I have debated with Ark Times Bloggers many times in the past on many different subjects. Abortion is probably the most often debated subject and I have noticed that many pro-life individuals are now surfacing on the Arkansas Times Blog.  Here are some examples. Arhogfan501 asserted: This is the beginning of the end for recreational abortion in Arkansas. Songbird777 noted: Babies have a right to live and not be chopped up for someone else’s convenience. The person using the username “baker” commented: Planned Parenthood (PPA) does not nor cannot provide mammograms, indeed no affiliate has the necessary license. PPA is an abortion provider and at some 900 plus killings a day rather prolific.

Here is another debate I got into recently on the Arkansas Times Blog and I go by the username “Saline Republican”:

On 3-22-13 on the Arkansas Times Blog Kimocat said, “Wow, Saline — you sure spend a lot of your life worrying about other people’s zygotes. But it still all boils down to whether one considers an implanted fertilized egg to be the same as a living, breathing person. I do not, and most objective people do not either. If your crazy religion thinks a fertilized egg is “a gift from God.” Fine, believe that. But stop trying to force everyone to believe it too. Your self-righteous indignation is really wearing thin.”

I responded:

I could compare this to the arguments put forth by those who wanted the abolitionists to shut up or to those like Deitrick Bonhoeffer who wrote the famous paper in April of 1933 ““The Church and the Jewish Question.”

Bonhoeffer was explicit about the church’s obligations to fight political injustice. The church, he wrote, must fight evil in three stages: The first was to question state injustice and call the state to responsibility; the second was to help the victims of injustice, whether they were church members or not. Ultimately, however, the church might find itself called “not only to help the victims who have fallen under the wheel, but to fall into the spokes of the wheel itself” in order to halt the machinery of injustice.

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Believe it or not lots of the opposition to Bonhoeffer came from the church. This is a human life issue and many nonbelievers have lined up to take up for the unborn children.

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The person using the username “Sound Policy” wrote:

Everette’s sole reason for living is to ensure that when a sperm and egg do the do si do that the end product must be carried to term. At the moment of forced birth he is finished with that end product and moves on to the next one. It’s assembly line work. Inspected by No. 666.

Malnutrition, childhood diseases, abusive parents-he doesn’t [care]!

Everette, you’re a poor excuse for a human being. And your cut and paste jobs are laughable. Never learned to think for yourself, huh?

I responded:

Sound policy said I am poor excuse for a human being. I respect you as a human being and I will continue to take up for the smallest and weakest in our society. Today that is the unborn child.

It is sad that in Jan of 1973 with the Roe v. Wade decision struck down almost every abortion law in the nation.

Proverbs 31:8-9 – Speak up for those who can’t speak for themselves

_________________

I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.  Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.

In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented  against abortion (Episode 1),  infanticide (Episode 2),   euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close look at the truth claims of the Bible.

Francis Schaeffer and his wife Edith pictured below.

Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION

Francis Schaeffer: What Ever Happened to the Human Race? (Full-Length Documentary)

Part 1 on abortion runs from 00:00 to 39:50, Part 2 on Infanticide runs from 39:50 to 1:21:30, Part 3 on Youth Euthanasia runs from 1:21:30 to 1:45:40, Part 4 on the basis of human dignity runs from 1:45:40 to 2:24:45 and Part 5 on the basis of truth runs from 2:24:45 to 3:00:04

Francis Schaeffer and Abortion

There is no question about it: Francis Schaeffer was a prophet. Clear indicators of being a prophet of God include the following traits:
-speaking boldly and uncompromisingly about biblical truth;
-going against the grain and challenging convention;
-speaking truths well ahead of the time, and leading the people of God to where they must be;
-proclaiming unpleasant but necessary truths, etc.

Francis Schaeffer did all this and more. He had such a vitally important ministry, and millions have been impacted by him, including myself. Such an important figure as this deserves all the promotion and endorsement that we can give him. Indeed, I wrote about him in more detail earlier: www.billmuehlenberg.com/2009/10/14/notable-christians-francis-schaeffer/

In many of his books, talks, lectures and articles he hammered home the need for believers to stand strong and loud for the unborn. Many in the evangelical world were simply sleeping through the abortion holocaust, which was especially unleashed with the 1973 Roe v Wade Supreme Court decision.

