The Catholic Church pushed for it during the early middle ages and achieved it in Europe by the 900's. Then the Spanish Emperor brought it back in the 1400's against the demands of the Pope. But the soon to be born Protestant Church was totally okay with it. Then, in the 1800's, the Protestants got it together. Numerous small Christian movements happened all over the US and England that pushed for abolition. The state of slavery today is the product of Christianity.
Today, people think it's just common sense that slavery should end. But when Christianity started, the Romans didn't think that at all. The early Christians were counter cultural. But over time they changed the culture to come into conformity with Christian values. The culture isn't as different from Christianity as it once was. My simple point is this. We did it before. We can do it again. We can transform the culture. Once we have transformed our culture to understand that abortion is wrong, then we should ban it. It obviously would be the thing to do at that point.
Any justification of violent force is built upon what a culture considers sacred. A handful of men armed with box cutters flew jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and killed a thousand more people than the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. They did this because they said God told them to do it. We didn't give them the right to exercise their religion freely. We hunted down the rest of their group and killed them. Once the culture is transformed, then people will simply see that abortion is murderous evil and that it cannot be allowed.
In the case of the Civil War, people were divided over the slavery issue. And even the abolitionists were divided over whether slaves should be freed by force or by democratic debate. But let's say that the South had simply invaded the North because God told them to. Would the North really do anything other than fight back and righteously so?
So when is the use of force to command obedience to the Bible justified from a Christian perspective? Paul's perspective is that the government has been put in place by God with a duty to punish evildoers with violence. He even says this about the Romans. In other words, it's when you are the government. In the Bible, God makes it clear that He manages politics for His purposes. He sends Israel to judge Canaan only after He gave the Canaanites time to possibly change their evil ways. He says that He sent the Persian ruler Cyrus to judge the Babylonians.
In the Civil War, Lincoln opposed the idea that anyone really knows what God's will is. He wanted slavery to end peacefully via debate. But the war broke out anyway. The South seceded over the northern states' refusal to comply with federal law on returning slaves. Slaves had been escaping to the north and gaining freedom. This was against the laws duly passed by Congress. The North then invaded the South. They justified military force on the grounds of preservation of the democratic Union. To them, the South was committing treason. It's no different than Benedict Arnold. I'd have to agree with the North's choice to invade here. For a government to exist at all, the people can't just take huge portions of it and form another nation with a separate government and army.
But Lincoln's mind eventually changed. The long horror of the war surprised everyone. While attending another of his son's funerals, Lincoln came to believe that God was punishing the United States for the sin of slavery. Simply put, he saw that it was time in the providence of God to use force to ban slavery. There is good reason to think that Lincoln wasn't even a believer in God up to this point. Because of this, he pushed forward an actual law, the emancipation proclamation, to end slavery.
I think Lincoln's example is instructive. There comes a point where you just know that it's God's time. There comes a point where the culture is simply ready to change and come into obedience to God. Essentially, at some point you really have a nation that has formed within a nation. This new nation is simply in possession of a new culture which is dedicated to new propositions.
But is there any way to know when this is apart from some special guidance from God? Maybe not. We can say that you'd need a truly new culture to have formed. Let's be clear about one really important thing. The case of abortion is like the case of slavery because it's about using military force when it is time for the culture to change. This is not the same as an existing culture being attacked and threatened from the outside. In the case of existing cultural values, you would of course enforce those. The Nazis can't try to take over the world and set up an evil empire. We can't allow that. We will bomb you to ashes until you stop. But using violence to literally change a culture into something new requires two things. First the new culture would need to be strong within the old one. Second you'd need something from God too. That's my best guess here.
Now you could argue that abortion was illegal and was legalized. Thus you might say that it was an invasion from the outside. This is totally wrong. When it comes to the abortion issue, atheism was already a powerful force within Western Culture since the French Revolution. The laws did change to legalize it when it had previously been banned. Legalization was new. But this was merely bringing the legal system into line with a much older cultural change. The 1800's were dominated with religious thinkers who doubted any proof for religion. On the liberal side, groups had begun a long process of trading away the long held doctrines for about 200 years at that point. On the conservative side, the dominant view was that there was no way to prove religion true, but they will believe it anyway. Secularism had long been a dominant cultural force. Modernization had been mostly embraced as the removal of God from the world.
