Adapted from Tower of Babel, by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Public Domain. source: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Pieter_Bruegel_the_Elder_-_The_Tower_of_Babel_%28Vienna%29_-_Google_Art_Project_-_edited.jpg, 12-16-12.

Genesis 1–11 presents a bleak picture of humanity. The rebellion in the garden and the pervasive wickedness precipitating Noah’s flood are the most famous stories, but Cain’s murder of Abel and the Tower of Babel are damning as well. The overall portrait is of a fallen race, in need of salvation.

I want to focus in on the Tower of Babel story, which I think has something important to say, in this case about our societal practice of abortion.

Challenging deeply-held values

First, consider two values that our society holds dear:

1. Self-Determination: As Americans, we want to decide what to do with our own lives. In brief, we demand our right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

2. Never-Ending Progress: President Obama’s slogan “Yes We Can” reflects the basic idea here, but both of our political parties bow down at this same altar. Politicians get elected by promising that we’ll overcome every obstacle if we work together, and we demand that they deliver on the promise.

Now consider what Genesis 11:1-9 (NRSV) says about human achievement in the Tower of Babel story:

Now the whole earth had one language and the same words….Then they said, “Come, let us build ourselves a city, and a tower with its top in the heavens, and let us make a name for ourselves; otherwise we shall be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.” The LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which mortals had built. And the LORD said, “Look, they are one people, and they have all one language; and this is only the beginning of what they will do; nothing that they propose to do will now be impossible for them. Come, let us go down, and confuse their language there, so that they will not understand one another’s speech.” So the LORD scattered them abroad from there over the face of all the earth, and they left off building the city. Therefore it was called Babel, because there the LORD confused the language of all the earth; and from there the LORD scattered them abroad over the face of all the earth.

Our society loves the sentiment marked in bold: we prize the idea of putting our minds together to accomplish great things. God, however, states it as a problem, and he promptly puts a stop to this kind of human cooperation. The Tower of Babel story takes a line we put on our coffee mugs for motivation, and it draws the exact opposite moral from it than we draw.

A proposed solution to a perceived problem

Abortion is a widespread practice that humanity has devised in order to eliminate unwanted pregnancies. It’s intended as a solution to a problem, and the availability of safe (for the mother) abortions is an enormous technological achievement.

Why are pregnancies unwanted? There can be a million different reasons in this world, ranging from the threat of starvation, to avoiding having to raise a potentially disabled child, to preferring not to have another child, to wanting to avoid the scandal of an illicit pregnancy. I don’t have the expertise to address how often any given motive is in play, so I won’t get into that here.

Whatever the specific motives for individual abortions, pro-choice advocates often place heavy weight on the broad motive of preserving self-determination. As a new parent, I can attest that there is one thing that having a baby often hinders you from doing: whatever you want. A baby throws a wet blanket on self-determination, which is why abortion is such a compelling option for so many people.

Once birth control fails, there are really only two lines of defense against losing some of one’s self-determination. The first is giving the baby up for adoption, which most respectable people would be too ashamed to do. The other line of defense is abortion.

As a man, I have to admit that much more than half of the burden of having a new baby falls on my wife. This is of course why feminists are among the strongest advocates for access to legal abortion. And I don’t want to downplay the loss a woman can experience in having a child. (I think Christians should challenge how far self-determination should reach, but I’ll set that aside for now.) A mother cannot do everything she could do if she remained childless. Her life may change profoundly, and not always for the better.

When a good solution isn’t possible

This is where the second American value, the commitment to never-ending progress, comes into play. What happens when the only consistently reliable way to achieve self-determination for women is to practice abortion?

If our fundamental conviction is that progress must never stop, and that progress must include self-determination for women, we really have only one viable conclusion: that abortion must be okay. We may talk about it being “regrettable” or “a difficult choice,” but if it is the only thing that allows for women’s self-determination, then it must be, on the balance, an acceptable practice.

