An Open Letter to Rob Schenck

Rob,

I had thought a point by point examination of your editorial would be the approach to take in answering your justification of the continued vitality of Roe v. Wade. Indeed, I have spent days pouring over your editorial piece to that end. There are so many manifestly wrong assertions – of the law of love, of reason, of judgment – that a full answer becomes, was it not on a matter so manifestly at the heart of God, nearly picayune.

Tell me I am wrong if I have misinterpreted your editorial. This is its sum and substance:

It is wrong to overrule Roe vs. Wade because there is an insufficient social safety net to support women whose impoverished existence prevents them from being the kinds of mothers that can give to their children the love, care, and sustenance necessary to their formation.

Thus, you will hoist children on petards you charge the church and the larger society either (a) with having created, or (b) with having at least maintained, or (c) at a very minimum, with having failed to deconstruct. In essence, you make the church and the larger society bearers of the bloodguilt of children killed by abortion because, as you seem now to see matters, a child’s mother cannot be directed by law to reject the death of another as an answer to fear or difficulty.

You don’t seem to be able to bring yourself to the stage where you propagate your newfound support for Roe by circulating photos of yourself licking a cake festooned with the message, “Abortion is Healthcare” as did Miley Cyrus recently. Indeed, you claim that every abortion is “a tragedy,” and every live birth is “ideal.” But you do not explain why these assertions are so. And you certainly do not explain why, if the reasons that these assertions are so are, as I suspect they are, why you would oppose restoring the once clear standard of legal protection for uterine children.

I think this is what you are not saying aloud but must be thinking:

Every abortion is a tragedy because it ends the life of a child in being. Every live birth of a child is ideal because such births continue in each being a life cycle of hope and the promise of entry into a life-giving relationship with the Creator God.

Is this why every abortion is a tragedy? Is this why every birth is ideal?

There are, of course, many ways to come to the question of whether an action should or should not be the subject of a positive prohibition in law.

The Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King experienced frustration in confronting a society of self-styled Christians that exhibited the most ungodly despite and abuse of their fellows based simply on the color of their skin. He yearned for all men to be judged by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. And many folks of fairer skin joined him in that yearning. But he wanted more than that. 

He wanted changes in the law that would afford equal status under law to colored people, so that they could enjoy, with the white man, the accommodations, businesses, and affairs of civil society unburdened by rank prejudice.

To that yearning, however, many fairer skinned folk balked. It asked, they argued, too much to enact positive prohibitions into federal law before hearts and minds were converted by the law of love. Let hearts and minds be won, then let laws be changed.

For this, though, Dr. King would not wait. He argued, as one might on a mound of God’s Word, that the civil rights laws should be enacted with dispatch, and not after hearts and minds were trained. Rather, as Paul to the Romans, Dr. King to his Christian interlocutors posed that it was right that the law should be changed so that it could teach the hearts and so that it could ameliorate the wrongs.

Dr. King explained:

“It may be true that you can’t legislate integration, but you can legislate desegregation. It may be true that morality cannot be legislated, but behavior can be regulated. It may be true that the law cannot change the heart, but it can restrain the heartless. It may be true that the law can’t make a man love me, but it can restrain him from lynching me, and I think that’s pretty important also. So while the law may not change the hearts of men, it does change the habits of men. And when you change the habits of men, pretty soon the attitudes and the hearts will be changed. And so there is a need for strong legislation constantly to grapple with the problems we face.”

You know that when the Apostles forbade abortion as a moral act, in the Didache, it was simply a restatement of the law of love, that we should not do to another, the nascent child, what we would not have done to ourselves.

And when the English common law, at least as long ago as the 13th Century, as confirmed by Henry de Bracton’s On the Laws and Customs of England, had concluded that abortion is a homicide of a living human, it did so for precisely the same reason. De Bracton wrote, "If there is anyone who strikes a pregnant woman or gives her a poison which produces an abortion, if the foetus be already formed or animated, and especially if it be animated, he commits homicide." 

William Blackstone explained the basis for the law this way: “Life is the immediate gift of God, a right inherent by nature in every individual; and it begins in contemplation of law as soon as an infant is able to stir in the mother's womb.”

Dr. King knew that the law should teach rightly, and thus should make a positive legal wrong of the morally wrong act of race hatred. 

So too the Apostles, the common law, and the positive statute laws of this Nation prior to Roe vs. Wade taught rightly that the human child in the uterus was a living being, a human one, and fully possessed of the natural rights endowed on each of us, at the moment we came into being, at conception, and not by passage through the magical gateway of the cervix.

You are at a crossroads, Rob. 

You must choose. It will be insufficient for those who have welcomed your editorial for you to merely assert, as you have, that Roe should maintain its legal status while begrudging that every abortion is a tragedy.

Lincoln understood how corrupting of the heart and mind the gospel of death could be. So, in addressing another evil, contumacious of the Imago Dei in every African slave, he put the slavers’ case as the slavers saw things:

“Holding, as they do, that slavery is morally right, and socially elevating, they cannot cease to demand full national recognition of it, as a legal right, and a social blessing.”