So I don't think a war would have been justified in opposition to the legalization of abortion. It's not like an invasion of racist Nazis. Nazis had only been around a few decades and already tried to take over the entire world as well as exterminate entire races of people. Although if the Nazis had moved slower and converted large portions of the world to their way, then maybe WW2 would have been the wrong way to defeat it. We often forget that Hitler would have been a normal person in the moral views of the Romans. Paul and the early Christians didn't go to war against the Romans, people just as bad as the Nazis. They changed the culture slowly. In fact, some of Hitler's views were more in line with the Bible than the Romans. At least Hitler didn't ban Christianity and he didn't think German women were deformed men. If the Nazis had moved slowly and totally transformed the culture, then WW2 would have been ineffective. Imagine that the Nazi way of life had ruled Europe for 200 years. Then the Allies go to war against it and win. As soon as the war is over then Europe would go back to its' Nazi ways.
In the case of abortion, this was simply the changing of law to come into line with a cultural change to secularism that had been around for 200 years. Wars are fought over existing sacred cultural values. Roe v Wade wasn't really changing things because things had really already changed. It was only what made sense according to what was now the old norm.
So I think force is justified but not to command total obedience to God. But still, some things must be punished. When it comes to cultural change, I think we can see the writing on the wall when it's time for that. In fact, that phrase from the Bible comes from just such a moment in history. It was when the very different and much more moral Persian empire replaced Babylon and many others. And when it comes to the existing cultural values, then you enforce them to the extent that they are believed sacred. So we aren't going to allow certain evil deeds and attacks to go unpunished. But others we'd allow. We'll allow Bin Laden to be a Muslim and reject the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. But we won't allow him to reject the Biblical command not to murder 3000 people on a Tuesday morning.
Of course all of this discussion is about a Christian culture and what it considers right. I don't see why anyone else should care about what the New Testament teaches.
There is one more crucial point to make on the use of force. The Bible teaches a violent response only for the most heinous crimes. The Old Testament was written to people who had a lot of cultural transformation needs. They approved of child sacrifice, sleeping with goats, huge drunken orgies to bring good harvests, and fathers murdering disobedient children on the spot. Fascinatingly, the Old Testament carefully begins to work on changing things. For example, it prescribes that if fathers want to kill sons then they have to go before a judge instead of doing it on the spot. Simply banning the idea would have made no sense to them at the time.
Imagine that you traveled back to that time and tried to change people. It would take a lot of work and you'd have to be careful. Even if you were God, the people were still free to be evil and have bad ideas if they wanted. So God handled it by just putting a worm into the wood. He said that when it comes to the issue of murder, then you have to execute the criminal. He says repeatedly that in this case you absolutely cannot let the person off with just a fine. This is incredible. In other words, God is making it clear that other crimes can be let off with a fine! (I should add that another passage equates the case of aggressive rape to that of murder.)
This method is not only effective. It's more loving. It shows respect for people's dignity to figure things out with some direction. It's less destructive and doesn't encourage revenge. Atheists often complain that an all powerful God should have clearly communicated a better morality instead of making it more of a puzzle. The fact is that good morals are in the Old Testament law. But you have to study it to find them. Atheists often want it to require no study. But that would only be effective at debunking modern atheists' attacks on Biblical morality. It would shut them up quickly, since they so often refuse to do the lengthier study. The problem with that is the bronze/iron age near eastern culture back then. To change them effectively, you have to work in the slow way. The irony is that the atheists today only hold the values they do because the culture was slowly changed. So they are using slow cultural change to complain about slow cultural change. It's like a child who you slowly teach to drive. Then the child complains afterwards that you didn't teach fast enough. This shows no awareness for how ignorant the child used to be and how much learning has really taken place. Once a great movement has happened, then the new normal is taken for granted.
But we have to wonder how much more change God has planned for us? He spent thousands of years teaching us things. And what if He has millions more years of things to teach us? And here we are complaining about how important the things He has taught us so far are and how we shouldn't have had to wait so long to learn them. But the speed at which we learn them is really dictated by our faithfulness to God.
The more direct point for us today is that the Old Testament clearly teaches capital punishment only for murder and perhaps rape. This communicates another clear Biblical Truth for us.
4)
Only the most serious crimes can be opposed with force.
