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Understanding Abolition
The pro-life movement is not a biblical movement, and their leaders often work against the ending of abortion. Tap into the principles below to learn the difference between abolitionist and pro-life efforts against abortion.
Abolition Is:
The great theme of the Bible is God’s work to abolish evil and its effects from the human condition and environment. As Christians who believe that the Bible is true and divinely inspired, abolitionists participate in God’s work by establishing our movement on the word of God, and using its principles to effect positive change in the world.
In contrast, the pro-life movement incorporates Christians and non-Christians together in a Secular work to oppose abortion in various ways. While Christian pro-lifers will quote Bible verses against abortion in superficial ways, the movement itself defines its goals and methods according to principles that fundamentally oppose biblical teaching on how to remove evil and bring genuine healing.
The pro-life movement regularly opposes legislation that would grant equal protection to pre-born humans by criminalizing abortion. In some cases, pro-life lobbyists and legislators are the primary reason that this legislation does not pass.
This is because the pro-life movement believes that the woman who willfully kills her child is a victim in the process, rather than a perpetrator. Therefore they turn to unjust forms of discriminatory legislation in an attempt to pragmatically, rather than ethically, reduce the amount of abortions performed.
While there is a great deal of false information propagated to support the universal victimhood of women, and such false information should be refuted, the biblical standard is clear regardless. Anyone who conspires to kill an innocent human being is guilty of murder, thus the homicide code should reflect that reality.
We do not grant mothers permission to murder their three-year-olds with impunity, even when the mothers are facing difficult situations. In the same way, we should not grant mothers permission to murder their pre-born children, even when the mothers are facing difficult situations. All human beings are created in the image of God, and are therefore equally valuable before God, regardless of their age.
We live in a culture that is filled with post-abortive fathers and mothers. From a merely practical standpoint, the only way to effect national repentance will be to share with our people the bad news of God’s judgement on sin, together with the good news that God forgives and redeems repentant murderers, when we are honest with him about our sin.
With that said, this personal message alone does not do justice to the whole gospel presented in scripture. It is true that Jesus came to redeem individual sinners from an eternity in Hell. But his work on the cross was done to redeem the whole of creation, and therefore has implications in the present day for any sinful aspect of human society. This means that it is appropriate to speak of gospel-centered politics, gospel-centered economics, and gospel-centered activism, etc., in contradiction to humanistic and other man-centered approaches to these disciplines.
Abolition is therefore a holistic gospel-centered movement in that it addresses the needs of individuals, and of nations, as we grapple with the impact of sin on our personal and corporate lives.
In the work to end slavery, two schools of thought competed for dominance in anti-slavery legislation. The colonizationists and their predecessors in Britain pursued various degrees of compromise with the slavers that would gradually reduce slavery until it was finally ended. The abolitionists instead sought legislation that would immediately bring an end to the practice without exception or compromise, and they were ultimately the group that succeeded. These two schools of thought became known as gradualism and immediatism respectively, and have been applied to various human rights conflicts since that time.
The pro-life movement is like the colonization society in that it pursues gradualist legislation that compromises with abortion, rather than seek its immediate end. it does this under the belief that compromising legislation is more practical than uncompromising legislation.
In many cases it is truly practical to compromise with opponents. However, when dealing with an issue of sin, compromise has the side effect of further embedding the sinful activity into one’s life or society. When a pornography addict compromises with his addiction, for example, his seeking to reduce consumption rather than completely and immediately cut it off will ultimately make him more complacent and enslaved to it.
Scripture teaches us to take a radical, no-compromise approach to the abolition of sin in our personal lives, and the same principles apply to legislation in our national life. As such, while the pro-life / gradualist approach may sound pragmatic, it is ultimately impractical and self-defeating, due to the nature of sin.
Abortion is sin, and the only answer to sin is the gospel. Because the Christian Church is the institution that was commissioned by Jesus to spread the gospel message, this means that she should be at the center of the war against abortion and other destructive evils in society.
Unfortunately, due to various bad theologies and general complacency, the Church has largely abandoned the fight against national evils like abortion. Abolitionist societies and other parachurch ministries have risen up to fill the gap and organize Christian responses to evil, but these fail to provide the holistic, unified community that Jesus designed to serve as salt and light in a dying culture. Parachurch ministries have a role to play in organizing local churches to particular tasks, but they should always be supplemental, with the institutional Church driving Christianity’s response to both personal and social evils.
Thus historic and modern abolition includes a message of repentance to Christians and to churches who fail to give a biblical, comprehensive response to the rise of sin in our dying culture. Individual Christians must repent of our failure to know and act upon the duties that God gives us to stand against evil. Churches need to repent of believing false and unbiblical ideas that reduce the gospel to only the personal salvation of souls, and their general failure to teach Christians what God expects of us in response to social evils like child sacrifice.
One of the unique features of Christianity is its reliance on the providence of God over the pragmatism of man to bring about its desired results. When Jesus went to the cross, this contradicted all of the worldly wisdom of his time on how to establish political power to advance one’s own agenda. Instead of compromise with the religious and political leaders of his day, Jesus rebuked them, held them accountable to the higher standard of God, and trusted that God would deliver him through the persecution they would bring upon his head.
More importantly, Jesus trusted that God would establish his kingdom through his faithful obedience rather than pragmatic compromise. Because God truly does rule over the world, the most practical, pragmatic thing a person can do is to align himself with God’s will, even when it contradicts the flawed logic of rebellious man. Thus abolitionists rely on the providence of God rather than the worldly wisdom of man, measuring our lives and our movement against his word, even when obedience to it seems counterintuitive.
Work in the pro-life movement is often separated into those who offer assistance to women in need, and those who agitate for public change. Abolitionism holds that Christians are required to participate in both kinds of activity, speaking the truth in love. Uniting these two modes in every abolitionist prevents love from devolving into a false, untruthful form, and truth from being delivered in a cold and arrogant way.
Abolitionists Bring:
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