Supreme Court ends Roe v. Wade?

God does command evil. Don't forget that Satan (Lucifer) is a creature, not God's opposite number; God created Lucifer. Though the Devil may not accept it, God commands all, including the legions of Hell itself. There is no domain in creation that does not fall under the sovereign will and power of God almighty. The Bible itself tells us that God can use wickedness for good (Gen. 50:20), and use wicked men for righteous ends (Isa. 10:56).

Of course I can see the response coming: "Well, doesn't that mean that abortion, ultimately, is for the good?"

No, and profoundly no. For if God sometimes uses the wicked to punish the wicked, the punishers will be punished by God in their turn. The wages of sin is death, always and everywhere, forever.

 

If God commands evil, then what is the difference between good and evil, in your view?

 

That which opposes God's will is evil. That which is good is that which strives to do God's will at all times and in all ways. God alone is the source of goodness and righteousness. Anything that goes against God's command is by definition sinful. ἁμαρτία (hamartia - sin) is a Greek word taken from archery, and means "to miss the mark".

Lucifer is evil because he rebelled against God's commands and continually works, with his fallen host of angels, to draw men away from God -- through spite and hate and (I believe) jealousy of God's sovereign power. Evil will is any will that works in opposition to God's design.

God can use evil to further his own design, but this never means that God sanctions or tolerates sin. God hates sin as only a completely holy being can hate sin. How do we know what is good and what is evil? We look to Scripture, which is God's very Word delivered to us.

Can we misconstrue God's word and do evil while meaning to do good? Absolutely. We are fallen beings, and our judgement and intellect is likewise fallen. But it's actually quite rare to commit evil acts by accident; nearly always, evil is done deliberately, through malice, through pride, through disobedience, through fear. We know when we sin, and the Holy Spirit will convict a person of his sin and demand repentance. For repentance must come before forgiveness; how can it be otherwise? God in his infinite grace forgives those who repent, but if they do not repent, God cannot forgive.

 

But if God wills evil, wouldn’t what is opposed to that evil be, in effect, good?

 

No. God commands evil. God does not will evil. He can't will evil, because God is the sovereign, holy, omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent creator of all that was, is, or ever will be. Evil springs from the rebellion of Lucifer, who through his pride and arrogance, presumed to usurp God's power for himself. Lucifer thus became Satan, the Adversary, who caused Eve to fall; and Eve then induced Adam; and so the sorry history of humanity on this earth was begun.

God grants his creatures, angel or human being, agency and volition. Volition means choosing, and as we have seen, some creatures choose evil over good. Why did God grant us volition if evil could result? Because if there is no volition, there is no good either. A creature without volition is just a husk, a being devoid of moral aspect, at best no better than an animal and at worst an empty shell, a void. To do good is to choose to do good first of all; to hear God's command and decide to obey...or not. An animal cannot choose; it can only behave, through instinct and external stimuli. God wants more from us. He created us with moral agency and the wherewithal to use that agency for good or evil, because it is in the choice itself that salvation lies. We are not punished for trying and failing so much as we are punished when we fail to try.

 

Isn’t commanding something tantamount to willing it?

 

I know what you're trying to say, but to be more precise God does not even command evil, God permits evil, while he commands good. We don't believe in determinism.

Nobody knows what you're saying then.

So look, let's really simplify it then. If you're not against the Anglican understanding of the soul, then you're not against the Anglican teaching on the soul, and ensoulment. Which means that in order to be an orthodox Anglican, you should be willing to ecclesiastically punish an ejection of the non-ensouled fertilized egg, and to criminally punish an abortion of a human fetus. It's really that simple.

 

I suppose if you are a strict Calvinist you could make this argument -- but though I am more of Calvin than Arminius, I balk at that formulation. And I am certain that not even John Calvin would assert that God does evil in order to do good. It makes a nonsense of the Gospel. It renders Christ's sacrifice upon the cross meaningless.

God has dominion over all. This includes Satan and his demons. As James points out in his epistle, even demons believe...and shudder. (Jam. 2:19) So why does God suffer evil to exist in the world? It is the eternal question of fallen humanity. Yet it is not God who does evil, but the fallen creatures he made. And what to us seems like divine tolerance of evil is really just God's grand plan unfolding as it must. The battle is already won; Christ is already King and sits on His throne at God the Father's right hand. We live now in the caesura between Christ being given his crown and Christ returning to earth to overthrow the principalities, powers, thrones and dominions. It seems long to us, but is a mere eyeblink the caverns of eternity where God dwells. We say "time is precious" because our spans are short; but God is not beholden to us, or our impatience with the pace of things.

