What Does the Bible Teach About Human Beings?
by Russell D. Moore
According to the Bible, one of the most powerful apologetic arguments for the Christian faith is humanity itself. The Scriptures tell us that the wonder of the human body points to the creativity and genius of the Creator God in a way that should evoke both fear and awe (Ps 139:14). The human exercise of dominion over the created order reflects God's kingship over the universe (Gn 1:26), a kingship that is fully realized in the mediation of Christ Jesus (Eph 1:10). Man is created male and female in the image of God for a one-flesh union resulting in offspring, a union that foreshadows the reality of the Christ/church relationship (Eph 5:22-33).
The Bible tells us that the human conscience testifies to the content and the rightness of the law of the Creator. Although human beings sought to define good and evil apart from the authoritative Word of God (Jms 4:17), God nonetheless planted within all children of Adam a witness to His standards of good and evil. The fact that fallen humans acknowledge any standards of morality indicates that there is a transcendent code of law, somewhere above merely constructing societal rules and boundaries (Rm 2:12-16). Moreover, as the Apostle Paul pointed out, this conscience points beyond itself to a day of reckoning. When humans make moral choices—or make immoral choices using moral arguments—they are actually acknowledging that they know of a day in which God will judge all the secrets of the heart (Rm 2:16).
Regardless of how often fallen humans seek to classify themselves as merely biological, they know on the basis of their common rationality, morality, and search for meaning that this is not the case. No matter how many times Darwinians, for example, speak of humans as one more kind of animal, and no matter how many times some psychologists explain our behavior on the basis of evolutionary mechanisms, human beings know it just isn't so. We know there is something distinctive about us—which is why the Bible calls on us to appeal to the minds and consciences of unbelievers, even though the minds are blinded (2 Co 4:4) and the consciences are often calloused (1 Tm 4:2).
Therefore, the biblical witness about human beings stands in stark contrast with other belief systems. Unlike some Eastern religions, the Bible does not present the life of a human being as a cycle of incarnations, nor does it affirm, as Mormonism does, the preexistence of disembodied human spirits. Unlike many nature religions and various forms of pagan worship, the Bible does not present humanity as part of the larger "life force" of nature. Unlike Islam, the Bible affirms the freedom and responsibility of human beings as moral creatures before a God whose image they reflect. Unlike many psychological theories, the Bible does not reduce human motivations or actions to the interactions of unconscious desires, habitual patterns, or the firing of neurons. Unlike Marxism and libertarian capitalism, the Bible presents the longings of the human heart as far more than material. Unlike Gnosticism or feminism, God's good creative purposes are seen in the goodness and permanence of sexual differentiation, in the equal worth of the sexes as image bearers (Gn 2:27), and in the protective, sacrificial headship of men as fathers of families and leaders of tribes (1 Co 11:3). In contrast to rival belief systems, the Bible presents human beings as distinct from a nature they are called to govern (Ps 8:5-8), free to act
according to their natures (Jos 24:15), responsible for actions before the tribunal of Christ (Rv 20:12-13), and created for conformity to the image of Jesus as joint heirs of a glorious new creation (Rm 8:17,29). The doctrine of the image of God grants value to every human life, regardless of its vulnerability or stage of development (Gn 9:6), and it stands in eternal hostility to any form of racial bigotry or nation-state idolatry (Ac 17:25-27).
The Bible's truthfulness about human depravity contrasts strongly with belief systems that are more optimistic about human nature, such as Mormonism, Scientology, or secularism. Human sin is an apologetic issue since a Christian framework explains how educated, rational, loving persons can bring forth cruelty, violence, and hatred. The biblical teaching on sin also answers what may be the most persistent charge against the truthfulness of Christianity: Christian hypocrisy.
Likewise, the prevalence of world religions and ideologies, which is often used as an objection to Christianity, actually serves as an apologetic argument for Christian claims. The Bible tells us that the universal instinct to worship and to interpret reality is grounded in the revelation of God and that the universal suppression of this truth leads to diverse idolatries (Rm 1:18-32). We should not be surprised, then, that literally every human civilization in history has had some practice of worship, but also that cults, world religions, and even secular ideologies often ape some aspects of Christian truth. Nor should we be surprised, as the ancient book of Ecclesiastes illustrates, when the human quest for sensual gratification, material abundance, or the wielding of power apart from the Creator's purposes leads to despair.
