The Sanctity of Human Life.. a meaningless concept

Christian people react with an instinctive disgust to abortion on demand and medical murder of the handicapped or terminally ill.

It is an offence to us because we see human life as valuable and the nearest thing on earth to the life of the eternal God. We rightly invoke the Bible teaching about mankind bearing the image of God.

But we have also adopted the silly slogan of the “Sanctity” of human life.

In other words, our reverence of the Holy God is to be reflected in our reverence for the holiness of human existence. God is holy therefore his image is also holy.

This is not a reasonable position since God does not treat us as holy. He has cursed us and laid burdens of grief, frustration and death upon us precisely because we have lost our essential holiness.

Humanity is unholy, unsanctified and lost.

Nevertheless, we are not without value. Christ has died to save the world and his sacrifice revalues us all. Everyone deserves respect and no one is to be despised. The redeemer has placed a value on every scrap of humanity including the unborn child.

Where there is faith in Christ there is a sanctity which comes as a gift from God. Believers in Jesus are often called “saints” in the New Testament - even where their behaviour falls far short of their new designation.

Right wing campaigners seem to believe in the sanctity of unborn Western lives and that adult Middle Eastern lives are unholy and cheap. Would it not be better to say that all human life is valuable and not to be wasted?

It may be necessary to kill in some extreme circumstances but killing the unborn for economic or social reasons is as shameful as waging war for such low purposes.

The myth of the “good war” of 1939-45

Karl Barth was made heart sick by the almost unanimous backing given by senior German theologians to the Kaiser’s War. At that moment he saw the great Liberal Theology project as morally bankrupt.

I felt similar reading an article in Evangelicals Now by Erroll Hulse at the time of the second Gulf War in 2003. It showed the bankruptcy of the Reformed Baptists of England. It did not make me doubt the tenets of the Reformed faith but rather the judgement of my brothers. Hulse gave a charicatured version of the second world war, declared Saddam to be a new Hitler and urged us all back the Bush/Blair war which was already looking sick.

I wrote a letter of protest to the editor - expecting it to be part of an avalanche of protest. Next month there was not even the mildest questioning of the travesty on the letters page. It seems that warmongering based on perverted history is just fine for us Evangelicals. The two million who walked the streets protesting that year were wiser than a man supposed to be a “teacher in Israel”. By contrast any article about different theories of creation, christian “singles” or hymnology seems to stir the letter writers to action.

Four years later and I am still angry. Myths are being peddled about the second world war by people who want us to see the Moslem or Arab world as the new Third Reich which must be crushed.

Here is a good article reminding us of a few truths about that conflict - Click this link.

As for the wider issue of a spiritual sickness and a love of war and authoritarianism in apparently bible -based churches - well that is a big issue and I may nibble at it from time to time.

The Great God Democracy

For many years we have worshiped at his feet, sacrificed our young men in his name and built shrines to his service. And like every false god has taken more than he gave.

By his name the Vietnam War and the second Gulf War were blessed.

The terrorism of Israel is trumpeted as virtuous because Israel is a Democracy.

Thousands flock to Parliament Square to gaze at the Houses of Parliament and Westminster Abbey, each in its own way a place of worship and neither very closely connected with Jesus of Nazareth.

The strange thing is that neither Moses nor the Gospel says much about the value of national parliaments or about popular elections as the best way to change governments but so many of my brothers and sisters have erected what they consider to be rock solid arguments to prove that the worship of Jesus leads to the worship of democracy.

In the 17th century the rights of monarchs were similarly proven from scripture. In my view, those arguments, quaint as they are, seem to have more backing from the Bible texts.

Why does the religious right in the USA share with the religious left in the UK a shared devotion to democracy? (Ignore the radically different forms their worship takes. The Church of Democracy is as diverse as the worldwide Anglican Church).

Some things can be inferred from scripture as possibly of value:

Wide consultation on policy is more possible in a democracy and that is good (Proverbs 11:14 but see Proverbs 28:2 as well).

Christianity presumes the right of every person to seek and find God in their own way and people say that is theoretically easier in a Liberal Democracy. In practice, the electing will of the Father and the power of the Holy Spirit have no problem overcoming restraints on freedom of conscience in many places.

Christian congregations were self-governing (Matt 18:15-20, 1 Cor 6:1-4) and responsible to God for the leaders they chose to follow (see Revelation ch’s 2 and 3). Those thinkers (Catholic and Protestant) who like to confuse culture and church will tend to extend the right of self-governing which God has granted the Spirit-filled community to the wider body politic.

But there is no way in which the ability of a Christian congregation to solve its own problems and discipline itself can be scaled up to cover millions of people, most of whom do not share a common daily life, loyalty to Jesus or confidence in the scriptures as a shared source of authority and wisdom.

The technology of balloting and counting and the crudities of party politics are completely different from the family of God talking through its problems helped by the presence of Jesus.

So, cheered on by the churches, our duly elected egotists pile higher the library of laws and nibble away our freedoms in the name of our 20th century God (I write 20c because I think that like many false gods he has had his heyday already).

War may be necessary but is never just

At the Evangelical Ministry Assembly three or four years ago some smartly suited American Gents were extolling the virtues of the “Kairos Journal” which is an online resource for Pastors - Link Here.Here is a recent snippet:

Three months into the 18-month siege of Hippo by the Vandals, St. Augustine (354-430) died of disease at age 76. To the city’s defender, Count Boniface, he had written, “[W]ar should be waged only as necessity,” and “[P]eace is not sought in order to the kindling of war, but war is waged in order that peace may be obtained.” He thus anticipated three just-war criteria later specified by Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274):

1. Legitimate Authority: Governments, not individuals or gangs, should wage war.
2. Just Cause: The external provocation and threat must be grave and evil.
3. Right Intent: The aim must be a just peace, not the selfish seizure of land, riches, or power.

What a marvellous extension of Augustine’s intentions! War is necessary when the Vandals are banging on the gates looking to murder your men, rape your women and steal your homes. And the aim is peace. Our armchair warriors in Kairos are trying to show how the mediaeval doctrine of “Just War” is what Augustine would have come up with.

Yes, that same convenient theory of “Just War” which is plastic enough in the hands of the Kairos Journal to even justify current American foreign policy and has been appealed to over the centuries by every blood stained villain in Western history.

In fact War can never be just. In every conflict the injustices pile higher and higher. God alone is just. Men are such limited and sinful wretches that even well-intentioned warmaking is obscene in actuality.

But, to our limited and faithless minds war sometimes seems necessary. When the Vandals are at the gates (truly and not metaphorically) what else can we do but fight?

So what do we say? “Hallelujah! We have a just war to fight!”?

No. We say let slip the dogs of war and may God have mercy on our souls.