Here I just want to summarise some of his many words on the issue of abortion. Let me begin with his very important 1981 volume, A Christian Manifesto. In his chapter on “Revival, Revolution, and Reform” he begins this way: “As we turn to the evangelical leadership of this country in the last decades, unhappily, we must come to the conclusion that often it has not been much help. It has shown the mark of the platonic, overly spiritualized Christianity. Spirituality to the evangelical leadership often has not included the Lordship of Christ over the whole spectrum of life.”

He looks at how previous leadership did indeed get involved in the pressing battles of the day. For example, the revivals of Wesley and Whitefield impacted the whole nation, not just the spiritual landscape. The work of Wilberforce and Shaftesbury was not just about saving souls, but transforming society.

“Our evangelical leadership seems to have forgotten its heritage” he says. “Many of the evangelical leadership either were totally silent about abortion, or qualified what they did say about abortion to such an extent that they really said nothing, or less than nothing, as far as the battle for human life was concerned.”

He goes on to write: “We must understand that the question of the dignity of human life is not something on the periphery of Judeo-Christian thinking, but almost in the center of it (though not the center because the center is the existence of God Himself). But the dignity of human life is unbreakably linked to the existence of the personal-infinite God.”

And of course he rightly argued that abortion was just one part of the bigger battle we have with secular humanism: “Certainly every Christian ought to be praying and working to nullify the abominable abortion law. But as we work and pray, we should have in mind not only this important issue as though it stood alone. Rather, we should be struggling and praying that this whole other total entity – the material-energy chance worldview – can be rolled back with all its results across all of life.”

In his earlier 1976 volume, How Should We Then Live (and the 10-part film series that went with it), he looked at the 1973 ruling in some detail. He talked about the decline of absolutes in American law, and how this decision was completely arbitrary. First, it was medically arbitrary, denying the clear understanding of biology and science.

Second, it was legally arbitrary, “disregarding the intent of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments of the Constitution.” And third, it was at “complete variance with the past Christian consensus. In the pagan Roman Empire, abortion was freely practiced, but Christians took a stand against it. In 314 the Council of Ancyra barred from the taking of the Lord’s Supper for ten years all who procured abortions or made drugs to further abortions.”

If this arbitrary law is accepted by “most modern people, bred with the concept of no absolutes but rather relativity, why wouldn’t arbitrary absolutes in regard to such matters as authoritarian limitations on freedom be equally accepted as long as they were thought to be sociologically helpful? We are left to sociological law without any certainty of limitation.”

Yes he certainly got that right. It was a prophetic insight into where things would lead, and we have certainly arrived, with euthanasia legalised in various places, and academics arguing for the acceptability of infanticide. Indeed, he made the warning quite clear back then: “The door is open. In regard to the fetus, the courts have arbitrarily separated ‘aliveness’ from ‘personhood,’ and if this is so, why not arbitrarily do the same with the aged? So the steps move along, and euthanasia may well become increasingly acceptable.”

In 1979 his book and film series, Whatever Happened to the Human Race?, co-authored with C. Everett Koop, appeared. It looked at the issues of abortion, infanticide, and euthanasia, and sounded a clear alarm for evangelicals to wake up to their social responsibilities. It also argued that abortion rights logically lead to euthanasia and infanticide rights.

In The Great Evangelical Disaster written in 1984 he continues these themes. As he had done elsewhere, he warned about the dangers of accommodation. He said “we must ask where we as evangelicals have been in the battle for truth and morality in our culture. Have we as evangelicals been on the front lines contending for the faith and confronting the moral breakdown over the last forty to sixty years?

Have we been aware that there is a battle going on – not just a heavenly battle, but a life-and-death struggle over what will happen to men and women and children in both this life and the next? . . .Truth demands confrontation. It must be loving confrontation, but there must be confrontation nonetheless.

“Sadly we must say that this has seldom happened. Most of the evangelical world has not been active in the battle, or even been able to see that we are in a battle. And when it comes to the issues of the day the evangelical world most often has said nothing; or worse has said nothing different from what the world would say.

“Here is the great evangelical disaster – the failure of the evangelical world to stand for truth as truth. There is only one word for this – namely accommodation: the evangelical church has accommodated to the world spirit of the age.”

Quite so. And he was fully aware that to win some of these battles we will need to get out of our evangelical ghettoes and start working together with others wherever possible. Some of these battles are just too big and too important to simply lose by default because we are so concerned about our ecclesiastical or theological purity.

