Abortion Matters
Abortion as a Challenge to Christian Orthodoxy
by Terry Schlossberg
Approval of abortion by mainline Protestant denominations is a thoroughly modern phenomenon—scarcely more than two decades old. Early Church documents—the second-century Didache and the Epistle of Barnabas, for example—specifically condemned abortion. Opposition to abortion can be found as a thread running through the ancient writings of church fathers up to those of twentieth-century theologians and denominational proclamations. Orthodox scholar Alexander Webster notes that for all the points of division in the Christian Church through the centuries, abortion was one matter on which the Church was never divided.
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Terry Schlossberg is executive director of Presbyterians Pro-Life (www.ppl.org), one of the sixteen unofficial renewal groups in the Presbyterian Church (USA).
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