Ireland, Abortion, Andy Stanley, & the Foundation of Truth

Everybody welcome to The Dividing Line. I am not Dr. James White, but I'm here crashing the studio, crashing the broadcast for today. Hopefully what we talk about will be a blessing to everybody watching.

Dr. White is where right now? Where in the world is Dr. White? He's in Scotland right now? Oh, he's on his way to Scotland. Okay, right on. So on his way to Scotland and isn't Ireland somewhere on the, or did he already go?

Scotland, then Ireland, and then home, and then home. Okay, how long has he been gone for? Three weeks. Three weeks traveling abroad. That's tough actually, very, very tough on you. So prayers for Dr. White and grateful for all the work that he's doing around the world and excited about today's broadcast.

I wanted to do a couple of things that I thought would be helpful to the listeners and to everybody who watches Dr. White on a regular basis. Some of the stuff, of course, you know, very, very well because you've watched Dr. White debate many, many times over now at least two decades.

And you've also listened to The Dividing Line many times. And so, you know, a lot of the foundational things that I'll be talking about today, but I do want to talk about how they all sort of intersect.

And what I want to talk about today is really the foundation of knowledge. How do we know what we know? And I'm going to talk about a distinctly Christian epistemology and that word, just a fancy word that just means theory of knowledge.

How do we know what we know? What's the foundation of knowledge? And Christians hold to a revelational epistemology. That is to say, we're supposed to hold to a revelational epistemology. And that is to say, Christian epistemology, how we know what we know can be summed up very simply, very Sunday school like, and it can be summed up like this, God says, because God says, and that really is the essence of the Christian theory of knowledge.

We believe in reason. We believe in rationalism. We believe in laws of logic. We believe in consistency. We believe in science. We believe in using our minds and being rigorous in our thinking. We believe in a scientific worldview in the sense that we believe that science is actually approachable in the world that God has created, the world that he governs.

And so Christians aren't dummies. We don't believe in checking out when it comes to thinking hard thoughts. We don't believe that we should abandon our minds and just be merely adolescent in our thinking.

Christians hold to a rigorous view of knowledge, truth, integrity, evidence. But we believe that because we're Christians and we have a fundamentally biblical worldview and outlook on life, what we would say is all those things, rationality, laws of logic, tools of science, intellectual integrity, all those things are part and parcel to a biblical outlook on life.

And you can't have a biblical outlook on life unless, of course, you have Christ at the very center. And this is really important in terms of the day that we live in today, because we live in a time and a culture that we are riding on the coattails in a sense of the Christian forebears before us.

We have in the West today, anyways, so many blessings and benefits from our Christian forebears, the things that they fought for, the biblical worldview that they squeezed into life, culture, and society, and we're reaping the rewards and benefits of that, but we're losing so much of it.

And in terms of Christian influence, particularly in the West today, the gospel is expanding all over the world today. Christian people are coming to Christ. God is saving His elect all over the world today in China, in Russia, all over South America, in Africa.

It's happening all over the world today. But in particular, we live in a time where so much of what the biblical worldview really brought into the world, and I'm talking about the pop of modern science, all these tools of technology all around us today, things that we're using today, were things that were ultimately brought into the world because of the life and labor and work of Christians.

And so we were reaping the rewards of all that, but we are having a very, very tough time now as the church really facing a culture that wants to abandon a revelational epistemology, the kind of epistemology that says, oh, that's because God says.

Why do we have this ethical appeal? Why do we feel this way about a particular view of ethics? Well, it used to be Christians had such a revelational epistemology and such an impact on culture, the biblical worldview did, that we would be able to say in culture and society, well, that's because God says.

So for example, John Jay, actually one of the very first presidents of the United States before Washington, who was also the first Supreme Court justice, when he would talk about law, case law, those sorts of things, he didn't have a problem referring to the biblical worldview because that was sort of just in the atmosphere.

It was the spirit of the age. It was the biblical worldview. It was just everywhere. And we're losing so much of that today. And we see a culture just slipping off the cliff, nearing the bottom at this point, ready to crash.

