Abortion is Wrong; Everything Else is… Complicated

It’s been 20 years since I read R.C. Sproul’s mostly-ignored book, Abortion, but it includes a statement that has been top of mind for me ever since. It goes like this: “If I know anything at all about God, I know that God hates abortion.” As one of America’s most influential 20th-century theologians, R.C. Sproul spent a lifetime studying scripture. For him to say, If I know anything of God… is something akin to Michael Jordan saying, If I know anything of basketball…or Tom Cruise saying, If I know anything of making an action flick… And while knowledge of the divine is nothing so simple as knowledge of sport or cinema, the assumption is, R.C. Sproul did know something of God. And he had as much confidence in God’s hatred of abortion as he had in anything. There was no universe for Sproul in which the God he worshipped could look with approval, or even indifference, at the poisoning and dismemberment of his smallest image bearers.

Though few of us have devoted as much time to the study of God as R.C. Sproul, I wonder how you would complete the statement, If I know anything at all about God… Because whatever you insert as the direct object is by definition the thing of which you are the most assured—which is what makes Sproul’s assertion so astounding. Is God’s hatred of abortion really the one theological truth that Sproul had the most confidence in? We might assume that Sproul held other beliefs with equal conviction, but his statement makes clear that there were no other truths about God in which Sproul had more confidence. And though it may seem like a niche answer, the more you think about it, the more sensible it becomes—because the Lord of hosts is exceedingly hard to pin down. When God appeared to Moses on Mount Sinai, to proclaim his name, this is what he said of himself:

“The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for thousands, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, but who will by no means clear the guilty, visiting the iniquity of the fathers on the children and the children’s children, to the third and the fourth generation.”

Do you see the difficulty? God is merciful and gracious, but he is not always merciful and gracious. God is slow to anger, but he is not always slow to anger. God abounds in steadfast love, but he does not always abound in steadfast love. God forgives iniquity, transgression, and sin, but he does not always forgive. Sometimes the sins of the fathers are visited upon the children to the third and the fourth generation. God is love, but the God who loves also hates. By necessity. In a world where evil exists, only beings devoid of love could be devoid of its counterpart. So when it comes to making baseline assertions about God, it’s not so easy as we might imagine. But here’s one that doesn’t need qualification. God hates sin. Always. And yet Sproul got much more specific in his framing. He went right past murder all the way to abortion. Why? Perhaps because of what we read in Deuteronomy 12:31, which is the first scriptural pairing of “the Lord hates.” What does the Lord hate? Idolatry. Namely, “every abominable thing” that pagan nations do for their gods, who “even burn their sons and their daughters in the fire.” Moses—directed by the Spirit of God—points to child sacrifice as the most grotesque and egregious expression of sin, and what is abortion but the modern equivalent of burning our sons and our daughters in the fire? The ultimate expression of arrogance and evil.

For reasons I won’t get into, I have spent the last six years as a church nomad. I attend worship service most every Sunday, but I’m not formally a member of any single congregation. Maybe that’s sinful, maybe it’s not, but my point lies elsewhere. By my count, I have attended 16 different congregations in my community—most of them more than once. I’ve been to six of them at least 10 times and would describe all of them as theologically-adjacent. The list includes Anglican churches, Baptist churches, Bible churches, community churches, Presbyterian churches, Church of Christ churches, and non-denominational churches. Each one would fit under the conservative/Protestant banner, but the thing that strikes me most is how differently they seem to understand and express the gospel. It’s disconcerting, in fact. When you spend all your time at one church, you may not realize how much confusion and contradiction exists in broader christendom. I can sympathize with the assertion that this is a uniquely Protestant problem, but I’m also sympathetic to the assertion that the Roman Catholic Church was in need of reform. Wherever the fault lies, the end result is deep divisions among those who claim the name of Christ. It may be true that different kinds of congregations help us reach different kinds of people, but the differences I have in view are not stylistic. They go to the very heart of the gospel.

