Abortion providers who turn pro-life

Justin Taylor recently linked to an article from the Weekly Standard called “Mugged by Ultrasound.”  It described the heart-change of several people who used to work in abortion clinics due to their gruesome experiences.  As Albert Mohler notes, the article says that there are two major trends that have pushed people in this direction: the use of “dilation and evacuation” and the ultrasound technology.  The article contains some awful descriptions abortion in the words of the clinic workers, including doctors and staff.

Here is the powerful conclusion:

This handful of stories is representative of many more. In fact, with the exception of communism, we can think of few other movements from which so many activists have defected to the opposition. Nonetheless, the vast majority of clinic workers remain committed to the pro-choice cause. Perhaps some of those who stay behind are haunted by their work. Most, however, find a way to cope with the dissonance.
Pro-choice advocates like to point out that abortion has existed in all times and places. Yet that observation tends to obscure the radicalism of the present abortion regime in the United States. Until very recently, no one in the history of the world has had the routine job of killing well-developed fetuses quite so up close and personal. It is an experiment that was bound to stir pro-life sentiments even in the hearts of those staunchly devoted to abortion rights.  Ultrasound and D&E bring workers closer to the beings they destroy. Hern and Corrigan concluded their study by noting that D&E leaves “no possibility of denying an act of destruction.” As they wrote, “It is before one’s eyes. The sensations of dismemberment run through the forceps like an electric current.”

I hope and pray that more providers will follow the path of those described in the article.  Recently, I posted about another article that discussed the moral difficulties faced by defenders of abortion.  This article was by an author who supported abortion-rights, which made it all the more remarkable.  That article, much more than my brief comments about it, is really worth reading.

Hat tip for Mohler article: Rick at Endued

Toby Sumpter on God’s interruptions

Toby Sumpter, writing in Credenda Agenda, follows the logic of God’s intervention into human life from the Incarnation to the world to come (following his postmillennial eschatology).  He writes that God interrupts the way that people do things, calling them to a new way of life.  It’s really just worth it to read the whole article, which isn’t too long but covers a lot of ground.  Here is a taste:

Generally, this Commission goes under the twin titles mercy ministry and evangelism: the gospel declared to the poor. These are the two sides of the one blade of the Word. And John Piper has helpfully said that the way we keep these two sides together, the way we ensure that this sword remains unified is through a robust doctrine of Hell. He says in a round table discussion with D.A. Carson and Tim Keller, “We exist to relieve all suffering, especially eternal suffering.” He goes on to describe how a ministry of so-called “mercy” that neglects the reality of the possibility of Hell after this life is an enormous failure. In other words, like Jesus, the urgency of our intervention is authorized by the reality of final judgment and eternal torment. I hereby resolve to increase my use of the words “damn” and “hell.” Jesus interrupts every conversation, every story with a good damn.

A good damn consists of condemning the brokenness, condemning the sin, and pointing to the reality of final judgment. It intervenes to pull, drag, and beg the slaves of sin and brokenness out of the fire that is already kindled in their lives. It offers grace and freedom to every form of poverty. Brian Fikkert and Steve Corbett define poverty as a complex breakdown in relationships. “Poverty is the result of relationships that do not work, that are not just, that are not for life, that are not harmonious or enjoyable. Poverty is the absence of shalom in all its meanings.” (When Helping Hurts, 62)

Sumpter also wrote an article about the early church creeds and the gospel last month.

How to work against Roe v. Wade

Justin Taylor posts the text of an interview with Clark Forsythe of Americans United for Life.  Forsythe’s recent book, Politics for the Greatest Good: The Case for Prudence in the Public Square, looks quite interesting, and he and Taylor discuss some of the content of the book in the interview.

