The Prolife History Of The Church

The Prolife History of the Church
John R. Petrilli

There are times when the history behind a modern issue can provide much needed perspective and very welcome encouragement. Such is the case with the prolife movement. I have been actively and passionately involved with the prolife movement for ten years, but have never come across anything that gave any kind of historical perspective on this paramount issue of our day.

That all changed in an instant when I purchased a copy of Chuck Colson’s new book, The Faith. While the book is essentially a primer on the doctrinal beliefs of the Christian faith, Colson devotes an entire chapter to the sanctity of life. He commends the Roman Catholic Church for its inclusion of the sanctity of life as part and parcel of the Gospel (Evangelium Vitae), and acknowledges that Evangelicals consider it integral to the Gospel.

Best of all, the book outlines the historic, clear and consistent stance that the Church of Jesus Christ has held with regard to abortion and infanticide. According to Colson’s research, the issue of abortion and infanticide arose early on in the life and ministry of the church, stating, “Those who say the current abortion debate is the result of Christians plunging into politics after Roe v. Wade are simply ill informed about history.” He repeatedly references the outstanding work by sociologist Rodney Stark (The Rise of Christianity) which traces the Church’s prolife doctrine from the beginning, who describes it as “absolutely prohibit[ing] abortion and infanticide, classifying both as murder”.

As far back as the first century, a manual of Christian discipleship known as the Didache pronounced an unequivocal condemnation on the pagan practice of abortion with these words:

“There are two ways, the way of life and the way of death. There is a great difference between them … In accordance with the precept of the teaching, “you shall not kill”, you shall not put a child to death by abortion or kill it once it is born. The way of death is this: they show no compassion for the poor, they do not suffer with the suffering, they do not acknowledge their Creator, they kill their children and by abortion cause God’s creatures to perish. May you ever be guiltless of all these sins”.

The great Church Father, Justin Martyr stated the following in his first apology: “We have been taught that it is wicked to expose even newly born children … [for] we would then be murderers”. The exposure referred to involved leaving a newborn child to die in the elements – a common form of infanticide.

In the second century Athenagoras condemned abortion in the Church’s first political appeal as he made the following plea to the Roman Emperor Marcus Aurelius:

“We say that women who use drugs to bring on an abortion commit murder and will have to give an account to God for the abortion … [for we] regard the very fetus in the womb as a created being and therefore an object of God’s care … and [we do not] expose an infant because those who expose them are chargeable with child murder.”

Colson states that, “The Church’s passionate engagement in politics in defense of life is not due to the emergence of the ‘big bad religious right’, as Christianity’s detractors might say (and many Christians mistakenly believe as well).” He observes that it was the early Church that consistently challenged the state, with descriptions of abortion and infanticide that would be unacceptable by today’s standards, and politically incorrect. Unexpectedly, the Church’s defense of life became hugely popular in an ancient culture that watched lions tear people apart for mere entertainment. Stark writes, “Christianity brought a new conception of humanity to a world saturated with capricious cruelty and the vicarious love of death.”

In my own review of Stark’s book, I was introduced to his proposition that there may well be a direct correlation between the Christians’ abstaining from abortion and infanticide and the rapid rise of the Christian faith among pagan people groups that regularly and prolifically ended the lives of their young. Colson agrees,

“The Church also expanded most quickly among women because of the Christian teachings against abortion and infanticide. Christian families welcomed all the female children God gave them, while the Romans – as in China, India, and other parts of the world today – employed abortion and infanticide to produce more male workers and warriors than ‘burdensome’ women. The early Church spread fastest among women because the Church offered then protection against abuse and exploitation that they could find nowhere else. The Church denounced divorce, incest, marital infidelity, and polygamy while these were practiced, much to women’s detriment, in the surrounding culture.”

Stark’s research has also documented that as early as the third century, “a universalistic conception of humanity” was embraced by the Church. In the eighteenth century Parliamentarian William Wilberforce’s legendary work to free Africans from the British slave trade carried on this long-standing Christian consensus on the value of human life and its bald-faced revisionism and countercultural defense of human life at all levels.

With regard to the colonial Church in America, Colson writes, “[The dispute over] which human beings, whatever their developmental state, possess the right to life … was not a difficult question for our Founding Fathers, whose moral views were shaped by Biblical revelation. They wrote, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’.”

Colson closes his chapter on the sanctity of life with these powerful words:

“Many Catholics, Protestants and Orthodox have argued that we are in a great struggle that pits a culture of life against a culture of death. This is, in fact, the preeminent form the battle of good versus evil has taken in our day – as it did in the early days of the Church. We see other troubling signs today. We no longer see children as gifts from God; we see them more often as commodities, something that we are ‘entitled to’ simply because we exist. We decide to have children or not on the basis of whether they will enhance our lives. We evaluate pregnancies according to their potential to produce ‘good outcomes’. When abortions are botched and ‘wrongful births’ occur, people sue, the grounds being that ‘my life’ has been adversely affected. What about the life of the child? Who thinks of that? As a result, the birth replacement rate in the most advanced nations is declining dangerously as people in affluent cultures want to live unencumbered (child free) lives. We are endangering our own species. This is why Evangelicals and Catholics Together, in perhaps the finest document, argues that, ‘Christians who support the legal license to kill the innocent [must] consider whether they have not set themselves against the will of God and, to that extent, separated themselves from the company of Christian discipleship.’ Christians propose to society a biblical humanism ‘deeply grounded in the dignity of the human person at every stage of development, disadvantage, or decline’. It would be difficult to find a more effective answer to the encroaching culture of death than the love and justice of God.”