Notable Christian Apologist: Anselm
Born in what would be modern-day Italy, Anselm (a.d. 1033–1109) was raised by a father who resisted his son's desire for a life of scholarly devotion. His mother, however, instilled in him a vision and love of God. Through his unwavering commitment Anselm became not only a Christian scholar but eventually also a celebrated teacher and the archbishop of Canterbury. Like the earlier scholar and churchman Augustine, Anselm sought to better understand the faith he already believed. In the classic Why God Became Man, Anselm produced what has become the standard view of the atonement: God alone can satisfy the infinite demands of His righteous wrath—and He graciously does so through the saving work of the God-man, Jesus Christ.
Written in a spirit of prayer, Anselm's Proslogion presents one of the most controversial and fascinating arguments for God's existence—the so-called ontological argument (argument from being). When a fool says in his heart that there is no God (Ps 14:1), he demonstrates that he understands what is meant by the term God, namely "that than which nothing greater can be conceived." And anything that can be conceived not to exist is not God. Thus God cannot be conceived not to exist. Or in other terms, God would not be that than which nothing greater can be conceived if He existed only in one's mind, for it is greater to exist in reality than in thought alone. Hence God must exist. In response to charges that the argument is unsound, Anselm expounded the argument further by noting that God is a necessary being, that is, a being whose uncaused self-existence accounts for the existence of all other contingent things.
Does the Cosmological Argument Show There Is a God?
by J. P. Moreland
The cosmological argument starts with the existence of the universe and reasons to the existence of God as the best explanation of the universe. There are different forms of the argument. Two important versions are the Leibnizian and Thomist arguments, which are named, respectively, after Gottfried W. Leibniz (a.d. 1646–1716) and Thomas Aquinas (a.d. 1225–1274). In recent years a third version has become prominent and it may be the most effective of all: the kalam cosmological argument, which can be diagrammed as a series of alternatives:
Universe
Beginning No Beginning
Caused Uncaused
Personal Impersonal
The defender of the argument tries to establish one horn of each dilemma and thus to argue for these three premises:
1. The universe had a beginning.
2. The beginning of the universe was caused.
3. The cause of the beginning of the universe was personal.
One philosophical argument for premise 1 involves the impossibility of creating an actual infinite number of events. For example, if you start counting 1, 2, 3, . . . , then you could count forever and never reach a time when an actual infinite amount of numbers had been counted. Your counting could continue forever but would always be finite; that is, it would have some point of ending. If the universe had no beginning, then the number of events crossed to reach the present moment would be actually infinite because the universe would be infinite. It would be like counting to zero from negative infinity. Since one cannot have an actual infinite, then the present moment could never have arrived if the universe had no beginning. Since the present is real, it had to have been preceded by a finite past; therefore, there was a beginning or first event!
One scientific argument for premise 1 derives from the second law of thermodynamics, which in one form states that the amount of useful energy in the universe is being used up. If the universe were infinitely old, it would already have used up all its useful energy and have arrived at a temperature of absolute zero. Since there are many pockets of useful energy (for example, the sun), the universe must be finite in duration. Therefore, there was a beginning when the universe's useful energy was put into it "from the outside."
Premise 2 is confirmed by universal experience with no clear counterexamples. Alleged cases where something comes from nothing actually involve one thing coming into existence from something else (for example, lead from uranium).
Evidence for premise 3 derives from the fact that since time, space, and matter did not exist earlier than the beginning of the universe, the universe's cause had to be timeless, spaceless, and immaterial. This cause cannot be physical or subject to scientific law since all such causes presuppose time, space, and matter to exist. The universe's immaterial cause was timeless, spaceless, and had the power to spontaneously bring the world into existence without changing first to do so. (If it had to change before bringing the world into existence, then that change, not the act of bringing the world into existence, would be the first event.) Such a cause must have free will, and since only persons have free will, it is a personal Creator.
