Does the Bible have any insights to help us decide when groups of cells can become viewed as a baby or when they are just considered human tissue?
Sermon preached on 6/9/24 by Rev. Karen Fitz La Barge at North Kent Presbyterian Church, Rockford, Mi.
Summer Sermon Series: Questions from the Congregation.
Published on Progressive Christianity.Org on 8/19/2024.
First Readings: Psalm 139: 13 – 16. For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb.14 I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful,
I know that full well.15 My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place,
when I was woven together in the depths of the earth.16 Your eyes saw my unformed body;
all the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.
Eze 37:5-6 This is what the Sovereign Lord says to these bones: I will make breath[a] enter you, and you will come to life. 6 I will attach tendons to you and make flesh come upon you and cover you with skin; I will put breath in you, and you will come to life. Then you will know that I am the Lord.’”
Gen 2:7 Then the Lord God formed a man[c] from the dust of the ground and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, and the man became a living being.
Job 33:4 The Spirit of God has made me; the breath of the Almighty gives me life.
Second Reading: Exodus 21:22-25, Septuagint
And if two men combat and should strike a woman with child, and her child be born not completely formed, he shall be forced to pay a penalty: as the woman’s husband may lay upon him, he shall pay with a valuation. But if it be completely formed, he shall give life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot, burning for burning, wound for wound, stripe for stripe.
——————————————————–
In our summer sermon series today, we have another hot topic question from the congregation. Abortion: When during pregnancy should the rights and status of personhood be granted? Does the Bible have any insights to help us decide when groups of cells can become viewed as a baby or when they are just considered human tissue? –Within our current political climate, our question today is so controversial that even the vocabulary that we use in our discussion matters. What do you call “it”? Is “it” a group of cells? A zygote? An embryo? A fetus? A baby? And most importantly, WHEN during development should we use these varied vocabulary words to describe “it”?
It may come as a surprise to you that there are three very different arguments that can be made from scripture about when personhood begins.
The first standard for personhood in the Bible is very straightforward argument and very easy to understand: Is it breathing? Over and over again in the Old Testament, the status of human personhood is tied to the idea of breath. In the origin story from Genesis 2, God forms the entity of “Adam” from “Adamah”. A dirt man from dirt. A Human from Humus. –Reading this passage, I always imagine God working in clay, squeezing and pulling and stretching and pushing on the grey stuff until a figure emerges. –But that figure that God creates is just made from stuff from the earth. From dust it has come and to dust it will return. But then, in Genesis 2, something very wonderful happens. We have a very intimate description of the God of the universe leaning in and breathing the breath of life into the nostrils of this earthen figure, giving it life, a soul, and being. –The very breath of God is making this entity a human person because it is now breathing on its own, as a separate entity from God. –Now, this theology of breath being a start to human life is not just limited to the creation account of Adam in Genesis 2. We also find this breath description in the very ancient story of Job. And it is breath that goes into the “dry bones” of that famous passage from Ezekiel to bring those dead and dry bones back to life again.
Now in the context of abortion, this argument about human status being bestowed upon that infant only once the baby is out of the womb and breathing on its own is a really high standard. —Are we really, today, with all of our medical sophistication and knowledge, not willing to call a fetus a baby until they are completely born and the mucus is sucked out of their airway and their APGAR score rises above 7?! — Anyone who has carried a baby to term will absolutely argue otherwise!
When I was pregnant, I vividly remember being repeatedly kicked in the bladder one day when Beethoven’s Fifth came on the car radio. (Da-Da-Da-DAAAAAAA! Du-Du-Du-DUUUUUUU!) The baby was very excited to hear it! The Baby kicked me HARD!: “WHAM! WHAM! WHAM!” –It was a very human response to that incredible and dramatic piece of music! It really hurt! While it was happening, I was driving up the hill past the Civic Center in Holland and the baby kicking distracted me so much that I had to really concentrate hard on traffic in order to not accidentally rear end the car in front of me!
This is completely normal. As the mother, you can feel the baby moving, first the little flutters, and then punches, kicks and finally even flips. For thousands of years, this standard of the mother feeling the baby move, called “Quickening” was the test that was used to determine if the pregnancy had progressed to the stage where you would call it a baby or not. –But this status was always based on the mother’s judgement, what the mother herself could sense and feel. It was not based on an arbitrary date on a calendar nor determined by an outside source. It was the mother herself who determined when that baby attained personhood, all based on her own personal experience.
Now the second standard for personhood that is found in scripture is a bit more nuanced and it is tied to Old Testament property laws: Is it fully Formed?[i] In Exodus 21, we have a chapter of scripture that deals with all kinds of property law. There are laws about selling your daughter as a slave (!), laws about what happens if your bull should gore someone to death and also in this section, laws about what happens if a pregnant woman is injured in a fight and then has a miscarriage.
–Now a bit of context here. The oldest version of the Old Testament that we today have access to is the Septuagint, a Greek translation of the Hebrew scriptures. The oldest Septuagint copies back to approximately 250 – 130 years BEFORE Jesus Christ. By comparison, the oldest version of Old Testament that is written in Hebrew that we have would be the fragments of the Dead Sea Scrolls which are from 100 to 300 years AFTER Jesus lived. The Bibles in our pews and the ones that Protestants typically use are English translations of Hebrew texts from after Jesus Christ. And in the Exodus 21 section that we read today, the Hebrew is very ambiguous. (There is a huge thread on Reddit of people trying to figure out what the Hebrew in these verses is actually saying.) The Greek Septuagint translation, which we read together today, is much clearer and it is making a very important point. Namely that if the miscarried fetus was not fully formed, that the husband would be compensated financially for property damages, but that only if the dead fetus was fully formed, would then the husband be entitled to the perpetrator’s life in repayment for the fetal life that was taken.
