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this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2023
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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.”