THE PRO-LIFE ARGUMENT- IntroductionThose who are pro-abortion or, as they prefer to be called, “pro-choice,” argue that the pro-life position on abortion is unfair. Is it really?THE PRO-LIFE ARGUMENT- Unfair Advantage to the RichPro-abortionists argue that if abortion were made illegal, it would become available only to the rich and not to the poor. The poor would become burdened with children they cannot afford to raise. Teenage girls who get pregnant would be forced to endure the emotional and physical ordeals of pregnancy and child-rearing even if they are not ready for them. Forcing women to bear children under these conditions, we are told, would simply be unfair to the women, and also to the children who would have to endure such poverty and unwantedness.THE PRO-LIFE ARGUMENT- A Very Important AssumptionThese arguments all make one very important assumption: that the unborn are not human beings. Should we allow parents who are too poor to take care of their children the right to kill them? If a teenage mother decides six months after giving birth that she doesn’t want her baby any more, should she be allowed to kill it? Of course not! But then, neither should parents of children who have not yet been born have the right to kill them. Thus the issue is not whether abortion is unfair, but whether the unborn are really human beings.THE PRO-LIFE ARGUMENT- Overlooked FactsThese arguments also overlook certain facts. For one thing, except in the case of women who are raped or who are victims of incest, no woman is “forced” to become pregnant or to give birth. And these hard cases account for only a small fraction of the abortions performed. Secondly, in the vast majority of cases adoption is still a very viable alternative to abortion. Children born to homeless mothers, to drug addicts, or to teenage mothers can be adopted into good homes with mature parents.THE PRO-LIFE ARGUMENT- Abortion Unfair to the UnbornMaking abortion a crime would not be unfair to anyone. However, abortion is deadly unfair to the unborn. In fact, we need to recognize one more time what an incredible privilege it is to have children — and to recognize that God, indeed, opens and closes the womb.On abortion and fairness, that’s the CRI Perspective. I’m Hank Hanegraaff.

Filed Under: Current Events and Christianity, Perspectives

Happy Birthday to someone who made a Big Difference. I’m John Stonestreet, and this is The Point. Visit http://www.thepointradio.org for more commentaries about life, culture, and current events.

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Francis Schaeffer, Part 2

Article ID: DA375

By: Hank Hanegraaff

The following is an excerpt from article DA375 by Hank Hanegraaff. The full article can be found by following the link below the excerpt.

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Those who continue to fight legislation restricting abortion are in reality not “pro-choice.” Rather, they are singularly “pro-murder.” While the rhetoric has served to camouflage the carnage, abortion is really nothing more than the painful killing of an innocent human being.

What Is Abortion?- Painful

It is painful because the methods employed to kill a preborn child involve burning, smothering, dismembering, and crushing. Dr. James Dobson offers a terrifying description of one method of abortion called Dilation and Extraction (D & X):

Over two days the cervix is dilated. Then an ultrasound device and forceps are used to reach in and grab the baby’s feet. The little body is pulled downward until just the head remains in the cervix. Next the abortionist grasps the nape of the neck and cuts open the back of the skull with blunt scissors. A device called a cannula is then inserted into the wound and the brain material is sucked out. If kidneys or other organs are desired, they are removed while the child is still partially in the vagina. Initially at least, these surgical procedures are performed on a live baby who has not specifically been anesthetized (although the mother’s medication may reduce some of the pain).⁹

Abortion is also performed by a procedure called Dilation and Curettage (D & C), in which a tiny hoe is used to chop the baby’s body to pieces. The body is then scraped off the wall of the uterus and subsequently reassembled to ensure that no remaining parts have been left behind. Other methods include:

• Saline Solution — a salt solution is injected into the amniotic fluid, burning the skin off the baby who, after thrashing in the uterus for a number of hours, is reduced to a shriveled corpse;

• Suction — presently two-thirds of all abortions in the United States and Canada are carried out using a suction tube, which tears the child apart and deposit the pieces into a jar;

• Hysterotomy — similar to a Caesarean section, except it is designed for the express purpose of killing rather than saving the baby;

• Prostaglandin — the injection of a chemical into the uterine muscle, causing it to react violently, thus expelling the preborn child (the few children who survive decapitation resulting from the violent contractions are exterminated after delivery).

