Seth Udinski, FISM News
For a person who espouses a biblical worldview, it is extremely difficult to make a sound argument against the morality of the recently-passed Texas heartbeat bill, a law that bans abortions at 6 weeks into a pregnancy unless the life of the mother is at risk. The law rightly punishes those who would commit infanticide against an unborn child, and has also already saved thousands of unborn lives. Yet there are some, even those who work in ministry, who would argue the bill is somehow anti-Christian.
Shockingly, one of those people is the head of a seminary. Serene Jones, president of Union Seminary in New York City, shared in an article on Tuesday that the heartbeat bill is “grounded in a fundamentally warped interpretation of Christianity.”
She further stated,
As a Christian, a biblical scholar, and a mother, it is infuriating that lawmakers would twist and distort our sacred text to give the government the power to force women to carry a child to term….The Bible doesn’t say that abortion is a sin and has no explicit definition of when life begins. The reality is that abortion only became a rallying cry for conservative Christians — and particularly Evangelicals — when Republicans decided it was politically advantageous to do so….Texas’ law is particularly un-Christian. The bottom line is, no government should have the power to force women to carry a pregnancy to term. Any faith leaders who say otherwise are willfully mischaracterizing the teachings of their religions.
This horrifying assessment from Jones becomes even more baffling when Christians consider that she is the president of a seminary. The reality is that Jones has abandoned the clear and true teaching of Scripture. There are numerous proof-texts to upend Jones’ reasoning, including a well-known passage in which God affirms the sanctity of all human life:
For you formed my inward parts; you knitted me together in my mother’s womb. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made. Wonderful are your works; my soul knows it very well. My frame was not hidden from you, when I was being made in secret, intricately woven in the depths of the earth. Your eyes saw my unformed substance; in your book were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them. – Psalm 139:13-16
Additionally, since abortion is the willful murder of a human being, Jones is also ignoring one of the most well-known commandments in the Bible, from Exodus 20: “You shall not murder.”
Jones’ argument is appalling but also unsurprising, considering the fact that she also denied the necessity of the bodily resurrection of Jesus Christ in a 2019 New York Times interview, showing that she has chosen to pick and choose what parts of the Bible she believes to be “true.”