The Incarnation and the (Im)Morality of Abortion

Two important terms in theology are “nature” and “person.”  Both terms help us understand the central Christian doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation.  With regard to the Trinity, we have one nature and three persons.  God is three “who’s” but one “what”.  The three persons share the same nature, so that all three are fully God, and yet there is only one God.  With regard to the Incarnation, Jesus Christ is one person with two natures.  He is one “who” with two “what’s,” one person who is both fully divine and fully human.  Both of these truths are great mysteries, because in our experience singular personhood is always tied to an individual human nature.  We have nothing analogous to the Trinity or to the Incarnation in normal experience, so we bow before the mystery. 

The word “person” has also been an important one in ethical debates about human life.  With regard to the issue of abortion, many on the pro-choice side have argued that, prior to a certain point (usually birth, viability outside the womb, or some standard of functionality), a fetus is not a human person.  It is certainly a living being of some sort, but personhood has not been established (so the argument goes) until some particular point of development.  The logical result of this argument is that abortion prior to the establishment of the fetus’s personhood is morally acceptable, for it does not constitute murder.  To kill the fetus is not to kill a person, so the act of abortion may be considered ethically analogous to putting a pet to sleep, a practice that is widely accepted as ethical in our society.  Much of the debate over abortion centers on the question of the moral status of the fetus.  Is it a person or not? 

My contention is that the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation helps to establish the personhood of all fetuses; therefore, all Christians should regard abortion as an immoral practice, the taking of life from an innocent human person.  Here is how my thinking goes on this.  Jesus Christ is one person with two natures.  The church has long confessed that the personhood of Christ does not come from his human nature; the person of Christ is the eternal Word, the divine Son, the second person of the Trinity.  The human nature of Christ has no personhood of its own; it is personalized by the Word.  The Word did not unite himself to a personalized human nature, an individual person known as “Jesus of Nazareth.”  That view is a heresy known as “Nestorianism,” the view that Jesus Christ is basically two people, a fully human person alongside a fully divine person.  In order to maintain that Christ is one person uniting two complete natures (known as the “hypostatic union”), we must say that the one person of Christ is in no way derived from his human nature.  The divine Word, who is eternally a personal being, simply added to himself a human nature and thereby personalized that nature.  The human nature of Christ is a personal nature, but its personhood comes from outside itself.  In this way, Jesus Christ is one person with two natures.

But when did the eternal, divine Word personalize Christ’s human nature?  It had to be at the very instant that the Word united himself to the human nature.  In other words, from the moment the human nature of Christ was united to the Word, it was a personal human nature.  Jesus Christ was a human person from that moment on.  When did that happen?  It happened at the moment the human nature of Christ was formed as an embryo in the womb of Mary.  The human nature of Christ has no existence apart from the personhood of the divine Word.  Therefore, there was never a time that one could say that Christ’s human nature was not a person.  From (miraculous) conception on, Mary had a fully human person in her belly.

Now, let’s work from the Incarnation to human life in general.  Does human nature ever exist apart from personhood?  Even though the Incarnation is a unique event, we can still draw the conclusion that personhood and human nature go together.  If a human nature exists within the womb of a woman at any stage of development, we have no theological warrant to de-personalize it and kill it.  That Jesus Christ was a person even in the embryonic stage indicates that personhood does not depend on a certain level of human development or functionality.  Any living being with a human nature constitutes a human person.  Personhood is an ontological category, not a functional one.  Therefore, to take the life of an unborn baby constitutes taking the innocent life of a human person.  Embryos and fetuses are not essentially different from the rest of us.  They are merely human beings (with the ethical status of personhood) at an early stage of development. 

Was the Cross Legal or Personal?

I am currently taking a class on the doctrine of the atonement.  We have been reading a number of different books expressing a number of different viewpoints on what exactly the cross means and what it achieved.  In recent years the traditional Reformed view of the atonement (a view known as “penal substitution”) has come under fire from many different sides.  According to this view, Jesus died on the cross as a substitute for sinners, bearing their guilt, having their sins imputed to him, bearing the wrath of God in their place.  To my mind, penal substitution is not the only thing that can be said about the cross, but it is the central category for explaining how the atonement works.  I believe that it is biblical, even central to the gospel itself.

Therefore, I am distressed to see so many people reacting against it today.  Most of the authors we have read who have some kind of objection to it say that it portrays God’s relationship with man in rigid, legal categories rather than in the warm, personal tone of Scripture.  According to them (i.e., Greg Boyd, Hans Boersma, Joel Green, and others), the traditional penal substitution view makes God an exacting judge rather than a loving Father.  The purpose of this post is to make two points that I hope will expose the inadequacy of this objection to penal substitution.

1. The legal is personal.  I suspect that the authors I have referred to object to “rigid, legal categories” because they are drawing their understanding of the adjective “legal” from human legal systems.  Human legal systems are impersonal.  A judge represents the state, which is an impersonal institution.  The judge has not been personally offended, but he administers justice as a representative of the impersonal state.  If we understand “legal” in this sense, then it does seem to be at some distance from personal, relational categories.

However, with God, things are different.  God is a judge, but he is not a representative of an impersonal institution.  He stands over us and against as one who has been personally offended by our sins.  The cross does not satisfy some abstract notion of justice that is removed from God the personal being.  It satisfies justice as the demand of the character of a holy, personal God, and thereby repairs our broken relationship with him.  Far from depersonalizing the atonement, penal substitution gets right to the heart of the God-man relationship by addressing a fundamental legal issue that keeps God and man apart: sin.  In the biblical teaching about God and his relationship to humanity, the legal is very personal.

