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Against indifference

Around Wycliffe when we are discussing various issues such as abortion, the morning-after pill, divorce, IVF and so on, I have heard people say a number of things along the following lines:

It's not up to clergy to tell people what to do in their private lives. We can pray for them and offer them emotional support, even provide them with information, but may not tell them what to do.

These issues are not black and white. They are very complicated and we should therefore be wary of giving black and white answers to people who are in a very vulnerable position.

We do not live in an ideal world. In a fallen world, we must often choose between the lesser of two evils.

I am always a little suspicious of these kinds of expressions because I think that the church should be a little bit more than the local branch of Samaritans - much as I esteem the Samaritans.

We might divide the comments I hear into two main categories: comments about the role of the clergy, and comments about the complexity of the cases.

First let's think about the role of the clergy. At Wycliffe we debate all kinds of extraordinarily complex things. Last week we had a lecture covering some very obscure linguistic and epistemological philosophy in an attempt to discover how to read a book which we had all managed to read already. The lecture came to no clear conclusions and we left with no new practical insights as to how precisely we should read the Bible any differently to the way we were already reading it. We might read all kinds of books about the metaphysics of Trinitarian perichoresis and their implications for the Oxford one-way system. We consider the historicity of the book of Genesis based on the number of humps the camels had in those days and we ponder the mysteries of Octo-Isaiah and how amazing it is that so many people called Isaiah were all able to get together and write one book. We engage in theological reflection about the movie Shrek and we are discuss whether we are hoovering up Jesus when we use a vacuum cleaner after communion. In other words we think about a lot of very complicated things which are extremely unimportant. It seems that it is perfectly ok to expend an enormous amount of energy discussing things which in the long run don't matter a tiny bit but when we get too close to the bone and talk about real-life stuff, we must suddenly back off for fear of telling people what to do with their 'private' lives.

Actually this notion of a private life which is somehow cut off from Christianity is a rather odd one when you think about it. If I understand Jesus correctly, the whole of life matters to God and not just the religious bits. There is no private sphere of life where God takes a back seat and lets you do what you want.

The role of the minister is to proclaim the good news of this very same Jesus Christ: God is interested in your life. And this good news will have certain things to say about 'private' morality. It might tell you not to get remarried. It might tell you that having children is not a right and that certain ways of 'producing' children go outside the way that God has given. It might tell men and women that if you chose to have sex, you also chose to have a baby. And as clergy it will sometimes - perhaps often - be our role to explain this to people. Certainly this does not mean forcing our opinions on people. We have no coercive power to enforce the demands of the gospel. Ours is the authority of the Word, not the Sword. But the authority of the Word might mean reminding them of the costly sacrifice demanded by the gospel. No-one ever said that laying down your entire life in order to follow Jesus would be simple or easy. It means you can't always have what you want.

The second difficulty I mentioned is the complexity of the situations faced. This worries me even more because I detect behind it a pietist refusal to engage in the hard work of actually thinking about stuff. It throws up its hands in horror at how complicated real life is and therefore backs away from the concrete and the real. This is about as obscurantist as young-earth creationism.

I referred above to the extremely complex but essentially unimportant things with which it is socially acceptable to occupy our time at theological college. The complexity of the subject matter does not stop us from reaching certain conclusions about it. I wonder if it might be good to study equally complex but actually important things and coming to conclusions about them too.

However, the idea that they are "very important" is itself up for grabs. I wonder if I detect behind some of these comments the idea that, somehow, it doesn't really matter. In which case, they are actually trying to smuggle in a conclusion about the subject matter without actually engaging in a proper discussion of it.

Take the example of IVF. If a certain view about the status of the embryo is correct, then IVF is quite literally a life and death matter. Innocent human lives will be destroyed in the process of conventional IVF treatment. So to say at the outset that the matter is too complex is not good enough. It suggests either that one must have already reached a conclusion (namely that embryos are not alive and therefore it doesn't matter if they are destroyed) or that one is too unspeakably lazy to bother thinking about whether innocent human life is being destroyed or not.

It is true that sometimes matters will be too complicated to decide. But the only way one can say with integrity that the matter is too complicated is by thinking about it first, rather than deciding it is too complicated in advance and short-circuiting the discussion.

So maybe when we are talking about ethics, it's ok, in the words of Mrs Merton, to "have a heated debate."

