Open By the Permission of the Church?

“We’ll stand before God one day and be held accountable for allowing abortion to continue,” a small group member said to me.

He’s right we will be.

Yesterday another video was released. This one was of a lunch with Cate Dyer, CEO of StemExpress an organization which recently filed a restraining order against the Center for Medical Progress to keep any videos of its employees from coming to light. That restraining order was lifted last week and this week we see not just an employee, but the CEO.

In this latest video we hear of the researchers who, upon receiving the aborted children’s parts, are horrified and the table jokes about making sure the severed head of a baby has its eyes closed (minute 7 of the embed video), before shipping it.

“Every abortion clinic should have a sign in front of it saying, ‘Open by the permission of the church.’” Francis Schaeffer said.*

That's a spine chilling statment. And we must ask ourselves, is it true? Are we, the church, allowing this holocaust to continue? If we are, then the current American Church has little difference than that of the German Christians of 1930's Germany who, as Barth said, existed in the abysmal gap that was between, "The inherent godlessness of National Socialism (Nazi)," and Christianity.

I pray that when we stand before God at the final judgement of all things many of us will be innocent of the blood of the innocent because we stood up for the murdered masses.

Roughly 58 million abortions have been carried out since Roe V. Wade, nearly the population of Italy.

________

* This quote has been attributed to Schaeffer on various places on the internet, I am researching this to make sure it was indeed Schaeffer that said it, and if so in this form. 

UPDATE: As I have been looking through Schaeffer's works I have not yet found this quote, however he does say, "That even the church is being used by the proponents of infanticide is particularly alarming. Those who have propagated these ideas or simply not bothered to think them through have had ample warning in history - if they would care to look. Doctors and nurses should be aware of how fallible these decisions are and how disastrous have been simplistic pop-science theories about human worth in the past. Lawyers should be frightened to let down the bars on the killing of any human being, when the decisions is made on the arbitrary basis of the equality of life. And finally, these theologians have obviously forgotten God's view of the work of every human being as made in the image of God. If these same theologians no longer believe in such a God, they should not use the church as a platform form which to propagate their discriminatory ideas." p. 327, Volume 5 The Complete Works of Francis Schaeffer: A Christian Worldview

What's It Mean That God is Father?

What does it mean that God is Father? Aside from the obvious answer that it means God is our Father, there are many characteristics of God that are encapsulated in the description of God as “father.” The providing aspect of God, his Kingship and, well you know, that whole “Him” thing. Books like "The Shack" like to present God as the all-mother or some such nonsense and dispense with the clearly written words of the Bible for some gender inclusive (or just as exclusive as calling him father, but that’s neither here nor there) shtick. But we, as Christians, call God Father.

The aspects of God, his love, greatness, goodness, gentleness, awesomeness, graciousness etc. are not qualities that we would necessarily look at and think that God’s a dude, rather we’d think these cool qualities. But when coupled with his providence, Kingship, leadership and general fatherly-ness we would need to assume upon his fatherly nature because, well, he is our Father. As the Provider we his children are given an old picture of a man bringing home what is needed to give health, home and happiness to his family. As King we see a God fierce in battle and mighty to save from the onslaught of demonic hosts and our own sin. As Leader we see a God who is willing to do what is necessary to take his people where he wants them go.

But something interesting occurs when you strip God of his fatherly-ness. He becomes it and it becomes impersonal and impersonal becomes impartial and impartial becomes careless and careless becomes graceless and graceless becomes meaningless - meaningless to the point of irreverence and disregard. So much so that culture uses his name as a byword and a curse.

Culture has steadily and slowly attempted at removing God’s personal qualities, namely that he is father. And we are now, yes, even now, seeing the outcomes of those slow and steady cultural modifications to cultural Christian understandings. The modern day fight of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgendered (LGBT) movement for cultural standing and inclusion is part and portion of the degenderization of the society at large which is an outcome of removing God’s fatherly-ness from his personality. It is also, I believe, part of the reason we see such drastic issues with out of wedlock pregnancies and fatherless children, as well as the astounding 56 million abortions that have legally happened since Roe V Wade.

Removing God’s Fatherly nature from the written word, from our modern understanding of God and our cultural understand of Christianity has done nothing in the way of help for our economy, our children or our future. It is safe to argue that homosexuality is not an economically sound decision because economics is based on buying units, of which, homosexuals do not produce because they cannot reproduce. The same can be said for abortion; on an economic point 56 million buying units have been lost thus far, those are both dollars not being used but also jobs not being created or sustained by one, if not all, of those 56 million. And statistically speaking a child born out of wedlock is more likely to live life on welfare than one born in a married family and is , therefore, a burden on the economy because a non-producing unit is only consuming.

But father God is and father he remains. He is father because he has revealed himself as such. He has spoken clearly of who he is in his word, therefore we see him not as impersonal, impartial and unimportant; no we see him as personal, partial and vastly important and this changes everything.

To read an expanded peice on this topic visit Parts, Portions & Pieces.