Appreciating true Morality – based on God’s Law – requires a renewed mind.

Even though we live in an essentially post-modern culture, we are
nevertheless the inheritors of certain assumptions of modernity, itself the
result of the Enlightenment. One of these is that we can know the meaning
of the right and the good by the use of our minds and that our minds need no
special enlightenment or divine assistance to arrive at, and to know, this
meaning.

Let us agree that unaided reason can recognize what is right and wrong in a
basic sense and furthermore can give reasons for this recognition. In such
things as driving a car while drunk, stealing goods from a house or money
from an employer, mercilessly beating a child, deliberately poisoning
someone, holding a person for ransom, planting a bomb in a crowded mall,
unfaithfulness to a spouse and so on,
reasonable people can agree that all this activity is wrong and say why it
is.

But why is it that many reasonable people cannot see that abortion is
wrong and is no different in principle than the deliberate slaughter of a
child or an adult?

The short answer is that they see abortion within the context of what is
portrayed as “responsible liberation” from biological and social tyrannies
and that this is set within the general “values” of post-modernism.

POST-MODERNISM AND THE ACCEPTANCE OF ABORTION

In post-modernism abortion is specifically tied to the self-liberation of
persons from their biology. Thus it is seen as assisting in the exercise of
free choice and the pursuit of personally chosen goals and projects in
life – and all these are important “values”. An unwanted pregnancy is
obviously most inconvenient for career plans, for active and intimate sexual
activity, for securing financial security, and for planning (if desired) a
family at the right time. So abortion is necessary – even if messy and
inconvenient for the female – for securing these goals and this ambition
when contraception has failed.

Also, to be pregnant by choice and find that the “foetus” will become a
handicapped baby and to do nothing about it is seen as failing to be a
responsible parent. For responsible people, it is said, take care to ensure
that children they bring into the world are healthy, wanted and will not be
a burden on anyone’s freedom and autonomy.

Further, since abortion is very much related to personal autonomy and
freedom, self-realization and self-fulfillment, the non-availability of it
is usually portrayed as the result of pre-modern structures of
patriarchalism and biological dominance. Much support for the use of
abortion is gained by emphasizing the out-of-date and cruel positions of
opponents.

So in this context all that is further required to justify the removal of
the “foetus” from the womb is an argument that makes the “foetus” to be
merely and only flesh and blood. So a moral difference between a “foetus”
and a baby is advanced. And that argument usually comes in the form of a
claim that before birth the “foetus” is human biological life but is not
human personal life. So abortion is the destruction not of a human person
but of human biological life.

And in the last 30 years there have been in the USA over 30 million
abortions. Has this been the destruction of mere flesh and blood or the
slaughter of persons made in the image of the Triune God?

In this same post-modern world, the practice of euthanasia or
physician-assisted suicide is also gaining ground and does so on similar
“values” to that which has supported the general acceptance and use of
abortion in western society. It is based on such values as the autonomy of
dying persons, dying with dignity, liberation from biological necessity and
the impersonal forces of nature, and that the good death is the death freely
chosen.

PRAYER AND MORALITY

Most people absorb the general “values” of their culture and thus receive
them as a foundation of their moral thinking, where they may compete with or
even mix with “virtues” received from partial Christian formation. In fact
most of us have a mindset which is inconsistent for it is fuelled and filled
with diverse moral/immoral principles and narratives.

The only way open to Christians to seek to purify their minds and allow them
to be open to the will of God in terms of morality is (a) the path of
mortification (dying to the world in union with Christ in his death) through
Gospel asceticism and (b) the path of vivification (rising with Christ to
newness of life) through faith and good works. In other words, union with
the Lord Jesus Christ in prayer, worship, repentance, faith and discipline
and through meditation upon His Word and contemplation of His glory is a
necessary preliminary to knowing Him and His will.

In order to form a Christian mind, the traditional wisdom of the Church has
been to teach converts to Christ the Creed (in whom to believe and what to
believe) the Lord’s Prayer (to whom to pray and what to pray) and the
Commandments ( whom to obey and the content of the obedience). Thus he who
believes and prays aright will be in the position to receive and understand
God’s commandments, His moral law.

As the influence of Christendom and modernity recede and decline, fewer
people will be able to see that such acts as abortion and euthanasia are
wrong unless their minds have been renewed through personal union &
asceticism with the Lord Jesus Christ in death, burial and resurrection.
And of course the renewal of the mind (Romans 12:1ff) has importance for the
whole of life and not only for the correct perception of what is right and
wrong.

The Rev’d Dr. Peter Toon Wednesday June 6, 2001