Forsythe describes the difficulties of undoing Roe by asking the Supreme Court to apply the 14th Amendment to the unborn:

It is not simply “improbable” but almost certainly impossible in our lifetime. That’s because every single justice since Roe has rejected it (the proposition that the unborn child is a “person” within the meaning of the Fourteenth Amendment), including the most anti-Roe justices, Justice Scalia and Justice Thomas. And Scalia and Thomas have rejected it for at least two or three reasons. First, the words “abortion” and “unborn child” are not in the Constitution; they weren’t specifically considered by the framers of the 14th Amendment. Second, Justice Scalia and Thomas believe that the abortion issue was and is an issue for the states to decide, as a constitutional matter. The third is perhaps the most powerful and the one most often ignored by pro-lifers: Scalia and Thomas want the Court out of the “abortion-umpiring business,” which they think has undermined the integrity of the Court as a constitutional and political institution. The declaration that the unborn child is a “person” within the meaning of the 14th Amendment would not extract the Court but thrust it more deeply into the “abortion-umpiring business.” So, for both constitutional and institutional reasons, Scalia and Thomas have at least implicitly rejected 14th Amendment “personhood,” and it’s almost certain that any justice nominated by even a pro-life president and confirmed by the Senate in the next 20 years will be heavily influenced by the reasoning of Scalia and Thomas.

On the other hand, Roe could be overturned on less sweeping grounds (which Forsythe considers a more realistic option) and the issue could be left up to individual states, as it was before 1973.  It would then be up to “a majority of states enact and enforce prohibitions on abortion, thereby exhibiting a national political culture that opposes all abortion,” which might eventually create the political climate in which legal abortion would eventually be considered a violation of the 14th Amendment.

What can we do now?

On the legal side, the states can enact (1) fetal homicide laws (the strongest possible legal protection of the unborn child today), (2) legislation to limit and fence in and reduce abortion, and (3) legislation to protect women’s health and ensure that women get full information about the six major medical risks to women from abortion. Political science professor Michael New’s series of statistical analyses attribute the 25% drop in abortions (from 1.6 million annually in 1992 to 1.2 million annually in 2006) to legislation of this kind. The current majority of the Court will likely uphold any regulation of abortion that makes medical sense, and there’s a lot that the states can and should do to protect women from the medical risks.

For private citizens, he has these suggestions:

1. Become active voters. Vote in upcoming primaries, and vote in the upcoming state and federal general elections, including the Congressional mid-term elections in November 2010.
2. Stay informed through reading and information that’s on the Web. See e.g., www.aul.org.
3. Get involved with a pro-life organization in your state that is actively involved in lobbying on the life issues in your state capitol this Spring.
4. Support AUL’s work in the courts and legislatures.

The connection between adoption and abortion

The Desiring God blog features a brief video interview with Russell Moore, in which he relates both adoption and opposition to abortion to our Christian responsibility to defend the orphan.  Aborted babies, he says, fit into the category of orphaned children.  Moore’s recent book on adoption, Adopted for Life, seems to have been very well received.

A new Hamas?

Fawaz Gerges, the University of London’s School of Economics and Political Science, argues in The Nation that Hamas has been moderating its positions since it participated in the 2006 elections, and it also must govern in order to maintain public confidence.  Gerges notes:

The Damascus-based Khaled Meshal, head of Hamas’s political bureau and considered a hardliner, acknowledged as much in 2008. “We are realists,” he said, who recognize that there is “an entity called Israel.” Pressed by an Australian journalist on policy changes Hamas might make, Meshal asserted that the organization has shifted on several key points: “Hamas has already changed–we accepted the national accords for a Palestinian state based on the 1967 borders, and we took part in the 2006 Palestinian elections.”