And that certainty of moral right in the decision to snuff the life of a child out in the womb is what allows Miley Cyrus to lick the abortion cake, and allows thousands of adoring fans of child murder to applaud her depiction of doing so. But it is not just that she must be allowed to celebrate the moral rightness of abortion while you bemoan – in 90-pound weakling fashion – its tragic proportions. As Lincoln put the case for the slaver, so you must see the case for the abortionistas: full national recognition as a legal right and a social blessing.

Sadly, you are along the path to granting all that they ask because, while you claim to see every abortion as tragic, you reject the gracefully direct and instructive act of restoring the legal status of the uterine child as it was before the aberration of Roe and its progeny.

Indeed, as Lincoln continued regarding slavery, you must decide regarding abortion: 

“Nor can we justifiably withhold this, on any ground save our conviction that slavery is wrong. If slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality - its universality; if it is wrong, they cannot justly insist upon its extension - its enlargement.”

Only fools lay in the center of the road, Rob. 

There is no chance for life there. There is no chance for having God take delight in your soul there. Either choose life or choose death. But put an end to the mincing about the question. 

Frankly acknowledge that the lives of every black baby taken by an abortionist and given by its mother represents a grievous moral wrong that society can only correctly mark as a homicide. Or, celebrate the power of the poor to liberate themselves from the quaint notions of a curious desert religion.

Jim Henderson

Christian Leader Disobeys Scripture While Accusing Christian Leader of Disobeying Scripture

Irony is the use of words to indicate an opposing meaning from their definition.

You give your wife a vacuum cleaner for an anniversary present. Coolly, she examines the gift, turns to you, and says, “How nice.” No, friend, she does not mean this is a nice gift. She means that you had best have held on to the receipt, or you had best follow that gift with your assurance that you bought it for her … because you wanted her to know that you would now be doing all the vacuuming at home.

Hypocrisy, however, is not irony.

Hypocrisy offers a portrayal of one’s self as adhering to a standard – legal, moral, social – while, in fact, one does not do so.

This past weekend offered us an insight into the difference between irony and hypocrisy.

In a recent blog post, I brought to light the inane call to Christians in America to adhere to a gospel of disarmament. That plea had been made by a former pro-life leader, the Reverend Rob Schenck. You can read that post here. [http://jimsjustsayin.blogspot.com/2015/11/rob-schenck-armor-of-light-or-disarmer.html]  It suffices to say, in summary of Rob’s newfound crusade, that a Jewish believer in Jesus has reached an accord with the kind of devilry that disarmed German Jews and made them susceptible to being victimized, minimized, and murdered by Hitler’s Third Reich.

Rather than learning the lessons of history, Schenck prefers to burn those lessons and would tempt Christians in America to disarm themselves in an entirely fallacious call to “do as Jesus does.”

Now, Rob Schenck is doubling down on his wrong-headed crusade. In doing so, as explained in this post, he has undertaken a hypocritical demand that he posits, instead, as a Christian one. He is demanding that Jerry Falwell Jr., the President of Liberty University, repent for remarks he made last week at the university’s convocation.

Let’s begin with Falwell’s remarks, here as reported by Reuters:

"It just blows my mind when I see that the president of the United States [says] that the answer to circumstances like that is more gun control," Falwell said, according to the newspaper. "… I've always thought if more good people had concealed carry permits, then we could end those Muslims before they walked in…"

... 

Falwell, whose father Jerry Falwell Sr. was an evangelical Southern Baptist pastor, televangelist, and conservative political commentator, urged students to take free classes offered by the university's Police Department to obtain a concealed weapon permit, the newspaper reported. 

"Let's teach them a lesson if they ever show up here," he said.

Liberty University describes it Convocation program this way:

"Convocation is NorthAmerica's largest weekly gathering of Christian students, and each year it plays host to more than 80 guest speakers of national significance from every sphere of society. It is held within the Vines Center at Liberty University during each semester at 10:30 AM on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday unless otherwise noted."

(Some have suggested that Falwell’s remarks are ironic because, as they have claimed, Liberty prohibits weapons on campus. If it were true that LU prohibits students from possessing weapons on campus, Falwell's remarks would provide an excellent illustration of irony. The assertion about a weapons ban, however, is false. In 2013, Liberty University changed its policy and now allows students with concealed carry permits to have their weapons on campus.)

Falwell’s remarks met with immediate criticism when some interpreted those remarks – out of context – as expressing an intent to harm all Muslims. Later the same day, he responded to that criticism, criticism that would have come from some no matter how carefully he couched his words, but undoubtedly came from others because his remarks were edited by media.

Now, let’s get back to Rob Schenck, who appears to have converted to a new religion: personal disarmament.