What is Abortion?- Killing

Abortion involves killing because the zygote, which fulfills the criteria needed to establish the existence of biological life (including metabolism, development, the ability to react to stimuli, and cell reproduction), is indeed terminated.

What is Abortion?- Innocent

While it is true that everyone is conceived and born in sin, preborn children are innocent because they have done nothing wrong. They deserve protection, not capital punishment.

What is Abortion?- Human Being

The living baby in the mother’s womb is a human being because he or she is the product of human parents and has a totally distinct human genetic code. This truth that abortion terminates the life of a human being is substantiated by science:

• As Dr. Micheline Matthew-Roth, a principal research associate at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Medicine, puts it, “It is scientifically correct to say that an individual human life begins at conception, when egg and sperm join to form the zygote, and this developing human always is a member of our species in all stages of its life.”¹⁰

• French geneticist Jerome L. LeJeune bore eloquent testimony to the truth of Dr. Matthew-Roth’s remarks when he gave the following testimony to a United States Senate sub-committee: “To accept the fact that after fertilization has taken place a new human has come into being is no longer a matter of taste or opinion. The human nature of the human being from conception to old age is not a metaphysical contention, it is plain experimental evidence.”¹¹

• Perhaps Dr. Hymie Gordon, professor of medical genetics and a physician at the prestigious Mayo Clinic, best summarized the perspective of science when he said, “I think we can now also say that the question of the beginning of life — when life begins — is no longer a question for theological or philosophical dispute. It is an established scientific fact. Theologians and philosophers may go on to debate the meaning of life or purpose of life, but it is an established fact that all life, including human life, begins at the moment of conception.”¹²

Long before science substantiated the truth that abortion is the painful killing of an innocent human being, the psalmist summarized the view of sacred Scripture with these words:

For you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you because I am fearfully and wonderfully made; your works are wonderful, I know that full well. My frame was not hidden from you when I was made in the secret place. When I was woven together in the depths of the earth, your eyes saw my unformed body. All the days ordained for me were written in your book before one of them came to be.

Psalm 139:13-16

Filed Under: Abortion, Articles Tags: Hank Hanegraaff, Matthew Roth, Saline Solution, United States Senate

This 10.5 minute Power Point presentation gives statements from Church leaders (early and late) regarding the Christian Church’s opposition to abortion.

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Thirteen years after his death, Schaeffer’s vision and frustrations continue to haunt evangelicalism.

by Michael S. Hamilton | posted 3/03/1997 12:00AM

 

The meaning of Francis Schaeffer
By the end of his life, Francis Schaeffer had come full circle. A ministry born in the ecclesiastical battles of the early twentieth century now completed its course by urging evangelicals on to another round of internecine warfare. And when all was said and done, evangelicals still did not know what to make of him. Commentators struggling to characterize him adequately have tried to attach a number of labels—pastor, evangelist, pre-evangelist, apologist, missionary to intellectuals, guru to fundamentalists, philosopher, prophet.

There is an element of truth in all these labels; each, by itself, reduces him beyond recognition. Clearly he was evangelicalism’s most important public intellectual in the 20 years before his death. Ideas were to him literally matters of life and death. History, thought Schaeffer, taught that the intellectual base on which a people build their society will determine that society’s laws and character: “There is a flow to history and culture. This flow is rooted and has its wellspring in the thoughts of people.” His singular message was that a society cannot hope for righteousness and justice without thinking the thoughts of God from the bottom up.

Despite Schaeffer’s errors of detail, some critics have recently allowed that his big picture has proven durable. The conceptual centerpiece of Schaeffer’s historical view is the triumph of relativism in the modern post-Christian world: “Modern men, in the absence of absolutes, have polluted all aspects of morality, making standards completely hedonistic and relativistic.” He would not have been surprised by the advent of “postmodern” thought, which has built countless altars to relativism across the intellectual landscape. Nor would he have been surprised by the resultant moral vacuum that characterizes much contemporary academic thinking. In a recent issue of the Chronicle of Higher Education, anthropologist Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban agonized over the fact that her discipline’s prime directive—cultural relativism—left her with no rationale for opposing rape or racial genocide in other cultures. One can almost hear Francis Schaeffer saying, “I told you so.”

