A Lethal Temptation
on Abortion & the Seductive Lie of Autonomous Freedom
From the moment our daughter was conceived, dark spiritual forces were striving to snuff out her life. The Prince of the Power of the Air and his sons of disobedience were bent, as they always are, on destroying anything that reflects the beauty and majesty of the Creator. The crafty serpent whispered in the birthmother's ear the alluring promise of autonomous freedom, just as he did with Eve in the beginning.
This is a most seductive lie, given that the longing for liberty is universal. Never will you witness a mob marching against it, chanting, "Away with this freedom!" No, the question that takes center stage in Genesis 3 (and upon which the very life of my daughter hinged) is not whether freedom is to be desired, but how it is to be defined.
When the Soviet Union was dismantled in 1991 and the Iron Curtain finally lifted, Eastern Europeans jubilantly celebrated the freedoms they had long been denied—including the freedom to indulge in pornography, prostitution, drug abuse, and organized crime. But is this what true freedom consists in? Having the opportunity to give full vent to your most debauched desires? No, the freedom to do whatever you want (Satan's indecent proposal) is not freedom; it's anarchy. And anything, it turns out, is better than anarchy; even tyranny is preferable (just ask the recently "liberated" people of Zimbabwe).
The Paradox of True Freedom
At the heart of genuine liberty, then, there exists a paradox, one which the Deceiver often exploits: that true freedom is not the casting off of all restraints, but conformity to them. This dialectical truth was alluded to by the Apostle James when he referred to God's moral law as the "law of liberty"(2:12), the law which, when obeyed, sets one free.
Conditioned as we are by modernity and its obsession with autonomy, our reaction to this paradoxical truth is incredulity: "How is that freedom?" For in our culture, liberty with limitations is no liberty at all. And thus we rush to rid ourselves of the law's restraints wherever we encounter them: in government, in religion, or even in physiology (as some attempt to do by denying the binary nature of sex). Truly we are a culture drunk on the demonic notion of fetterless freedom. And yet, consider how grasping for such low-hanging fruit turned out for Adam and his bride, and even for Western civilization in the twentieth century.
"When were Adam and Eve most free?" is the question we should ask. Was it when they were in the garden under God's restrictions, when they could eat of all the trees except one? Or was it after they lost paradise, and were "free" to roam around and eat whatever they wanted by the sweat of their brows? No, the promise of autonomy always ends up east of Eden, never in freedom.
A Necessary Choice
This is the chief insight of Genesis, indeed in the whole canon of Scripture. And it places before each of us a necessary choice. We must all choose between the freedom from all restraint, and the freedom to attain a higher level of being. That decision confronted our daughter's birthmother the moment the plus-sign appeared on the pregnancy test.
It's not that she didn't know what God has said concerning the image-bearer in her womb, but it was an inconvenient truth, one that would require great personal sacrifice to obey. And it was a truth that made the Tempter's promise of a way to avoid such suffering and humiliation bewitching. Her situation was not unlike Jesus' experience in the wilderness when Satan offered him a path to princehood free from the suffering and condemnation of the cross, a route to royalty that avoided the via dolorosa.
Bradley J. Helgerson is Minister of the Word for The Church on the Square in Georgetown, Texas, and a Ph.D. candidate in theology at North-West University. He and his wife Pamela have five children and live in a fixer-upper in Georgetown. He can be reached at bjhelgerson@gmail.com.
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more on abortion from the online archives
26.1—Jan/Feb 2013
on Abortion as a Matter of National Welfare by W. Ross Blackburn
27.2—March/April 2014
on C. S. Lewis & the New State Paganism by W. E. Knickerbocker
19.1—January/February 2006
on Death & Seven of the Last Words of Socrates by Graeme Hunter
more from the online archives
30.5—Sept/Oct 2017
on Costly Grace in Breece D'J Pancake's Flyover Country by Casey Chalk
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