So if someone wants to take over the entire nation, then that's an opposition to everything we stand for. If they want to commit murder, then that's as bad as it gets. The most serious punishment must be reserved for the most serious crime. The point here is hypothetical. Let's say that a Christian nation came to think that burning a Bible was truly a horrible act against what is most sacred. Nevertheless, this isn't the most serious crime. This is more like a disobedient son, not a rape or murder. So even if a culture changed and had new cultural values, the use of force would not be justified unless the crime was of the worst sort. For example, slavery is of the worst sort. And abortion is too. But exceeding the speed limit, even to make it to church, can never be comparable to murder.
The final question is whether the culture really can be changed when it comes to abortion. I started by claiming that the tactics used by Christians are really bad. So are there any good ones? Can Christianity change the culture again with abortion as with it did slavery? Can we show abortion to be the murderous crime that it is?
Let's take a stab at that. I'll take a first crack at changing the culture here. I want to argue that abortion is wrong because people have souls. If you don't believe in souls, then you should because your position is silly and dumb.
If you have no soul, then all of your thoughts are really complicated electro-chemical events in your brain. This is really just a machine that runs according to how it is built. Oxygen doesn't choose to bond with hydrogen. It just bonds because of it's chemical properties. No matter how complicated you make the system, it's still just something that functions according to it's physical properties. There is no free will or choice here. "I love you" is really, "I'm having a chemical reaction."
So how do you know the chemicals in your brain react to give your true beliefs? They might give you false beliefs! Let's say that you come up with some theory that logically proves the chemicals will give you true beliefs. But where did you get that theory? It's just another thought and belief you hold because the chemicals caused you to do so. That's circular reasoning. That's saying I can trust the events in my brain because the events in my brain told me I could.
Think of all the things that require knowledge. Try to go through your day doubting every belief you hold. Without free choice, then you cannot choose to be honest or lie. You can't choose to be rational or not. You have no method of control over your own thoughts without the ability to choose what they actually are.
So it's simple. If you want to affirm that you know absolutely anything at all whatsoever, then you should affirm that you have a non-physical, spiritual self. As I said before, denial of the existence of a soul is dumb. The physical brain can certainly have great influence over the rational soul. Jesus said that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Paul taught that the fleshly nature holds us back from following God. But to say that you have no soul at all is pure intellectual suicide. It's dumb.
The conservative right tries to argue against abortion as though this is not a religious issue. This is exactly where the problem lies. This is absolutely a religious issue. 100%. End of story. Get over it.
A cow that is slaughtered for hamburgers or a sheep for mutton has a larger and more developed brain than a baby in the early stages in the womb. You cannot scientifically claim that these animals which are murdered by the thousands daily have less of a thought life than a fetus. Speaking for myself, and probably for pretty much everyone else, there is nothing evil about killing cows for food. I am literally eating a hamburger as I am writing this.
An early fetus has a smaller less developed brain than a sheep or cow. It's tiny. This is why abortion is legal up to a point after which it becomes illegal. Science can only deal with what we can physically observe. From the perspective of an atheist, there is no soul. All of your thought life, choices, emotions, desires, hopes and consciousness is in your brain. Therefore, an early fetus has less of this than a cow or sheep in the slaughterhouse. If you aren't concerned about the destruction of the animal's consciousness, then you shouldn't be concerned about the destruction of the early fetus' consciousness.
Except of course for one thing, the soul. According to the Bible, God has gifted humans with the blessing of a rational soul. The Bible is very smart for saying this. It says we are spiritual beings that are embodied in a physical form that is our first possession in this world. One day we will shed this body and be given a new one.
If we introduce the concept of souls, then life begins at conception. Since we know souls inhabit bodies, then once there is a distinct and new human body, then there is an individual, sacred unique soul embodied there.
So let's move on to the next question. Should abortion be banned? Since you cannot ban it without belief in a soul, then what about atheists? They don't believe in anything supernatural like souls. Should they be forced to obey the teachings of the Bible? To get at an answer, let's look at three basic truths taught by the Bible. These truths are inescapable and immovable.
Truth 1)
Christianity is not to be forced on people.
Proof:
Paul taught believers to obey the Roman government even though he and they were breaking the law by being Christians. Paul often wrote from jail. Therefore, Paul doesn't mean do whatever the government says. But he does mean go along with it as much as you can. If you were going to force people to be Christians, then you would need to get an army together.