And we also have to face the difficulty that so many today who profess the name of Christ, do not root their thinking in an explicitly biblical worldview. We sort of a mishmash today in the church in the West today, whereas by mishmash, I mean, oftentimes we'll have a professed commitment to the word of God as the ultimate, but in terms of how we usually work this stuff out and how we think about the world and think about ethics and those sorts of things, we tend to sort of be a mixed bag.

There's a little bit of pragmatism. Well, this seems to work best for me, or I've experienced this. Maybe a little bit of rationalism, well, reason would lead us to conclude A, B, or C. There's even maybe a bit of scientism that we've adopted in the church today.

And that is to say Christians adopting sort of a view of knowledge that many people who are naturalistic materialists today, atheists who deny God's existence, who would say that all that exists is the material universe, nothing supernatural, nothing beyond material.

We've adopted many times their view of scientism. And so then added to that, the struggle that we have is that we have such a horrible representation of Christ, the biblical worldview, on the large broadcasts around the world.

And what I mean by that, I'm talking about channels historically, at least like TBN, and the kind of representation of Christ you'd see, say, in a Jim Baker today. If you, I mean, some of my favorite things to do right now is just look at some of the editing that Vic, is it Vic Berger?

I think his name is Vic Berger, does with some of the Jim Baker videos. You're welcome if you go take a look at that. Not right now, of course, wait until the broadcast is over, then go check out. I think it's Vic Berger, it's Jim Baker.

The way he edits those videos are just spectacular and amusing and entertaining, but they're entertaining and hilarious and the way that they are because that becomes the representation of Christianity today.

This sort of, you know, let go of your mind, check your mind at the church door kind of thing. You know, we believe things that are irrational. We believe things that make us ultimately look silly. They're not rooted in the biblical worldview.

It's just pure silliness. So there's all these things working against us today in the culture that we live in, the culture of the West. And yet Christ calls us to be a light in darkness. He says to the church, you are the salt.

You are the light. Salt's a preservative. It preserves things from spoil and decay. Light dispels darkness, and Christ says that's your role. And again, no matter what your view is of the future, that really doesn't matter at this point.

And what matters right now at this point is in terms of faithfulness. Faithfulness, fidelity to the Word of God, to the biblical worldview, and to Christ first and foremost. And so, when we think about the call upon our lives that Christ makes, God calls us.

We'll just take one example. Let's take the Great Commission, for example, Matthew 28, 18 through 20. Jesus says, all authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. That was a long time ago, brothers and sisters.

All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. And he says, therefore, because of this, go and make disciples of all the nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and the Son and the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.

So, discipling the nations, baptizing them, and teaching them to obey Jesus, that's the call. So, no matter what differences there are amongst us believers, Reform believers in particular, in terms of style of worship, exclusive Psalms, eschatological beliefs, however you want to cut the cake, what we can all settle in on as believers, joined together in humble unity, is that Christ commands us as his people to go with his authority into the world and to disciple the nations and to teach them to obey him.

That's the command. So, that's what we're at. That's what we're called to do. And as we watch the culture round about us, slip off into darkness, the question we have to ask ourselves is, well, how do we approach this?

And by what standard do we actually come into conflict with the world? And I think one way that we can approach this, I'm going to do three points of contact today. One, I'm going to talk about what happened in Ireland this past weekend on Saturday, officially.

I want to talk about a little bit more sort of teasing out the foundations of Christian knowledge. How do we know what we know? And then what I just, by way of sort of intersecting, I'm going to talk about some of the comments made by Andy Stanley in a recent video.

Now, I know, I know, I know that Dr. White touched on this a bit, but hopefully we can help even a little bit more by discussing some of the foundational things that Stanley says and some of the way that impacts the church.

