Journal: Eikon
Volume: EIKON 02:1 (Spring 2020)
Article: Contending For A Culture Of Life: Abortion In The Work And Witness Of The Early Church
Author: Nathan Tarr

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 81

Contending For A Culture Of Life:
Abortion In The Work And Witness Of The Early Church

Nathan Tarr

Nathan Tarr is the Pastor of Missions and Discipleship at Christ Baptist Church in Raleigh, NC.

The issue of abortion is never far out of the news. This perennial discussion provides believers with regular opportunity to articulate our convictions as well meaningfully engage those with different convictions. Certain opinions, such the claim that the right to “terminate one’s pregnancy” is “fundamental to one’s humanity” published in America’s paper of record, may sadden us but are no longer surprising.1 They are immediately recognizable as a distortion, and indeed a rejection, of the biblical anthropology which roots our humanity in the imago Dei.

Eikon 2.1 (Spring 2020) p. 82

But what of arguments in favor of abortion that lay claim to the history of the church itself? This approach can be both surprising and, for believers unfamiliar with the convictions of their forebears in the faith, even disorienting. Christiana Forrester, founder and director of Christian Democrats of America, attempted to formulate such an argument in the Huffington Post. Forrester advanced the claim that, “for hundreds of years Christians weren’t concerned about abortion.” In fact, she continued, there is “a lack of interest in the topic in early Christian teaching.” She concluded that because “there is little to no mention of abortion as a topic of great alarm,” from the Old Testament through to modern history, there is therefore “no case to be made for a definitive Christian stance throughout history on the spiritual or moral aspects of abortion.”2

Forrester’s wholesale revision of the historical record –– suggesting that Christians first began to care about abortion after Roe v. Wade –– smuggled in a payload of lying implications. She used her claim first to deny pro-life arguments any biblical and historical legitimacy, then to diminish the moral significance of abortion, placing it well beneath the mandate to excise xenophobia and alleviate poverty, and finally to reduce resistance to abortion to the level of political pragmatism.3 Most troubling, for the purposes of this article, Forrester’s claim that her conclusions “simply bring the biblical and historical record to light,” forfeited the very sources contemporary Christians so desperately need in order to formulate and practice a biblically faithful, relationally sensitive, historically informed response to the cluster of issues surrounding aborti...