I admit I’m not doing justice to the range of pro-choice arguments. But we must not miss the weight of this reality: for many people in our society, the possibility that abortion is the destruction of a human life would undermine their entire view of how the world should work. It would force them to admit either that self-determination should not be such an absolute goal, or else that this particular line of human progress must screech to a halt. What chance does a tiny human life, hidden and secret in its mother’s womb, stand again such lofty ideals?

The cost of “Yes We Can”

In drawing from the Tower of Babel, I don’t want to blindly attack Progress. Many smart people have worked very hard to create infrastructure and technologies that make our lives immeasurably better.

But when Progress gets turned into a god, often someone is sacrificed on its altar. We can (in a sense) solve the problem of unwanted pregnancies, but only at the cost of 1.3 million lives a year in the USA––fetuses who would grow into people, provided their parents did not intentionally end their lives.

I once heard a commentator remark that the progressive movement in this country had always moved toward protecting civil rights of broader and broader groups until it came to the question of abortion––where it stopped. And maybe there’s a simple reason why: unwanted pregnancies are the place where we find out that our noble goals aren’t possible after all. We can’t give women self-determination and also protect the unborn. The march of real progress cannot continue: someone has to win, and someone has to lose.

The case for why unborn children must be protected is a question for a different post. But to honestly address the issue of abortion, first we have to admit to ourselves a fact that our culture often does not want to consider: that the only solution to a given problem might itself be deeply immoral. It is here that the story of the Tower of Babel must confront us: we have put our minds together to accomplish something, but the result of our “achievement” in this case is not to our glory, but to our shame.

My friend Andy replied to the last post with a link to an extensive study he took up last year on judgment and the afterlife in the Gospels. It’s thoughtful and well-written, and you can find it here.

Andy then asked,

Did you ever struggle with the issues of inerrancy and internal consistency in the Bible? Does any of this bother you? How do you handle it?

Usually I focus here more on ancient texts and current interprations than I do on my own experience. But at the risk of being self-indulgent, I’d like to tell my story here. Much of it is very common.

The summer before my senior year of high school (1996), my church youth group did a devotional reading of the book Experiencing God, by Henry Blackaby. Part of Blackaby’s approach to spirituality is that Christians should look for where God is already working, and go join that work. The idea is that we should not rely on our own abilities, but rather on the power of God.

If I remember correctly, Blackaby said that as Christians we should see things in our lives that only God could do. When I read that, suddenly something snapped in my mind, as I realized that I couldn’t think of anything in my life that only God could do.

Now, I need to clarify: I believe that God has made a good world, and that I played no role in creating myself, or in creating most of the things I enjoy. I believe that whatever good traits I may have, they are overwhelmingly dependent on factors I didn’t control: my family, my church communities, my genetics. These are all gifts that God has given me, and I have not remotely used them as faithfully as God has called me to.

So I’m not saying that I thought I deserved all the personal credit for good things I had done. But that summer, I suddenly realized that I couldn’t prove that God was directly responsible for the good in my life. Supposing that God had created the world and left it alone, I could still easily imagine having learned honesty from my parents, or having learned service from the people at church, or having had spiritual experiences based simply on emotions.

I was suddenly desperate for proof that God works in the world, not just in a broad sense, but in specific ways in people’s lives. I wanted to point at something that I could logically prove that only God could do. However, this world provides alternate explanations for everything imaginable. Faith could lead me (rightly, I believe) to see any number of things as the work of God, but there was no way to prove in any irrefutable sense that they could only be the work of God.

Could the Bible be the solution?

Being a member of a Church of Christ, the Bible was readily available as the obvious solution to the question. After all, it’s full of stories of things only God could do.

But could I know that those stories were true? It was the same predicament as before: faith could lead me to accept that God had done the things in the Bible, but words on a page don’t have to be factual. I needed the Bible to be supernaturally perfect (as I had always been taught that it was) so that I could have a solid hook to hang my faith on.

I tried reading about the “Bible codes,” which tided me over for a bit. (Then someone showed how you can similarly find coded predictions in Moby Dick.) At church we watched videos of Ron Wyatt’s impressive archaeological discoveries of Noah’s ark, Sodom and Gomorrah, and other Biblical places. (To say that Wyatt’s findings are questionable is something of an understatement.)

