The Duties of Love: A Christian Response to Abortion

The whole law is fulfilled in one word: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” (Gal. 5:14)

The sum of the Ten Commandments is: to love the Lord our God with all our heart, with all our soul, with all our strength, and with all our mind; and our neighbor as ourselves. (Westminster Shorter Catechism, 7.042)

Thou shalt love thy neighbor more than thy own life. Thou shalt not murder a child by abortion. (Epistle of Barnabas, 19:5, circa 125 AD)

God, out of his great love for us in Jesus Christ, has blessed us by revealing his will to us in Scripture, so that we may know how to love each other, as Christ loves us.1 That revealed will is the moral law.

One of the chief confusions of our time is the relationship between Love and Law. We find it baffling to learn that the Law is abrogated by Christ’s coming—that to use it makes us legalists—and then discover that we are trying to resist the moral relativism of our age without it. We know that Jesus Christ is “the Truth,” but we are told that what is true arises from particular circumstances. Thus our confidence is shaken because we are of two minds on what is morally right or wrong. A good example of this loss of confidence is in the expression, “I would not have an abortion (usually meaning, “I do not believe abortion is right”), but I cannot say what is right or wrong for another person” (usually meaning, “I don’t want to impose my personal beliefs on anyone else”). Most of those who have learned to repeat the apparent generosity and compassion of this statement probably are not conscious of the overwhelming conflict in it.2

Loving another person outside the Law’s framework means there is no objective measure for making judgments about what others say or do. It means both that I must respect anyone else’s truth to be as legitimate as mine, and that my own expression of love is not accountable to any moral standard outside myself. The separation of Love from Law ultimately means that we are freed to express the depths of our depravity and we can commit heinous crimes in the name of Love. This is not far-fetched. There are defenders of this view. And this view is played out in life and death decisions for the innocent and vulnerable in our society every day.

Joseph Fletcher’s situation ethic: morality based on love without law

Episcopal priest Joseph Fletcher wrote a little book in 1966 called, Situation Ethics: The New Morality. The book expresses well the premises on which moral relativism is based. Fletcher’s view can be summarized as: love is the single moral absolute, good moral decisions are based on love of neighbor, and love is the antithesis of law and derives its meaning from response to circumstances.3 Fletcher’s book has had a significant effect on moral thinking in our society, even among those who never read his book.

Fletcher writes that situational factors are so primary that “circumstances alter rules and principles.” Love, in his view, makes every absolute relative so that absolutes can be adapted to the circumstances. “Thou shalt not steal,” he says, must not be read as a commandment. It is merely a guide, a “maxim.” It, like all the commandments, may be employed when it is useful. There are times when stealing is right and when it is wrong. If a lie is told unlovingly, it is evil; if it is told in love it is good. My reason for lying can make it a good.4 “If people do not believe it is wrong to have sex relations outside marriage, it isn’t, unless they hurt themselves, their partners, or others.”5 “There are no rules—none at all.”6 Fletcher justifies not only abortion, but also infanticide, euthanasia and assisted suicide with his ethic: “In principle, even killing ‘innocent’ people might be right.”7

In this view of morality, no deed is good of itself. An act acquires its good only if it serves the welfare of another human. “Whatever is benevolent [loving] is morally right; whatever is malevolent or indifferent [unloving] is morally wrong.”8 In this view, the words that form the basis of the judgments have no content except that given them by the decision-maker: words such as “hurt,” “good,” “welfare,” and “malevolent”—like “love”—are defined by the person in the circumstance.9

The situation ethic has reshaped our whole society’s understanding of love. By making Law the antithesis of Love, situation ethics allows us to sanction lying, stealing, sex outside of marriage, and every other violation of God’s Law governing human relationships.

