Since I read it ten years ago, I have always found the chapter on abortion in Richard B. Hays’ magnificent The Moral Vision of the New Testament (1996) exemplarily theologically level-headed. Of course Hays easily demolishes the discourse of “rights”; equally, however, he dismantles as quite unbiblical the notion of the “sacredness of lfe”. But, even further, he writes: “It is inappropriate to approach the issue of abortion by asking, ‘When does human life begin?’ or ‘Is the fetus a “person”?’ Such questions are unanswerable, both from a scientific point of view and from the biblical evidence. There is no basis in Scripture for answering – or indeed even asking – such questions.” But Hays then adds: “They are also exceedingly dangerous questions if they seek to justify abortion by defining marginal cases out of the human race. This is, for obvious reasons, a bad precedent to set. Jesus’ persistent strategy was, on the contrary, to define the marginal cases in.”

This anti-abortion paradigm of defining the marginal case in seems to me to be not only right, but also a useful point of contact (if you like) for the purpose of moral apologetics, particularly as the woman is rare indeed who, pregnant, regards an abortion as simply the cosmetic removal of an inconvenient cluster of cells. And, ironically, even pro-choicers will look askance at pregnant women who smoke or drink excessively.

However the thing is that, inevitably, if uncomfortably, even if you make the case for the marginal case, you are going to get marginal cases of the marginal case, of the kind that Sullivan sensitively draws to our attention. And then, further, particularly in a society where the concept of the common good is otiose, ousted by radical libertarian individualism, inevitably, if tragically, what Rowan Williams calls “moral slippage” sets in, the slippage “between thinking compassionately about exceptional cases and losing the sense of a normative position.” And that’s where we’re at now – at best. Is there a way to retrieve the normative position?

The language of “murder”, let alone state sanctioned mass murder, will get us nowhere, not only because it generates more heat than light but because it simply does not ring true. The vast majority of people, including Christians, simply do not react the same way to an abortion as they do to the killing of a child, and I am not convinced that this asymmetry is simply the result of cultural habit or moral stupefaction. It thus strikes me as semantically and ethically obtuse to speak of abortion statistics and the Holocaust, or the Rwandan genocide, in the same breath.

Nor do I think that the holy grail for Christians is the overturning of Roe v. Wade or, here in the UK, the repeal of the 1967 Abortion Act (and the latter just ain’t going to happen). The real issue here is not public policy, it is the ethos of death itself which is the soil of public policy, which includes not only abortion but also the legitimation of capital punishment and war – indeed the valorisation of war. Thus is Williams himself “genuinely puzzled by political parties, governments or churches that appear to find a greater moral problem in abortion than in the manufacture, marketing and use of indiscriminate weaponry.”

I submit that as long as such violence is thinkable – and thinkable as necessary, even redemptive – among Christians themselves, even the normative case against abortion will be not only morally inconsistent but morally unintelligible. Judgement begins in the household of God. Pacifism, as I have suggested before, goes all the way down, or else violence, in one form or another, will always find a way to rise to the top. As it is, because nonviolence, not only in the US but quintessentially in the US, is the great unthinkable, the only way to be consistently anti-abortion is to be foundationally anti-American.

A reader responds via email:

What’s worse, “taxation without representation” or “infanticide”? The answer seems obvious, but the implication would, I believe, be very difficult for Prof. Reno to swallow.

The more I think about the state-legitimacy arguments, the more I think it needs to be said that precisely these arguments bear some responsibility for the killing of Dr. Tiller. They do so, because a Christian killed the doctor, and because it is Christian doctrines of legitimacy that give theological backing to the use of lethal force. All Scott Roeder did is to say that our particular state fails the Christian test of legitimacy. You’ve already pointed that out, but I think it’s also crucial to actually see the connections between, on the one hand, arguments of the sort Reno advances and their dependence upon misreadings of Romans 13, and, on the other hand, the murder of Dr. Tiller. Yes, Reno quite helpfully admits that even legitimate authority is fallen and unjust. This is an important corrective to readings of Romans 13 that generate naive ideal conceptions of legitimate authority. However, Reno goes on to say that, however unjust and corrupt authority might be, we still NEED the state’s violence in order to have a culture that respects life. “A legitimate, functioning government is the precondition for civilization.” And this is the crux of the issue: once you’ve given a theological blessing to the state’s violence, it’s only a matter of time before some Christians decide that the state’s falling down on the job that God wants it to do and then proceed to take matters into their own hands.

One should note that Reno’s argument here is parallel to James Dobson’s attack on gay marriage—i.e., nothing less than civilization is at stake. Even if this were true—and claims like these are highly dubious; they strike me as false apocalyptic—the mandate for civilizational life-support is obviously not being read out of Romans 13. Rather, a deeply Constantinian habit of mind is overwhelming an otherwise helpful reading of the text. Reno is certainly right that “Paul is not suggesting that the Roman emperor of his day is a trustworthy divine deputy with a pipeline to God.” So far, so good. But Reno cannot be right when he further says that government “is the very basis for any successful collective effort to respect life.” In saying the latter, Reno has, without noticing it, made the sword-bearing function of secular government more important than, indeed prior to, the work of the Spirit-empowered Church. And so against Reno, but with John Howard Yoder and Ratzinger/Benedict, we must say that the Church is a culture of life, the Church is a “collective effort to respect life.” Furthermore, we must observe that in the crucial case, the birth of the Church, the only role government really had to play was in the betrayal of its duty in the crucifixion of Jesus. Theologically speaking, then, Reno has it backwards. If there is ever to be a government that respects life, then there must be a Church-culture which testifies in word and deed that its existence flows from the life-giving, resurrection-power of the Spirit, and not from the death-dealing powers of the world.

