Are the unborn my neighbor?

Sometimes I almost feel sorry for Rachel Held Evans. Almost. What keeps me from crossing that line are her own words. She continues to confound me with her strange approach to reason. In a recent article she displays her confusion over the nature of personhood. Doug Wilson offers help:

Rachel Held Evans recently wrote a number of things about our public debates about contraception, and it is not my purpose to get into all that, not even to defend the admirable epithet Uncle Sugar. But she did say something near the end of her piece that I wanted to comment on because I think it is an example of how easy it is to take our increased scientific knowledge about human reproduction and apply it in precisely the wrong direction. She said this:

“The fact that a woman’s body naturally rejects hundreds of fertilized eggs in her lifetime raises some questions in my mind about where we draw the line regarding the personhood of a zygote. Do we count all those ‘natural abortions’ as deaths? Did those zygotes have souls? Will I meet them in heaven? Honestly, the more I learn about the reproductive system, the harder it becomes for me to adamantly insist that I know for sure the exact moment when life begins. And it’s even harder for me to insist that everyone else agree.”

But I don’t think this is the right conclusion to draw from our increased knowledge of the human reproductive system. It delights me that God brings all the great questions of life and death down to the razor thin issues. It delights me that there are human beings created in the image of the most high God who could fit on the head of a pin and not fall off. From the vantage point of the Almighty, the rest of us are not that much bigger. So every fertilized human egg will live forever, and every unfertilized egg won’t.

Put another way, a poet, one of your own, has said, “a person’s a person no matter how small.” The size of these tiny people only affects the clarity of the situation if we define the humanity of others on the basis of our limited eyesight. But why is the question of a soul connected to size, as though the naked eye were in charge of these things? Once the DNA strand is established, we can say any number of things about this person that we cannot say at all before that point, whether we are talking about about sperm or eggs. We can now say, for example, “it’s a girl,” or “blue eyes,” or “black skin.”

So yes, we count natural abortions as deaths. Yes, zygotes have souls. Yes, we will meet them in Heaven, provided we get there.

We live in a fallen world, and consequently there are natural abortions as a result. We also live in a world where children in the third trimester die. We live in a world where newborn children die. We all die because we are sons of Adam. Nature is not the standard because nature suffers under this bondage to decay, and will continue to do so until the sons of God are manifested to the world.

Read Wilson's entire post HERE.

Be relevant: Stop listening to the squeeky wheels

Rachel Held-Evans made the news again for a piece she wrote for CNN's Belief Blog. In it she argues that the church must begin listening to the concerns of Millenials if it is to survive. She asserts that the church is losing the younger generation because it is too conservative, opposes gay marriage, and not involved enough in social justice. Of course the first problem with her argument is that the church she's calling for exists already in numerous forms: The United Methodist Church, PCUSA, American Baptists, and The United Church of Christ. And, by the way, those denominations have been steadily dying for the better part of the last century.

Held-Evans' post generated many helpful replies but I think Brett McCracken truly nails it.

He writes:

Millennials: why don’t we take our pastors, parents, and older Christian brothers and sisters out to coffee and listen to them? Perhaps instead of perpetuating our sense of entitlement and Twitter/blog/Instagram-fueled obsession with hearing ourselves speak, we could just shut up for a minute and listen to the wisdom of those who have gone before?

And for pastors, church leaders, and others so concerned with the survival of the church amidst the glut of “adapt or die!” hype, is asking Millennials what they want church to be and adjusting accordingly really your best bet? Are we really to believe that today’s #hashtagging, YOLO-oriented, selfie-obsessed generation of Millennials has more wisdom to offer about the church than those who have thought about and faithfully served the church decade after decade, amidst all its warts, challenges and ups and down?

Part of the problem is the hubris of every generation, which thinks it has discovered, once and for all, the right way of doing things. C.S. Lewis called it “chronological snobbery,” defining it as “the uncritical acceptance of the intellectual climate common to our own age and the assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited.”

But a deeper problem is that Christianity has become too obsessed with how it is perceived. Just like the Photoshop-savvy Millennials she is so desperate to retain, the church is ever more meticulously concerned with her image, monitoring what people are saying about her and taking cues from that.

Read the entire article HERE.