In particular, he appears to have been prescient on the issue of human life. In 1976 he observed that “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. And if so, why not keep alive the bodies of … persons in whom the brain wave is flat to harvest from them body parts and blood?” Schaeffer’s bleak vision is now daily news. “Cadaver Jack” Kevorkian has already killed more people than Ted Bundy, but the state of Michigan cannot muster the political will to stop him. A federal court has forbidden the state of Washington to pass laws preventing doctors from killing their patients, while the University of Washington is permitted to scavenge and sell the body parts of thousands of aborted children every year.

In Francis Schaeffer’s later years, he seemed to act as though the social order perhaps could be reformed from the top down, beginning with laws and proceeding toward intellectual foundations. This is almost certainly due to the fact that he was thoroughly radicalized by the merciless killing of millions of unborn children. If his later actions were inconsistent with his philosophy, they were certainly understandable. To echo pro-choice historian Garry Wills, if one really does think that abortion is the taking of innocent human life, surely Schaeffer’s response makes sense.

In trying to assess the meaning of Francis Schaeffer, it is instructive to compare him to Billy Graham. Both reached the peak of their influence at about the same time, and both had an immeasurable impact on American evangelicalism. Graham in many ways represents the moderate middle of evangelicalism—defusing controversy, wishing the best for everyone, friend of both Republicans and Democrats, slow to disturb middle-class conventions, willing to cooperate with anyone who will let him preach the gospel. As historian Grant Wacker once wrote, “When Graham spoke, middle America heard itself.” It was just as natural to see Graham and the President on the fairway together as to see Graham on a platform with a Bible in his hands.

But one can no more imagine Francis Schaeffer playing golf with the rich and famous than one can imagine Mother Teresa shopping for furs in I. Magnin. If Graham represents evangelicalism’s smooth center, Schaeffer represents its crushed-glass edges. Evangelicalism by its nature blurs denominational distinctions, but Schaeffer’s own version of Christianity was tightly sectarian. Graham lent his name widely and welcomed allies from all corners, but Schaeffer refused all alliances. Those who were not his followers but believed in his aims he categorized as cobelligerents in the war against the secularizing and dehumanizing trajectory of modern culture. While Graham appealed to the majority in the middle, Schaeffer attacked the middle for failing to see the direction it was headed. It is no accident that his strongest impact has been among those who have a bone to pick with the middle class—dropouts, intellectuals, and that remarkable recent phenomenon, formerly respectable citizens who have begun to perceive the American judiciary as a refuge for scoundrels.

In short, Francis Schaeffer represents that part of evangelical Christianity that has always been ill at ease with the world in which it finds itself. He once said, “In my teaching, I put a great deal of weight on the fact that we live in an abnormal world. I personally could not stand this world, if I did not understand it is abnormal—that it is not the way God made it.” Perhaps, then, this is his most enduring legacy—his crystalline vision of the vast difference between the world God designed and the world that is the work of our hands.

Michael S. Hamilton is coordinator of the Pew Scholars Programs and concurrent assistant professor of history, University of Notre Dame.

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Francis Schaeffer February 21, 1982 (Part 1)

Uploaded by DeBunker7 on Feb 21, 2008

Francis Schaeffer February 21, 1982 (Part 2)

Thirteen years after his death, Schaeffer’s vision and frustrations continue to haunt evangelicalism.

by Michael S. Hamilton | posted 3/03/1997 12:00AM

Hospitality at L’Abri
In 1954 Schaeffer took his new message of “observational love” back to the Bible Presbyterians in the U.S., where it was not universally received as a word from the Lord. Moreover, the Schaeffers reported that the simple receiving of guests was an increasingly important part of their work, prompting the mission board to cut their pay. So in 1955 they resigned and set up their own independent ministry organization called L’Abri (“The Shelter”) in the mountain village of Huámoz.

Immediately, the oldest of their three daughters began bringing home fellow students from the University of Lausanne. In short order, students were coming to L’Abri every weekend. The Schaeffers developed a pattern of meals, walks, and a Sunday church service all geared toward providing an atmosphere that would stimulate conversation about philosophical and religious ideas.