Dr. Thomas F. McDaniel, a professor and Hebrew scholar argues that the Septuagint version of Exodus 21 is the correct version.[ii] He cites a very similar Arabic word that would have influenced the original Hebrew interpretation and he also points out that there was a parallel for this Hebrew law in ancient Hittite Law, which states, “If anyone causes a free woman to miscarry –if it is the 10th month, he shall give 10 shekels of silver, if it is in the 5th month, he shall give five shekels of silver.” Dr. McDaniel also points out that Philo of Alexandria, a Jewish Philosopher until 50 CE, wrote about and agreed with the Septuagints translation of Exodus 21 instead of the Hebrew version.
The third scriptural argument that people make about abortion is the one that is very common today, but it is actually the one that has the weakest scriptural support. Many Christians believe and will argue that personhood starts at the moment of conception. To support this, they will cite verses from Psalm 139, which is a hymn celebrating that there is nowhere that we can run to, where God is not present with us. It is a hymn that talks about how we were knit together in the womb and it praises God’s omniscience, that God “knew” us (in the depths of the earth!?) from before we were born, and that God also knows all of the days that we will live. –But this beautiful Hebrew song ultimately says more about God than anything concrete about when someone becomes a person in the eyes of God.
Another strike against the conception argument is that the very idea of “conception” was absolutely unknown at the time that any part of the Bible was written. Neither in the Ancient Near East, nor during Jesus time. –People had no idea that women ovulated, or that half of a zygotes genetic code always comes from their mother. Instead in the ancient world view, the father planted his seed in the soil of the mother, and that female was either fertile, in which a new human could sprout and grow, or else she was barren soil where a new human would not grow. To put the idea of the “moment of conception” into the Biblical world view is totally anachronistic. The very concept did not exist then.
In the ancient world of the Old Testament, what was much more important than “the life of the child” was the question of WHO was the FATHER of that child and if they were going to be a son so that they could inherit the promised land from their father. In fact, the Israelites practiced induced ABORTIONS themselves in order to try to ensure the paternity of the infant! If a Hebrew husband was jealous of or just suspicious of his wife, he could take her to the priest to have her pregnancy tested before God. Numbers 5:19- 22, has these Hebrew abortion instructions: Then the priest shall put the woman under oath and say to her, “If no other man has had sexual relations with you and you have not gone astray and become impure while married to your husband, may this bitter water that brings a curse not harm you. 20 But if you have gone astray while married to your husband and you have made yourself impure by having sexual relations with a man other than your husband”— 21 here the priest is to put the woman under this curse—“may the Lord cause you to become a curse[d] among your people when he makes your womb miscarry and your abdomen swell. 22 May this water that brings a curse enter your body so that your abdomen swells or your womb miscarries.”
The statistics of pregnancy are also something to consider here. It is estimated that 78 % of all fertilized eggs fail to develop into a full-term pregnancy. They are frequently flushed by a woman’s system with her period before she even knows that she is pregnant. And then, of the women who do realize that they are pregnant, 15 – 20 % more of those pregnancies miscarry on their own before 12 weeks. (This is why women are advised to not publicly announce their pregnancy until after week twelve.) The entire process of human reproduction is not designed by God so that every instance of human conception is a rare and cherished and valued life. Instead, it is a process filled with many more chances for pregnancy failure. What would it say about our God if every one of those failed human conceptions involved the end of the potential of an unfulfilled human soul?!
So what does all of this mean for us here today? For thousands of years, abortion was not seen as a sin nor as an inherent evil. It was practiced in the Ancient Near East as well as by the children of Israel and it was still widely practiced in Roman Times when Jesus walked this earth. (Jesus never once spoke about Abortion nor did he condemn it.) Even as late as the 1970’s, Evangelical Protestant Christians were not at all opposed to women having necessary abortions. Abortion for any reason was only considered a sin by the Catholic church. –It was only after people realized that legalized abortion could be turned into a major vote mobilizing issue that they partnered with Evangelical Protestant Church leaders to change the churches theology in order to further their political goals.[iii] This change in Christian theology was not due to better Biblical scholarship, or new found Biblical textual evidence. Instead, it was purposefully done to gain political power in the United States. It was done to create legions of “one issue” voters who could be counted on to reliably sacrifice their vote on other important issues in order to cast their vote to “save the children.”
Our work as Progressive Christians is to educate people as to what the Bible really says about when human personhood starts: The Bible does not say anywhere that human life begins at conception. Conception was a much later idea and it was unknown in Biblical times. The Hebrew people actually practiced induced abortions in order to reassure the husband that the fetus was his child. And until the fetus was fully formed, it was not even considered a human life according to Hebrew property law documented in the Septuagint. Today, millions of evangelical Christians are being used as political pawns and they have no idea that their theology about abortion is not Biblically supported. May God make a way for us to correct this theological mistake and give women back their reproductive rights in our time and place! So be it. Amen.
[i] Exeikonismenon “Completely Formed”.
[ii] https://tmcdaniel.palmerseminary.edu/LXX_EXO_%2021_22-23.pdf
[iii] https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2022/05/10/abortion-history-right-white-evangelical-1970s-00031480
https://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2022/09/the-pro-life-legacy-of-francis-schaeffer