Thus Schaeffer saw no problem whatsoever in working with, say, Catholics on the abortion issue, even though he of course had theological differences with them. As he told two British journalists, “I have two words which I would recommend to anybody . . . and they are ‘ally’ and ‘co-belligerent.’ An ally is a person who is a born-again Christian with whom I can go a long way down the road . . . now I don’t say to the very end, because I’m a Presbyterian and I might not be able to form a church with a strong Baptist . . . but we can go a long way down the road – and that’s an ally.

“A co-belligerent is a person who may not have any sufficient basis for taking the right position but takes the right position on a single issue. And I can join with him without any danger as long as I realize that he is not an ally and all we’re talking about is a single issue.”

Those who find this to be a radical, novel, or alarming concept are urged to look here where I develop this concept in much more detail: www.billmuehlenberg.com/2010/09/02/on-co-belligerency/

Perhaps more than any other individual Schaeffer helped to put the abortion issue (and its wider implications) on the map of the evangelical world. He stirred a generation of believers to see their faith must extend beyond pietism and privatism into other areas where it really matters.

In closing, I repeat part of the quote I cited above: “We must understand that the question of the dignity of human life is not something on the periphery of Judeo-Christian thinking”. He understood that 35 years ago. Do we?

Dr. Koop with Francis Schaeffer in their film WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE? made it clear that unborn babies have the right to life. That point is made well in this political cartoon about abortion:

___________

I have debated with Ark Times Bloggers many times in the past on many different subjects. Abortion is probably the most often debated subject and I have noticed that many pro-life individuals are now surfacing on the Arkansas Times Blog.  Here are some examples. Arhogfan501 asserted: This is the beginning of the end for recreational abortion in Arkansas. Songbird777 noted: Babies have a right to live and not be chopped up for someone else’s convenience. The person using the username “baker” commented: Planned Parenthood (PPA) does not nor cannot provide mammograms, indeed no affiliate has the necessary license. PPA is an abortion provider and at some 900 plus killings a day rather prolific.

Here is another debate I got into recently on the Arkansas Times Blog and I go by the username “Saline Republican”:

On 3-22-13 on the Arkansas Times Blog Verla Sweere wrote:

Saline–a real pro-life person respects the lives of those already with us. We want them to have food, shelter, medical care, education and a quality of life you would deny them. Remember your commandments–love thy neighbor as thyself, do not bear false witness, etc. How long since you have given even lip service to those?

I responded:

I would deny that government is the answer to all our problems. However, I do not want unborn babies to be eliminated because of financial problems in our country. If you want the best path to a growing economy then check out the book FREE TO CHOOSE by Milton Friedman.

Baylor University philosopher and bioethicist Baruch Brody has commented:

In an age where we doubt the justice of capital punishment even for very dangerous criminals, killing a fetus who has not done any harm, to avoid a future problem it may pose, seems totally unjust. There are indeed many social problems that could be erased simply by destroying those persons who constitute or cause them, but that is a solution repugnant to the values of society itself. In short, then, if the fetus is a human being, the appeal to its being unwanted justifies no abortions.

Baruch Brody, Abortion and the Sanctity of Human Life: A Philosophical View (Cambridge, MA: M.I.T. Press, 1975), 36-37.

____________

_________________

I truly believe that many of the problems we have today in the USA are due to the advancement of humanism in the last few decades in our society. Ronald Reagan appointed the evangelical Dr. C. Everett Koop to the position of Surgeon General in his administration. He partnered with Dr. Francis Schaeffer in making the video below. It is very valuable information for Christians to have.  Actually I have included a video below that includes comments from him on this subject.

In the film series “WHATEVER HAPPENED TO THE HUMAN RACE?” the arguments are presented  against abortion (Episode 1),  infanticide (Episode 2),   euthenasia (Episode 3), and then there is a discussion of the Christian versus Humanist worldview concerning the issue of “the basis for human dignity” in Episode 4 and then in the last episode a close look at the truth claims of the Bible.

___________

Francis Schaeffer Whatever Happened to the Human Race (Episode 1) ABORTION

Francis Schaeffer: What Ever Happened to the Human Race? (Full-Length Documentary)

Part 1 on abortion runs from 00:00 to 39:50, Part 2 on Infanticide runs from 39:50 to 1:21:30, Part 3 on Youth Euthanasia runs from 1:21:30 to 1:45:40, Part 4 on the basis of human dignity runs from 1:45:40 to 2:24:45 and Part 5 on the basis of truth runs from 2:24:45 to 3:00:04

Francis Schaeffer “BASIS FOR HUMAN DIGNITY” Whatever…HTTHR

Whatever Happened To The Human Race?