Is Beauty in the Eye of the Beholder?
by David A. Horner
The answer to this question is yes—and no. Beauty involves both subjective and objective elements, both taste and truth, which is why there is often confusion about it.
The ability to perceive beauty does involve a kind of taste, which can be either cultivated and trained or distorted and dulled. Some instances of beauty are perceptible only to those who have cultivated a taste for them through disciplined practice. For example, trained musicians hear subtle distinctions of tone that others miss, and painters see additional hues in the sunset. In a fallen world we can lose our taste for beauty through inattention, self-absorption, and suffering. We can even develop a taste for what is ugly.
Beauty itself, however, is objective, a matter of truth. Tones and hues are real properties of music and sunsets; they are there whether or not we are sensitive enough to perceive them. The way we experience beauty shows this. We are struck by something beautiful. We may even be surprised by it—it takes our breath away. We respond to it with spontaneous expressions of awe, gratitude, appreciation, or reverence. These reactions show we don't really think it is beautiful merely because we think it's beautiful. We are responding to the beauty it has, independently of us. What is truly beautiful merits such a response.
Ultimately, beauty is grounded in the nature of God Himself, the supremely beautiful Person (Ps 27:4), and then in His creation, which reflects His beautiful intentions and artistry (Gn 1; Ps 50:2). The created order is magnificently diverse in its beauty, meaning we can see beauty in a variety of things that can all be considered beautiful (Ec 3:11).
There are deep connections among goodness, truth, and beauty (e.g., goodness is a kind of moral beauty; Php 4:8). The full meaning of the Hebrew word shalom conveys this rich biblical picture. More than merely "peace," shalom is the uniting and flowering of truth, goodness, and beauty in the wholeness of life. However, the fall has broken shalom and as a result sin has introduced ugliness into the world. Evil is not only false and bad but ugly (for instance, pornography is an ugly distortion of God's beautiful created context of sexuality). Thus our experiences of beauty are often distorted—and even dangerous, when we worship beauty instead of God (Gn 3:6; Rm 1:21-25).
Each of us needs beauty in our lives, relationships, work, and worship. We are made for it and we long for it. Our hunger for beauty is an expression of our fundamental human longing for shalom—ultimately for shalom with God (Rm 5:1).
Beauty has value for apologetics in the sense that it is part of the common ground we share with all people, since we are made in the image of God and live in a God-created world. Beauty points beyond the physical cosmos to the Creator. Like goodness and truth, beauty is not a physical property, measurable by science, and its reality indicates that the physical world is not all there is. The beauty of the world points to the nature of the Divine Artist whose handiwork it is. And the fundamental human longing for beauty, for shalom, is a hunger that cannot ultimately be satisfied in this fallen world—it is a clue that we were made for more than this life (Ec 3:11).
Does Science Support the Bible?
by Walter L. Bradley
Introduction
Two major areas of scientific inquiry can in principle either support or undermine the Bible, namely, what science tells us about the nature of our universe and planet and what it can tell us about the history of our universe and planet. Biblical theism describes a God who is immediately responsible for all physical reality, with the laws of nature seen as descriptions of God's customary way of caring for His creatures (as in Col 1:17). Biblical theism also affirms that God sometimes works in extraordinary (or supernatural) ways to shape and care for His creation (Gn 1:1). The challenge is, can the biblical and scientific pictures of our universe and planet be harmonized?
Our Remarkable Home
One of the most surprising scientific developments of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries has been the discovery of the many remarkable features of our universe and planet that are essential to make it such an ideal habitat for life. First, we need a sufficient diversity of elements, combined with a relative abundance of certain critical elements, to make possible the production of complex "molecular machines" capable of processing energy, storing information, and replicating molecules such as RNA, DNA, and protein. Second, at least one element in this complexity of life must be capable of serving as a ready connector, reacting with essentially all elements to form bonds that are stable but not too stable to be broken during "reuse"; carbon is such an element. Third, we must have an individual element or compound that is liquid at certain temperatures on planet earth and very abundant and that can serve as a universal solvent. This liquid must be capable of dissolving most elements and/or compounds essential to the chemistry of life; that describes water. Fourth, we need long-term sources of energy that fit with the chemical energy in the carbon bonds so that this energy can fuel the chemical reactions we find in the carbon-based, chain molecules that are essential to life.