And I would actually argue, to be honest, I would argue some of the comments made by Andy Stanley in his message, Aftermath Part 3, are not actually so unusual, not so strange and far-fetched. Now, from historic orthodoxy, from New Testament Christianity, biblical Christianity, and just from the overall scope and history of the church and the kingdom of God in history, of course, it is strange and fanciful and crazy and all that.

But I would argue that Stanley's position and the things, the sort of things that he says, sorts of things that he says in his message are not so strange to the culture around us. I think it's pretty much that's adopted, that's generally sort of understood, or at least it's in the back of some people's minds.

And so I want to try to address some of those things today. So are you guys ready? Let's talk a bit about what happened in Ireland. I did have a video, and what I'll do is just point you this point to my page, my Facebook page.

I did share a video on my Facebook page this past weekend, and to be honest with you, it was heartbreaking. It was hard to see. It was hard to see because I have so much of a love and a commitment to uphold and support and love my brothers and sisters in Ireland.

I think maybe it would be helpful, rather than just going to the issue and to the text, I'll just explain by way of my own connection to this. How did, there's a light on this one now, how did I get connected to the church in Ireland?

So I got a phone call or a message two or three years ago from some people I didn't know. They were in Ireland, and they asked if I would come and be the head speaker for their denomination's national conference in Ireland.

And believe it or not, these things are really tough. I mean, leaving my family for extended periods of time, and the church, and going across the world. It's a lot of hard work. It's a huge gift, and it's a blessing, of course.

It's a lot of hard work. So I wasn't so sure. But one of the things that really convinced me to go was the people that asked me to come were part of the Covenanters, the Irish Covenanters. So they can trace their roots all the way back to John Knox.

These are some devout and hardcore Presbyterians. I mean, there is as Presbyterian as you can get, and Presbyterians are my favorite. So they said that they wanted me, a Reformed Baptist minister, to speak and be the head of their conference in all of Northern and Southern Ireland, which I thought was a huge honor and a privilege, and I thought it was such a tremendous moment.

You know, there are some bad spots in Christian history and some difficult moments between Baptists and Presbyterians. And so now, to have this amazing Presbyterian denomination ask me to come as a Baptist to be the head speaker for their national denominations conference, it was a huge honor.

So I agreed to do it. And when I went out to do this, I had nothing in my mind in terms of abortion. There was nothing there. It was, you know, come to this conference and talk about apologetics and addiction and some other issues.

But what happened was, while I was in Ireland, North and South, I was traveling all around Ireland, speaking at different churches, speaking at the conference itself, I got to so many amazing, amazing Christians in all of Ireland, and so many godly, just phenomenal Presbyterians.

I got to teach at the seminary itself and speak to men who are far, far ahead of me, and just got to share with them. But one of the things that kept coming up in the North and the South was the issue of abortion.

And again, I had no intention to go there. But one of the learned was that, you know, Ireland, of course, is this historically Christian nation, both in the North, South, all the biblical worldview stuff is just deeply rooted, and you can't go anywhere in Ireland without seeing the remnants of this Christian civilization.

And I learned that Ireland, of course, was one of the last standing nations that had not allowed for the murder of the unborn, both in the North and the South. And as I talked to my fellow brothers and sisters in Ireland, I discovered that so many of them were so passionate about fighting against abortion, which was right on their doorstep.

And, you know, you could just see it in their eyes, just this passion and boldness to fight against it, but just sort of, but we're not quite sure how to go about it at the moment, and it's right on our doorstep, it's looming.

And what I committed to at the time was, I said, Apologia Church will support you, will back you up, and will serve you, will give you whatever you need to help you to fight against this, to speak the word of God into the culture on this point.

And I just said, we'll make ourselves available to you. And what happened was, is we discovered an opportunity to go out to Ireland, because now the pro-choice movement was actually working to legalize abortion in Ireland, right on the tails of my being there.

So the timing of it was just so phenomenal, just God's providence, and it was just incredible. So we went back out to Ireland, to the South, to the Republic, and we were there. We got to attend a pro-life march or movement that was there, about a hundred people were in attendance in downtown Dublin.

