I’m coming off a long stretch of women confessing abortions to me.  They are confessing because they are scared…and looking for hope.

I know some of you may be thinking that I’m hitting on a bunch of political topics these days.  Yes, I am.  But in this article you will not find photos of unborn children or the usual pro-life message. My thoughts go soul deep.  You will not find guilt-tripping or politics-as-usual because it’s not just usual politics in the lives of women I meet.  It’s personal to them.  They’re frightened because it’s their story and they’re looking for answers to questions.   They’re looking for hope.

I’m writing about this today because good politics arise out of good theology.  If one’s worldview is to be consistent, that is.   Whether your worldview is one that includes God or not, it’s not a cafeteria where you choose some from each group, a knife and a fork, and head to the cashier.   

Presently, the Democratic National Convention is underway in the United States.  Numerous women are scheduled to speak, ostensibly on behalf of American women. 

* * *

They do not speak for me.

They do not speak for me because I hold a well-developed theology on the Image of God.  These women, because of their views, simply cannot speak life to any woman who thinks theologically as I do.

In the previous article, Asking All the Wrong Questions about Discrimination, I outlined the necessity of holding a high view of the Image of God and asserted that this is our way to solving the racial divide.  Likewise, a well-developed understanding of the Image of God ought to inform our views on abortion.

There is a wrong question out there:  Should there be limits on a woman’s right to choose?

There are many reasons this is a wrong question.

1. The first one is grammatical.  “To choose” –a verb—typically needs an object for the sentence or question to make sense.  One needs “to choose” something whether it is a choice to do or not to do, or a choice among alternatives.  The implied object in the question above is abortion.  If the object were different (substitute anything you choose and see for yourself), the whole question changes.  As does the answer.  The meaning and the value given to the object are what determine the rightness of the choice.
2.  Sometimes the word choice just reflects a manner of choice as in “Choose wisely.”  But even Indiana Jones knows the choice is among alternatives (e.g. to drink from the Holy Grail or select a different cup).  The alternatives have consequences, if the choice truly makes any difference.  What are the implied options in the question above?  Choose what?  You know the two answers.  There is no half-life or anything in between.
3. Then, there’s the issue of whether it’s any person’s right to choose.  At present, Roe v Wade has been a turning point, giving a woman a right to choose an abortion because it’s her body in which the baby is formed.  This is the legal premise on which a woman has a choice.  What our wrong question presumes is that we can discriminate in favor of one party.  No wonder it’s a coveted “right” for so many women.  I know some of you will find this offensive, but it’s the same selfishness behind slave owners having liked the choice–the right–to have Negro slaves, even though it would have not been the choice of the person enslaved nor those who sought emancipation for them.  If the object of the question were “to choose gradual eradication of black Americans,” a woman’s right to choose seems significantly less noble and far more horrific, does it not?  Consider this: “Abortion kills more black Americans than the seven leading causes of death combined, says Centers for Disease Control data,” according to published news reports.  BlackDignity.org writes:

In America today, almost as many African-American children are aborted as are born. A black baby is three times more likely to be aborted as a white baby.

“Since 1973, abortion has reduced the black population by over 25 percent. Twice as many African-Americans have died from abortion than have died from AIDS, accidents, violent crimes, cancer, and heart disease combined.”

“80 percent of abortion facilities are located in minority neighborhoods. About 13 percent of American women are black, but they receive over 35 percent of the abortions.”

4.  A fourth reason (and there are many others) that this is a wrong question is that a society without limits, by definition, exhibits anarchy.  There must certainly be limits and laws to keep our society from becoming a lawless place where one person’s right to choose results in the extermination of other people.

Let me say this differently: When a choice involves one class of people’s “right to choose” and results in selective and intentional elimination of another class of people because the powerful choosers have determined that the vulnerable have little or no utility, this is not a social good.

In China, the death toll among girl babies has been astronomical.  According to researchers, this year alone perhaps a million have been aborted and tens of thousands abandoned.  As the BBC captions this photo of a boy, “Boys are considered much more useful than girls” and quoting a Chinese mother, “Boys are best, because they can work.”

Boys have utility.  Girls don’t. 

In America we might do fewer gender-selective abortions, but perceived utility for the chooser is the driving factor nonetheless.

So the debate becomes focused on when life begins. 

If the embryo has fullness of life and a woman were to choose to abort it; if she doesn’t want it to live or be a burden to her, this is no mere choice.  It’s like what’s happening in China.  But if it’s not life, then it’s like removing a wart.  A choice between a woman and her doctor.  It explains why the Supreme Court doesn’t want to weigh in on when life begins because then another person’s choice might come into play.  These people are judges not biologists and sadly, everyone has their own political interests.