At least 50 such requirements have been identified, all necessary for life to exist in our universe.
God's Remarkable Design
God has satisfied the many requirements for life in three remarkable ways: the elegant mathematical form that is encoded in nature and that we call "the laws of nature"; the fine-tuning of the 19 universal constants (e.g., the speed of light, the gravity force constant, the mass of the electron, and the unit charge); and the unbelievably demanding initial conditions that God had to set. For example, the ratio of the strong force constant to the electromagnetic force constant must fall within a window of 5 percent of the actual ratio if we are to have elemental diversity and a star like our sun that gives a long-term, stable source of energy. To match the energy of the light from the sun to the chemical bonding energy in organic compounds, six of the universal constants have to be carefully tailored to each other. The speed of light (c), the mass of the electron (me), the mass of the proton (mp), Planck's constant (h), the gravity force constant, and the unit charge must have carefully matched magnitudes that satisfy the following algebraic equation:
mp2·G/[h c]>~[e2/{hc}]12[me/mp]4
Remarkably, these six constants do have exactly the right relative values for the energy from the sun to be matched precisely to that needed to facilitate critical chemical reactions in organic molecules.
Many scientists have remarked with admiration about this amazing characteristic of our universe. For example, the famous English astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle commented, "A common sense interpretation of the facts suggests that a super intellect has 'monkeyed' with the physics as well as the chemistry and biology, and there are no blind forces worth speaking about in nature."
Possibly the most impressive scientific achievement of twentieth century was the discovery of DNA, upon which is encoded the information of life. That such a remarkable information storage system exists, and that the DNA molecules have somehow come to be encoded with the precise information needed for life, is the climax to an amazing testimony from science of God's providential care for us in His creation. For example, for the accidental origin of the cytochrome-C molecule to have the required sequencing of the various amino acids has a probability of only 1 in 1060.
These findings from recent science give an even more profound significance to Paul's testimony in Rm 1:20 that God's divinity can be seen even in the invisible elements of His universe.
Can We Harmonize Genesis 1 and Science?
While the scientific discoveries of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries have strengthened belief in a Designer/Creator, highly publicized conflicts between science and the Bible such as the Scopes "Monkey Trial" have eroded confidence in the biblical inferences about natural history found in Genesis 1–2. This conflict is the result of unsubstantiated scientific claims and unnecessarily limited interpretations of Genesis 1–2 (whether they be of the liberal or conservative variety).
The unsupported claim from science is that the origin of life and its progression from simple to complex forms are achieved by molecular selection and mutation/natural selection respectively. While this synthesis of mutation/natural selection adequately explains how organisms become more adapted to their environment and how incremental improvement in existing characteristics might occur, it seems incapable of explaining the origin of multicomponent systems, such as the human eye. New multicomponent systems would have no advantage from natural selection until the individual parts had already evolved to an advanced stage of development. Yet without natural selection to guide this development, it is almost impossible to imagine how complex, multicomponent systems can originate. Biochemist Michael Behe has dubbed this process "Darwin's black box"—a whimsical term for a device that does something but whose inner workings cannot be seen and sometimes are not comprehensible.
Notable Christian Apologist: Joseph Butler
Joseph Butler (1692–1752) received an Oxford University education, was made bishop of Bristol and later Durham, and became chaplain to the queen of England. But prestige did not dominate his interests; rather, he was concerned about the defense of the Christian faith. In his day Enlightenment views prevailed in Europe. While faith and revelation were increasingly spurned or ridiculed, confidence in reason and science was rising. Biblical Christianity was openly attacked as irrational and superstitious. The intellectual elite regarded deism, with its disavowal of any divine activity after creation, as the true religion. Deism could not accept the supernatural involvement of the biblical God in history.
