Daily Verse | Daniel 12:2
“Multitudes who sleep in the dust of the earth will awake: some to everlasting life, others to shame and everlasting contempt.”
Wednesday’s Reading: Hosea 1-7
Wednesday and I think of this blog as daily commentary on politics, culture and the Christian faith. I see those three fields as directly interrelated. Politics is downstream from culture, and culture is downstream from faith. The politics we’re experiencing are a result of the culture we live in, and the culture we live in is shaped by the amount of biblically-accurate faith that exists in the culture.
According to research conducted a year ago by Dr. George Barna, 176 million Americans claim to be Christian (69% of the population), but only 9% of them possess a biblical worldview. In other words, nearly three-quarters of us identify as “Christian” but only about one in ten of us actually live life according to that biblical identity.
What that means is that we end up with proclamations like the one that Joe Scarborough recently offered up during MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
Scarborough lauded [Republican South Carolina state Sen. Katrina] Shealy’s speech and then accused pro-life Christians of “heresy” and suggested that Jesus doesn’t necessarily oppose abortion because the Bible doesn’t record him having said the word.
“As a Southern Baptist, I grew up reading the Bible — maybe a backslidden Baptist, but I still know the Bible. Jesus never once talked about abortion, never once! And it was happening back in ancient times, it was happening during, in his time!” Scarborough said angrily. “Never once mentioned it, and for people perverting the gospel of Jesus Christ down to one issue, it’s heresy.”
Backslidden Joe Scarborough is correct in his assertions about two things: abortion was a common practice in biblical times, and Jesus did not, in fact, address abortion in scripture. But knowing those two facts does not lead necessarily to his conclusion, which is that “there are people who are using Jesus as a shield to make 10-year-old raped girls go through a living and breathing hell here on Earth.”
I would put Scarborough among the 176 million Americans who claim to be “Christian” but don’t have a biblical worldview. His rant is not meant to be a strong biblical argument, but an emotional appeal to win support for his ideological position. The 9 percent of Christians with a biblical worldview are constantly hammered with arguments like these and need to be able to answer them with biblical reasoning and logic.
The most obvious flaw in his argument is the logical fallacy of arguing from silence. He’s saying that because Jesus never addressed abortion, it’s un-Christian to make such a singular issue out of it—”heresy,” as he labels it.
The problem with his argument is that we don’t know that Jesus never addressed abortion. Not everything Jesus said and did is recorded in scripture (John 21:25). Jesus is not recorded as addressing slavery, sex trafficking, drug use, systemic racism or transgenderism. What can we conclude about his views on those issues?
Nothing. We don’t know because scripture is silent on what Jesus thought.
Scarborough, though, is declaring what Jesus believed about abortion by what he didn’t say. But silence does not mean approval nor, to be fair, does it mean disapproval.
Essentially, the argument from silence is attempting to prove something in the absence of evidence. What would help, then, is evidence. And when it comes to children and their value to Jesus, we have plenty.
First, Jesus himself experienced the process of conception to birth, arriving incarnate as a child rather than a fully formed adult.
Second, Luke 1:41-44 records an in utero interaction with his cousin, John the Baptist, who “leaped for joy” over his proximity to Jesus while he was still in the womb. That indicates awareness, emotion and agency, which are all aspects of personhood.
Third, Jesus honored the Jewish scriptures as authoritative during his life. We can safely assume that he would affirm the declaration of David in Psalm 139:13-16.
For you created my inmost being;
you knit me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made;
your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.
My frame was not hidden from you
when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.
Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book
before one of them came to be.
And, finally, Jesus scolded his disciples who tried to prevent children from being brought to him (Mark 10:13-16).
People were bringing little children to Jesus for him to place his hands on them, but the disciples rebuked them. When Jesus saw this, he was indignant. He said to them, “Let the little children come to me, and do not hinder them, for the kingdom of God belongs to such as these. Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” And he took the children in his arms, placed his hands on them and blessed them.
Jesus was indignant with his disciples’ treatment of the little kids. I can imagine him saying, “Whoa, whoa! What are you guys doing?” He was offended by their presumption.
Even though Joe Scarborough is correct that Jesus never mentioned abortion in scripture, he’s wrong in concluding that therefore it’s wrong for Christians to make such a big deal about it. It’s clear from the rest of the Bible that children are created by God and that Jesus found them worthy of blessing.
That’s why we fight the scourge of abortion.