Then it was time for college, and as a freshman Bible major I was hoping my classes could “prove” the Bible to me. But while the profs at ACU supported us in our spiritual growth, they were rightly unwilling to sidestep questions like the Synoptic Problem and suggestions that Paul didn’t write some of the letters ascribed to him. I still had the same choice as before: I could accept on faith that the Bible was from God, but studying the Bible itself couldn’t prove that the Bible had to be from God.

The false alternatives

In all this, I thought that I had only two choices, reflected also in the perspective of Phillip C. commenting on my previous post: either every word in the Bible was accurate, or it wasn’t really the word of God. It was an all-or-nothing proposition.

It’s easy enough to find defenses of particular passages in the Bible, but as I studied I found that the questions were far more complicated than I had imagined. Defending the inerrancy of the Bible is not simply a matter of small discrepancies, but also questions of canon, translation, literary genre, manuscript transmission, and even theology. In a sense, my posts in this blog over the years are dedicated toward showing just how complex these questions are.

More and more, inerrancy started to look to me like an overly simple solution to a complex problem. This isn’t to say that the arguments in its favor are simple––indeed very smart people have made very well-informed arguments in favor of inerrancy. The problem is, in my experience, smart people can explain literally anything. Both sides of the argument have explanations; the question is, which explanations ring true?

Inerrancy tries to start with the character of God, arguing that a perfect God would communicate only with complete accuracy. That’s a fine supposition, but in the end inerrancy protects God’s honesty, but leaves him with a whole slew of other problems. We’re left with a God who states things unclearly; who inspires Scriptures word-for-word but then doesn’t make sure that all their actual words survive to the present day; and who makes the world look really old even though it isn’t. While the starting point (God being accurate) is appealing, all these other implications pile up until they make the whole idea untenable.

A third way

A lot of my discussion here has been negative, because a lot of my journey was spent moving away from a view of the faith that I no longer think is right. However, the false alternative discussed above can be sidestepped if we imagine that this complex problem has a complex solution rather than a simple one.

Scripture is inspired because it proclaims the good news of Christ, and because God speaks to us through Scripture. God inspired Scripture to use fiction and poetry and allegory and rhetoric along with more direct historical facts, all to lead us to Christ. God also reveals himself in the church, in history, in tradition, and even in the work of professional theologians.

I still have some of the same doubts I had in high school, and I still can’t prove God. What has changed most is that I no longer think that “proving” God––or proving the inerrancy of Scripture––is a goal of the Christian life. I still take up those questions here on the blog because I’m part of a church that finds them important, and so I’ll probably always wrestle with my identity as part of that church.

But turning against the inerrancy of Scripture doesn’t keep us from knowing the Gospel. Christians have always been pretty clear about the key tenets of the faith, such as what we find in the Apostle’s Creed. Obviously the story of the Bible is at the core of the faith as well, though sometimes what Scripture has to say isn’t to be taken at face value.

While knowledge is important, it is not the entirety of the Christian faith. Those who are baptized into Christ are united to the person of Christ, and we receive the Holy Spirit. Membership in Christ is not something to simply be defined by perfect doctrine––it is something that happens as a fact through faith and baptism.

(No doubt someone will point out places in Scripture that suggest we must arrive at a perfect doctrine to be saved; in response, I can only point again to the places where Scriptures is unclear or seemingly contradictory about important points of doctrine.)

As churches, we have different practices, some commanded in Scripture and others devised in other ways. The resulting lack of unity is tragic, but “believing the Bible” is not a viable way to conclude which practices are right, nor does the content of the New Testament suggest that God intended the Bible to tell us what all our church practices should be. I’m confident that some practices and traditions are better than others, and ultimately God will judge us by his standards.

But even if we don’t know for sure that we’re right about everything, we can still walk with confidence as members of the body of Christ. The Christian church existed for decades before most of the Bible was written, and it existed for centuries before everyone agreed which books belonged in the Bible. It remains for us to live, love, and worship in faith, and leave room for God to sort out the rest.