In this the Schaeffers were brilliant. For Edith, homemaking was high art, and she created an atmosphere that drew people in and invited them to relax. Francis was a superb and caring interlocutor who listened attentively, made guests feel important, and spoke with earnest confidence of Christianity’s ability to solve the human dilemma. Wrote Francis, “This was and is the real basis of L’Abri. Teaching the historic Christian answers and giving honest answers to honest questions.” A number of students converted to Christianity as a result of these weekends, and a few volunteered to stay on to help with the growing workload.

Word about this unique open home in the mountains quickly spread, and by 1957 they were hosting up to 25 people every weekend. Francis spent weekdays teaching classes for students in several locations in Switzerland and Italy. Though the Schaeffers never appealed directly for funds, Edith kept a growing list of supporters abreast of L’Abri’s activities through her “Family Letter.”

The Schaeffers learned firsthand that keeping their door open was very costly. Francis later remembered, “In about the first three years of L’Abri all our wedding presents were wiped out. Our sheets were torn. Holes were burned in our rugs. Indeed once a whole curtain almost burned up from somebody smoking in our living room. … Drugs came to our place. People vomited in our rooms.”

At this time, many of the students who came to L’Abri were Europeans, well-schooled in the philosophies of Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger and in the existentialist literature of Sartre and Camus. These students tutored Francis in the details of modern post-Christian thought, while he observed its impact on their lives. They had been taught that human beings were the mere product of time and chance in a materialistic world. This left many of them unable to find any basis for distinctions between right and wrong nor meaning in the normal activities of human life. The young people’s self-destructive moral confusion, alienation from society, and sincere search for something better stirred the Schaeffers’ compassion. It made the cost of an open home worth bearing, and it compelled Francis into ever-deeper reflection on the trajectory of modern culture.

By 1960, L’Abri had become such a phenomenon that it attracted the notice of Time magazine. Facilities had expanded to three chalets, Edith’s “Family Letter” had a circulation of 1,300, and her Sunday evening “High Tea” was hosting upwards of 50 people from around the world every week. Sheer numbers made it necessary to replace the informal weekends with a full-time program of lectures, discussions, study, work, and worship. L’Abri workers taped Francis’s lectures on the philosophical meaning of modern theology and culture, and these tapes quickly developed an international circulation. “Study” at L’Abri consisted of listening to and discussing Francis’s recorded lectures.

These may have been the hardest years of marriage for the Schaeffers, both of whom were extraordinarily intense, work-centered personalities. Edith was by nature proud and competitive, and Francis had for a long time struggled with a plant-throwing, pot-smashing temper. Stormy sessions between them were not infrequent. The most demanding years of L’Abri’s ministry had coincided with their son Franky’s early childhood, made twice difficult because he had contracted polio at age three. L’Abri’s financial situation was always precarious and sometimes desperate—more than once they faced a table full of guests with only a few basic staples in the pantry. Edith, who from the start bore much of the practical burden, began to resent her role. She remembers the early 1960s as “a time that could only be described as one of self-pity. I had begun to look away from ‘willingness for anything’ to a desire for ‘something for myself,’ and this filled far too much of my thoughts and prayer times.”

Francis was receiving an increasing number of invitations to speak to groups in Europe and North America, but Edith resisted his going on extended lecture tours. Giving up this opportunity was terribly frustrating for him. By this time he was the veteran of hundreds of conversations with well-educated doubters, agnostics, and scoffers. He had developed great confidence in his by now standard replies, and he was ambitious for larger audiences. Edith remembers many nights after small-group discussions at L’Abri when he would come upstairs to their bedroom and pound the wall with his fist until it turned red, saying, “Oh, Edith, I’m sure I have true answers. … I know they can help people . …But no one is ever going to hear … except a handful. … What are we doing? What am I doing?”

Return to North America
In 1965 Edith at last relented, and Francis got the larger stage he longed for. Harold O. J. Brown, then working with college students in Boston, arranged for Francis to give several lectures in the area. These were followed by a series of talks at Wheaton College, which were later published as his first book, The God Who Is There. Schaeffer ranged widely over the arts and sciences to argue that all of modern thought and culture was based on the presupposition that human beings were the chance product of an impersonal universe. But systems of thought based on this presupposition could not explain the origin of human personality, of “hope of purpose and significance, love, notions of morality and rationality, beauty and verbal communication.” Apart from Christianity, one is left with two choices—escape into the unreality of mysticism, or descent into nihilistic barbarism that debases humans by reducing them to machines. Christianity alone, because it is true and therefore comports with the lived reality of human existence, has the power to solve this existential dilemma. But Christians cannot effectively present the gospel in this modern era until they first learn to speak the language of twentieth-century culture and thereby persuade non-Christians to face the logical conclusions of their presuppositions.