More on witholding treatment

The Nuffield Council has now published its report (it's long but there's an executive summary). It's not all bad, rejecting active intervention to end neonatal life, and pointing out the danger of allowing economic factors to rule our considerations. But (unsurprisingly), it readily buys into the idea that quality of life and sanctity of life can be played off against one another, that there can be circumstances in which it is in one's 'best interests' to die.

The bishops of this country, never slow in issuing press releases in which Scripture and Christian theology are totally absent, did not let the side down in popping out this comment pronto. They right say:

There is a clear distinction between interventions which are deliberately aimed at killing, and decisions to withhold or withdraw medical treatment when it is judged to be futile or unduly burdensome.

But they fail to note a further distinction between "futile" and "unduly burdensome". There is a surely significant difference between witholding treatment from a baby who is going to die no matter what you do, and witholding treatment from a baby who might survive if they receive such treatment. To put it more strongly, the difference is the difference between supporting and comforting a sick person on their deathbed and refusing to throw a lifering to someone who is drowning.

P.S. on letting die

Only a short clip from this withering piece in the Independent by Dominic Lawson is available online, but it is still worth reading.

Bioethics, babies and baptism

It's about time I started blogging again. And what got me started (apart from the fact that I have class to prepare for and therefore, obviously, am scratching around for other things to do) is the report made by the Mission and Public Affairs Council of the C of E to the Nuffield Council, which has established a working group to look into questions around fetal and neonatal care. It is due to make its report this Thursday.

The C of E submission, available here, has come in for a great deal of criticism - most notably in the Mail's screaming headline, "Church backs calls for severely disabled babies to be killed at birth". Unsurprisingly, the Mail quotes the report selectively. It also fails to take into account the distinction the submission draws between acting to kill and withdrawing treatment. Others have therefore reacted in defence of the submission.

But is such a defence really warranted? On reflection, it would appear not.

1. Scripture and Christian tradition would not seem to recognise the distinction between acting to kill and witholding action in the knowledge that such death will result from such witholding. Jesus warns that a failure to give care and provision to someone vulnerable and in need is to fail to give such care to Jesus himself. James points out that it is not enough to hope that someone in need gets enough food and shelter: the decision not to meet another's need is culpable. This is why many liturgical confessions of sin recognise not only that we sin in what we do, but also by omitting to do that which we ought to have done. As Luther put it, failing to feed someone who is starving to death is morally equivalent to killing them.
2. The submission explicitly subscribes to the widely discredited consequentialist idea that in some cases, love ('compassion' in the submission's terms) overrides rule-based ethics. Any undergraduate who studies Christian ethics will be familiar with the absurdities of such a position - but they appear to have escaped Bishop Tom Butler! Consequentialism argues that one is justified in doing something formally wrong (i.e. against a moral law, in this case the commandment "Do not murder") in order to maximise the good consequences in a situation (or minimise the bad ones). It sets up a tension between love and law which Jesus did not accept (on the commandments to love God and neighbour hang all the Law and the Prophets). Shall we do evil that good might increase? By no means!
3. Christians are called to be people who never give up on the hurting, the sick and the poor. We are called to be people of faith (trust) in a God whose grace and compassion has no boundary or limit. We are called to believe that God can intervene in any situation, no matter how terrible, to heal physically and in every other sense too. It is therefore difficult for me to see how Christians can ever give up on any particular baby, how we can ever resign ourselves to death? This is fatalism, not faith. Christians are called to believe that sickness and death are evil consequences of sin, and irreconcilably opposed to the will of God. Sickness and death is never God's will: there can be no truce with death. It is the final enemy, which the death of Christ has overcome. Such a faith will be profoundly costly, since it will call us to agnonise and be hugely frustrated with the prevalence of sickness and death in our world - rather than giving in to it. But perhaps such agnoy and frustration will produce a people who pray with ever more persistence and compassion for the sick, who suffer with patience and courage, and who eagerly cry out to God for the kingdom to come.

Christianity as Political Strategy (1)

Time for something a bit more serious and, hopefully, a bit more interesting: Christianity as political strategy, a new mini-series. (More on abortion may well follow but for now I'm following my current interest since that will make it more interesting reading.) This will be brought to you primarily by Dr Martin Luther of sixteenth-century Wittenberg, with a few comments of varying coherence and intelligence from me.

This post: Foundations and axioms.

Future posts: Repentance as Political Strategy; Prayer as Political Strategy; Preaching about Jesus as Political Strategy; Martyrdom as Political Strategy ... and possily more, but that lot will certainly keep us going for now!