Christ will judge everyone by what he has done (Rev. 21:12-15). No evil will go unpunished.

 

It’s very simple: I am saying that the Scriptures do not teach that a human being is composed of a physical body and an immortal soul.

“Soul” in the Scriptures is not a thing; it is the activity of a living thing. When that activity ceases, a thing is no longer said to be living, but dead.

 

Matt. 10:28 refutes this statement directly. Consider the words of the Lord Jesus Christ:

(Emphasis mine.) Jesus Christ himself teaches that the soul transcends the earthly body.

In Ecclesiastes 12:7 we read:

In James 2:26 we read:

(Emphasis mine.)

When Jesus was dying on the cross, he said, "Father, into your hands I commit my spirit!" (Luke 23:46) Surely our Lord knew that he would transcend his earthly body, and he makes us the same promise in our own resurrection.

What you seem to be advocating, Invictus, is called "anthropological monism", which runs contrary to Scripture, as I have demonstrated above.

 

I think just about anybody could. When you wrote:

surely you meant to include “commands” under the term “will”. Otherwise you would be leaving open the possibility that opposing God’s commands is good. Yet in your next post, you say that God “commands evil” but does not “will” it. But this is surely incoherent, for how are we supposed to know what God wills aside from what God commands?

And this is not merely a matter of God allowing or permitting something, as @Stalwart would have it, nor is it an instance of God doing something directly without recourse to human mediation. The Numbers 5 passage I cited above contains the command for a priest to attempt to induce an abortion, as part of a trial-by-ordeal, in future situations in which a husband accuses his wife of adultery. Human beings, not God, were tasked with making these determinations and carrying out these instructions, but on the basis of something explicitly commanded by God.

No passage in all of Scripture comes closer to addressing abortion explicitly than this one, and it must be said that evidence of a teaching of fetal personhood is conspicuously absent from it. Some of you here have gotten yourselves all twisted in mental knots in order to evade the implications of this, rather than simply allow these plainly worded passages to speak for themselves in their simplicity and inform a more moderate view of the subject.

It is fine, of course, to hold a view of the soul akin to that of the ancient Greeks. While the Bible doesn’t teach it or endorse it, it doesn’t prohibit it either. So while that particular view of humanity may be compatible with Christian teaching - despite leading to insoluble controversies - it is not mandated by it. And that has important implications for how Christian belief ought to be proclaimed and manifested in the world.

 

So we can agree, then, then unless God commands that the abortion be performed, it should not be done?

 

Are you saying then that Anglicanism teaches something that the Scripture doesn't? That it's essentially false? Can you just say it outright.

Are you saying also that the Athanasian Creed is in error, where it says this:

He is God, begotten before all worlds from the being of the Father, and he is man, born in the world from the being of his mother — existing fully as God, and fully as man with a rational soul and a human body; equal to the Father in divinity, subordinate to the Father in humanity.

 

I was hoping you would cite these passages. None of them prove what you intend them to. If you think Jesus was teaching the incoherent doctrine of soul-annihilationism in the first passage (from Matthew), that would not only place you well outside the Anglican (and Christian) mainstream, but also counts against the very assertion you’re making, since an immortal soul, by definition, cannot be killed.

The Ecclesiastes passage is referring to the breath of life. There is not even a hint of a belief in an afterlife of any kind in the whole book of Ecclesiastes, and no serious biblical scholar questions this today. The James passage, and the Luke passage, also need be referring to nothing more than the breath of life.

Greek authors like Plato had no trouble describing and defending a belief in the immortality of the soul, in plain language that anyone could understand. Yet we find no analogous statements in the Scriptures. The best explanation for that, that I know of, is that the biblical authors didn’t share the concept.

 

Not at all. What we can take from the Numbers passage that’s relevant for us today is that Scripture teaches that there are at least some instances when its deliberate procurement is not unjust, therefore we cannot say that it is either inherently wrong, or, more specifically, murder.

 

I have already addressed these potential objections.

 

Can you link to where you addressed the Athanasian Creed?

Are you saying that neither the Anglican doctrine, nor the Athanasian Creed, teaches this "immortal soul concept"?