I want to tell you my personal journey.  Please consider joining me on the next page to read how it applies to the Right Question about Abortion: 

How well do we see the Image of God in the unborn?”

I can’t tell: am I angry or grieved?  Maybe both.  Both, I suppose, are suitable responses to Discrimination.  In my recent series of Asking All the Wrong Questions, I’ve stated that Good Theology Must Answer Hard Issues…and it does so with the redemption of the Gospel.  It does so with Truth and Love.

In the last few weeks I’ve seen television coverage of the shootings at the Sikh temple in Wisconsin, the carnage at a movie theater in Colorado, Trayvon Martin’s death, Chicago gang shootings, and even an act of violence against the American Family Institute.

I’ve been comparing and contrasting what drives the American curiosity and concern.   It’s not good.  And I’m appalled.

On top of that, out of the blue I’ve encountered people who are unabashed segregationists and separatists who believe that desegregation has only contributed to problems.  Furthermore on TV, we have witnessed an increasing number of self-proclaimed supremacists—and that makes me angry.

What happened to the dream of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.? 

(Click here to listen to the full audio of this powerful speech, excerpted below)

“And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

Regarding that dream, there are those who say, “We’re already there.  We are completely desegregated.  Racial discrimination is a thing of the past.” 

I would disagree.  Rather, I’d say that over and over again, we’ve traded one form of discrimination for another and yet in America, we haven’t really dispensed with any.

It’s why—in a shameless act of indifference—the news media gave a giant yawn over the Sikhs and don’t even blink an eye at the ongoing violence in the City of Chicago, but can’t get enough of Trayvon Martin, the issue of amnesty for illegal immigrants, or throwing down “the race card” whenever it might possibly deflect responsibility from those who don’t want to accept legitimate criticism or when racial guilt or fears of being called the epithet racist might fill in the gap for insufficient qualifications.  No person of color I know wants lower or higher standards set for someone basis skin color alone.  This is at the heart of racial discrimination and it is not good.

Diversity, however, is good!  We see the beauty of human diversity throughout Scripture. 

Plenty of people purportedly want a “color-blind society.”  I want a “color-full society” in which each person’s beauty shines in a biblical kind of diversity.  Yes, with every skin tone, a “color-full” display of moral excellence and accomplishment in advancing truth, love, knowledge, and faith.

But for far too many Americans, this diversity has become diminished in quality, filtered through the lens of racism.  It’s a thin diversity.  And it only goes skin deep. 

If so many people want discrimination to end, why is it still an issue?

Because racism and discrimination sell–that’s my guess.  Perpetuating division sells newspapers, gains fundraisers, secures votes, increases viewership, and employs special interests.  Do we see it in the unwillingness of certain television networks to show political convention speeches—even little soundbytes from these quite eloquent speakers—because they are people of color who believe differently than the stereotype?

That’s discrimination, is it not?

What would Martin Luther King Jr. say about the ongoing trumpeting of our President’s being the “first black President?”  I can only imagine both he and our President would want his legacy to reflect better things than just being born of a darker skin color, as if melanin might constitute his highest and greatest achievement on behalf of the American people.  Celebrate a milestone, yes!  But as one who had a milestone event of my own, rather than rest on that rock forever, I pray for God to use me to change our culture in the best possible ways: stopping evil’s insidious creep, and seeking God’s favor to advance truth and love. A turning point, not a journey’s end.

Discrimination—whether in favor of one or against another—is wrong.  It matters little whether it’s racial or gender discrimination.  If it grieves the heart of God who created this glorious diversity, shouldn’t I be angry or grieved, or both? 

If civil rights marches and media coverage can’t change this problem, how can it be changed?  Good Theology Answers Hard Issues when we see each other through the Gospel’s truth and love.

It clearly has not.  Skin color, race, or ethnicity trumps character in so many ways.  Polls, crime statistics, educational standards, affirmative action, the Census, and an administration that “looks like America”:  these determinations are almost always basis characteristics that are skin deep.

That’s why the Right Question—for changing a culture—is, “How well do we see the Image of God in our fellow man?”

Or as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. dreams, have we ceased judging others—favorably or negatively—by skin color and are we free at last to judge by “the content of their character?”

A deep understanding of the Image of God ought to inform our judgments.  Seeing the Image of God in our fellow man ought to make issues of race disappear.  Let’s go beyond skin deep on the next page.

When my daughter was stillborn in 1998, I learned something: Good Theology Must Answer Hard Issues. No glib word, Christian cliché, or reassuring pat on the back can ever put a new frame around what is bad and make it good, make the hard easy, or turn any wrong into a right.