– Revisited

This year is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the publication of Whatever Happened To The Human Race? It is a most remarkable book.  In a list of ‘the books that changed me’, this unquestionably ranks in my top five.  I have just re-read it, with unexpected profit.

The entire project
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? was more than just a book written by a theologian and a doctor, namely, Francis Schaeffer and C Everett Koop.  It was an ambitious project that included the book, a series of five films, plus a study guide.  The book was first published in the US in 1979, with a British version the following year.  The project was launched in the UK in 1980, with a tour of major cities by Schaeffer and Koop.  Later that year, we in Aberystwyth, were among the first in the UK to show the films publicly – at the university, over three consecutive Friday evenings.

Cinematographically, they were not great films.  While they were technically a vast improvement on Schaeffer’s predecessor, How Should We Then Live?, gaffes and bloomers remained.  There were the rather twee shots of Schaeffer in a car junkyard, representing the ugliness of materialistic thinking, and there were the all too healthy-looking ‘slaves’ trudging up the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, depicting the atrocities of slavery.  Yet one haunting image did hit the spot – everyone remembers the hundreds of plastic dolls washed up on the shores of the Dead Sea, portraying the horrors of mass abortion.

As literature, the book was never destined to be a classic.  It was full of Schaeffer’s jerky style with Koop’s medical addenda all a little too obviously interleaved.  Indeed, the two men were not great presenters, either in print, or in public.  In fact, they were a genuinely odd couple.  Schaeffer was the non-establishment theologian, with a goatee beard, dressed in mountain gear, and founder of a study centre for hippies and others in Switzerland.  For this he was vilified and largely ignored by some, while others regarded him as the greatest Christian thinker of the twentieth century.  On the other hand, the dapper Koop, with his austere Dutch-style beard and neat bow tie, was straight from the American establishment, a paediatrician of international renown, who was later to become the Surgeon General of the United States under President Reagan.  What an unlikely pair!

The message of the project
So, you may ask, what was so impressive about Whatever Happened To The Human Race?  Why is it regarded as a landmark in evangelical endeavour?  The answer is quite simple – first, it identified a dreadful problem (rampant abortion, covert infanticide and threatening euthanasia), second, it explained the origin of that problem (the advance of secular humanism coupled with the decline of biblical Christianity) and third, it outlined the solution (Christians must believe that the Bible is true and live and act upon its teachings).  In other words, it was a total package that was both entirely believable for the brain, and fully satisfying for the heart.  And that was Schaeffer’s great gift.  He would take you back into history, often to Genesis, to show the development of an argument, and then he would take you forward to show the logical consequences of that argument, whether it was existentialism, or the resurrection, or genetic engineering.  Once he had systematically shown you the entirety of the problem, you felt much more obligated to respond.  So, forget the weird garb, the squeaky voice and the unpolished prose, it was his rigorously-argued and (usually) convincing content that was king.  Here was the man committed to true truth.  Like no other Christian leader in the twentieth century, Schaeffer had grasped the zeitgeist and he equipped ordinary Christians to engage with the big issues, as well as with unbelieving men and women.

The opening three chapters of Whatever Happened To The Human Race? deal with abortion, infanticide and euthanasia.  Twenty-five years ago, this exposé came as a bombshell to many evangelical Christians – we had no idea what was going on in our local hospitals and clinics.  The sheer logic of Schaeffer and Koop’s argument – that once a society has accepted abortion of the unborn (as we had in 1967), then it would soon be infanticide for the newborn, and finally euthanasia for the elderly –- was appalling.  Yet, twenty-five years on, who can gainsay their prophetic analysis?