Furthermore, Paul doesn't set out to end slavery politically. Rather he tells slaves to obey their masters as though it is Christ. Then he tells the masters to do the same thing to the slaves. Thus slavery would end once the household was converted. But to tell masters to free their slaves would have been illegal. It was against Roman law to do this before the slave reached 30, which few people reached at that time, especially slaves. Telling masters to free slaves would have been a military rebellion against Rome.
As Jesus said, His kingdom was not of this world. If it was, then His followers would fight to prevent his arrest. The Kingdom of God is a spiritual invasion. Therefore, people are not to be forced to be Christian. This is an immovable truth of the Bible.
Truth 2)
The government has a God given responsibility to punish evildoers with violence.
Paul tells the young believers not to eat meat sacrificed to idols. This was illegal. But in the previous chapter he tells them to submit to the government. Coming from a man who was often jailed for spreading the message of Jesus, we can safely say that he means obey the government as much as you can. He then justifies this by saying that even evil governments are put in place by God to punish evildoers with violence. It is a God given responsibility. He is quite clear on this.
Truth 3)
Christians are to obey God.
Finally, this simply means that what to do and what not to do is a religious question for Christians. It always is. Peter says to set apart Christ in your hearts as Lord. Paul says that he takes every thought captive to make it obedient to Christ. John tells us that if God's Spirit is in us, then we will obey God. This means that if a Christian does anything, then she must do what God says.
So let's combine all 3 of these and see what we get.
Christianity is not to be spread by force.
The government has a God given responsibility to punish evildoers with violence.
Christians are to obey God.
The conclusion means that if a Christian is running the government, the she must enforce what God has commanded. But she must not force people to be Christian. Therefore she can only enforce some of what God commands. For example, God commands us not to steal or murder. She must punish this or else she punishes nothing. But she cannot make a law requiring people to devote their lives to Christ. This would be spreading Christianity by force.
So there are two extremes. On one side, you have to punish some things. You can't let people get away with any evil deed. But you cannot punish people for disobeying everything God commands. So where do you draw the line? We can return to the slavery issue here for an answer. It is helpful here.
Paul didn't tell everyone to start a war to free all the slaves. Rather he taught submission to the government. But he also taught that Christian slaves and masters are to treat each other as equals. Over time, Christianity was the thing that ended slavery in the world. The Catholic Church pushed for it during the early middle ages and achieved it in Europe by the 900's. Then the Spanish Emperor brought it back in the 1400's against the demands of the Pope. But the soon to be born Protestant Church was totally okay with it. Then, in the 1800's, the Protestants got it together. Numerous small Christian movements happened all over the US and England that pushed for abolition. The state of slavery today is the product of Christianity.
Today, people think it's just common sense that slavery should end. But when Christianity started, the Romans didn't think that at all. The early Christians were counter cultural. But over time they changed the culture to come into conformity with Christian values. The culture isn't as different from Christianity as it once was. My simple point is this. We did it before. We can do it again. We can transform the culture. Once we have transformed our culture to understand that abortion is wrong, then we should ban it. It obviously would be the thing to do at that point.
Any justification of violent force is built upon what a culture considers sacred. A handful of men armed with box cutters flew jumbo jets into the World Trade Center and killed a thousand more people than the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. They did this because they said God told them to do it. We didn't give them the right to exercise their religion freely. We hunted down the rest of their group and killed them. Once the culture is transformed, then people will simply see that abortion is murderous evil and that it cannot be allowed.
In the case of the Civil War, people were divided over the slavery issue. And even the abolitionists were divided over whether slaves should be freed by force or by democratic debate. But let's say that the South had simply invaded the North because God told them to. Would the North really do anything other than fight back and righteously so?
So when is the use of force to command obedience to the Bible justified from a Christian perspective? Paul's perspective is that the government has been put in place by God with a duty to punish evildoers with violence. He even says this about the Romans. In other words, it's when you are the government. In the Bible, God makes it clear that He manages politics for His purposes. He sends Israel to judge Canaan only after He gave the Canaanites time to possibly change their evil ways. He says that He sent the Persian ruler Cyrus to judge the Babylonians.
In the Civil War, Lincoln opposed the idea that anyone really knows what God's will is. He wanted slavery to end peacefully via debate. But the war broke out anyway. The South seceded over the northern states' refusal to comply with federal law on returning slaves. Slaves had been escaping to the north and gaining freedom. This was against the laws duly passed by Congress. The North then invaded the South. They justified military force on the grounds of preservation of the democratic Union. To them, the South was committing treason. It's no different than Benedict Arnold. I'd have to agree with the North's choice to invade here. For a government to exist at all, the people can't just take huge portions of it and form another nation with a separate government and army.