In the Christian view, true love is not a free-floating emotion to be caught and filled with our own personal version of goodness. Theologian Wolfhart Pannenberg asks, “Can love ever be sinful?” And he answers, “The entire tradition of Christian doctrine teaches that there is such a thing as inverted, perverted love.” Pannenberg writes that true love is perverted whenever we turn away from God. God’s will is our “guiding star,” he says, to loving rightly.10

The situation ethic is the inversion of love of which Pannenberg speaks because it is so easy to rationalize decisions to serve our own purposes. The problem with a law written only on the heart, and not also in the Book, is the condition of our hearts. Calvin wrote about our susceptibility to self-delusion: “For our nature, wicked and deformed, is always opposing [God’s] uprightness; and our capacity, weak and feeble to do good, lies far from his perfection.”11 This is a spiritual reality that Christian faith knows about the human heart. It is what Fletcher’s view denies. Fletcher’s rejection of the Commandments is a way of saying we do not need God’s definition of the moral. We can determine it for ourselves.

This law-less ethic of loving the neighbor does its greatest harm when it is used to make life and death decisions about others. It is the basis of the “choice” of abortion. Abortion may be regarded as a loving act, a good, only if love is emptied of biblical content and then twisted to mean the opposite of God’s intent: that killing innocent human beings is allowed. It is an inverted, perverted love.

The “benevolence” of the church’s modern position

This topsy-turvy understanding of benevolence, or love, as justification for abortion has been the ethic of the documents of the Presbyterian Church (USA) since this denomination’s great reversal on abortion in 1983. The document from that year speaks of a “covenantal responsibility of parenthood,” or familial love. Compassion for the needs of the woman involved, other children in the family, the general conditions of life at the time of a pregnancy, are what justify the abortion decision.

…The decision to terminate a pregnancy is a question of one’s covenant responsibility to accept the limits of human resources.… When someone can discern that it would not be good for a child to be born as the result of a particular pregnancy, she has a responsibility to take her human limitations seriously and to act accordingly.12

The child lives or dies depending on the way in which the woman chooses to express the situationist’s version of love.

The current policy document of the PC(USA), adopted by the General Assembly of 1992, has a more moderate tone than its predecessor, but it, too, yields to circumstances rather than to law as the determiner of the morality of abortion. “Problem pregnancies are the result of, and influenced by, so many complicated and insolvable circumstances that we have neither the wisdom nor the authority to address or decide each situation.” The policy leaves the decision to the pregnant woman, and declares her decision, whatever it is, morally acceptable. The decision to kill the unborn child or to allow the child to live are morally equal decisions. Of course, the policy does not express its view in such stark language.13

This is a very attractive position in our modern world. It frees us from the legalist label. It permits us to appear tolerant and compassionate. We think it allows us to avoid conflict. It is unnerving to discover that it isn’t Christian.

In Christian faith Law is the ground in which Love is rooted

Scripture says that “The whole Law is fulfilled in one word: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’” (Gal. 5:14).

Scripture teaches us to love the law of God (Psalm 1, “Blessed is the person [whose]…delight is in the law of the Lord, and on his law he meditates day and night.”). It teaches us that obedience to the law is how we express our love of God (John 14:15, “If you love me, keep my commandments”). It ties love of neighbor to obedience to the law (James 2:8, “You do well if you really fulfill the royal law according to the Scripture, ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself’”). It shows us that we demonstrate our love of our Savior in our treatment of the neighbor (Matthew 25:40, “just as you did it to one of the least of these who are members of my family, you did it to me”). Loving the neighbor is not the means of obtaining the grace of God, which no work of ours can possibly do. It is, rather, the means of expressing God’s grace as members of his body. It is the living of the Christian life as Christ’s disciples. Fletcher is not far from the mark in his great emphasis on love. But he could not be farther from the mark in thinking that God’s revealed will as the meaning and content of love is the antithesis of loving the neighbor.

Unlike the ceremonial laws, which were fulfilled in Christ and abrogated by his coming (Gal 3), the moral law, the summary of which is the Ten Commandments, continues for all time. The Reformed confessions teach that the moral law applies to all people, unbelievers as well as believers. “The moral law doth forever bind all, as well justified persons as others, to the obedience thereof.”14 Luther defined two uses of the Law and Calvin added the third. The third is closest, Calvin said, to “the proper purpose of the law.”15 The first two uses are the Law as a Schoolmaster, showing us our need and leading us to Christ, and the Law as a restraint on evil-doers, a standard for the execution of justice. Calvin’s third use of the Law describes it as a guide to obedient discipleship: living in a way that is pleasing to God and truly good for the human community. All three uses are applicable to love of neighbor. The first implies a caring for the state of the neighbor’s soul, the second implies a caring for the protection of the neighbor from harm, and the third implies a Christ-like positive obligation of laying down our own lives for the neighbor.16 Fletcher’s view of love does violence to all three understandings of the benefits of the law in loving the neighbor.

