Three Reasons Why to Only Preach the Gospel but not Talk about Abortion and Give a Sound Pro-Life Case Will Not Work
I want to briefly sketch three factors that show why merely preaching the gospel without discussing abortion and arguing a Pro-Life case will not work.
The degree to which a person is receptive to the gospel message will depend on their views regarding the ideas embedded within the gospel message.
If a person values other human beings for how well they perform or function, then they will have trouble seeing how their Creator can still value them even when they might have lived the worst life imaginable. If people think that our nature has nothing to do with our moral perceptions but that our moral perceptions and actions are byproducts of our skill sets and levels of development, then they will have a hard time seeing how sin, separation, and judgment from God is a universal reality for everyone – including those who are worse off in terms of their abilities and intelligence - who has rejected Him and His redemptive plan for humanity.
The culture we live in and the ideas that dominate our cultural context of ideas will determine the general reception Christians receive from secularists in presenting the gospel.
If our culture is largely secular in what shapes the marketplace of ideas, then the gospel presentation will largely be reduced to being appealing to uneducated citizens but perhaps a “harmless” superstition to the academia. Since science or scientism is taken to be the foundation and mechanism for what counts as real knowledge, “educated” people or people who have real knowledge about subjects and fields, won't be largely interested in talking about the moral responsibilities and duties people have to one another but rather the sociological, psychological, and neurological aspects of peoples’ brain chemistry since those factors are simply descriptions of their past history.
And since those factors, that secularists only consider, are believed to be the only relevant issues for why people are the way they are and act the way they do, any other reason proposed will be considered to not reflect "objective" features of the nature and moral makeup of human beings. Why? Because they cannot be cashed out in scientifically measurable ways.
Since
the gospel presentation does not really appeal to those factors in determining
that people are genuinely guilty before God for their sins and are responsible
for their lives, it will largely be appealing to the uneducated man but not
appealing to the educated elite.
If the
culture at large has a radically different understanding of the sanctity of
life than our Christian understanding of it, then this will affect the
effectiveness of the gospel’s ability to transform broken lives and get people
to see that their value to their Creator does not depend on the quality of
lives they have.
The assumptions people have – before and after talking and thinking - about the issue of abortion and its immediate and broader effects on people will also affect the effectiveness of presenting the gospel message.
What makes a person responsible for his or her actions? Is it their environment, levels of development - social, intellectual, physical, etc - or primarily the fact they have a certain nature that grounds the kinds of choices they ought and ought not to make and that they have a Creator to whom they ultimately owe their allegiance to?
Is real forgiveness possible and if so what must be done to discover it? Is forgiveness an option primarily or only for those who have done less than worse acts than others have done? Would Ted Bundy be more able to be forgiven because he murdered fewer people than Hitler? Or is it something that is genuinely available for everyone, even for the worst possible criminal?
Can a person be restored to God and if yes then what makes restoration possible in the first place? A person's understanding of human value will also affect their understanding of the meaning of restoring a severed relationship with their Creator. If a person's value is grounded in, being a human being, being made in God's image, not in his or her performances, levels of development, successes, failures, or whether their acts were horrific or good, then they can be restored to the very God who gave them the value they possessed from the moment they began to exist.
Conclusion
Those three factors that I discussed which I hope to have proven are as follows: (1) The degree to which a person is receptive to the gospel message will depend on their views regarding the ideas embedded within the gospel message. (2) The culture we live in and the ideas that dominate our cultural context of ideas will determine the general reception Christians receive from secularists in presenting the gospel. And (3) the assumptions people have – before and after talking and thinking - about the issue of abortion and its immediate and broader effects on people will also affect the effectiveness of presenting the gospel message. Let us carry on this mission in Jesus' name!