Some of the challenges to Hamas have come from more radical jihadist groups, rather than from secular groups like Fatah.  One example is Jund Ansar Allah (Warriors of God), who “declared the establishment of an Islamic emirate in Gaza.”  This drew an immediate assault from Hamas, which Gerges describes as “a message to foes and friends alike that it will not tolerate global jihadist groups like Al Qaeda, which want to turn Gaza into a theater of transnational jihad.”  As conditions in Gaza have deteriorated, Gerges writes, many young men have joined the radical groups that criticize Hamas for “forfeiting the armed struggle and failing to implement Shariah law.”  In this context, Gerges places Hamas in the middle:

Compared with these puritanical and nihilistic groups, Hamas is well within the mainstream of Islamist politics. Operationally and ideologically, there are huge differences between Hamas and jihadi extremists such as Al Qaeda–and there’s a lot of bad blood. Hamas is a broad-based religious/nationalist resistance whose focus and violence is limited to Palestine/Israel, while Al Qaeda is a small, transnational terrorist network that has carried out attacks worldwide. Al Qaeda leaders Osama bin Laden and Ayman al-Zawahiri have vehemently criticized Hamas for its willingness to play politics and negotiate with Israel. Hamas leaders have responded that they know what is good for their people, and they have made it crystal clear they have no interest in transnational militancy. Their overriding goal is political and nationalist rather than ideological and global: to empower Palestinians and liberate the occupied Palestinian territories.

Unlike Al Qaeda and other fringe factions, Hamas is a viable social movement with an extensive social network and a large popular base that has been estimated at several hundred thousand. Given its tradition of sensitivity and responsiveness to Palestinian public opinion, a convincing argument could be made that the recent changes in the organization’s conduct can be attributed to the high levels of poverty, unemployment and isolation of Palestinians in Gaza, who fear an even greater deterioration of conditions there.

Gerges believes that Israel’s inflexibility is now a greater obstacle to peace than Hamas, citing statements by the former director of Mossad and an analysis from the US Army Strategic Studies Institute:

Despite its frequently reactionary rhetoric, Hamas is a rational actor, a conclusion reached by former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy, who also served as Ariel Sharon’s national security adviser and who is certainly not a peacenik. The Hamas leadership has undergone a transformation “right under our very noses” by recognizing that “its ideological goal is not attainable and will not be in the foreseeable future,” Halevy wrote in the Israeli daily Yediot Ahronot just before the 2008 attack on Gaza. He believes Hamas is ready and willing to accept the establishment of a Palestinian state within the 1967 borders. The US Army Strategic Studies Institute published a similar analysis just before the Israeli offensive, concluding that Hamas was considering a shift of its position and that “Israel’s stance toward [Hamas]…has been a major obstacle to substantive peacemaking.”

Gerges concludes that the US and Israel must accept that Hamas has legitimacy from the support that it receives from the Palestinian people, encourage the unification of Hamas and Fatah, and realize that any lasting peace settlement between Israel and the Palestinians will need to include Hamas.

Here are my responses to the article:

• It’s helpful to make a distinction between nationally-based Islamist groups like Hamas and transnational terror groups like al-Qaeda.  While they have important similarities (not the least of which is the willingness to murder civilians), they also have important differences and don’t always get along.  I summarized historian James Gelvin’s contrast between them here.  Also, Gelvin points out later in The Modern Middle East: A History that Hamas’ charter explicitly endorses nationalism.  You can see that charter here.
• It’s frightening to think that Hamas, which just a little over a year ago was allowing rockets to be launched from its territory into Israeli towns and uses Palestinians as human shields, is the “mainstream” option in Gaza.  Gerges makes an interesting case in this article and certainly knows more about this than I do, but I’m holding out for more evidence that Hamas has changed.
• I’d like to see a two-state solution, but based on what I stated in my last point, I understand why Israel has a harsh stance toward Hamas.  So while I’m sure that there are ways that Israel could change its stance, saying that the government is inflexible doesn’t fully take into account recent history.

Hat tip: Jeff Goldberg

Expressing Latin concepts in German words

Peter Leithart quotes and summarizes Ernst Benz, author of Mystical Sources of German Romantic Philosophy (Pittsburgh Theological Monographs.  Benz argues that German philosophical language borrowed from poetic language to translate theology and philosophy from Latin (the scholarly language of the Middle Ages) into German.  French scholars, whose language was more closely related to Latin, did not have this problem.

