What Would the Early Church Say?

The past few years has been showing the divide in the nation is very wide. The past few weeks have shown the continental drift of morality is near a seismic shift catastrophe.

Abortion is a subject that will not go away until the nation is destroyed or repents.

Consider what’s been going on in states like Maryland, California, and Colorado just this past week moving full infanticide permission bills through the legislative path that seems clear they will soon put into motion permissions that will protect doctors (who would prove themselves to be Not-a-Doctor-Doctor) and mothers (who will prove themselves unfit for motherhood) with legislative power to murder their children, in some cases up to six weeks past birth. That is unthinkable.

Compare that with what states like Mississippi, Texas, Idaho, and now Oklahoma are doing. Where these new “near-abolition” bills are gaining ground and are advancing in more conservative states they have yet to abolish abortion.

The two cases at least show a widening of the moral gap.

But what would the early church say about such actions?

Here is what Tertullian had to say: ““In our case, a murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb, while as yet the human being derives blood from the other parts of the body for its sustenance. To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in its seed” (Apology 9:8 [A.D. 197]).

But this statement stops a man in his tracks: ““all knew well enough that a living being had been conceived, and [they] pitied this most luckless infant state, which had first to be put to death, to escape being tortured alive” (The Soul 25 [A.D. 210]).

Where is the statesman in any state willing to say this and more, where is the man in the pulpit willing to claim the glory of God with such boldness?

What a sad state of affairs. There is no mercy to the “luckless” child in the womb to be put to death to escape being tortured alive.

God save the nation!