In conjunction with becoming a foster parent, I've been thinking about how "pro-life" issues can be better framed via a theology of the Cross. To be overly broad, people kill babies and old people because allowing them to live would impose what they perceive to be unbearable burdens upon themselves; in other words, choosing "life" for the baby or old person would mean a death to self, to one's own preferences and ambitions.
Today's "culture of death," then, might better be described as a "culture of death for other people so I might live my life to its fullest." Over against this, the "pro-life" choice is simultaneously a choice to die to oneself; in other words, to take up one's cross.
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The cross puts everything upside down from "normal," which is, in reality, abnormal. In a theology for which "sin" is "any act or thought that robs myself or another human being of his or her self-esteem" (Robert Schuller, Self-Esteem: The New Reformation). "The Cross sanctifies the ego trip" (Ibid.). "If reformation and repentance from our captivity to American religion is to really occur, there must be a rediscovery of sin" (Michael Horton, Christless Christianity, p. 63. G. K. Chesterton, in Orthodoxy: The Romance of Faith: "All the real argument about religion turns on the question of whether a man who was born upside down can tell when he comes right way up." [Schuller and Chesterton as quoted in Christless Christianity, pp. 33 and 63, respectively]
- P.J. King
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