2. The personal is legal.  I have a closer relationship with my wife than with anyone else on earth.  We live together, sleep in the same bed, partner together in raising our son, and share the same goals and dreams for our family.  We truly have one life shared by two people (three if you count our son, though he will go his own way eventually).  The marriage relationship is the most personal relationship imaginable.  Yet it is first of all a legal relationship.  Before God and the state, we declared our vows in a legally binding ceremony that sealed our union and brought us into a state of marriage.  That was no trivial event.  It marked a turning point in our relationship.  Prior to that event, we did not live together or sleep in the same bed or share one life or any of those things.  In fact, though it has become more accepted today, I frown on the idea of two people living as though they are married when they are not legally joined to one another.  I think that is putting the cart before the horse, and I know I am not alone in that view. 

So the legal relationship of marriage is immensely important, and yet no one would accuse me of being rigid, cold, and impersonal with my wife because we sealed our union in a legal manner.  To give another example, no one believes that my father and stepmother acted in a cold, impersonal, rigid manner by going through the proper legal channels to establish themselves as the legal parents of my adopted sister.  Without the legal basis, adoption (also one of the most warm, personal relationships in human society) would not exist.

Scripture portrays our relationship with Christ as analogous to marriage, and it portrays our relationship with God the Father as analogous to adoption.  These are legal categories that are at the same time very personal.  We need to get over this false dichotomy that what is legal is necessarily impersonal and that what is personal is necessarily not tied up with legal matters.  The cross is very legal in nature.  Jesus Christ paid the penalty demanded by the law for our sins and thereby satisfied the justice of God by removing his wrath from us.  And just as in human relationships, the legal serves as a foundation for the personal relationship with God through the cross.     

What Does the Cross Mean?

Did the death of Jesus on the cross satisfy the wrath of God against sinners?  Did Jesus Christ bear the sins of his people such that he became a substitute in their place, receiving and exhausting in himself the punishment we deserved?  In recent years, many self-proclaimed evangelicals have answered these questions negatively.  The doctrine of penal substitution (that Christ bore the penalty of the Law as a substitute in our place, thereby satisfying the just wrath of God) has come under fire from many corners. 

A number of objections have been raised against penal substitution, and a number of answers have been given to those objections by proponents of penal substitution (see the new book Pierced for Our Transgressions for an exhaustive list of answers; it will be out in the USA in November).  In this post I merely want to offer a general reflection on what I believe is the often unspoken assumption behind many of the objections that are raised against this doctrine. 

I think, more often than not, people reject the idea of penal substitution because it makes God out to be so exacting.  He demands punishment for every misdeed.  He cannot make sinners right with himself apart from full satisfaction of his wrath.  A God who demands this kind of strict perfection does not seem like the God of Scripture who is merciful and gracious, slow to anger and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness.  After all, he commands us to forgive others when they sin against us without demanding any form of payment.  Does he command us to do something that he himself will not do?  Isn’t it more compatible with love simply to sweep offenses aside and have done with this tedious legal business?

This line of thinking, whether pursued consciously or not, is one symptom of an age that has remade God in our image.  I have argued before that God does many things that we cannot do precisely because he is God and we are not.  In our human relationships, of course the person who forgives without payment demonstrates greater love than the person who demands some kind of restitution, especially an exacting restitution.  But the Bible does not command us to forgive just because forgiveness is grand.  Repeatedly, it gives a specific theological basis for our forgiveness of others.  And that basis is precisely that God is the one who exacts vengeance for sin, not us.  Our mandate to forgive is predicated on the fact that God is a righteous judge who will exact the full penalty for every sin, whether from Christ on the cross or from the unrepentant at the final day of judgment.  Either way, vengeance is not ours to pursue.  But this does not mean that the demands of God’s holy Law have been obliterated at a whim; it means that we do not have the right to press those demands–only God does.  Here are two biblical examples of what I am talking about:

Romans 12:17-19: “Do not repay anyone evil for evil.  Try to do what is honorable in everyone’s eyes. If possible, on your part, live at peace with everyone.  Friends, do not avenge yourselves; instead, leave room for His wrath.  For it is written: ‘Vengeance belongs to Me; I will repay, says the Lord.‘” 

On what basis did Jesus himself refrain from lashing out against those who abused him?  Peter answers that in 1 Peter 2:23: “When reviled, He did not revile in return; when suffering, He did not threaten, but committed Himself to the One who judges justly.”   

God demands perfection.  This has been a distinctive mark of Christianity for centuries.  Every other religion denies this tenet and ends up with some version of salvation by personal effort.  Other religions teach that if you jump through certain hoops, your good deeds will in the end suffice to overcome your bad ones, and you will find favor with God.  Perfection is not necessary, but being good enough is, and we have it in our power to jump through all the right hoops.  Christianity has always proclaimed otherwise.  The church has always proclaimed that the demand for perfection (James 2:10) rules out all hope of any of us ever attaining salvation by our own efforts.  And this is why Jesus Christ came for us–to satisfy the demand for perfection in our place.  He obeyed the Law and bore its full penalty against us, thereby upholding the justice of God even while lavishing us with the grace of forgiveness. 

The objection that penal substitution is incompatible with a loving God can only be sustained if God is brought down to our level and treated as though he is one of us.  I cannot demand that my wrath be satisfied against those who have offended me, but that is because I am not the creator and judge of the universe.  But if God is honored as God, who stands above us and whose holiness will not be compromised, penal substitution is the only means of atonement that could possibly answer our need. 

The Truth

If God has no wrath, the cross has no meaning.