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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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I’m a pastor and I can tell you that modern theology on abortion was largely fabricated in the late 70’s and early 80’s.
Even the Southern Baptist Convention, one of the largest Evangelical denominations called abortion a “distinctly Catholic issue”. The cause for the change of consensus between 1973 and 1977, but the point being the largest pro-life organization in America took years to become outraged. If the Bible were as clear cut as they pretend, then they should have been marching on day 1.
What does the Bible say about abortion? The only time it discusses it is in Numbers 5:11-31, known as the Drought of Bitter Waters. Essentially if a husband suspects his wife is pregnant due to an affair, a priest administers a drink of bitter waters. There’s some debate over whether this drink is legitimately harmful and God supernaturally protects the innocent or it is perfectly harmless and God supernatural punishes the guilty, but it doesn’t really matter as the result is the same: The termination of the pregnancy.
If a fetus is a fully developed human life, then an innocent is being executed for the crimes of another. That’s a pretty horrific conclusion, but that’s obviously not the perspective of the audience of the day.
So how did the Biblical audience view the notion of when life began?
This gets a little tricky as we’re essentially asking when does a person have a soul. For much of the European church history, this moment was called ensoulment and happened when the mother first felt the cold kick. This specific moment was also known as the quickening. Most evangelicals now argue that ensoulment happens at the moment of conception.
The problem is that ensoulment isn’t actually a Christian idea at all, rather it’s Greek and Roman. Unfortunately, a lot of how Christian’s think isn’t due to the Bible but because of a rather interesting fella named Plotinus and his philosophy known as neo-platonism.
Speaking broadly, in neo-platonism, the soul is the true essence of a person and it is immortal and eternal. The soul inhabits a body and lives a life of good or evil that determines its eternal destination, heaven or hell.
Sound familiar?
In Judaism and therefore Christianity, people don’t have an immortal soul. You will find no verse in the Bible that discusses an eternal spiritual essence. The Bible explicitly notes that we were forbidden the tree of eternal life.
Jews did not believe in going to heaven when you die, they believed in a blessed hope known as the resurrection of the dead. A time when all who died would arise again to face judgment, the righteous would never taste death again and the world would be set to rights.
Even in Jesus’s day, this wasn’t a universally held belief, however. The Pharisees held to the resurrection, while the Sadducees believed that death was final and permanent.
But the words Soul and Spirit occur all throughout the Bible, you may be thinking. Yes, but that’s more an artifact of translation and cultural appropriation. In Hebrew, spirit is “ruach” and can be translated roughly as breath or wind. Soul is “nephesh” and literally means throat.
In Jewish thought, and therefore Christian thought, a person becomes a living being when they breathe.
The real kicker in all this is that the church rejected a lot of Jewish thought and leaned into Greek and Roman thought because of antisemitism.
The best argument for the Southern Baptist Convention’s pivot on this issue? Probably racism as well. Integration in public schools caused a massive surge in private Christian schools, which could segregate under the guise of religious liberty.
While the Supreme Court ultimately decided against Bob Jones University in the early 80’s, it was only after a 13 year battle with the IRS and lower courts. By the late 70’s, it became clear that the final bastion of racial segregation, Christian education, was going to fall.
Racism had been a hugely potent force for turning out evangelicals to vote and with these final court cases, the voting block was no longer motivated or unified. Abortion was one of several issues workshopped by Jerry Falwell and lesser-known, but not less-influential, Paul Weyrich and first floated in the 1978 midterms with tremendous success.
It finally became an issue with national attention in 1980 and the theology of life beginning at conception was largely solidified in place.
All that to say, if you want to believe life begins at conception, that’s fine. But you can’t pretend that’s ever been a commonly held perspective. Throughout much of church history it was the quickening and when the Bible was written, it was almost certainly at first breath.
Interesting, pastor W.A. Criswell, the former president of the southern baptist convention agreed with that notion in 1974. “I have always felt that it was only after a child was born and had a life separate from its mother that it became an individual person,” Criswell declared, “and it has always, therefore, seemed to me that what is best for the mother and for the future should be allowed.”