Good theology meets us in the hard places, in the hard issues, and in the cold hard realities of life.  And it offers the Gospel as an answer.  It offers Compassion in the form of Love.  And it offers Truth.

With that in mind, I want to confess up front that my “Wrong Questions” series began in my mind with the one I’m going to answer today, Asking All the Wrong Questions about Homosexuality.  Over the past 3 months, a daily series of events has kept this issue in front of my eyes.  I know I need to answer it because Good Theology Answers Hard Issues…and it does so with the Gospel’s Truth and Love.

The Gospel enters another person’s pain.

When you’ve been in the waters of deep pain, you are in a unique place to see the pain of others up close and personal.  Many people preach from the glassy-walled observation room.  I preach the Gospel from the deep waters of the ocean of pain.

From the depth of pain, I know the topic of homosexuality hits people in their hearts much like the women-in-ministry debate hits me in the heart. 

For those of us affected by topics in a direct way, it’s not just a theological plank in a platform.  It’s personal.

For the homosexual reading this, I want you to know that I understand.  For you, it’s personal.

Over the course of the past decade, on AllExperts, a few brave souls publicly solicited my view of homosexuality.  The questioners have been sincere and kind—as most homosexuals I know are.  Note, however, that the vast majority of questions I’ve answered were flagged as private—private, because homosexual thoughts and tendencies are a source of deep confusion.  It’s very personal to them.  My answers remain between the questioner, myself and God.  I bring my thoughts about the topic out of the closet today because I have something to say:

The question that I’ve been asked in a hundred different ways is the same, “Who made me homosexual: God or me?”

I’ve grown to see that this is the wrong question.  The right question is “What will be my response?”

“Who made me this way?” is a question designed to affix blame—on God or on self.  But the blame squarely rests with the broken world in which we live.  It’s like my asking, “Who killed my daughter?”  Do I blame God for why this happened…or me?

Pain looks for someone to blame.  The Gospel ministers a response of hope.

I’d like to take this a step deeper as it relates to homosexuality.  If you’d like to see how Christians can understand the difference between the wrong question and the right question, please join me on the next page.

Asking the wrong question “Who can be legally married?” leads us to wrong answers.  Instead, we need to remember the original purpose and definition of marriage being one man and one woman becoming “one flesh” to the glory of God.  God both established and defined marriage.

Society now circumscribes–through a series of written laws–something like marriage, just without God.

The redefinition of marriage began.   

In Part 1 we traced the history of marriage from Bible times to the Middle Ages.  Now we will explore six of the watershed events resulting in the legal code that we see today in Europe and America.

1.  Ironically, the great concern over mutual consent was the first of six pivotal events that determined the course of Western marriage as we know it.  

Mutual consent can be considered pivotal because marriage shifted from a family-endorsed social structure with dual purpose (religious and social) to an individual decision apart from a religious framework or social benefit.  This was not a bad thing since many families arranged marriages for completely political or worldly reasons.  But a shift from community to individual paved the way for future changes.

Mutual consent was an issue because, under Germanic law in the 5^th to 9^th centuries A.D., marriage didn’t require the bride’s consent at all.  The families arranged a Brautkauf or bride-purchase agreement in which the groom consented and the bride was assumed to consent by her family.  Originally, a nuptial pretium (a certain amount of property or money) was contracted as the purchase price given to the father or guardian of the bride-to-be.  Eventually, to combat the idea of a wife as purchased property, the nuptial pretium became a sum given to the bride as her security should her husband die prematurely.

At this point, we’re in the central and late Middle Ages and the Catholic Church altered Germanic marital practice to insist upon direct, free, and fully mutual consent by both parties in the marriage.  To ensure that the union was by mutual consent, the Church established the suggestion that unions be blessed.

A religious blessing became part of the union and occasionally the Catholic Church threatened to excommunicate any persons who married without the blessings of the local priest.  Given that the position of women (prior to the Catholic canonists) was extremely low in Frankish tribes, the mutual consent aspect was a good development.

It took significant time for divorce—common in Germanic law—to be abolished by the spread of Catholicism.  In the Frankish tribes, legal matters (including marriage related issues such as adultery, divorce, etc.) were typically resolved by ordeal–an ordeal being by fire, water, combat, etc.  Eventually a system of compensation—the giving of money to satisfy grievances—was encouraged by the Catholic Church to curb violence and paved the way for the development of the system of indulgences.  For those of you who know Reformation history, the system of indulgences eventually became one of Martin Luther’s hot button issues.

Join me on the next page for the next watershed moment, marriage as a sacrament.