And we got to actually be there the day that they had 30 ,000 pro-choicers protesting for an amendment to the Irish constitution. The Eighth Amendment in the South is, and it was an amendment that equalized the life of the unborn child with the life of the mother.

And so abortion was illegal, and it even carried a 14-year jail sentence, prison sentence. So we got to see some of that, some of that conflict, and we got to see, and this is what got us, the pro-life movement in America, the pro-life movement in America that really argues from a position of neutrality.

We have specific conversations that we've had about the pro-life movement's leadership. I'm talking at the highest level of the biggest organizations. And we have recorded conversations, interviews with them saying things like, they don't want to use the Bible as the foundation of their fight against abortion, or the biblical worldview.

They say that they don't want to make it about Christ and using Christian terminology. They say they want to use a backdoor approach and no explicitly Christian language. They really want to see women as victims.

Tobias, the head of the National Right to Life says that she believes that the women who have abortions are as much victims as the children in abortion. That's what she says. You can go to Apologeo Studios and YouTube and look up our video we have of her saying that.

What concerned us was that we saw that the pro-life movement in America was sort of leading the fight in Ireland to fight against abortion. And you might be surprised to hear me say, very humbly, that that very much concerned us.

And it concerned us because of what we started the broadcast with today, this question of Christian epistemology. How do we know what we know? What's the center of what we're standing on? What we're proclaiming?

And what we've discovered in all those years of ministry outside of abortion mills, thousands of children saved at this point, over 250 churches now, local churches now involved in the fight, over 100 children saved just from the work of Apologeo Church ourselves.

What we've learned about the pro-life movement in America is that it tries to distance itself from a biblical worldview and an explicitly Christian proclamation in the area of abortion. And we think that that is devastating to the cause of the pro-life movement.

Because you see, we believe that the problem of abortion is a problem of the heart. It's whenever you have a culture that says that it is perfectly acceptable for a mother and a father to walk into an abortion mill and to pay somebody to destroy their boy or girl in the womb, that's not a problem of education.

That's not a problem of a lack of evidence. That's a problem of the heart. And what we have noticed outside the abortion mills is we've noticed that when we call out to these mothers and fathers, that we say, we'll help you.

We will serve you. We'll give you money. We will give you food. We'll give you shelter. We will adopt your child. Please don't kill your child today. When we've had discussions with them, as they've stopped to talk to us about the life that's inside of them, heartbeat, fingernails, toenails, all the brain activity, all of the objective scientific analysis of what's taking place in the womb, what we've consistently and always heard from these mothers and fathers is, I know it's my child.

I have a right to kill my child, something to that effect. And so what we've noticed, of course, is what we've known all along, that the problem is not reason, logic, rationality, evidence. It's a problem of the heart.

And what has concerned us is that the pro-life movement in the United States tries to move itself away from an explicitly biblical proclamation where the Bible says that it's the gospel that is the power of God for salvation, that it is God's good news that God uses by his spirit.

He empowers that message, and he opens the eyes of the blind, and he gives hearing to deaf people through the proclamation of God's good news. That's how people go from a place of spiritual death to spiritual life.

You can't get somebody to turn away from sin. You can't get somebody to become ultimately moral apart from a heart change, and that only takes place according to this word, according to this book. That only takes place when God's truth, his word, comes into the heart of a fallen person.

So, back to what happened in Ireland. When we went to this pro-choice protest last year, there were about 30 ,000 people in attendance. It was incredible. Almost got arrested for no reason. And that's the honest truth here.

We weren't, at this point, even standing up and preaching anything. We weren't even engaging with people. All we did was, we walked up to some people who were there at the pro-choice rally, and we said, can we ask you some questions?

And because of that, the Garda came and started surrounding us and very abusive to us, and we hadn't even done anything. We hadn't even started a conversation, nothing. And so, obviously, it was very, very risky even to have a conversation.

If you would have heard some of the things that the pro-choicers were saying, it would blow your mind. The fact that they weren't being arrested for saying these things in public surprises me, but people who were on the pro-life side weren't even allowed to engage with them that day.

