VERITAS
"Calling Evil Good"
By Craig Branch
Oct-Nov-Dec 2001

Welcome to the fourth issue of the Apologetics Resource Center's quarterly publication, Areopagus Journal. The theme of this issue, “Calling Evil Good” deals with some of the profoundly important cultural issues of our day. There are other issues which we plan to cover in the future, but these reflect the seismic proportions of the decline of Christian influence in our Western culture.

It is my sincere prayer that our readers will be challenged to change according to God's truth in their lives—in your life. I say that because it is too often my experience that there is a growing trend among Christians to be guilty of not heeding the admonition in James 1:22-25: “But prove yourselves doers of the word, and not merely hearers who delude themselves. For if anyone is a hearer of the word and not a doer, he is like a man who looks at his natural face in a mirror; for once he has looked at himself and gone away, he has immediately forgotten what kind of person he was. But one who looks intently at the perfect law, the law of liberty, and abides by it, not having become a forgetful hearer but a effectual doer, this man shall be blessed in what he does.” The more we are influenced by the distractions and attractions of the world, our flesh, and demonic principalities, the more anemic and hardened we become. Too many Christians either approach the presence of God through His word too casually, or avoid it altogether.

There is a significant irony in what God is telling us through James. When Christians are confronted with the need to change perspectives and behavior, and yet choose to avoid it, we do so because we don't truly believe it is what is best for our lives.

It is ironic because the law of God is actually the law of true liberty. It safeguards, expresses, and enables us to experience the life of true freedom into which Christ has brought us. This is the blessing of which James speaks, the blessings of full life, a true humanity. Obedience is the key factor in our enjoyment of it.

We at ARC are becoming painfully aware of too many Christians who just do not firmly know the truth about these issues and therefore fall prey to a situational ethic, or are passive in not engaging and persuading others to change their ideas, which inevitably produces a culture of death and inhumanity.

As we state in our mission statement, “Our mission is also to equip Christians with a culturally relevant apologetic, enabling them to have a deeper level of personal faith, contend for that faith, and enter arenas of resistance, reclaiming ground lost to skepticism, secularism, and other alien philosophies.” The challenge is echoed by Chuck Colson in his book, How Now Shall We Live, as he charges,

The church's singular failure in recent decades has been the failure to see Christianity as a life system, or worldview, that governs every area of existence. . .

Most of all, our failure to see Christianity as a comprehensive framework of truth has crippled our efforts to have a redemptive effect on the surrounding culture. At its most fundamental level, the so-called culture war is a clash of belief systems. It is as Kuyper put it, a clash of principle, worldview against worldview. . .

Evangelism and cultural renewal are both divinely ordained duties. . .

. . . Our calling is not only to order our own lives by divine principles, but also to engage the world. . . .

To engage the world, however, requires that we understand the great ideas that compete for peoples’ minds and hearts.[i]

Evangelical author John Seel notes in his book, The Evangelical Forfeit, that because of evangelicalism reactionary retreat from the arena of our calling,

it became easier and easier for evangelicals to live from womb to tomb in an insulated evangelical ghetto—attending Christian schools and evangelical collages, reading evangelical magazines, listening to religious radio, watching Christian programming and so on. . . .This isolation had two consequences. First, the scope of concern was narrowed to the private world of family and home. . .

. . .The second consequence of privatized faith was the loss of a publicly accessible language in which to enter the public debate in an increasingly secular and pluralistic society.[ii]

Another elder statesman in the evangelical community, J.I. Packer, continued to reinforce the concern by adding his voice to the cocophany of others. In a new book Packer is asked questions by Christianity Today's Wendy Murray Zoba. She asked him, “What challenges do Christians face in the third millennium?” Packer responds,

We are going to have to fight much more against the idea that all religions are on a plane [universalism, pluralism], so that they are all ways to God. . .

It will take us a couple of decades to get out of the swamp of what's called postmodernism—a recently developed post-Christian philosophy in which relativism is all, and you have no notion of absolute truth. . .

We also need to recover a true understanding of human life, a sense of greatness of the soul. We need to recover the awareness that God is more important than we are, that our future life if more important than this one. . . [iii]

Nothing makes this advice more pressing than the ethical crises of our times. For example, unless you are living in a monastery you are aware of the recent technological developments in breaking the Genome Code as well as President Bush's agonized decision over whether to federally fund stem-cell research.

The Genome Project is the centerpiece of a huge moral/ethical dilemma and debate in the general category of Genetic Engineering. The US Human Genome Project is a joint effort coordinated by the US Department of Energy and the National Institutes of Health. Its accomplished goal was to identify all of the approximate 30,000 genes in human DNA and map the sequences of the 3 billion base pairs making up the human DNA. The projection of the use of the extraordinary information is that it will lead to improved diagnoses of disease, early detection of genetic predispositions to disease, rational drug design, gene therapy, and better custom drug design. Some of the corollary issues emerging from such a breakthrough are human cloning, genetic engineering and the possibility of “designer” children.

Closely tied to this issue is the stem-cell controversy. Stem cells are master cells which are normally extracted from a human embryo five days after the egg is fertilized, which kills the embryo. Stem cells have the ability to be transformed into other cell types which go on to develop the organs in the body. Scientists hope to be able to engineer the cells with healthy DNA patterns into organs which replace diseased ones. They can also be used to test therapeutic or toxic effects on human tissues without using an animal or human subject in an experiment. Scientists project the ability to treat or cure diseases like diabetes, Alzheimer’s, strokes, heart attacks, cancer, spinal cord injuries and more.

So what is the controversy? There are several objections to embryonic stem cell research from a Christian/Biblical perspective. The major objection is that the process kills the human being in the embryonic stage. The human being is used as a sacrifice in an experiment at this point, without his permission. This would also lead to the commercialization of the process and many embryos will be harvested just for this market.