But Lincoln's mind eventually changed. The long horror of the war surprised everyone. While attending another of his son's funerals, Lincoln came to believe that God was punishing the United States for the sin of slavery. Simply put, he saw that it was time in the providence of God to use force to ban slavery. There is good reason to think that Lincoln wasn't even a believer in God up to this point. Because of this, he pushed forward an actual law, the emancipation proclamation, to end slavery.
I think Lincoln's example is instructive. There comes a point where you just know that it's God's time. There comes a point where the culture is simply ready to change and come into obedience to God. Essentially, at some point you really have a nation that has formed within a nation. This new nation is simply in possession of a new culture which is dedicated to new propositions.
But is there any way to know when this is apart from some special guidance from God? Maybe not. We can say that you'd need a truly new culture to have formed. Let's be clear about one really important thing. The case of abortion is like the case of slavery because it's about using military force when it is time for the culture to change. This is not the same as an existing culture being attacked and threatened from the outside. In the case of existing cultural values, you would of course enforce those. The Nazis can't try to take over the world and set up an evil empire. We can't allow that. We will bomb you to ashes until you stop. But using violence to literally change a culture into something new requires two things. First the new culture would need to be strong within the old one. Second you'd need something from God too. That's my best guess here.
Now you could argue that abortion was illegal and was legalized. Thus you might say that it was an invasion from the outside. This is totally wrong. When it comes to the abortion issue, atheism was already a powerful force within Western Culture since the French Revolution. The laws did change to legalize it when it had previously been banned. Legalization was new. But this was merely bringing the legal system into line with a much older cultural change. The 1800's were dominated with religious thinkers who doubted any proof for religion. On the liberal side, groups had begun a long process of trading away the long held doctrines for about 200 years at that point. On the conservative side, the dominant view was that there was no way to prove religion true, but they will believe it anyway. Secularism had long been a dominant cultural force. Modernization had been mostly embraced as the removal of God from the world.
So I don't think a war would have been justified in opposition to the legalization of abortion. It's not like an invasion of racist Nazis. Nazis had only been around a few decades and already tried to take over the entire world as well as exterminate entire races of people. Although if the Nazis had moved slower and converted large portions of the world to their way, then maybe WW2 would have been the wrong way to defeat it. We often forget that Hitler would have been a normal person in the moral views of the Romans. Paul and the early Christians didn't go to war against the Romans, people just as bad as the Nazis. They changed the culture slowly. In fact, some of Hitler's views were more in line with the Bible than the Romans. At least Hitler didn't ban Christianity and he didn't think German women were deformed men. If the Nazis had moved slowly and totally transformed the culture, then WW2 would have been ineffective. Imagine that the Nazi way of life had ruled Europe for 200 years. Then the Allies go to war against it and win. As soon as the war is over then Europe would go back to its' Nazi ways.
In the case of abortion, this was simply the changing of law to come into line with a cultural change to secularism that had been around for 200 years. Wars are fought over existing sacred cultural values. Roe v Wade wasn't really changing things because things had really already changed. It was only what made sense according to what was now the old norm.
So I think force is justified but not to command total obedience to God. But still, some things must be punished. When it comes to cultural change, I think we can see the writing on the wall when it's time for that. In fact, that phrase from the Bible comes from just such a moment in history. It was when the very different and much more moral Persian empire replaced Babylon and many others. And when it comes to the existing cultural values, then you enforce them to the extent that they are believed sacred. So we aren't going to allow certain evil deeds and attacks to go unpunished. But others we'd allow. We'll allow Bin Laden to be a Muslim and reject the Crucifixion and Resurrection of Christ. But we won't allow him to reject the Biblical command not to murder 3000 people on a Tuesday morning.
Of course all of this discussion is about a Christian culture and what it considers right. I don't see why anyone else should care about what the New Testament teaches.
There is one more crucial point to make on the use of force. The Bible teaches a violent response only for the most heinous crimes. The Old Testament was written to people who had a lot of cultural transformation needs. They approved of child sacrifice, sleeping with goats, huge drunken orgies to bring good harvests, and fathers murdering disobedient children on the spot. Fascinatingly, the Old Testament carefully begins to work on changing things. For example, it prescribes that if fathers want to kill sons then they have to go before a judge instead of doing it on the spot. Simply banning the idea would have made no sense to them at the time.