So, over this last year, we have been praying for and working with the church in Ireland. We went out again to hold a conference, which was sold out in Northern Ireland. Huge gift and blessing. Christians from all over Northern and Southern Ireland, churches across Ireland, cross denominational barriers, pastors, church leaders, Christians from all over filled this place up.

We held a conference just appealing to them, please don't make the mistakes that we've made. Don't make the mistake that the American church has made by walking away from the word of God as the foundation of the fight.

Don't make the mistake of handing over this fight to a pro-life movement that refuses to stand on the word of God as the basis for their fight against abortion. By the way, I just want to make very, very clear, I'm grateful, grateful to the pro-life movement in America and all the work that they've done to save the lives of children.

I believe like Van Til says, God can strike straight blows with crooked sticks. But as I often say, I don't believe that we should go looking for crooked sticks to hit people with just because he does.

And so, what we did was held this conference and we even met with Christians in the North and the South. We held private meetings with pastors, church leaders, an entire denomination to tell them, we will serve you, we'll help you, let us know how we can help you.

And so, I'm going to encourage you with this. While abortion is now legalized in the Republic of Ireland, there are Christians that have been working hard and are on their feet and they are ready to fight as Christians against this culture of death.

And there's all kinds of things in the background right now in the works that I can't tell you about at the moment, but just trust me when I say God is at work in Ireland right now. But what happened after the vote this weekend on the amendments is they're calling it a landslide, a landslide victory for the pro-choice movement, which is surprising to be honest.

If you're in Ireland, everybody's pro-life. Our cab driver was an atheist and he was fiercely opposed to abortion. If you talk to the average Irish person in Ireland, they'll tell you Irish people are pro-life predominantly.

However, the media has been controlled by the leftists. The media has been controlled and funded by big, well-known people and organizations to make this thing a reality. And what happened on Saturday was it was made official.

And if you look at my page, you'll see the video that I've shared. And what you see is the women, their reaction to the legalization of the slaughter of your own unborn child. Their reaction was horrific, heartbreaking, terrifying.

The reaction of women huddled together, shouting in praise that they now have the right to kill their child in the womb. It was amazing to see. If you watch that video, go look at it. If you watch that video, you'll see the women huddled together, just thousands of them.

And what else you see flowing in the background is you see the LGBT flags. One of those things that just drives me bonkers. I just can't even imagine it. The LGBT lifestyle doesn't support human offspring.

You don't get it. You have to leave your commitments in the LGBT lifestyle, lesbian or gay. You have to leave your commitments and relationship that you have, male to male, female to female. And you have to leave that worldview commitment and you have to step back into God's world.

You have to step back into God's world and you have to pull things from God's world to make it work to where you can have offspring. You have to abandon those commitments to even have children. And you see these people cheering as they hear the words come down that they won.

The vote to kill children had won the day. You see tears. You see applause. You see people with flags, LGBT, just praising this moment that mothers in Ireland, the South, are now given the right to kill their own pre-born boys and girls.

And they just came with applause. Now, I think many of you know where I'm going with this. I couldn't help but think when I saw it about what God says in Romans 1. I couldn't help it. Romans 1. God says that everybody knows him.

Romans 1 .18. We suppress the truth about God in unrighteousness. That's active suppression. What's known about God is evident within them, for God has shown it to them. That's knowledge from God that he's put there for all of us.

The creation itself testifies to us. It shouts to every one of us about God, so much so that we are left, Dr. White says often, unapologetus, without a defense, without an apologetic, without a reasoned defense before God.

We don't want God in our knowledge, Paul says. We don't want him, so we exchange the truth of God for a lie, and we worship and serve the creature rather than the creator, so it says God gave them over.

God gave them over. God gave them over. To do what? To do what's against nature. You could see that. You could see it in the video, the flags waving, what's against nature itself, just waving. And then you see the list that Paul makes in Romans 1 .28, and since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind to do what ought not to be done.