Here is Leithart’s summary and reflection of the German adaptation (the last 3 paragraphs of his 5-paragraph post):

That changed with “German Thomistic mysticism,” particularly with Eckhart.  In his preaching to nuns, he could not rely on Latin theological terms and treatises, and so he had either to “translate the abstract terms of theological language into poetic images” or “create a new terminology of abstractions improvised in German.”  If he translated theological terms into poetic images, “the translator was forced to form some very audacious and dangerous paradoxes, which were capable of being understood and considered as heresies” – and in Eckhart’s case were so understood.  But the alternative was to use “new concepts and unheard-of abstractions” that would make the sermon incomprehensible.

Eckhart is responsible for the development of a “new German philosophical and theological terminology” but one that had a strong poetic and mystical component.  Boehme continued the project, introducing all the basic vocabulary of German philosophy down to Heidegger and beyond.  Sein, Wesen, Wesenheit, das Seinende, das Nichts, Nichtigkeit, as well as Form, Gestalt, Anschauung, Erkenntnis, Erkennen, Vernunft, Verstand and Vertandnis, Bild and Abbild, Grund and Ungrund, Ich and Ichheit and Nicht-Ich – all of it came from “German mystical speculation.”

Perhaps this is as good a description of “Continental” philosophy as any: It’s not merely the philosophy of Kant’s Third Critique, but philosophy whose categories (including Kant’s!) came from German poetic mysticism.

This is an interesting example of how our languages can’t always (or perhaps can’t ever) be perfectly translated into other languages.

Addressing biblical illiteracy

David Nienhuis, a professor at Seattle Pacific University (a Christian college) describes his students’ ignorance of the Bible and traces it to a long trend in American evangelicalism that has valued morality and emotion more than knowledge of the Bible and of doctrine.  This, he believes, has led the church to a quite shallow place of consumer-driven religious experiences and widespread “moral therapeutic deism,” quoting Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton’s phrase.  In his conclusion, he describes the weaknesses of a current focus on quoting Scripture and offers a solution:

[The goal of producing “informed quoters”] is part of what I find troubling about what appears to be the dominant model of biblical literacy employed among evangelicals in their attempts to raise children of faith. This approach emphasizes the memorization of discrete Bible verses and “facts,” mostly in the service of evangelism and apologetics. By mastery of passages that are deemed doctrinally relevant and emotionally empowering, it is hoped that believing youth will be equipped to own their faith, share it with seekers, and defend it against detractors. Most of the students in my classes who consider themselves “familiar with the Bible” have been trained to approach Scripture in this fashion….

Book Review: Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning

Last semester, I assigned Christopher Browning’s Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland in my modern Western civilization course.  One of the other history teachers assigned it in a summer course, so I decided to keep in on the reading list for the fall.  Browning looks at the experiences of men in the Order Police assigned to Nazi-occupied Poland, not as frontline soldiers but as occupiers of conquered territory.  Reserve Police Battalion 101 was assigned at first to massacre Jews and later to clear Jewish ghettos and drive the residents onto trains for transport to the extermination camps.  Browning believes that this was not a group that would automatically follow along with the fanatical racism of the Nazi leaders.  Almost all came from the Hamburg area, where they held working-class or lower-middle-class jobs, and the majority fell in the age range of 37-42.  In 1942, only a quarter were Nazi Party members, with very few having joined before the Nazis came to power, and Browning thinks that a decent number of them must have been members of the Communist Party, Socialist Party, or a labor union before 1933.  These were not men programmed from birth to be killers:

By virtue of their age, of course, all went through their formative period in the pre-Nazi era.  These were men who had known political standards and moral norms other than those of the Nazis.  Most came from Hamburg, by reputation one of the least nazified cities in Germany, and the majority came from a social class that had been anti-Nazi in its political culture.  These men would not seem to have been a very promising group from which to recruit mass murderers on behalf of the Nazi vision of a racial utopia free of Jews. (48)

