One Can Oppose Abortion While Supporting Morally Licit Forms of Killing
“As Christians, we are not contradictory when we support the death penalty yet oppose abortion. Yes, both actions will end the life of a human being. But while the death penalty ends the life of a convicted murderer, abortion ends the life of an innocent baby. It is immoral for us to fail to see the difference between these two categories of humans.”
There are some believers—especially some Catholics—who seek to argue that the Christian should be “fully” pro-life and oppose all killing—certainly things like capital punishment, along with things like abortion. Sometimes this is referred to as a “consistent life ethic” and the like.
But is this a fully biblical position to hold to? And is it morally and mentally coherent? I and many others—including many Catholic ethicists—believe it is not. I have discussed this matter before, but it keeps arising. So let me give it another hearing.
Here I want to just look at capital punishment and how it differs from abortion. One person recently came to my site seeking to make the “seamless garment” case. I get folks like this quite often. In this recent case, I told the person:
I—along with so many others—am a social conservative and biblical Christian who fully agrees with the rightness of capital punishment. I strongly differ with those who want to push the claim that we should oppose abortion AND capital punishment. The two could not be more different: Abortion involves the unjust murder of the innocent while the death penalty involves the just killing of the guilty. So there is no moral equivalence here whatsoever. See here for more on this.
What I said there should really suffice, but let me tease it out further. First, as I have argued often enough, killing and murder are NOT the same. The Sixth Commandment proscribes the latter, but not the former. I have in some detail made the case for three biblically and morally licit forms of killing in previous pieces.
On self-defence, see this.
On just war theory, see the many articles featured here.
And here are 23 articles making the biblical, moral and social case for the death penalty.
Second, as I have sought to argue elsewhere, there most certainly is a place for the death penalty in Catholic social teaching. Even some supporters of the seamless garment recognise this reality. See here.
Third, much of this has to do with the biblical concept of justice. Too often folks—including many believers—think that love and mercy somehow trump justice, or are more important. See the piece on James 2:13 above that looks at one such passage they appeal to. But let’s look at justice further.
One brilliant thinker who specializes in philosophy, politics and ethics, and strongly appeals to the teaching of Thomas Aquinas and natural law theory, J. Budziszewski is well worth appealing to here. He has penned many important volumes that could be drawn upon, but let me restrict myself to his vital 2009 work, The Line Through the Heart. In his chapter on capital punishment, he writes:
Justice is giving each what is due to him. So fundamental is the duty of public authority to requite good and evil in deeds that natural law philosophers consider it the paramount function of the state, and the New Testament declares that the role is delegated to magistrates by God Himself…
So weighty is the duty of justice that it raises the question whether mercy is permissible at all. By definition, mercy is punishing the criminal less than he deserves, and it does not seem clear at first why not going far enough is better than going too far. We say that both cowardice and rashness miss the mark of courage, and that both stinginess and prodigality miss the mark of generosity; why do we not say that both mercy and harshness miss the mark of justice? Making matters yet more difficult, the argument to abolish capital punishment is an argument to categorically extend clemency to all those whose crimes are of the sort that would be requitable by death.
I ask: Is there warrant for such categorical extension of clemency? Let us focus mainly on the crime of murder, the deliberate taking of innocent human life. The reason for this focus is that the question of mercy arises only on the assumption that some crime does deserve death. It would seem that at least death deserves death, that nothing less is sufficient to answer the gravity of the deed. Revelation agrees. As Genesis instructs: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” Someone may object that the murderer, too, is made in God’s image, and so he is. But this does not lighten the horror of his deed. On the contrary, it heightens it, because it makes him a morally accountable being. Moreover, if even simple murder warrants death, how much more does multiple and compounded murder warrant it? Some criminals seem to deserve death many times over. If we are considering not taking their lives at all, the motive cannot be justice. It must be mercy.
The questions to be addressed are therefore three: Is it ever permissible for public authority to give the wrongdoer less than he deserves? If it is permissible, then when is it permissible? Is it permissible to grant such mercy categorically?
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Spotlight on Preaching
If done right, preaching never produces a conscious moment of being in the spotlight. But it will put the spotlight where it belongs – on Him whom we preach. And in gazing upon that spotlighted figure, those to whom we preach will be bettered, and helped, and encouraged, and enabled to persevere, forgive, repent, serve, and worship. And the one who preached will back up into the shadows where he belongs and be thankful.
I recently read a quote by a man who spends a lot of time leading leaders. He has a great number of followers and I have no doubt that a great number of church leaders have been helped by what he has to say. He made this quote earlier this week – “Another way to take the pressure off yourself and help your church experience consistently strong preaching is to share the spotlight: develop a team approach to preaching…The best way to break the chains of insecurity is to share the spotlight with someone more gifted than you. So share the spotlight. It will do you and your church more good than you realize.”
Well, allow an Are Not to comment.
It is good advice for a pastor to share the preaching ministry in his church. It is almost a complete misunderstanding of the ministry of preaching to call it the “spotlight”.
There is no doubt that there are spotlight aspects to preaching. There are those who, after a message, will thank the preacher, pat him on the back, say how meaningful the message was to them. While preaching, the preacher is the centre of attention, the centre of most of the congregation’s attention, the one who appears on the screen and seems to be the only one in the room. In some churches the preacher has an actual spotlight shining on him. But a man whose work includes the regular preaching of the Word of God and who thinks that one of the reasons he should let other people preach from time to time is so that they can share in the spotlight does not truly understand what preaching is. Having a team approach to the preaching of the Scriptures may be a good thing if there are those in the church who are gifted for it and can be properly trained. But putting them into the pulpit so that the spotlight can be shared is about as far away from a legitimate reason to preach as possible.