This small, intense man from the Swiss mountains delivered a message unlike any heard in evangelical circles in the mid-1960s. At Wheaton College, students were fighting to show films like Bambi, while Francis was talking about the films of Bergman and Fellini. Administrators were censoring existential themes out of student publications, while Francis was discussing Camus, Sartre, and Heidegger. He quoted Dylan Thomas, knew the artwork of Salvador Dali, listened to the music of the Beatles and John Cage.

The effect of this tour de force on evangelical students was electrifying. Schaeffer’s Boston lectures, Ronald Wells later wrote, commenced “my excitement about the task of Christian scholarship.” Historian Mark Noll remembers the Wheaton talks as the most stimulating campus intellectual event of his student years. Francis Schaeffer tore down the gospel curtain that had separated evangelicals from contemporary cultural expression, giving Christians object lessons in how to interpret sculpture, music, painting, and literature as philosophical statements of the modern mind. Future historian Arlin Migliazzo was thrilled: “Schaeffer showed me that Christians didn’t have to be dumb.”

In the next ten years, the Schaeffers became well-known figures in American evangelicalism. Francis published 18 books and booklets, most of which came out of lectures and talks he had been giving since the 1950s. (Four more books were to follow after 1975; total U.S. sales alone exceeded 2.5 million copies.) Edith accompanied him on many of his speaking tours, developing her own messages and popular following. On college campuses, Edith liked to treat young women in the dorms to “an intimate, candid talk about marriage, sex, and the career of being creative as a homemaker.” Edith also took up her typewriter, publishing L’Abri in 1969. In the mid-1970s, she wrote a regular column for Christianity Today, and by 1981 had completed a total of eight books on family life and devotional topics that had sold over 1 million copies. In her writing she often voiced opposition to “women’s liberation” and the trend toward two-career families. This latter was curious, given that Francis’s wider ministry commenced for her a new full-time career as a writer and lecturer. Meanwhile, 11-year-old Franky was trundled off to English boarding school.

Her depiction of L’Abri’s early years was perfectly pitched to the countercultural sentiments of young people, with its homey images of young people with backpacks, shared labor, fresh whole-grain bread, and intellectual conversations by the fireside, all under the umbrella of God’s supernatural provision through prayer. The book brought in hundreds of new visitors, mostly American evangelicals. Nevertheless, L’Abri still attracted a fair number of non-Christians—even Timothy Leary, the guru of lsd, managed to find his way there. Francis and Edith now spent but three months per year in residence, the work being carried on by their daughters’ families and by volunteers.

Under Francis Schaeffer’s tutelage, Evangelicals like Chuck Colson learned to see life through the lens of a Christian worldview. Join Chuck as he celebrates a life well lived.

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I learned so much from the books and films of Francis Schaeffer. He really got me excited about the pro-life movement. In order to understand where I am coming from it is best to take a look at where Schaeffer was coming from and his thought processes. Take a look at this article below that appeared 13 years after his death in Christianity Today.

Francis Schaeffer engaged the society and he took a long hard look at where the society was going. Michael Hamilton observed:

Francis met a Dutch student of art history, Hans Rookmaaker, who shared Schaeffer’s commitment to Kuyperian thought. Together they discussed how art could be a window into the general philosophy of society. This became a trademark both of Rookmaaker’s career as an art historian and of Francis’s portrait of the decline of Western society. In later years, Francis gave Rookmaaker international exposure, and Rookmaaker in turn inspired and assisted a number of young evangelical artists such as Theodore Prescott and art historians such as Mary Leigh Morbey and E. John Walford of Redeemer and Wheaton colleges, respectively.

Thirteen years after his death, Schaeffer’s vision and frustrations continue to haunt evangelicalism.

by Michael S. Hamilton | posted 3/03/1997 12:00AM