Several years ago, I heard Tim Keller say that every Christian church has the same problem. “Low church and high church,” he said, “liturgical smells and bells” and “Bible-believing, evangelical, sawdust-trail churches” are all united in the same thing. “We actually don't believe the gospel." That’s how Keller put it. Yes, yes, I remember thinking. Finally someone is going to talk about the elephant in the room, but then he skirted right past it without seeming all that concerned. The only way I could make sense of his rather nonchalant response was to qualify his initial declaration. Perhaps he was asserting that the church does not understand the gospel as it should but does understand it enough to offer salvation. Keller went on to assert that though it often looks very different in practice, every denomination in the world erroneously inserts good works into the justification equation. In his words:

"Now that I'm forgiven, I need to really live for Him.” That's how most people think. So people cycle in and out of the church... They try hard to live as they should, but something makes them fail... They actually never become Christians. Because a Christian is someone who is justified freely by faith through [Christ’s] blood. Here's what I want you to do to help you break free and break out of that cycle. I want you to stop looking for a minute at your sins.

But Immediately after decrying the damning intrusion of salvation by works, immediately after declaring that we are justified freely by faith in Christ, and immediately after telling us to stop looking at our sins, Keller continued, "Now don't anyone go home and [claim], 'Tim Keller says your sins don't matter.' Listen, if you're sinning, I would like you to stop and get forgiveness. Let the record show." So, when it comes to justification, we’re still left wondering. Does sin matter or does it not? This is the question that the church seems to be constantly dancing around. And the more time I spend at more churches, the more convinced I am that nobody has a very good answer—despite being hyper-focused on evangelism. We are agreed that Christ’s death and resurrection is the basis of redemption, but we struggle to articulate how and upon whom salvation is applied.

At some of the churches on my circuit, I get the impression that God expects nothing of me. He’s just happy I’m there. At others, it seems I’ve got to take up my cross and work! So which is it? Is the yoke easy, as Jesus said in Matthew 11? Or is the way hard that leads to life, as he said in Matthew 7? Some churches go in for the former; others prefer the latter. Some accept practices once deemed sinful. Others continue to condemn them. Some churches preach of coming judgment; others proclaim that our sins have been removed as far as the east is from the west. Some churches major in acting justly; others in loving mercy. But they all claim to be animated by love, they all believe they’re being led by the Holy Spirt, and they all seem convinced that they’re doing things the right way. God’s way. Here’s one more thing they have in common. They’re all filled with people who struggle to answer what is billed as a very simple question. What must I do to inherit eternal life? Or, how can my sins be forgiven? So without any further ado, allow me to clear everything up for you.

If you want your sins to be forgiven, Jesus says in Matthew 6, you must forgive those who sin against you—because if you don’t forgive others their sins, God will not forgive you yours. Easy peasy. But wait a minute, don’t you have to believe in Jesus to have your sins forgiven? Yes, for whosoever believes in God’s only begotten son shall not perish but have everlasting life. Jesus said that in John 3. But what about repentance, isn’t the turning away from sin necessary? Of course, the forgiveness of sins comes through repentance. Jesus said as much in Luke 24. And don’t forget about love. The prostitute in Luke 7, who bathed Christ’s feet in tears, had her sins forgiven because she loved Jesus much. I should also mention sacrifice. Whoever loses his life for Christ will save it, but whoever tries to save it will lose it (Luke 9:24). And in some situations, apparently, the faith of your friends is enough to forgive your sins. We read that in Luke 5:20.

Ultimately, all that’s needed to secure eternal life is to not murder, not commit adultery, not steal, not lie, honor your parents, and love your neighbors as yourself. That’s the pathway Jesus prescribed to the rich young ruler, along with a willingness to give away all earthly treasure should Christ require it—not forgetting that in Christ’s economy, unmerited anger is akin to murder and lust is akin to adultery. To the lawyer in Luke 10, Jesus added that eternal life belongs to those who love God with all their heart, soul, mind, and strength and who love even strangers enough to give up their time, money, and reputation to save them from death. You also have to become like a child. Whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it. And you must fight sin with a seriousness that considers it better to maim your body than to give it free rein to condemn your soul (Matthew 18:8). And I’d be remiss not to mention that if we fail to physically intervene on behalf of those who are threatened by deprivation and death—called the least of these in Matthew 25—we’ll suffer eternal punishment. So it’s all pretty simple, really. Although we must remember that according to the parable of the four soils, most of the people who get “saved” don’t stay saved. The cares of the world or the deceitfulness of riches choke out their faith. And Jesus also warns that not everyone who calls upon his name will be saved. It’s only those who do the will of the Father. He tells us that many purported Christ-followers—including preachers and miracle-workers—will reach the end of their days only to hear, “Depart from me, I never knew you.” To those who aren’t sure whether they can rightly be counted among the redeemed, the apostle John offers the following reassurances. If you get all that you ask for in prayer—because you’re praying according to God’s will (I John 5:15), and if you’ve stopped sinning (I John 5:18), you can be assured that you have been born of God. And that’s all there is to it.