Law’s relationship to love: The example of the Good Samaritan

Love begins with God who is love. Therefore, the context for viewing a neighbor and his or her needs is God and not the circumstances. The neighbor doesn’t always inspire our natural compassion. It is when we see Christ in the neighbor, as Jesus explains in Matthew 25,17 that we begin to comprehend the meaning of love. In the Christian view, God is the primary context for good moral decisions, and the circumstances provide information to guide the response. Often the circumstances become the obstacles that must be overcome in order to love the person. Circumstances are not insignificant and they are not to be ignored. But neither are they determinative of decisions that please God.

The Law is based on a prior biblical premise that God has marked every human being with his own image. We have that image in common with every other human being and it is the basis of our neighbor-hood. It is the reason that no human being is a stranger to us. Therefore, every person is the worthy recipient of our love. Circumstances do not disqualify a person from possession of the image of God and the obligation of love. Calvin comments on the claim that image in the neighbor places on us:

Say, ‘he is contemptible and worthless;’ but the Lord shows him to be one to whom he has deigned to give the beauty of his image. Say that you owe nothing for any service of his; but God, as it were, has put him in his own place in order that you may recognize toward him the many and great benefits with which God has bound you to himself. Say that he does not deserve even your least effort for his sake; but the image of God, which recommends him to you, is worthy of your giving yourself and all your possessions.18

Christian faith’s call to love of neighbor is not a matter of what we are inclined to do naturally. That love often calls us to behavior and actions that we resist because of the circumstances.

Perhaps the best example of the contrast between the situational and the biblical ethic is in Jesus’ parable of the Good Samaritan (Luke 10). The man on the road had nothing to commend him to his prospective helpers: he had been robbed and was penniless; he was beaten, dirty, and bleeding, already “half-dead;” he was alone, without friend or family member who might have had a natural desire to care for him. He was a stranger, an alien, on this road, someone who put no natural claim on passers-by.19

Only one of the three people who encountered this man chose to help him. We may say that the two, the majority, regarded the circumstances and judged that it is morally acceptable to “pass by on the other side.” Why did the Samaritan make the opposite decision? Was the answer in the circumstances? Not likely. The Samaritan was of a race hated by the injured man. In order to help, he had to delay his own trip and spend his own money on a stranger. He had to find lodging and care for the man, and pay for it out of his own pocket. What besides the obligation of love that Scripture places on us would explain why the Samaritan did not also “pass by on the other side”? Even if the Samaritan did not know the biblical teaching, he behaved as if he recognized in the distorted, damaged, nearly-lifeless human being the image of God; he behaved as if he understood the Law’s requirement to avoid what “tends to the destruction of the life of any,” as well as the Law’s positive requirement of “comforting and succoring the distressed, and protecting and defending the innocent.”20 He was merciful at great cost to himself. We call him the “good” Samaritan because he is an imitation of Christ. He shows us how to lay down our lives for each other (John 13:34-35; 15:12).

Jesus teaches in this parable that not every person’s decision in this circumstance expressed love for the neighbor. The priest and the Levite could not stand before Jesus and justify their decisions.

Abortion, like situation ethics, is opposed to the Christian view of love

In any pregnancy where, for any reason, the baby is not wanted, it is possible to find a benevolent-sounding reason in the circumstances for why the pregnancy must end and the baby must die. The reasons may range from the baby’s poor prospects for a normal life after birth to a teenage girl who exercised poor judgment when she was alone with a male friend. They may range from pregnancy as a result of a violent attack to contraceptive failure. If the baby is not wanted, the circumstances will always cooperate with a reason for doing away with the innocent child.

The stories of two pregnant teenagers and two women who came to their aid serve as a modern version of Jesus’ parable. These are true stories.

In one, a clergywoman writes that she received a call from a school nurse who wanted help getting a high school teen across a state line to have an abortion. The minister drove to the school, picked up the teenager and drove her to an abortion clinic in New York. She waited while the young woman had the abortion and then drove her back to school and dropped her off. She tells us nothing more about the teenage girl. It was the only contact she ever had with the young woman.

