#583: On Controversies and History: the SBC and IVF
Or, why evangelical's moral formation remains shallow.
The Southern Baptist resolution on IVF passed two weeks ago, which has meant a steady stream of discourse about its meaning and implications. In their defense of the resolution in the Wall Street Journal, Andrew Walker and Albert Mohler acknowledged the political context created by Alabama was decisive for their timing, indicating that the Alabama legislature’s decision to overturn the court’s ruling “revealed the need for Christians to rethink the issue.” As Ruth Graham has observed, the resolution puts the Southern Baptists at odds with the Republican Party. Mohler and Walker acknowledge that their denomination’s new “position on in vitro fertilization will be derided as strange and retrograde” (even though the resolution is not as anti-IVF as their op-ed suggests, as Walker has acknowledged here). As they conclude, though, “the destruction and commodification of human life is sufficiently important to risk derision.”
While Mohler and Walker are indisputably right about the importance of embryonic life, their insistence now also raises questions about why the view was not sufficiently important before Alabama for the “‘barometer’ for evangelical sentiments nationwide" to risk addressing such questions. While the Alabama Debacle has doubtlessly generated numerous 'conversations' about the ethics of creating and storing embryos, it has also thoroughly politicized them: churches (and church leaders) who now attempt to shape how their members think about fertility will be inherently drawn into partisanized debates about what it means to be pro-life after Dobbs. Evangelicals failed to do the hard work of moral reasoning about IVF early and so find themselves in a much harder position now. The resolution is only the latest indication of how thoroughgoingly politicized evangelicals' moral imaginations are: generating substantive moral attention on an issue only happens when it becomes a matter of political controversy. And, in this case, Southern Baptists leaned into the political dimension by exhorting members in their resolution to "advocate for the government to restrain actions inconsistent with the dignity and value of every human being."
It is worth reflecting for a moment about what is lost for Christians when our moral discussions and deliberations are fueled by politics. The impulse to not let a controversy go to waste is certainly understandable. Yet it also shapes the types of questions that are asked in a particular way. The question the Alabama Court had to face is a practical one: what should be done with the parents who were suing about damaged embryos? That question relies on a number of assumptions, namely, whether embryos are persons and what we owe to them as a result. A serious Christian account of IVF must eventually address both the assumptions and practical question—but it might introduce other questions that are of similarly urgent importance for a community who is seeking to be shaped by the Gospel.For instance, who is the “we” in relation to the embryo? “We” the political order or “we” the church? If the aim of forming Christian imaginations is shaping them to be members of the church, then the starting point is of immeasurable importance.
If we are to ask what the church owes embryos, the answer can only be given in historical terms—for the church is a community constituted by the free confession of sin. Deep, mature Christian formation on questions of fertility requires addressing history head-on: how did we arrive where we are now debating this, and what did we miss along the way? We can glimpse at this juncture one deep difference between the church’s responsibility and our contemporary political imagination, where acknowledgment of wrongdoing is tantamount to political suicide. Starting with the politically urgent question of what is to be done now with embryos begins in the middle of things: the church must instead be forthright about her own complicity in enabling her members to engage in practices that she now thinks are wrong. To put a fine point on it, a man critiqued the SBC resolution from the floor by appealing to his ten embryos(!) he and his wife have in storage as indicators of his commitment to his family and the kingdom of God. If the church is going to condemn such a practice after it has been done, then they must bear responsibility for allowing it to happen in the first place. An imagination focused on the immediate controversy of the day makes such judgements difficult, if not impossible.
In eclipsing the history of how we arrived at a moment, the politicized nature of controversies invariably generate more shallow diagnoses and therapies than we would otherwise have. The politicization of a moral question means there is not only a concrete answer—yes or no?—but discrete groups of people who are divided from each other based on their response. If the only question that matters is what should be done, then those groups will remain perpetually divided. But if we begin to reflect on how we arrived to the moment of controversy in the first place, the divide between the two groups will look a lot less stark as we will almost invariably discover failings on both sides of the issue. While such an approach can lead to self-loathing and self-laceration, it is also necessary in order to plumb the source of the controversy to the bottom and ensure that whatever answer we give substantively accounts for our own complicity in bringing the controversy about to begin with. It demands, in other words, a depth of care and thoughtfulness that the immediately urgent question of what we ought do simply does not allow.
Evangelicalism’s moral shallowness is inextricably intertwined, then, with its failure to attend seriously to history—to its own history as much as to the broader history of Christian moral teaching. The most important moral question might be the unasked question of what we have done and left undone, rather than the question of what we should do or think about the matter that lies immediately before us. A church that chases headlines as a means of waking Christians to their moral obligations will invariably fail to offer the depth and substance of formation we need to successfully navigate the world around us. I suspect the conversation evangelicals need about IVF is still waiting to begin.
Around the Web
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Jesus’s One Question to God
“Jesus asks hundreds of questions in the Bible. He asks them of all sorts of audiences and in all manner of ways. He puts questions to his disciples, to the crowds, to the soldiers who come to seize him, to lawyers and to Pharisees and Sadducees. He asks rhetorical questions and real questions, questions that are aimed to draw his audience in and questions that are aimed to drive them away.
Yet of all the questions he asks, he directs exactly one question toward God.
As he hangs upon the cross, Christ pierces the hushed silence with a cry so poignant that Matthew records it in its original Aramaic: “Eli, Eli, lema sabachtani?” “My God, my God, why has thou forsaken me?” Jesus petitions God often in the Gospels. Only one chapter prior, he asks that the cup of suffering might be taken from him (Matthew 26:39). But while requests and questions have much in common, they are not the same. Only once does Jesus turn to God directly with a question on his lips (Matthew 27:46).”
This is from a chapter I wrote for Bob Tiede’s ‘e-book’ 340 Questions Jesus Asked. You can download the full book, including my chapter, for free here. Or, as always, you can respond to this email with a request and I’ll send along the essay.
CIQ
No, not everyone loves the book. One reviewer describes it as a “stew of confusion, contradictions, nonsense, good points that are irrelevant, good points that are relevant but sandwiched between completely irrelevant statements and absolutely awful advice to those deconstructing.”
Probably you should buy a copy and rate it to find out whether he’s right!
The Penultimate Word
“The Holy Spirit as the Spirit of Jesus Christ is the enlightening power of Him who as very God and very man is the Guarantor of the truth of the atonement made in Him—and therefore the summoning power of the promise given in Him to sinful man. When the promise is heard by men, inwardly and outwardly these men are together ordained to be the community sent out as a witness in the world and to the world. The historical reality and inward upbuilding of this community are not ends in themselves. It is now actually the case that in its particular existence it stands vicariously for the whole world. The Holy Spirit is the enlightening, and as the enlightening the summoning power of the divine promise, which points the community beyond itself, which calls it to transcend itself and in that way to be in truth the community of God—in truth, i.e., as it bears witness to the truth known within it, as it knows itself to be charged with this witness and sent out to establish it. Its members are men who can hope on the basis of the promise.” — Karl Barth