I don’t mean any of that to come off as flippant or irreverent. My point is simply this. The gospel is less straightforward than most churches would have us believe—both in its messaging and application—which may be why the apostle Paul called for constant self-examination (2 Cor 13:5). Why would he do that if there wasn’t a real risk of failing the test or running the race in vain? Salvation is a profound mystery filled with tension, paradox, and uncertainty, and yet publicly allowing for ambivalence is something churches are loath to do. Pastors are supposed to alleviate fears, not feed them. Or so the thinking goes. Jesus did warn us against doubt, after all (Matt 21:21). Militant assurances of salvation may be easier to manage than the alternative, but they leave congregants ill-equipped to handle the existential trials of life. Churches that make a show of forced enthusiasm are, to me, barely tolerable in the best of times and almost perverse when the valley of the shadow of death looms overhead. I love to laugh, but I don’t go to church to hear inane jokes or be asked, “Who’s excited to be in the house of the Lord?!” like some kind of game-show contestant. Would that more pastors followed the lead of John Piper, who claims to have never told a joke in 50 years of preaching. We can’t understand, he says, “a happy pastor who never tells jokes” or a happy pastor who has a “sad strain running through [his] life.” Sorrowful, yet always rejoicing.

The older I get, the more “merely” Christian I become. In other words, the less certain I am about all sorts of theological specifics and the more drawn I am to broad big-picture truths. What does God require of me? “Shall I come before him with burnt offerings?” That’s what the prophet Micah wondered aloud. Shall I offer “rivers of oil” or even my firstborn son for the sins of my soul? No. God has told us what is good. He has told us what is required. Act justly. Love mercy. Walk humbly with your God. That’s it. The problem is, justice and mercy are combatants—which is why humility is so essential. With the humble is wisdom, and it is only wisdom that can rightly navigate between law and grace. There shouldn’t be “justice” churches or “mercy” churches. There should only be humble churches who cry out to God for the wisdom to rightly administer both. Not only is the humble man better positioned to discern the will of the Lord, but the humble man is also willing to admit that he may be wrong. “Truth and humility go together,” I read this week in Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, “(but) so many lies come from our pride.” Lies and enmity—which has led of late to an epidemic of political and theological infighting amongst those who should be allies.

One of the things I appreciate about Andrew Klavan is his call to hold with a loose hand that which divides us from our fellow Christ followers. Devotion to a particular doctrine should never supplant devotion to Christ. “When we look at Jesus honestly,” Klavan said earlier this year, “we find he is vastly bigger than our theologies.” His is a presence that “cannot be reduced to rules and philosophies.” Simply put, Jesus cannot be contained. He sometimes tells us to give to those who ask (Matt 5:42) and sometimes recommends not giving to those who ask (Matt 25:1-9). We are sometimes instructed to put away our sword (Matt 26:52) and sometimes instructed to buy one (Luke 22:36). Jesus warns against the perils of loving your family too much (Matt 10:37) and against the perils of loving them too little (Matt 15:4). Paul Kingsnorth calls the way of Christ a spiritual bomb. “It detonates under all of our worldly projects”—which is why Andrew Klavan asserts that our theology “must always bow to the person of Jesus.” Theology is the map; Christ is the territory. Klavan continues:

You know how I know you don't know anything. Because nobody knows anything. Nobody has seen God. We're all feeling our way. We have a book, it guides us. It's great. But all of that theology—Jesus is way, way, way bigger than theology. The rules say you stone an adulteress. How does [Jesus] know not to do that? How does he just not erase the rule?… Religious people (love to) jump down your throat with their theology. And one of the things that I'm here to tell you is we should all be a little less certain about our theology. I believe in orthodoxy, but I believe that orthodoxy is a way of giving us a picture of the invisible world. And none of us knows what that invisible world is exactly, because it's invisible.