In the other, a young pregnant teen sought help from a woman in a pregnancy care center. The teenager had been raped by a young man of another race. She lived with her grandfather whom she knew would react violently to the news, so she felt she must have an abortion. The woman offered to go with the teenager to see the grandfather and help deliver the news. The teen agreed. The woman writes that the trip to grandfather’s house was one of the most dreadful moments of her life. They found him sitting on the front porch of his farmhouse. When they told him the news, he exploded, and told the girl to leave and not to come back.

The young girl now had a friend in the woman, who cared for her and who accompanied her time and again in trips to visit the grandfather. Gradually, the grandfather warmed up and accepted his granddaughter back into his home. The baby was born there, and became the grandfather’s pride and joy.

We should ask, as Jesus did, who proved to be neighbor?

When the Church bases its morality in circumstances rather than in the Law, it puts human beings in peril, both physically and spiritually. When a young woman enters an abortion clinic and finds an attractive religious brochure with her denomination’s name on it, sanctioning her abortion decision, the defenses of her own troubled conscience are broken down. The church has abetted her spiritual peril. When the Church then denies her need for forgiveness by regarding abortion as morally equivalent to preserving innocent human life, it has set up a barrier to her healing and her reconciliation with God. Women need the ministry of the church that warns them away from decisions that will harm them spiritually. They need the pastoral ministry that proclaims how ready God is to forgive. And they need a spiritual family who will reach out into its community and commit itself to acts of mercy toward women in troubled pregnancies.

Scripture tells us that in bearing each others’ burdens we fulfill the law of Christ (Gal. 6:2). The loving response to the abortion crisis of our time is both to see that the innocent babies’ lives are spared, and to do the difficult and time-consuming work of caring for young women, both spiritually and physically. The church has expressed love in this way throughout her history.

Theologian and writer Richard John Neuhaus says that abortion raises the question of whom we regard as neighbor, and to whom we will be neighbor. Who is outside the biblical requirements of love? Who is it we have no obligation to protect and care for? Neuhaus points to the danger of the situational approach for every needy person.

Among the senile aged, the comatose, the grievously handicapped, the mentally deranged, the drug enslaved, and the millions who are starving, we encounter innumerable people who are not useful to themselves or others, are not viable, and have no claim upon our caring by virtue of their present or potential achievement. In short, any criterion we might employ to exclude the unborn from our field of moral vision inevitably excludes millions of other human beings as well. The Church’s moral teaching rests on the proposition that other people do not need to qualify for our love and protective concern. It is enough that they are members of the human community and God’s children in need. If we do not care about every human life, it is doubtful that we really care about any human life. In biblical language, of course, the question is: Who is my neighbor? If by some measure we can exclude the unborn as neighbor, can we not by the same or similar measure exclude, for example, the emaciated victims of Ethiopian famine or the “vegetables” in our state hospitals?21

It is the moral law, reflecting the will of the Law-Giver, that protects the widow, the orphan, and the poor, those among us who cannot defend themselves. No unborn child is safe without the protection of that law. None of us is safe without the protection of that law. James 1 chides believers who think they can profess faith in Christ and ignore his commands. True expression of faith is found in caring for the needy and vulnerable (James 1:27). Scripture admonishes us to demonstrate our faith by how we live our lives. In what sounds like an allusion to the parable of the Good Samaritan, James says, “If a brother or sister is ill-clad and in lack of daily food, and one of you says to them, ‘Go in peace, be warmed and filled,’ without giving them the things needed for the body, what does it profit?” (James 2:15-16). Faith must be visible in what we do.

The situationist’s version of love is at its heart no more than love of self. The love we have from God and are commanded by God to express toward each other, makes big demands on us. But its end is all blessing.

By this we know love, that he laid down his life for us; and we ought to lay down our lives for the brethren. But if any one has the world’s goods and sees his brother in need, yet closes his heart against him, how does God’s love abide in him? Little children, let us not love in word or speech but in deed and in truth. (1 John 3:16-18)

This article first appeared in Theology Matters, Vol. 11, No. 3 (May/Jun 2005).