Intro blurb:

In his Sincere Admonition to all Christians to Guard Against Insurrection and Rebellion of 1522, Martin Luther first outlines the various reasons why rebellion against the government is not a legitimate (or indeed effective) political strategy. He then balances this negative judgement by giving an account of a positive strategy for how Christians might respond to a government which seems hell-bent on acting wrongly. This post will outline the arguments which provide the foundation for his negative judgement on violent rebellion, and the subsequent (much shorter) ones will comment on his positive suggestions.

Foundation and Axioms:

1. God is in charge and you/me/he/they are not. This liberating truth means that it is not up to me or you to set everything right, since only God can and will do this. This does not mean that we can sit back and relax whilst the world goes to hell in a handbasket or any other kind of basket for that matter. But it means that we are set free from the idea that we must change the world by any and all means necessary, since God bears the ultimate responsibility.
2. Human judgement is, ironically, far too lax, since human judgement proceeds not from selfless compassion but self-justification, i.e. the desire to feel that one is in the right - which is usually accomplished by envisaging the other as in the wrong. Sin becomes petty as opposed to the radical rebellion and consequent plight into which humanity has been plunged by its vicious and evil ways. Luther made this comment in the light of the medieval papacy, which had grown fat by exploiting the superstitions of the people by selling indulgences: "when the penny rings in the collecting tin, the soul flies out of purgatory." Incencsed by this evil deception Luther envisaged a very, very angry God - angry because of his compassionate love for the exploited.
3. Judgement is God's work; rebellion takes the judgement of God upon the shoulders of man, putting yourself in the right, idolatrously usurping God's place.
4. Violence doesn't work: "it generally harms the innocent more than the guilty". Once again we see Luther's heart for the people at the bottom of the pile - the ones who get shafted whoever is in power, and the ones who really suffer as a result of civil war and rebellion. Furthermore, the need to resort to violence suggests that you lack confidence in the truthful force of your arguments. Truth commands assent. This is one of Luther's much more subtle arguments in this piece: written in the context of the early Reformation he could see the powerful effect his preaching and writing was having. The temptation to rise up by force and to physically cast off the shackles of papal control was therefore the devil's strategy to confuse and undermine the Reform movement: to diminish its credibility and scare people off. Insurrection is a sign of God's victory - the devil is running scared - but no compromise can be made with the methods of the world and the methods of the gospel.
5. This does not mean that no force can be used to impose what is right - but it must come from the proper source, i.e. the legit government. Luther was afraid of everyone trying to enforce their right and wrong all over the shop - but he strongly retained the idea that the secular government had an important role to play in shaping the moral and spiritual life of its people.

That will do for now. Not all of Luther's account will command equal assent in today's context, of course. But in order to understand what to me is the more interesting stuff of his positive account, one needs to have a basic understanding of where he was coming from, so hope this helps. More anon.

Abortion (2)

Thank you to all of you who have made such intelligent and sensitive comments on this topic. Quite a lot of the issues which I was going to raise have already been raised in the comments, which is very helpful. I think it is very significant that there can be dialogue on the issue rather than dogmatic posturing on either side.

One of the key dogmatic (in both senses) postures often adopted by those who call themselves or are called pro-life is that a human life morally deserving the same protection and care we would consider due to a fully grown human begins at conception. This has always seemed to me to be a completely unprovable belief. Some people (e.g. Romans Catholics) believe this to be the case basically because of special revelation from God, i.e. the Church through the Pope and his homies say so and that settles it. Obviously I believe in special revelation from God but I don't believe it necessarily comes through the Pope! So I can't just accept this teaching on those grounds.

Others try to prove it scientifically - and this is a complete minefield, because there are simply no universally agreed upon biological markers of life. Is it to do with consciousness? Is it do with sensations? Hence some have pointed to the development of the primitive streak in the brain as a key moment when life might be said to begin. Those on the pro-life "side" (I use this term with caution!) tend to come across as manipulating the science in order to back up an ideological point held on other grounds. In turn, those who believe that women have the right to choose tend to point out the massive difference between a tiny ball of cells which has no conscious thought, independence, sensation, motion or whatever and a fully developed, rational human being. How can these two things be said to be morally equivalent? A tiny ball of cells cannot be said to be a human person in any meaningful sense. The most that could be said of it is that it is a potential human person.

The reason why I mention all this is that, perhaps ironically, it was the very ambiguity of this whole part of the debate which massively shifted my mind on the matter. I had had slightly uneasy misgivings, but had not seriously doubted that abortion should be safely and legally available, since after all how was one to know whether that ball of cells deserved protecting anyway?