Real preaching is pastoral. I have the privilege of preaching in different churches and it truly is a great honour. I believe that if I can preach to strangers in any effective manner, it is because I have been trained to do so through preaching to people I pastored and shared life with. Really effective preaching takes place by a man who is part of the church in which he preaches, and he is preaching to people he knows. He is preaching to people he has visited, prayed with, prayed for. He knows that when he goes into the pulpit there are sitting in front of him people who are overcome with all kinds of problems. There are parents agonizing over the life choices of their children.
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When Grief Like Sea Billows Roll through Your Holidays
Losing my mom has made me recognize afresh that I am a child of weakness. My strength indeed is small. The loss of a loved one removes our veneer of self-confidence, our masks of self-sufficiency. C. S. Lewis said that the death of a loved one is like an amputation. So, until we meet again in that heavenly city, I’m a son without a mother—walking with a limp and leaning on Jesus.
When my mother passed away last winter, I discovered the gift of grief.
In the span of a single year, my mother went from a vibrant, constant presence in my life—through phone calls, texts, and when we could, in-person visits—to a swift decline in mental and physical health.
The first sign, for me, was an unexpected call at 5 a.m. one morning. Mom had many skills but being active at 5 a.m. was not one of them. Calls at 10 a.m., lunchtime, or late in the evening were much more likely. I immediately answered, thinking something had to be urgent.
“Mom, is everything okay?” I asked, pretending I had been up for hours while clearing the cobwebs from my mind and the frog from my throat.
“Oh, I’m just calling to see how you are doing,” she said, “but I hope I’m not interrupting dinner for you guys.”
Maybe she’s just confused. Maybe she had a bad night’s sleep, I thought. I didn’t want to believe this was what my sister, Laura, had been gently warning me about. My sister and her husband had recently moved back to Illinois to live near my parents. And in recent weeks, they had told me that Mom had forgotten how to write a check. Well, that’s not that crazy. Who writes checks anymore? I had rationalized at the time.
“Mom, you do know that it’s five o’clock in the morning, right?” I offered.
“Oh, I’m so sorry. You know, I keep getting my times mixed up, with daylight savings and all,” she replied, though we were nowhere near a time change. After talking a bit more, we ended the call. When I told my sister about it, she said these sorts of incidents were becoming more common.
A few days later, I got another call from Mom—this time more bizarre. She insisted that men were in her house, that my father had let them in, and that she’d called the police. My heart sank as a realization began to set in: I think we are losing her.
We clung to one last desperate possibility that it could be Mom’s iron deficiency, something she’d struggled with for much of her life. We were hoping against hope that with a few doctor visits and medical adjustments, Mom might return to her normal self. My sister dutifully begged, cajoled, and shepherded her to doctors and specialists, updating me every time.
My dad quit his job so he could take care of Mom as she slowly lost her memory, until we learned the hard, final, difficult news: The results of her MRI revealed significant dementia.
Dementia is still a mystery, even to the most learned minds. In the season after her diagnosis, we talked with experts and with friends who had endured this journey with their own loved ones. There was no way to predict which course Mom’s health would take. Would she, like the sweet wife of a friend in my small group, slowly decline over nearly a decade? Or would she, like my late mother-in-law, decline quickly?
When you lose a loved one to dementia, you grieve twice—once when they lose their mind, and again when they lose their life.
The early grief is like a weight on the soul. I can’t explain the heaviness you feel in realizing that the one who birthed you, raised you, consoled you when you came home crushed after a bad day at school—the one who stood on the sidelines and cheered at your basketball games, who said everything you wrote was amazing even when it wasn’t; the one who introduced you to Jesus—is slipping away.
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To Gossip is to Hate Your Neighbor
If we are speaking about another brother or sister in Christ remember that Jesus died for them, as much as you. Honor them in light of that mercy. There is nothing that destroys the Church more than the childish garbage of holding grudges and feelings of anger and jealousy towards others in your local congregation.
We’re almost done with the Ten Commandments. Only two left! In some ways out of all the laws of God summarized in Exodus 20 and Deuteronomy 5 the call to not bear false witness has some of the most sticky wickets of all Biblical ethics, it also has some of the most pointed toe-stepping of all the statutes of the LORD. For example, the most common question posed here is was it acceptable for the Dutch man to hide Jews in his attic and lie to the Nazi’s about their presence. It’s a hard one, because bearing false witness is a sin. However, deeper in the midst of the answer is does that SS officer deserve the truth? We’ll get to that here in a minute. Before we go further here are the catechism Q/A’s for this week:
Q. 76. Which is the ninth commandment?
A. The ninth commandment is, Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy neighbor.
Q. 77. What is required in the ninth commandment?
A. The ninth commandment requires the maintaining and promoting of truth between man and man, and of our own and our neighbor’s good name, especially in witness bearing.
Q. 78. What is forbidden in the ninth commandment?
A. The ninth commandment forbids whatsoever is prejudicial to truth, or injurious to our own or our neighbor’s good name.
The Ninth is in some sense a corollary to the 3rd commandment, the only difference is this deals with not using your own or your neighbor’s name in vain. While we mainly think of “bearing false witness” as to having to do with court rooms, it really is much more about how we treat one another in truth. People made in the image of God are of value and are worth honor and respect. That dignity is not based on how much you like that person or grounded in the way they have acted toward you. In fact as a Christian if John or Mary does nothing but create disorder and cause trouble it is ever more the reason to not return evil for evil. We are to turn the other cheek, especially against our “enemies”. Christ’s Golden Rule applies to the worst individual you know. To pass blame for your sin to someone else is demonic. That’s what Adam does to Eve in Genesis 3. Doing well to those who mean wrong toward you is part of your witness of the gospel in real life. We expect the world to act like the world. Believers must be above that nonsense.
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