Some who are seeking a compromise propose that in the current process of invitro-fertilization for couples who are unable to have children naturally, there are numbers of embryos produced which will be destroyed anyway. So why not just use those for stem-cell extraction?

Of course, this does not remove the moral issue of intentionally killing a human for even a good purpose. Eventually the issue comes back to the question, when does a person become a person? Proponents of both stem-cell research as well as cloning point to the fact that the Supreme Court decision allowing abortion has already settled the issue. Pro-life advocates, of course, disagree. They argue that life begins as conception.

If an embryo, zygote, or fetus is indeed a human person, the charge of stem-cell research being analogous to the experimental research on Jews in Nazi concentration camps is right on point. The same arguments and points made by pro-lifers in the abortion debate can be made against stem-cell research. (Greg Koukl deals somewhat with the crucial question in this journal—is an embryo a human person?)

Robert Joyce has contributed a potent essay in the book, Readings in Christian Ethics.[iv] He asserts that the issue is ultimately a philosophical one. Technically, biologically, the embryo is a living, human being. But does it have a soul? Is it a human person?

Joyce points out that what many have adopted as their underlying philosophical perspective is termed the “developmentalist” interpretation. According to that view the destruction of the embryo is “not the destruction of a human person—for at no stage of its development does the conceptus fulfill the definition of a person, which implies a developed capacity for reasoning, willing, desiring, and relating to others—but is the destruction of an important and valuable form of human life.” This is in harmony with the Roe v. Wade decision. Therefore it becomes strictly utilitarian. The argument goes that the value of a human person’s quality of life is more important than that of a potential person. Joyce responds,

I would suggest that a person is not an individual with a developed capacity for reasoning, willing, desiring, and relating to others. A person is a individual with a natural capacity for these activities and relationships, whether this natural capacity is developed or not. . . . Neither a human embryo nor a rabbit embryo has the functional capacity to think, will, desire, read and write. The radical difference, from the very beginning of development, is that the human embryo actually has the natural capacity to act in these ways, whereas the rabbit embryo does not.[v]

Opponents of stem-cell research argue on other grounds as well. They point to the usability of adult stem cells extracted from human tissue as a viable alternative to embryonic stem cells. Another point opponents make is that embryonic research has been conducted in Great Britain for 15 years without any measurable positive effect—in fact 15% of the patients treated with genetic research have had nightmarish side effects.

President Bush, for the time being, has sided with the pro-life side on stem cell research. He announced in August that he would permit federal funding for research only on the 60 or so stem-cell “lines” that have already been extracted from embryos that have already been killed. He also announced the formation of a White House council to review stem-cell research, monitor the scientists conducting it, and set ethical guidelines. The council will be headed by a Christian, University of Chicago bioethicist, Leon Kass.

This philosophical issue is answered, however, by the Christian, Biblical worldview, which corresponds to reality, as truth claims must. The point when a individual person begins to exist and ought to be protected is one of the most crucial philosophical and social issues of our time. That is why we have chosen to address this issue and others closely related to the value and dignity of human life in this journal.

The topics addressed by the articles in this issue are abortion, euthanasia, and homosexuality. Abortion has of course already established itself in our society due to the pontification of the Supreme Court in Roe v. Wade in 1973. But now there are efforts to amend those legal lines and change the hardening hearts of a society bereft of a moral compass. John Ankerberg and John Weldon do a wonderful job of clearly setting forth the Biblical basis for prohibiting abortion with a penetrating array of passages, removing any doubt of what is God’s will. The authors chillingly exposit the plight of those who participate either by the sin of commission or permission, “Speak up for those are who are destitute. Speak up and judge fairly; defend the rights of the poor and needy.” “Nothing in all creation is hidden from God's sight. Everything is uncovered and laid bare before the eyes of him to whom we must give account” (Ps. 31:8-9; Heb. 4:13).

In the second article on abortion, Greg Koukl systematically dismantles the common arguments which seek to justify abortion. He provides the believer with the rational basis for belief in the sanctity of life and “destroys every lofty thought raised up against the knowledge of God” (2 Cor. 10:5).

Dr. Robert Orr addresses an issue that will become more and more an active issue as the baby boomer generation ages. Dr. Kevorkian has significantly raised the issue but it will be magnified. The issue is Euthanasia. Philosophically and ultimately legally, this issue was opened when the Pandora’s Box of abortion was legalized, when the basis for protection of human life was made more arbitrary than absolute.

The homosexual lobby has made significant advances in their effort to reframe the issues and to pander to the postmodern rhetoric of total equality of choice and an indignant (and intolerant) accusation of hateful homophobic bigotry to anyone who disagrees with their view. They are well organized and established.

There are two articles dealing with homosexuality. They ably address the developed arguments of the prohomosexual constituency. Terry Wilder presents “What the New Testament Does and Does Not Teach About Homosexuality”, and ARC's own Steve Cowan takes on the claim that homosexuality is genetic and therefore natural and morally permissible.

For more detailed information on these topics, as well as on cloning or other individual issues pertaining to genetic engineering, make your request to our office for a specific information packet.

Craig Branch is the Director of the Apologetics Resource Center.

NOTES

[i] Charles Colson and Nancy Pearcey, How Now shall We Live? (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 1999), xii, 17.

[ii] John Seel, The Evangelical Forfeit: Can We Recover? (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1993), 41-42

[iii] J.I. Packer, Answers to Question for Today (Wheaton, Ill.: Tyndale, 2001), 85-86.

[iv] See Readings in Christian Ethics, vol. 2, eds. David K. Clark and Robert V. Rakestraw (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1996), 46-57.

[v] Ibid., 47-48

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