Butler's Analogy of Religion undermined the deists by employing the very reasoning they used to attack the Bible. He claimed that if biblical revelation is to be doubted due to its difficulties and mysteries, then science should also be disbelieved. The same kinds of obscurities and unanswered questions are part of science, yet deists were all too quick to trumpet science as the new revelation. This example of inconsistent thinking, Butler argued, did not exalt the rationality honored by intellectuals. If anything, the common patterns in nature and the Bible point to one and the same Author. And if deists believed in the grandest of miracles, the creation of the universe, then why should they doubt the lesser miracles of the Bible? Butler's Analogy mightily rebutted deism in his generation and became a standard text at Cambridge and Oxford for more than a century.
If God Made the Universe, Who Made God?
by Paul Copan
Atheist philosopher Bertrand Russell mused, "If everything must have a cause, then God must have a cause." But the question of what or who caused God is misguided.
First, science supports the notion that the universe had a beginning and that something independent of the universe brought it into being. The well-accepted scientific belief in the universe's origination and expansion and the second law of thermodynamics (energy tends to spread out) support the universe's absolute beginning from nothing. This sounds remarkably like Gn 1:1! The chances of a thing's popping into being from literally nothing are exactly zero. Being cannot come from nonbeing; there's no potential for this. Even skeptic David Hume called this "absurd"—a scientific (real) impossibility.
Second, believers reject the claim "Everything that exists has a cause" and affirm "Whatever begins to exist has a cause." To say "Everything needs a cause" would necessarily exclude an uncaused God. This is "question begging" (assuming what needs to be proved). It's like presuming that since all reality is physical (which can't be demonstrated), a nonphysical God cannot exist.
Third, why think everything needs a cause, since an uncaused entity is logical and intelligible? Through the centuries, many believed that the universe didn't need a cause; it was self-existent. They thought a beginningless/uncaused universe wasn't illogical or impossible. But now that contemporary cosmology points to the universe's beginning and an external cause, skeptics insist everything needs a cause after all!
Fourth, a good number of uncaused things exist. Logical laws are real; we can't think coherently without using them (e.g., the law of identity, X = X, tells you: "This book is this book"). Moral laws or virtues (love, justice) are real. But none of these began to exist. They are eternal and uncaused (being in God's mind).
Fifth, the question "Who made God?" commits the category fallacy. To say that all things, even God, must be caused is incoherent—like the question "How does the color green taste?" Why fault God for being uncaused? When we rephrase the question to say, "What caused the self-existent, uncaused Cause, who is by definition unmade, to exist?" the answer is obvious.
How Should a Christian Understand the Age of the Earth Controversy?
by Ted Cabal
Only three major Bible-science controversies have confronted the church: (1) the Copernican controversy, (2) the Darwinian controversy, and (3) the age-of-the-earth controversy. The question about the age of the earth did not become significantly heated until the latter third of the twentieth century. The primary disputants today are young- and old-earth creationists (YCs and OCs); theistic evolutionists and those not holding to biblical inerrancy have little interest in the issue. The debate does not pertain to dating Adam's creation, since both sides believe this occurred only thousands, not millions, of years ago. Nor is the controversy about the age of the universe, because some YCs believe in an old universe. And both creationist camps oppose Darwinian common descent. What is needed is a clearer understanding of both sides and a discussion of how significant an issue this is for biblical faith.
Some OCs contribute to the controversy by contending that YCs undercut biblical credibility with an artificial clash between science and Scripture. The biggest source of the controversy, however, is the contention of some YCs that only belief in a young earth is doctrinally acceptable. Some YCs believe this doctrine is so clear that its rejection compromises biblical authority. While OCs agree that biblical genealogies teach the recent creation of Adam, they don't agree that Scripture teaches that the creation days were consecutive 24-hour periods. (See the article "Are the Days of Genesis to Be Interpreted Literally?" p. 4.)
Some YCs argue that old-earth views, by placing animal death before the fall, conflict with Romans 5:12. OCs respond that Romans 5:12 says nothing about animal death. The Apostle Paul's context treats only of sin and death's entrance into the human race.