They were filled with all manner of unrighteousness, evil, covetousness, malice. They are full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, maliciousness. They are gossips, slanderers, haters of God, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, disobedient to parents, foolish, faithless, heartless, heartless, ruthless, ruthless.

Though they know God's decree that those who practice such things deserve to die, they not only do them, but give approval to those who practice them. It's amazing. We live in a time where so many atheists, agnostics, secularists, humanists, just attack Scripture and the Word of God.

Give me evidence. Give me evidence for your belief in God. Give me evidence for the existence of God. Give me evidence for the historic Jesus. Give me evidence that the is divinely inspired. And I think it's a powerful thing.

We can go there with them. Absolutely. And I'm so grateful for the ministry of Dr. White over all these years that he's done exactly that. He's gone there and he's gotten them on their own grounds and refuted them on their own ground.

But you know what's amazing? Is that some of the greatest evidences for the divine inspiration of Scripture are moments like last Saturday in Dublin, where you see this testimony in bright, shining, high-definition, vivid detail.

It's right there. This is the result of a culture that abandons the Word of God, that abandons Christ at the center. Now, here's why I bring that up today. One is I want you to please join us in praying for, of course, America and what's happening today.

If you watch this today, by the end of this day, there'll be 3 ,000 children killed today through abortion. So please pray for our country. But now we need to start praying for Ireland in terms of how we're going to save lives in Ireland.

How is the Christian church going to be a light and a witness for the gospel in the context of this culture of death? But I bring it up for this reason. We're talking about epistemology today. How do we know what we know?

What do we say to people in terms of, this is a truth claim, and you must follow this, you must obey this? Well, one of the things that's interesting is that some of the results that came out of what happened in Ireland, they said that some of the voters voted based upon the particular emotional appeal, and they did it here in the United States too.

Believe me, the pro-choice movement has been helping in Ireland, and unfortunately so has our pro-life movement in terms of some of the really bad arguments to resist the pro-choice movement. But one of the appeals that's made is the pro-choice movement often appeals to, what about the life of the mother?

What about rape? What about incest? They use what accounts for less than 2 of all abortions. They use the argument that accounts for less than 2 of all abortions to legalize abortion at will in every circumstance.

Now, that won the day here in the United States. It continues to be a very bad argument the pro-choicers use over here, but boy, did it ever win in Ireland. And a lot of the undecided voters said that they ended up making their decision based upon the emotional strength of the arguments that the life of the mother, rape, and incest.

What do you do in those cases? And of course, the arguments that are used by the pro-choice movement, my body, my choice, we saw all of the signs. It was as if the pro-choice movement in Ireland went shopping in America to the pro-life or pro-choice movement's websites to make their arguments.

It was just tremendous. Now, I want to say that we have really an option in terms of how do we fight against the pro-choice movement? Do we go with them when they argue from emotional appeals and pragmatism and all the things they do?

Do we go with them and start firing back with emotionally laden arguments? Because that is often what the pro-life movement does in the United States of America. From an epistemological standpoint, we are using the same kind of shaky foundations as the pro-choice movement, emotionally laden, driven arguments.

What about the life of the mother? What about if it was rape? What about if it was incest? And the pro-life movement in America fires back with the same kind of emotionally driven argumentation. Give you an example.

When the pro-choice movement says, well, what if she was raped? Just think about this for a second in terms of epistemology. How do you know what you know? Well, I have a question we have to ask. How do you get any basis to argue against rape with your humanistic presuppositions?

You see, you're borrowing from a biblical life and worldview in order to make your argument that rape is wrong and to appeal to those emotions. Because only with a Christian worldview can I ultimately have a basis to say that rape is objectively, really, ultimately evil and wrong.

And yet the pro-choicers use that emotional argument of rape against people to argue for abortion at will. And just think about it in terms of epistemology. If you're standing on a biblical world and life view, if Christ is at the center, you have every reason for that emotional appeal to work on you.