My first and longest-serving pastor reached the end his earthly life just three days ago. John MacArthur. Has anyone in history published more sermons, books, and commentaries than he did? There’s even a Bible with his name on it. But for as much as MacArthur knew about God, it’s as nothing to what he didn’t know. And as nothing to what he does know now. For Sproul and Keller and now MacArthur, the veil has been lifted. Faith has become sight. Hallelujah. But for the rest of us, the blinders are still on. The great unknown remains—which is why it might behoove us to take a breath and admit just how little we actually know. We are surrounded by partisans on both sides who claim to speak for God, but how unsearchable are his judgments and unfathomable his ways! Just consider the world around us. Does God look with favor or disfavor upon the bombing of nuclear facilities in terrorist countries? Does God condone or condemn Israel’s response to the terrorist attacks of October 7? Does God want the war in Ukraine to end, or does he want President Zelensky to hold out for victory? Does God smile or frown upon President Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill? And would God have us remove the people who entered our nation illegally or leave them be?

These are all open questions upon which Christians can and do disagree—but to which none of us can definitively declare, what would Jesus do. Novelist turned podcaster Walter Kirn is someone else I listen to who regularly reminds me how valuable it is to proceed with patience and humility. If the rules of statecraft were really as ironclad as so many pundits make out, Kirn observes, there wouldn’t be any procedural debate. We’d all know exactly what happens when tariffs are enacted, or foreign dignitaries are insulted, or massive government bureaucracies are excised. But we don’t. And so things have to play out. “I’m going to reserve my right, as an American,” Kirn declares, “to keep learning, keep talking to people, to have friends from all sides, to maintain their goodwill against those who would call them spies and lunatics [no matter] what happens on Twitter or what happens in real life.”

I have now gone far afield from the issue of abortion, so let me bring it back in closing. There are many issues for which no one can rightly know the mind of God, but child sacrifice is not one of them. “If I know anything at all about God, I know that God hates abortion, and I know that he will not tolerate [it] forever.” That’s the conclusion to the R.C. Sproul remark which I left out the first time through. God will not tolerate it forever. Churches who avoid the issue of abortion because they deem it too political or too divisive have made a grave miscalculation. Abortion is not primarily a political issue. It’s a love-your-neighbor issue and a judgment-of-God issue. It’s an issue that anyone who desires to spare the world from God’s wrath should give more than passing attention to—unless you simply don’t believe that God is who he says he is: a God who abhors nations that kill their children.

All the churches I’ve attended over these last several years are “nice.” They’re all welcoming and friendly, but I’ve only ever heard one of their pastors call out the sin of abortion. Abortion—to most churches—is a minor thing compared to what they deem the real business of ministry. But I think Sproul is suggesting, and I would concur, that the American church’s priorities are largely backwards. On what basis do we imagine that the church does more good for a community by having a friendly Sunday-morning greeting committee than by working to rescue its tiny and helpless children from dismemberment? There are six things the Lord hates, according to Proverbs 6, and all six are baked into the fabric of abortion. Haughty eyes, check. A lying tongue, check. Hands that shed innocent blood, check. A heart that devises wicked plans, check. Feet that run to evil, check. A false witness who breathes out lies, check. Ours is a culture relentlessly engaged in pulling the rug out from beneath every moral absolute it can find. Trying to fight these attacks on all fronts would be a fruitless game of whack-a-mole, but here’s why we can’t let the abortion issue go. There is nothing else beneath it. Abortion is the last stand. If you want one unifying moral absolute that should bind the whole world together, this is it. Don’t kill babies. This is what you go to the mat for. This is the bet upon which you stake every last chip. The condemnation of abortion should not be an afterthought. It should be the one thing every God-fearing Christian is able to agree on.

Yes, abortion is a physical threat to unborn children, but it is a spiritual threat to everyone else. And God will not tolerate it forever. Andrew Klavan said last month that in his “own personal, maybe superstitions, maybe completely-wrong opinion, [America] (has) been given [a] second chance because we repealed Roe v. Wade.” And now, he believes, we have the opportunity as a nation to leave behind the road that leads to death and disaster and to choose instead, life. In many ways, abortion is a litmus test. If you don’t know who to trust politically or theologically, their view on abortion is a good place to start. There is little we can know with certainty, but if you had to go all in on one particular truth, this wouldn’t be a bad one to choose. Because if God doesn’t hate abortion, that could only mean one of two things. Either he doesn’t exist at all, or he bears no resemblance to the God revealed in scripture. My recommendation, let’s hold our denominational distinctives more loosely and our opposition to abortion more strongly. We should be less worried about the men who can destroy our bodies and more worried about the God who can destroy our souls. All of which leads me back to my admittedly-hyperbolic, title and conclusion: Abortion is wrong; everything else is… complicated.