Some YCs worry that old-earth interpretations make the Bible subservient to science. And it is true that old-earth interpretations arose due to the (pre-Darwinian) discovery of enormous numbers of extinct animals such as dinosaurs. But this same data also led YCs to interpret Scripture in light of science (such as interpreting the book of Jb to describe dinosaurs). Indeed, some YCs have suggested plate tectonics as the possible interpretation for Genesis 10:25, and some offer a young-earth "big bang" interpretation of the first four creation days. Moreover, virtually all creationists now believe biblical descriptions of a stationary earth and revolving sun are from a human observational standpoint and are not intended as technical scientific descriptions.
Some YCs charge OCs with caving in to evolutionary theory, alleging the "long ages" are synonymous with the evolutionary system. Macroevolutionary theory needs an old earth, but inferring that old-earth views are thereby macroevolutionary is to commit a logical fallacy (x and y regularly occur together; therefore, x is the cause of y). By this same logic, YCs can be charged with accommodating naturalistic views for accepting "microevolution" (the idea that species change over time); Darwinian macroevolution needs microevolution, but this does not entail the two being synonymous. Neo-Darwinists contend that the layers of fossil strata constitute the main evidence for macroevolution. But YCs and OCs agree that this same fossil record, with its scarcity of credible transitional fossils, does not reveal a history of common biological descent. YCs typically understand fossils as depositions from Noah's flood, and OCs view them as artifacts of supernatural creative acts separated by long time spans.
Some YCs even contend that OCs have contributed to the demise of Western culture, but such contentions are historically unjustified. References by YCs to OCs as "evangelical evolutionists," "semi-creationists," or "compromisers" have clouded rather than clarified the debate. Indeed, YCs are not agreed as to just what is "evolutionary" in matters such as ice ages, star formation, and the origins of species.
A lesson from a past controversy may be helpful. Early in the twentieth century, some held the pretribulational rapture to be central to the faith. Great controversy followed, but eventually most Bible believers realized the issue was not worthy of such contention. Perhaps one day this will be true of the age-of-the-earth controversy. Creationist leaders should work hard to understand the data. And exploring, holding, and promoting various creationist views are legitimate projects. But promoting the controversy as a basis for disunity in the church is another matter altogether.
Does the Bible Provide Guidance Regarding Human Cloning?
by R. Albert Mohler Jr.
When Dolly the cloned sheep was born in 1997, few thoughtful persons could avoid wondering whether this stunning new technology would soon be used to clone a human being. Now human cloning has become an issue of immediate, urgent, and universal importance. The cloning of a human being represents a radical break with the human past and with the established patterns of human life. It also raises a host of ethical questions: Who would be the "parents" of a cloned child? In an age of patented forms of life, could a cloned being be "owned," at least in genetic pattern? Will parents seek to clone children in order to provide organs for transplant into another child?
These are but a few of the many pressing questions that will demand answers, and the worldview of secular humanism provides only tentative and provisional answers. The fact is that only the Christian worldview—revealed in God's Word—can provide us with an ethical context and authority adequate to address such questions.
The biblical creation account presents the creation of human beings as the pinnacle of God's creative purpose. After creating the world and filling it with living creatures, God purposed to create human beings. The human creature—set apart from all other creatures—would bear the imago Dei, the image of God.
Though the image of God in human beings has been corrupted by sin, it has not been removed, and this image is an essential mark of true humanity. Each human being is a special creation of God, made in His own image. Each is unique by design of the Creator. The status of human beings as created beings, each unique but all bearing the image of God, establishes a foundation for theological understanding—and for answering the questions raised by human cloning.
This understanding also makes clear the decisive distinction between the biblical and secular conceptions of human nature and value. The nonbiblical understanding of humanity rejects any conception of divine purpose. Human beings are cosmic accidents—the incredible by-products of blind evolutionary process. Any value thus ascribed to human life is arbitrary, tentative, and self-centered.
The Bible, on the other hand, teaches that human beings, like all of creation, were created in order to glorify God. But humans were created with a distinct and unique capacity to know, revere, worship, and glorify the Creator. He made human beings, male and female, of His own good pleasure, in His own image, and to His own sovereign purpose. Thus human beings are not mere biological artifacts nor accidental forms of life.