Because what do we believe from a Christian worldview? That rape is absolutely, objectively wrong and evil. As a matter of fact, in God's law, God so values a life of the woman that in what he said in the Old Testament was that it's worthy of a death penalty.

That's how much God values a woman in the Old Testament is he says that rape is objectively evil and wrong. And it's so awful, so horrendous that justice is capital punishment. That's how when we approach this question, Christians stand.

We stand on the word of God and his revelation and his testimony. Rape is objectively, morally evil. Now, the unbeliever who abandons Christ, who abandons God's word, ultimately has no epistemological foundation for arguing that rape is wrong at all.

They're borrowing from Christ in order to argue against life. God says, those who hate me love death. And that's what you get with the issue of abortion. We hate God first, and then we start loving death.

We love all kinds of death. We love death, the death of the family. We talk about homosexuality, homosexual marriage. We love the death of the family. We love the death of our children. We love the death of social institutions.

We love the death of economics. We just love death when we abandon God. But think about that argument just as an epistemological foundation. If we don't use the word of God as a foundation to argue against the culture of death, if our epistemological foundation is found elsewhere as the pro-life movement often does today, instead of the word of God rooted there, how do we argue against the person who says, what if she was raped?

I say this, I'm a Christian. I stand in the word of God. I know why I believe that rape is absolutely, objectively, morally evil, but why do you? What I say to them when they bring it up is, what's wrong with rape?

Again, I know why I think it's wrong, but why do you think that it's wrong? And of course, the humanists, the secularists, the atheists today, the person who embraces that culture and worldview says, what do you mean?

What's wrong with rape? Do I need to really spell this out for you? Rape? Well, rape is a violation of another person's body. Rape is a violation of a person's own body. You don't have a right to do things to someone's body.

It's not your body, it's their body. You have no right to do that. It's a violation of their own person, their body. And I would say, thank you for that very pro-life argument, because what's in the womb of the mother is not the body of the mother.

And those presuppositions that you have no right to do something to somebody's body like that are the very things that are happening in abortion. But watch this. It goes deeper than that. It's not just answering the fool according to their folly, which is what it is, Proverbs 26, 4 through 5, but it's also not answering the fool according to their folly.

That is to say, I'm standing on the word of God in the biblical world as my foundation to argue against that emotional appeal. You see, I feel the weight of the argument. What if she was raped? Because I think rape is such a horrific and immoral and awful, evil thing.

How do I know that it is? It's just not on my say-so. It's because God has defined. This person is in the image of God. Love does no harm to its neighbor. God has called rape immoral. He says that it's worthy of punishment and death.

That's how I know that rape is objectively morally evil and wrong. And you're using a Christian worldview to argue against me, but you don't have any basis to use those tools if you use your standards of epistemology in your worldview.

From an atheistic or secularist worldview, rape isn't wrong. It's just something that happens in this cosmically indifferent universe. Just something that bags of biological stuff and protoplasm in this godless universe do.

Don't forget, in the atheist perspective or the secularist perspective, if you abandon the word of God, there's no justice ahead of any of us. It's only sky above us. There's no justice ahead of us, behind us, below us, around us.

There's no objective standards. There's no prescriptions. There's just what is. Time and chance universe. As Dr. Bonson used to say, quoting Shakespeare, it's sound and fury signifying nothing. It's just nothing.

It's stuff moving around. Why are we complaining when one bag of stuff runs into another bag of stuff? It may be painful. It may affect somebody's nervous system, but it's not evil. But you see, here's what's important.

We can't argue against that emotional appeal by abandoning the word of God and the fact that we ultimately should say as Christians, without shame, I believe what I believe about the unborn, not because of my own feelings and perspective and history and tradition, but I believe it on the basis of the word of the living God.

God calls this evil, immoral, and he commands us to repent and turn to Christ, to flee to him for life, forgiveness, and peace. You see, I would say that we need to fight against this culture of death all over the world, not with pragmatism, not with traditional arguments in terms of, well, this is our Western tradition, family, you know, children, all those things.