As has been mentioned in the comments, Andrew Sullivan has been posting a series of actual stories from people’s experiences of facing into the difficulties of pregnancy and abortion. Whatever your position on these issues, these stories bring it home. The tangible reality of this whole nexus of painful and tender issues should not be ignored in the name of ethical flag-waving, as sometimes tends to be the case for people on all sides of the issue.

Here are all the posts so far:

• It’s So Personal
• It’s So Personal, Ctd
• The Catholic Mother
• The Trauma
• A Doctor’s View (reader reaction)
• A Target Of Terror
• The Regret
• Not Knowing For Sure
• When Principle Meets Reality
• Serial Abortions (reader reaction)
• Preparing For The Worst
• An Unforgiving Family (reader reaction)
• The Guilt
• Holding On
• The Gay Fathers
• What Guilt?
• Ectopic “Miscarriage”

Recent discussions have probed how one can, in an ethically consistent manner, condemn the murder of George Tiller, while simultaneously insisting that, as an abortionist, he was a mass murderer who had vowed to kill again. In all of these discussions, as well as the broader discussion all over the web, the answer always seems to come back to the issue of the necessity of legitimate authority to exact justice. In other words, Tiller should have been convicted, put on death row, and given a lethal injection, not gunned down by a vigilante. Okay, that has a certain prima facie plausibility to it, but lets look deeper here.

It seems to me that the only way the argument from state legitimacy can gain purchase is if we operate on the basis of an understanding of abortion that pro-lifers cannot accept, at least on the basis of common pro-life rhetoric. The argument from state legitimacy posits that abortion, which is understood and described as legally-protected genocide, does not call the legitimacy of the state into question. But if mass genocide doesn’t nullify the legitimacy of the state, then what would count? If our government were systematically rounding up all Latinos and gassing them, would we really be arguing that its wrong for citizens to violently oppose the government because, you know, after all they’re the government? If government-protected genocide does not mitigate the legitimacy of the state, its hard to see what ever could.

In other words, pro-lifers constantly call abortion murder and genocide, but when it comes to actually dealing with it, they treat it like a social ill that is undesirable, but best handled through due process and proper channels. In short, it doesn’t really look like they think is genocide.

But if abortion on demand really is the genocide we often say it is, this leaves many pro-lifers in the odd position of, in essence, arguing that it is completely impossible for the state to ever forfeit its legitimacy. Is that really what we want to be arguing? I certainly do not. Again, it seems to me that the only consistent way to condemn the murder of abortionists, as a pro-lifer, is to embrace some ethic of nonviolence. Only if violence itself is to be rejected as a tool of any and all social change and political action can we consistently stand against acts like this.

The whole George Tiller incident continues to dominate the newswires around the interwebs. Bobby likens the issue to the question of whether it was justifiable to assassinate Hitler, finding himself, admittedly in a quandary because there is an instinctive desire to support Hitler’s assassination in a way that doesn’t quite feel right for abortionists. Davey also responds, asking if there is not room, along with Barth for a “practical pacifist” position that, on the basis of Romans 13 defers the use of violence to the state in the righting of wrongs. There are several similar comments in my own thread as well.

These responses all seem to, in some way or other, come home to roost on the issue of the immorality of vengeance and the importance of legitimate authority (i.e. the state) in the dispensing of just violence. This seems to go wide of the target in this instance for two reasons.

First, I seriously doubt that Roeder was attempting to take vengeance on Tiller in any normal sense of the term. By all accounts Roeder was stridently pro-life, had protested regularly at Tiller’s clinic, and truly believed that what he was doing was saving innocent lives. In short, he was not acting out of a desire for revenge, but out of a desire to protect the innocent. And there’s a good case to be made that he did just that. Tiller is one of only three late-term abortion clinics in the country and he performed the latest term abortions in all of history. Killing him certainly did prevent some abortions from happening. If abortion is murder (and I think it generally is), Roeder saved innocent lives. Thus, if we affirm that lethal violence in defense of the innocent is morally justifiable, it would seem that we have to defend Roeder’s actions.

Second, and related to the first point, I see no reason to assume that, if lethal violence in defense of innocent life is moral, it should only be the state that carry out this violence. Again, if a guy was shooting up an office building, and someone stopped him by throwing him out a window, no one would say what he did was wrong because he wasn’t a police officer. Indeed, for the non-pacifist, it is morally incumbent on us to utilize violence to save innocent lives. To fail to do so would be a sin of omission. As such, I don’t think the appeal to governmental authority dissolves the problem here. If we have an ethic that allows for the use of lethal violence in defense of the innocent, I don’t see a way for us to avoid affirming Roeder’s actions, or at least mitigating the manufactured moral outrage that is coming from key pro-life groups.