ABORTION, THEOLOGICALLY UNDERSTOOD - The Diigo Meta page

• 06 Sep 08
  

  Todd Way

  Article from 1990. Hauerwas shares a sermon on abortion then offers ethical commentary.

  abortion ethics theology hauerwas

  • We cannot simply throw the issue of abortion in the faces of women and say, 'You
    decide and you bear the consequences of your decision.' As the church, our response to the
    abortion issue must be to shoulder the responsibility to care for women and children. We
    cannot do otherwise and still be the church.
  • Christians in America are tempted to think of issues like abortion primarily in legal
    terms such as "rights." This is because the legal mode, as de Tocqueville
    pointed out long ago, provides the constituting morality in liberal societies. In other
    words, when you live in a liberal society like ours, the fundamental problem is how you
    can achieve cooperative agreements between individuals who share nothing in common other
    than their fear of death. In liberal society the law has the function of securing such
    agreements. That is the reason why lawyers are to America what priests were to the
    medieval world. The law is our way of negotiating safe agreements between autonomous
    individuals who have nothing else in common other than their fear of death and their
    mutual desire for protection.
  • 9 more annotations...
  • • We
      Christians do not believe that we have inalienable rights. That is the false presumption
      of Enlightenment individualism, and it opposes everything that Christians believe about
      what it means to be a creature.
    • We do not believe that we have a right to our bodies because when
      we are baptized we become members of one another; then we can tell one another what it is
      that we should, and should not, do with our bodies.
    • Here is the way it works: you can only act in the world that you
      can see, and you must be taught to see by learning to say.
    • One of the crucial issues here is how we learn to be a people dependent on one another.
      We must learn to confess that, as a hospitable people, we need one another because we are
      dependent on one another. The last thing that the church wants is a bunch of autonomous,
      free individuals. We want people who know how to express authentic need, because that
      creates community.
    • We, as church, are ready to be challenged by the other. This has to do with the fact
      that in the church, every adult, whether single or married, is called to be
      parent. All Christian adults have a parental responsibility because of baptism. Biology
      does not make parents in the church. Baptism does. Baptism makes all adult Christians
      parents and gives them the obligation to help introduce these children to the Gospel.
      Listen to the baptismal vows; in them the whole church promises to be parent. In this
      regard the church reinvents the family.

    • I often remind my right-to-life friends that Christians took their
      children with them to martyrdom rather than have them raised pagan. Christians believe
      there is much worth dying for. We do not believe that human life is an absolute good in
      and of itself. Of course our desire to protect human life is part of our seeing each human
      being as God's creature. But that does not mean that we believe that life is an overriding
      good.

      
      

      To say that life is an overriding good is to underwrite the modern sentimentality that
      there is absolutely nothing in this world worth dying for. Christians know that
      Christianity is simply extended training in dying early. That is what we have always been
      about. Listen to the Gospel! I know that today we use the church primarily as a means of
      safety, but life in the church actually involves extended training in learning to die
      early.

    • Honestly, I cannot imagine anything worse than
      people saying that they have children because their hope for the future is in their
      children. You would never have children if you had them for that reason. We are able to
      have children because our hope is in God, who makes it possible to do the absurd thing of
      having children. In a world of such terrible injustice, in a world of such terrible
      misery, in a world that may well be about the killing of our children, having children is
      an extraordinary act of faith and hope. But as Christians we can have a hope in God that
      urges us to welcome children.
    • Even Christians now think that we ought to marry people simply because
      they are "in love." Wrong, wrong, wrong! What could being in love possibly mean?
      The romantic view underwrites the presumption that, because people are in love, it is
      therefore legitimate for them to have sexual intercourse, whether they are married or not.
      Contrary to this is the church's view of marriage. To the church, marriage is the public
      declaration that two people have pledged to live together faithfully for a lifetime.
    • Christians witness to wider society first of all not by
      lobbying for a law against abortion, but by welcoming the children that the wider society
      does not want. Part of that witness might be to say to our pro-choice friends, "You
      are absolutely right. I don't think that any poor woman ought to be forced to have a child
      that she cannot afford. So let's work hard for an adequate child allowance in this
      country." That may not be entirely satisfactory, but that is one approach.

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