Imagine that you traveled back to that time and tried to change people. It would take a lot of work and you'd have to be careful. Even if you were God, the people were still free to be evil and have bad ideas if they wanted. So God handled it by just putting a worm into the wood. He said that when it comes to the issue of murder, then you have to execute the criminal. He says repeatedly that in this case you absolutely cannot let the person off with just a fine. This is incredible. In other words, God is making it clear that other crimes can be let off with a fine! (I should add that another passage equates the case of aggressive rape to that of murder.)
This method is not only effective. It's more loving. It shows respect for people's dignity to figure things out with some direction. It's less destructive and doesn't encourage revenge. Atheists often complain that an all powerful God should have clearly communicated a better morality instead of making it more of a puzzle. The fact is that good morals are in the Old Testament law. But you have to study it to find them. Atheists often want it to require no study. But that would only be effective at debunking modern atheists' attacks on Biblical morality. It would shut them up quickly, since they so often refuse to do the lengthier study. The problem with that is the bronze/iron age near eastern culture back then. To change them effectively, you have to work in the slow way. The irony is that the atheists today only hold the values they do because the culture was slowly changed. So they are using slow cultural change to complain about slow cultural change. It's like a child who you slowly teach to drive. Then the child complains afterwards that you didn't teach fast enough. This shows no awareness for how ignorant the child used to be and how much learning has really taken place. Once a great movement has happened, then the new normal is taken for granted.
But we have to wonder how much more change God has planned for us? He spent thousands of years teaching us things. And what if He has millions more years of things to teach us? And here we are complaining about how important the things He has taught us so far are and how we shouldn't have had to wait so long to learn them. But the speed at which we learn them is really dictated by our faithfulness to God.
The more direct point for us today is that the Old Testament clearly teaches capital punishment only for murder and perhaps rape. This communicates another clear Biblical Truth for us.
4)
Only the most serious crimes can be opposed with force.
So if someone wants to take over the entire nation, then that's an opposition to everything we stand for. If they want to commit murder, then that's as bad as it gets. The most serious punishment must be reserved for the most serious crime. The point here is hypothetical. Let's say that a Christian nation came to think that burning a Bible was truly a horrible act against what is most sacred. Nevertheless, this isn't the most serious crime. This is more like a disobedient son, not a rape or murder. So even if a culture changed and had new cultural values, the use of force would not be justified unless the crime was of the worst sort. For example, slavery is of the worst sort. And abortion is too. But exceeding the speed limit, even to make it to church, can never be comparable to murder.
The final question is whether the culture really can be changed when it comes to abortion. I started by claiming that the tactics used by Christians are really bad. So are there any good ones? Can Christianity change the culture again with abortion as with it did slavery? Can we show abortion to be the murderous crime that it is?
Let's take a stab at that. I'll take a first crack at changing the culture here. I want to argue that abortion is wrong because people have souls. If you don't believe in souls, then you should because your position is silly and dumb.
If you have no soul, then all of your thoughts are really complicated electro-chemical events in your brain. This is really just a machine that runs according to how it is built. Oxygen doesn't choose to bond with hydrogen. It just bonds because of it's chemical properties. No matter how complicated you make the system, it's still just something that functions according to it's physical properties. There is no free will or choice here. "I love you" is really, "I'm having a chemical reaction."
So how do you know the chemicals in your brain react to give your true beliefs? They might give you false beliefs! Let's say that you come up with some theory that logically proves the chemicals will give you true beliefs. But where did you get that theory? It's just another thought and belief you hold because the chemicals caused you to do so. That's circular reasoning. That's saying I can trust the events in my brain because the events in my brain told me I could.
Think of all the things that require knowledge. Try to go through your day doubting every belief you hold. Without free choice, then you cannot choose to be honest or lie. You can't choose to be rational or not. You have no method of control over your own thoughts without the ability to choose what they actually are.
So it's simple. If you want to affirm that you know absolutely anything at all whatsoever, then you should affirm that you have a non-physical, spiritual self. As I said before, denial of the existence of a soul is dumb. The physical brain can certainly have great influence over the rational soul. Jesus said that the spirit is willing but the flesh is weak. Paul taught that the fleshly nature holds us back from following God. But to say that you have no soul at all is pure intellectual suicide. It's dumb.
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