As my previous post explains, Rob has fallen onto hard doctrinal times. Like so many of us, he has witnessed the aftermath of terrible tragedies caused by armed criminals. As very few of us have done, he has spoken with some surviving family members of individuals killed in such shootings. His conversations and processing of the incidents caused him to conclude that the new cause celeb for himself and his ministry is to urge Christians to disarm themselves and disarm others in the face of thugs and criminals. That conversion is documented in a recently released documentary, The Armor of Light, directed by a niece of Walt Disney.

Still, as my blog post explains, the market has disciplined Schenck.

Donations to his ministry have been seriously impacted by his newfound gospel. According to Schenck’s own Facebook posts, he has been forced, for the first time in his ministry, to publicly grub for funding. Rather than learning the lesson being taught to him by those who formerly supported his ministry financially, he has stubbornly grasped to his errant word.

Still, one must pay the bills. In Schenck’s case, to pay the bills he must drum up support for his work and ministry. In turn, drumming support for his work and ministry apparently requires that he recklessly adhere to his newfound nonsensical doctrine, and make a public spectacle of his having done so. Consequently, when Liberty University’s Jerry Falwell Jr. called on students to arm themselves, and to obtain their concealed carry weapons permit – a permit they could obtain after attending a free CCW course at the University – Schenck lost little time in ginning up a PRESS RELEASE to criticize and to shame Falwell by demanding that he repent for his remarks.

You can find that release here:

Here is a brief excerpt from his extended remarks in the release:

The remarks on Friday by President Jerry Falwell, Jr., of Liberty University, regarding the terrorist attackers in San Bernardino, California, were morally reprehensible.

...

It's understandable that emotions run high after horrendous acts of violence against innocent people, and Dr. Falwell can be excused for that, but to make the contemptuous remarks he did from his seat as president of the largest Evangelical Christian university in the world, and in front of more than 10,000 of his charges, not to mention on an international video feed, is inexcusable.

When we say and do the wrong things, we must repent of our failure, admit to our wrong, beg the pardon and forgiveness of God and those we have offended, and set things right as best we can. I respectfully suggest Dr. Falwell follow that course.

Lest there be any doubt, I am not opposed to correction. In fact, there is a model in the Scripture for how correction should be provided. For example, in the Gospel of Matthew, chapter 18, Jesus explains how to confront a brother who has sinned:

Moreover if thy brother shall trespass against thee, go and tell him his fault between thee and him alone: if he shall hear thee, thou hast gained thy brother. 16 But if he willnot hear thee, then take with thee one or two more, that in the mouth of two or three witnesses every word may be established. 17 And if he shall neglect to hear them, tell it unto the church: but if he neglect to hear the church, let him be unto thee as an heathen man and a publican.

Notice the progress of biblical correction. 

First, go privately to the offending brother, “between thee and him alone.” At that point, if the offending brother repents, then further publication of the brother's wrong is itself a sin. If the brother repents, you have regained a brother. Second, if that offending brother doesn’t repent then take one or two witnesses and again confront the brother. At that point, if the brother still has not repented, then you take it to the whole church.

Strangely, Jesus said nothing about sending out a press release as a call for repentance. Of course, Jesus may just not have been sufficiently sophisticated.

Let’s turn, now, to the hypocrisy inherent in Rob Schenck’s demand that Jerry Falwell, Jr., repent for his remarks.

In a strange case of the pot calling the kettle black, Schenck – believing, it seems, that Jerry Falwell, Jr., has grievously sinned – appears to have ignored the direct command of Jesus himself to go privately to Falwell and confront him. As a consequence, observers are left to wonder at the hypocrisy of Schenck’s rebuke of Falwell. There just is not any portion of Jesus’ command for biblical restoration that invokes the “chastisement by press release” ministry.

Think about the lengths of biblical contradiction to which Schenck has gone in this instance.

He has a personal agenda. It appears to me that he has substituted his personal agenda, the gospel of disarmament, with the actual message of the Gospel. Then, when a national Christian leader in the field of education speaks a message contrary to Schenck’s agenda, he gets his dander up (perhaps forgetting the biblical command to “be angry but sin not”).

He drafts a call to repentance. His call, however, reads more like a press release than a personal appeal to repent. That resemblance to a press release, it turns out, is okay, because he is, in fact, writing a press release. 

Next, Schenck submits that press release to a news service so that it can be circulated to news editors of print and electronic media. 

Helpfully, he includes a contact number and name … not for Falwell, but for his own assistant. As a consequence, news editors that are interested can set up interviews with … wait for it … Schenck. And now, the coup de gras, Schenck gets publicity for his ungodly gospel of disarmament.

Rather than going to Falwell privately – as the Word of God teaches for actual instances in which a brother has sinned – Schenck simply appears to use the Rahm Emanuel playbook, not letting a good crisis go to waste.

For his sensationalism, for his failure to comport with scripture, and for his departure from the exact teaching of the Word, Rob Schenck has to answer to someone well above my pay grade. In my book,  the hypocrisy of attempting to shame Falwell by public press release, rather than privately seeking Falwell’s repentance, is fairly rank and low behavior.