A recent Wall Street Journal article entitled “The Divorcé’s Guide to Marriage” opened with, “Want great marriage advice?  Ask a divorced person.”   I’d say “Ask History.”  After 30 years of marriage to my husband, I’m convinced it has much more to do with understanding what marriage is all about.

These days, the topic of marriage is getting confusing.

In American culture, a war has been escalating over the question, “Who is legally allowed to have something called a marriage?”  But we’re asking the wrong question.

The right question is “What was the original purpose of marriage as an institution?”

I’ve been wondering something for a while now.  Somewhere down the aisle it seems marriage has changed from a sacred institution of God (Genesis chapter 2) to something that courts decide as they subordinate the original religious ideal beneath an increasingly complicated legal code requiring decisions by the U.S. Supreme Court.

It bubbles up from the oddest of places as even the recent Chick-fil-A vs. gay marriage controversy demonstrates.  Why is the definition of marriage so blurred?

In short, sin.  To counteract sin, the Bible outlined a few laws.  But for the past 250 years, we’ve added new laws upon existing laws to deal with problems with applying prior laws.

But what was the original purpose of marriage?

God blessed them and said to them, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground” (Genesis 1:28).

In the beginning, marriage was intended as one man and one woman to be joined as one flesh by God, then blessed by God to be fruitful (literally fertile, hence increase in number); to fill and subdue the earth; and to rule over it all.  God’s design was for the image of God present in both man and woman to be multiplied by length of days and production of offspring.

Somewhere, though, we’ve gone off-track.  In the pages that follow, I will trace the history of marriage.  In Part 2, I will explain how 6 pivotal events have shaped marriage law–for better or for worse.  These 6 watershed moments–some of which represented progress at the time–had unintended consequences as they paved the way to a redefinition of marriage:

1. Mutual Consent
2. Marriage as a Sacrament
3. The Protestant Reformation
4. The Council of Trent
5. The Clandestine Marriage Act of 1753
6. Vatican II

Would you like to learn more about the history of this important institution called marriage?  Join me on the next page.

With the recent Supreme Court’s upholding the constitutionality of the Health Care Law known as Obamacare and the upcoming Independence Day holiday, I’ve been pondering how many pundits are asking and answering the wrong question.  Headlines are everywhere about the government upholding every American’s right to, in this case, health care.

That’s asking and answering the wrong question: “What rights does the government give us?”

Because the truth is the government didn’t come first.  The rights we have date back to our Creator. 

That’s what the Bible says and for those who don’t like the Bible, it’s also what the Declaration of Independence says.  

Significantly drafted by Thomas Jefferson, the same man who took a pair of scissors to his Bible to make a book scrubbed of any supernatural elements, the United States Declaration of Independence was adopted by the Second Continental Congress on July 4, 1776, the anniversary we celebrate as the Fourth of July, Independence Day. The text of the second section of the Declaration of Independence states,

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”

If we take the Bible and the Declaration of Independence to be correct, the government doesn’t give us any rights.  Our Creator does.

So the right question becomes, “What is the purpose of the rights we have?” 

The rights we have are given so that we might freely choose how to live (i.e. whether we will follow God or choose a different way).  The government’s role is not to give any rights whatsoever.  The role of government is to guard and protect our freedom and to preserve those God-given rights that we already have.

• Will we find life with God or without Him?
• Will we enjoy full liberty in Him or apart from Him?
• Will we pursue and find genuine happiness with God or on our own?

It’s part of what makes the United States of America a beautiful place to live.  It is why America is the envy of an oppressed world which yearns for the political freedom to pursue God-given rights.

Would you like to go deeper into the topic of Freedom and Rights? If so, please join me on the page.

This is a trustworthy saying. And I want you to stress these things, so that those who have trusted in God may be careful to devote themselves to doing what is good. These things are excellent and profitable for everyone.  But avoid foolish controversies and genealogies and arguments and quarrels about the law, because these are unprofitable and useless (Titus 3:8-9).

Asking all the wrong questions is an unprofitable and useless endeavor.   Yet, in every wrong question and its wrong answer, people find hills to die on.  Fight to the death is what too many do and we end up bleeding the Body of Christ with words that hurt, wounds that endure, and worthless controversy that the Bible says is harmful, unprofitable, useless, and completely futile.  Why do we do this?

In this first installment of Asking the Wrong Questions, we’ll be considering the wrong question, “Is patriarchy God’s design for women?” 

 The short answer is Yes and No.  Patriarchy is God’s design for all of us, yet not as we practice it in our culture. 

 If you’d like to go deeper, please join me on the next page.