But then it clicked that this assumption missed the whole point. The very ambiguity of the question meant that in the case of every abortion, an act was being deliberately performed which might end a human life. It might not, but it might. We could not know for sure - and yet the structure of the act itself demanded that we know before we could consider proceeding, since the act could be murder.

This sounds quite complex. Let me put it another way. We do not know and perhaps we cannot know whether the embryo is a human life deserving of the full legal protection such as we might accord to a child or adult. To commit an act which would end a human life would ordinarily be quite wrong. It cannot therefore be right to commit such an act where the status of that which is terminated is ambiguous, since it might involve the termination of a human life deserving of full protection. If we cannot know, it cannot be moral to proceed. Let's pretend I like to shoot a gun at a cardboard screen. I cannot see through the screen and I know because of where it is located that there is a possibility that there will be a person behind that screen, who might be killed if I shoot my gun at it. If I can, it is morally obligatory to check behind the screen before I shoot. If for some reason I cannot check behind the screen, it is would be immoral to shoot, because I would be doing so in the knowledge that I might kill somebody.

Or still another way: it is a question of who gets the benefit of the doubt, on which side is the burden of proof. Is it up to those who wish to prove that an embryo is a fully fledged human life to do so before it be accepted as such, or up to those who wish to prove that an embryo is not deserving of protection? It seems to me pretty obvious that the benefit of the doubt should lie with protecting what might be a human life, since unless we know for sure that the embryo is not a human life then we could be committing a murder (i.e. the premeditated taking of an innocent human life). This is not to say dogmatically that an embryo is a human life in the full sense. It is to say that unless we know it is not, we should not act to end it.

So, is an embryo a human life? I just don't know. But does it deserve our protection as a human life? Yes, it surely must, unless it can be demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that it is not.

Keep those thoughts and comments coming!

Abortion (1)

I have been challenged by a friend to blog a bit more about Christian Ethics, since that is what I am studying, and it might actually be quite interesting to some readers - whether Christians or not - if I post from time to time on various moral questions... Obviously as ever comments and challenges are sincerely welcome; I really don't want this to be a space for me to pontificate but to engage in conversation.

I thought I would plunge in at the deep end with the question of abortion/terminating pregnancy. For several years I tended to be quite 'liberal' (i.e. in favour of a woman's legally protected right to choose, despite personally feeling that abortion was not right) on this question for two main reasons. Firstly, it seemed to me that whatever private misgivings I or anyone else had regarding abortion, it was not right to force these views on people (i.e. women) who did not share them and who, it seemed to me, had the right to decide what to do with their own bodies. Secondly, it seemed wrong to force women by law to bear a child which they did not want to give birth to, much less raise.

I also felt that, although abortion was not in general an ideal, healthy or right option, in certain tragic circumstances it might be the least bad option (and therefore in a sense the right option), such as when a woman had conceived as a result of rape or when a woman's health was in danger. I think that on the whole I still stand by this latter view that although abortion is never an unqualifiedly good thing (and few would disagree to that, I think) in some situations it is sadly the least worst out of a number of bad outcomes. So often in our fallen world the choice is not between good and bad but between bad and bad. I say "on the whole" I stand by this, because I am always vary when someone uses the language of justification in this context, i.e. claims that abortion is "justified" in such a situation. I guess this whole language seems quite clinical and cynical to me, as if we are trying to convince ourselves we are in the right in a nice, neat way - which is why I prefer the language of tragedy. The fact of the matter is that sometimes we have to do wrong things in order to avert much worse things. I don't like the word "justified" in this sense but rather think we should act admitting we are doing wrong but casting ourselves on the mercy of God. Very Bonhoeffer, for those who are interested.

However, although in this latter sense I still support the legal protection of a woman's right to choose whether to terminate a pregnancy or not, I have increasingly questioned my original two reasons why this should always be the case, i.e. why women should always have the right to choose. (Obviously this doesn't mean that there aren't other reasons why it should be legal.) What I therefore intend to do is a little series in which I explain some of my misgivings and questions concerning these reasons, and perhaps question some of the other reasons why choice should always be legal (e.g. the back-street abortionists argument).

As I said above, though, this isn't meant to come across as me pontificating about intensely personal and emotional situations. What I more envisage it as is me telling my story of how I came to be challenged and eventually to change my mind. But I hope my mind isn't closed, so please let me know what you think, and keep reading the series.