Human cloning represents an effort to redefine human identity and human reproduction by allowing individuals to replicate themselves. This reality cannot be separated from the related questions of "designer" children, human-enhancement technologies, eugenics, and sexuality. Furthermore, the use of cloning technology in human embryonic stem cell research undermines human dignity and will eventually lead to an expansion of human cloning for other purposes.
The artificiality of cloning technology undermines marriage by further separating sex and reproduction. Human cloning—whatever its form—violates the sanctity of human life as revealed in Scripture.
ARTICLE
What Does the Bible Say About Abortion?
by Nigel Cameron
The intentional taking of life before birth is not new. Though adoption of "abortion rights" as a progressive political cause in Western societies is recent, abortion has been practiced in every culture from ancient times. Indeed, one of the signal achievements of the spread of the gospel in the Greco-Roman world was to push this practice and its close sibling, infanticide, to the margins of society. In classical paganism, while it was sometimes controversial, abortion (like euthanasia) was common and widely approved. The ancient physicians who took the Hippocratic oath, whose medical vision was powered by saving life and not taking it, were swimming upstream. It was the church of Jesus Christ that swept through the later Roman world as the great pro-life movement, setting standards in medicine, culture, and public policy that still condition the thinking of fractured Christendom in the twenty-first century.
Readers who seek abortion in a concordance are unlikely to find it, and as a result believers have sometimes suggested that Scripture is silent on the subject and that therefore we may do as we please. Such a conclusion depends on some serious misunderstandings. The biblical foundations of a comprehensive prohibition on induced abortion lie deep, in the doctrines of creation and incarnation.
The starting point for a biblical understanding of human nature is the truth that human beings are created in God's image. It is clear from Genesis 1:26-27 that this applies to all those who are members of the human species. Homo sapiens is distinguished from all other "kinds" by our bearing the likeness of our Maker. The image is specifically stated to have been given to women as well as men and to remain after the fall (Gn 9:6). And it applies to Jew and Gentile, religious and irreligious, young and old, those in the flower of human ability as well as the disabled and sick. The imago Dei is what makes us the beings we are and it is in place wherever there are members of our species. The question of which beings bear the image is one of species membership and therefore genetics.
While extraordinarily difficult issues are raised by the prospect of human-animal hybrids (and also, perhaps, humanoid robots), the issue here is simple. If someone is a member of the human species, that person bears the divine image. Therefore, his or her life is sacred. With this single recognition, we find the basis of biblical bioethics and immediate answers to many of the most pressing questions in contemporary medicine and bioscience. It provides a straightforward response to the issue of induced abortion, since the commandment "Do not murder" (Ex 20:13) therefore applies to all human beings, from the beginning of life to its end. And this command is explicitly rooted in the bearing of the divine image in Genesis 9:6, in the ironic context of the provision for capital punishment: "Whoever sheds man's blood, his blood shall be shed by man, for God made man in His image."
This species principle is of central importance to debate about human embryos, as researchers have developed techniques using in vitro fertilization and cloning, making it possible to use embryos for destructive research. The biblical position is unambiguous: those who are part of the species, made in the divine image, should not be murdered.
The second foundation lies in the doctrine of the incarnation. As if to illustrate this creation principle of the species-wide bearing of the image, in His incarnation the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, took human form and did so from the beginning of human biological existence. When in the "sixth month" (Lk 1:36, a reference not to the calendar but to the advanced state of her cousin Elizabeth's pregnancy) Mary was told by the angel that she would conceive by a miracle, the human life of the Son of God began. Shortly afterward she visited Elizabeth, and we witness John the Baptist's first testimony to his kinsman and his Lord as a six-month fetus leaped in his mother's womb at the presence of the days-old embryonic Jesus (Lk 1:39-45).
In light of these basic theological affirmations, the many incidental references to unborn life in the OT—in the prophets, Job, and especially Psalms—take on powerful significance (for example, Ps 139:13 and the following verses).
The one biblical text sometimes offered as a counterargument is in Exodus 21:22 and following, which refers to the appropriate punishment to be applied if men, while fighting, accidentally hit a woman and cause her to miscarry. There are varying translations of the passage, but it has no relevance to the debate about deliberate abortion, since it refers to manslaughter of the unborn child and not to deliberate killing.