The legacy of the project
Furthermore, Whatever Happened To The Human Race? had a credenda and an agenda.  Schaeffer and Koop would never be satisfied with us merely tut-tutting and sitting on our hands.  They wanted us up and doing. ‘Let those of us who share a high view of people use wisely these days when we have influence and the freedom to strike a great blow for the humanity, dignity, and sanctity of individuals’ (p. 90).  Their chapter 6 was entitled ‘Our Personal Response and Social Action’ and it galvanised evangelicals throughout the UK into action, like never before.  As a result many of us got involved with pro-life organisations.  I co-founded Evangelicals for LIFE, in order to encourage believers into the educational, political and caring work of LIFE, which was generally regarded suspiciously as an admirable, but largely Roman Catholic, organisation.  Soon evangelical Christians were becoming local LIFE group treasurers, speakers, carers, chairmen, and so on.  Throughout the 1980s we blossomed and LIFE’s approach and expertise became the paradigm for many newly-formed Christian pro-life groups.

This, above all, was the impact of Whatever Happened To The Human Race?  It got evangelicals informed and then responding in practical ways.  And that legacy is still alive today – look at the proliferation of pro-life publications, pregnancy crisis centres, political lobbying, and so on since 1979.  OK, it is still patchy, still insufficient, but without Whatever Happened To The Human Race?, it would be significantly less.

The importance of chapters 4 and 5
Twenty-five years on, re-reading Whatever Happened To The Human Race?  I was struck not by the rehearsal of the bioethical issues – they have dominated and changed the course of my life since 1979 – but what I found refreshingly gripping were chapters 4 and 5, ‘The Basis for Human Dignity’ and ‘Truth and History’.  I had forgotten them.  In these, modern philosophy, and secular humanism in particular, are given a ‘right old kicking’.  Schaeffer and Koop demonstrate just how irrational and bankrupt they are, and how they inevitably produce the ghastly dehumanisation that surrounds us today.  And twenty-five years on, we have to admit that their thesis was spot on – we do still think that man is nothing more than a machine, we do view ourselves as mere accidents of the universe.  One of their grand sweeping, but entirely accurate, assertions is, ‘Suddenly we find ourselves in a more consistent but uglier world – more consistent because people are taking their low view of man to its natural conclusion, and uglier because humanity is drastically dehumanised’ (p. 9).

After their devastating critique of secular humanism, comes the cavalry – the absolutes of historic, biblical Christianity.  What a puny, limping thing secular humanism is alongside the robustness of true truth. ‘Where all humanistic systems of thought are unable to give an adequate explanation of things, the Bible as God’s statement is adequate’ (p. 124), and (this is sweet!), ‘God gives the pages, and thus God gives the answers’ (p. 125).  Here is evangelism – engaging with modern men and women to show them the paucity of their worldview, and then the genius of Christianity.

The other rousing chapter, entitled ‘Truth and History’ asserts the historicity of the Bible, that is, how Christianity is rooted in history.  If you think that Schaeffer was always entangled with abstruse philosophy, then read this.  It starts with Abraham (the historicity of Adam and Eve has been established in the previous chapter) and ends with Thomas’ declaration, ‘My Lord and my God!’ In between is an exegesis of ‘… all truth finally rests upon the fact that the infinite-personal God exists …’ (p. 135).  Yes, it is heavy-duty apologetic, but also heart-warming exposition.

Whatever Happened To The Human Race?

was a great Christian book.  It still is.  And a revised US version is currently available, as a paperback, from Crossway Books [ISBN 0-89107-291-8].  No other Christian book, published before or after, has attempted, and succeeded, in developing such a fundamental biblical approach to bioethical issues.  My meagre contribution, Responding to the Culture of Death, draws heavily on the Schaeffer and Koop approach, and I gladly acknowledge my indebtedness.

In conclusion …
Whatever Happened To The Human Race? was also a wake-up call to unaware and lethargic Christians.  Who would dare say, a generation on, that we do not still need its message?  Human life is still cheap, and becoming still cheaper – created in the image of God, destroyed at our convenience.

Let Schaeffer and Koop have the last words.  ‘We challenge you to be a person in this impersonal age … put the people in your life first … come to your senses … you and those around you are people, made in the image of the personal God who created all people in His image.’ (p. 89).  ‘The only thing that can stem this tide [of abortion, infanticide and euthanasia] is the certainty of the absolute uniqueness and value of people.  And the only thing which gives us this is the knowledge that people are made in the image of God.’ (p. 148).  ‘In the end we must realise that the tide of humanism, with its loss of humanness, is not merely a cultural ill, but a spiritual ill that Christ alone can cure’ (p. 157).

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I have written about this before and I have even emailed the White House about it. Today we have some very good news!!!

Elizabeth Slattery and Sarah Torre

November 26, 2013 at 2:12 pm

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