Can you cite some historic Anglican teachings on the soul, either from the Saxon period, or from the Reformational period, which teach your view and contradict the "everyday" view which you are intent on debunking?

 

There is one and only one instance where that applies: when God commands it. Who decides if a killing is just or unjust? God. God commanded the killing of the Canaanites (Deut. 2:34, Deut. 3:6, Deut. 20:16-18), and commanded Saul to exterminate the Amalekites in 1 Sam. 15:2-3. Was this just or unjust? It was just, because God commanded it. The Israelites were agents of God's divine wrath. The Israelites in their turn were given over to the Assyrians (1 Chron. 5:26), and then the Babylonians (1 Chron. 9:1). Was this just or unjust? It was just, again, because it was God's command...even against his own chosen people, as punishment for their wickedness and unfaithfulness. (And the Assyrians and Babylonians were punished in their turn. God always punishes sin.)

God cannot murder because he is holy and he is just. If he visits death upon one of his creatures, it is according to the divine will and thus just by definition. "I will be gracious to whom I will be gracious, and I will show mercy on whom I will show mercy" (Ex. 33:19), God says. He creates, he destroys, and always to his own purpose and his own glory. When a human being takes the power of life and death into their own hands absent God's command, they usurp his power -- in essence, they commit the same sin as Lucifer.

"Whoever sheds the blood of a man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image" (Gen. 9:6) God says to Noah, even before the famous "Thou Shalt Not Murder" commandment in the Decalogue. Judicial killing (as in war, or in self-defense, or defense of the helpless and innocent) is permitted as part of the duty of care we owe to God to protect his property (us!). Abortion is not judicial killing because the unborn child has no advocate, is deprived of God-given rights (the most basic of which is life itself), and is given no opportunity for response or redress. Murder it is, then, a violation of God's law if not man's fallen and imperfect law.

 

So, you're a pacifist? What I mean is, if you're going to apply the rather stringent regulative principle to the moral question of under what circumstances a woman can terminate her own pregnancy, you must be at least as stringent for the sake of consistency when it comes to the killing of full persons, as in warfare (rather than merely potential persons, as in the case of an abortion). Since all the wars recorded to have been commanded by God were against peoples that no longer exist, it must not be possible to wage war today at all without an explicit divine command, under the criterion you're applying.

Otherwise, this is all just special pleading, and would be incomprehensible to someone seeking to understand the range of Christian opinion on the subject. You have yet to establish that an unborn fetus meets the independence criterion to be a rights-bearer in the first place, let alone has rights equal to (or superior to) the rights of the mother. Given what Exodus has to say about the death of the unborn in the very next chapter following the Decalogue, as well as the passage from Numbers, it is more than safe to say that the author of Exodus/the Pentateuch did not consider the category of "murder" to apply to the unborn in the first place (which has in fact always been the position of Orthodox Judaism, along with the ascription of potential personhood, rather than actual personhood, to the fetus). Otherwise, there would have been specific penalties assigned for that particular act. Your own argument works against you here. If God did not assign any penalty for an abortion, neither can we, according to the standard you've endorsed.

 

No. Here's what I wrote: " Judicial killing (as in war, or in self-defense, or defense of the helpless and innocent) is permitted as part of the duty of care we owe to God to protect his property (us!)."*

It is presuppositionally true. Do I have to "prove" my worthiness as God's image-bearer? Do you? Does anyone? Why should this grotesque burden be put on an innocent infant, who has no advocate or ability to respond? Children born as early as 24 weeks have survived and grown into healthy children - at what point does their right to live come into effect? Just after birth? After a few weeks in the infant ICU? When? I argue that it is true from conception; it saves me from having to make ridiculous arguments about "viability".

God knows every person who has ever lived because he created them. We are not owners of ourselves; we belong to God. Our bodies are his, from the beginning. We have no right to destroy each other absent Divine sanction. (Killing in war is a vast topic beyond the scope of this discussion, but I do believe that it is wicked to kill in service of an evil regime. God punishes corporately as well as individually -- a whole nation can be held guilty for such things, and God levies corporate punishment accordingly. The entire Old Testament is the story of how this plays out.)

*I have turned around on capital punishment, for what it's worth. I don't disagree with it in principle, but I have come to doubt the ability of our horribly broken justice system to reliably establish guilt in these cases beyond a reasonable doubt. And given America's lamentable (and arguably wicked) recent history in our "wars of choice", I am rapidly coming around to being anti-war as well.