And yet they did kill.  After introducing the Order Police in general and Reserve Police Battalion 101 in particular, Browning catalogs the atrocities perpetrated by these “ordinary men.”  While the men found their first massacres to be horrible, Browning contends that only 10-20 percent of the men refused to kill.  Others, he argues, killed by their own volition and increasingly became used to the killing and even volunteered for missions.  One man even rationalized killing Jewish children if someone else had killed their mothers; he would never shoot the mother, but felt that her child could not survive without her, which allowed him to kill the child.  Even those who refused only seemed to achieve keeping their own hands clean rather than saving the lives of the victims of their comrades.

Training Leaders International

John Piper’s Desiring God Ministries is concerned about what they call the “theological famine” in the global church.  This post from the DG blog notes that some estimate that 85% of pastors have never had any theological education.  One of the new groups to address this situation is Training Leaders International, which DG is partnering with.  Here is the DG Blog’s description:

This ministry was born out of a desire to provide careful theological education to places where training is hard to come by. This ministry has brought together an outstanding board of well-known godly men to help the mission.

Training Leaders International equips young evangelical scholars to train church leaders where theological training is lacking or not available. Seasoned missionaries and cross-cultural teachers mentor young competent evangelical scholars who have the desire to teach but do not understand how to do so in a different culture.

The next sentence is important and exciting:

Every trip is done at the request of, in cooperation with, and in submission to local national leaders, theological institutions and churches.

This is an important trend: the idea that people who are privileged to have more resources, education, or other blessings don’t automatically know what’s best for the people that they serve.  It’s a true partnership that treats the people being served with dignity and not simply as victimized or underserved.  I discussed this trend a bit more here.  Also, I posted some quotes from an article that discussed the disconnects that Americans can have when doing short-term missions here.

Defining “social justice”

Kevin DeYoung asks Christians to clarify what they mean when they use this term:

In A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell explains the difference between the constrained and unconstrained view of justice. In the unconstrained view justice is a result so that wherever people don’t get “their fair share” or don’t have as much as others there is injustice. If Goldingay is correct, most people assume this unconstrained view when they speak of social justice. For example, the RCA (my denomination) in one of its official study materials includes a glossary which defines justice as “The fair, moral, and impartial treatment of all persons, especially in law. Includes concepts of right relationships and equitable distribution of resources.” By this definition the inequality of opportunities, income, or outcomes is considered an injustice, a situation that in and of itself is sinful, implicates all (or most) of us in society, and demands immediate redress. In the unconstrained vision, the society has a lump of resources and if they are not shared roughly equally, then we do not have social justice.

In the constrained vision, by contrast, justice is a process where people are treated fairly (the first half of the RCA definition). The goal here is not forced redistribution; no one distributed the resources in the first place and no one is wise enough to allocate them for the good of everyone. Justice, in this vision, is upheld through the rule of law, a fair court system, and equitable treatment of all persons regardless of natural diversity. This doesn’t mean that in the constrained vision we shouldn’t care for the poor or that we simply shrug our shoulders and say “oh well” when we see people struggling through life with far fewer opportunities and resources than the rest of us. The Christian must be generous and should care about suffering and the disadvantaged. But in the constrained vision, this care is a matter of compassion, charity, and love, not automatically an issue of justice.

I happen to think the constrained view of justice fits the biblical definition better. But arguing one way or the other is not the point of this post. This is only a “modest proposal” after all. I simply want Christians to be more careful and more precise with their language. We don’t all mean the same thing by social justice. So when we use the term we should explain it and take pains to demonstrate why our conception of social justice is supported by Scripture. However we use the phrase “social justice” we should be slow to insist that any Christian who disagrees with our policy solution is obviously a spiritual miscreant.