today. That obviously is going to change from culture to culture. So we’ll look at that next week.
This week the primary focus of the answer to the question, how have people rescued the innocent obeyed the biblical call to rescue the innocent throughout history, including especially the early church fathers, church writers, early church Christians and missionaries throughout history or people throughout cultural crises in history where people have stepped to the forefront to obey the biblical call to put a hedge of protection around those who are most vulnerable. The more acute that vulnerability is, the higher a priority they should be in our list of people that we’re going to prioritize rescuing.
So I will be referencing several quotes from early church writings, but the basic premise here is that from the very earliest times of the New Testament and modern church era, the biblical injunction to rescue and the ethical demands of Scripture to rescue the most vulnerable people have been seen and acted upon by Christians by and large. To the very earliest stages of Christian history, including abortion itself, many people would be a little caught off guard to realize that abortion was happening and was well-known in the early centuries of the Christian church back to the first century itself. In the first century Roman world, infanticide existed. People would give birth to children and if they had any sort of birth defects, they were often put on the city wall to be left and to die of exposure there. Here is a quote from the Didache, an early church writing from what many think were by the second century church fathers or those second in line in apostolic succession in the early church history. Some people even believe that the Didache itself was inspired and should have been included in the historical canonization of Scripture. Of course it was not included, but that’s how reliable these writings were. These were second generation Christians and church leaders who had learned from their fathers who were the twelve apostles and Paul the apostle, learning directly from these guys by living with them. The Didache has one passage that says: o not murder a child by abortion or kill a newborn infant.” So these were babies that were obviously being killed by abortion or exposure in the first century Roman world. The Christians responded by adopting these children, rescuing and collecting them, and personally helping pregnant mothers to figure out ways to have their babies.
Then in the third century we have Augustine, who’s one of my favorite church fathers. He is exposing, if you will, the moral culpability that men have when they perform abortion or fail to rescue from abortion. This is what Augustine wrote: “They provoke women to use poisonous drugs to secure barrenness or else, if unsuccessful in this, to murder the unborn child.” So that’s Augustine speaking out against the practice of using drugs to create infertility because they don’t want to have babies or to use drugs or any other means to harm an unborn child in the womb. So that’s in the third century, Augustine is speaking out about that. In the fifth century Justinian taught the finder of the baby (those who go out and look for babies to be rescued from exposure) is to provide Christian care and compassion. They may be adopted just as we were adopted into the kingdom of grace. An amazing thing there. So Justinian is actually referencing the first chapter of Ephesians in verse five, when it says: “In love, He predestined us for adoption to Himself as sons through Jesus Christ.” In other words, adoption was not plan B for God. It’s not if all else fails, you can adopt. It was plan A for God, for him to adopt us out of His great love for us into His family through Jesus Christ. Incidentally there are places around the world where adoption is really disdained or looked down upon as second rate parenting, or this is something that you would do only if there was no possibility that you could have children of your own. Because biological children, in this line of thinking, are obviously better, are obviously more loved, are obviously more well-adjusted. And those things we know are not true. We know that there are many adopted children who find themselves cherished and prized, on the same plane with biological children.
In China, where John and I have done so much work, the translators of the Bible actually chose to not include the word adoption in the most accepted Chinese versions or translations of Scripture. They chose to use the word or phrase “treated as sons” rather than in place of what should be translated as adoption. So it would have said: “He predestined us to be treated as sons through Jesus Christ.” But there’s a difference between being treated as a son and actually being adopted, officially and legally adopted. Our lamentation for the people who chose to translate the word adoption out of the Chinese Scriptures was that even though the Chinese culture looked down on adoption, we don’t change what the Scripture says in order to accommodate the shortcomings of the culture. So we would really challenge future Chinese translationists to be true to the word adoption since it is close to the heart of God. And it is obviously not plan B from Ephesians 1:5. Adoption is necessary to eradicate abortion because some mothers just are not ready to parent.
During the Reformation in the 16th century, John Calvin wrote this: “Whether declaring God’s truth against Satan’s falsehoods, or in taking up the protection of the good and innocent, we must undergo the offenses and hatred of the world, which may imperil either our life, our fortunes, or our honor.” What John Calvin is saying is that whatever it takes, we will obey the ethical demands of Scripture to protect the poor and the innocent.
Then moving on again into the 19th and 20th century, you find more of the examples that we’re going to be giving here along the lines of missionary history. Many of us are familiar with the great stories of William Carey who was the pioneer missionary in India and did so much work to change the laws of sati, which was the wife burning ritual, when a man died, his wife was either burned on the funeral pyre with him, or was expected in some cultures and places to leap into the fire and commit suicide as a means of devotion. William Carey worked within the law to outlaw this. He also worked within the law to outlaw babies being thrown into the Ganges River as a means of sacrifice to Hindu gods. It was very common and he worked to get that changed. It was one of the ways that he stood in the protection of human life.
Mary Slessor was an early missionary in Nigeria. In that country, if someone got pregnant, they knew where that baby came from. But the thinking in the Nigerian culture and the tribal cultural mind during that time was if a woman got pregnant with twins, there was a possibility that one of those is my twin, but the other one may be the offspring of a demon, or it may be some sort of curse. And you don’t know which is which. So twins were ritualistically during that time left exposed in or outside the villages in the surrounding jungles or forests to die because no one knew which was the legitimate twin in their mind. Mary Slessor worked to adopt and to collect a lot of those babies. She, along with a lot of the women that she worked with in her mission organization, literally and legally adopted over 120 babies as a means of rescuing them from exposure. They would go out and listen for the cries in the wilderness and collect these babies.
Christians, as we discussed in my last installment of this video, invented orphanages, hospitals, and created adoption in every place of need in the world. Christians helped the slaves escape in the United States through the establishment and the running of the Underground Railroad. During the Boxer Rebellion, the Boxer Uprising in China in the early 19th century, the Christians hid Christian missionaries so that they wouldn’t be killed by the Boxers. We know a lot of stories of Christians who came to the forefront to rescue Jews during the Holocaust of Nazi Germany, such as Corrie ten Boom, and just multiple stories of rescue, many of which were led by Christians who were standing by the ethical and biblical demand to rescue the innocent, wherever the innocent may be found, wherever the vulnerable and the most threatened may be found.
This is part of your history, Christian, from the earliest part of Christianity in the New Testament era until today. Christians have done whatever it takes to find, protect and rescue innocent human life because we know that that is what God desires for all of us. From abortion to infanticide to gendercide and all the way to the other end of the equation throughout the end of life, even into elder care and hospice care. All of these things were invented by Christians to protect human life. Enjoy, live, revel in your history, Christian. Join in the rescue movement.
Today, there is no better place to join in the rescue movement, as far as vulnerable people being targeted for extinction, than in the anti-abortion movement, in the pro-life movement. Join the pro-life movement. Join us in prayer. Join us in following the PassionLife newsletters. Join us by perusing the information on the PassionLife website. Get involved in rescuing the innocent because this is what God has expected and used his people to do all throughout history.