Frank Schaeffer's culpability, and ours

The logic goes like this: If you call abortion murder you are now an accomplice to homicide. This is because, according to Francis Schaeffer's renegade son Frank, the logical conclusion of such talk is violence against abortionists like George Tiller. Here rests the case of the pro-abortion movement in all its irrational glory. It's not killing to puncture the base of an infant's skull in order to suck out his brains, but calling such an act murder is malicious and irresponsible.

The non-Christian can be forgiven for acceding to Schaeffer's rhetorical sleight of hand, even if Schaeffer himself ought to know better. The beautiful scandal of the Christian faith is precisely that it rejects what is logical to men like Schaeffer. Christian churches taught from the earliest days that abortion is a vile thing, yet they also taught that we are to love our wicked neighbor, and that to murder him is a terrible sin. While believing that abortion is murder logically leads, in Schaeffer's worldview, to violence, in the proper Christian worldview it leads to grieving, and prayer, and love for victims and perpetrators alike. In fact, the very revelation that drives the Christian to speak out against abortion---that all humans are created in the image of a loving God---is what compels him to resist unlawful violence against even a blood-soaked killer.

This has always been the teaching of the Church, that there are narrow allowances for the taking of life, and that even a lawful killing must be mourned. The man who brutally murdered George Tiller was either poorly taught by the churches he attended or inadequately vigilant against wicked-mindedness, or both. Anyone in the vicinity of Christian teaching ought to learn first and foremost that God is love, and that the chief calling of the Christian is likewise to love and forgive as he is loved and forgiven. Insofar as any of us fails to live this out so that others come to know it, all of us are culpable not only in Tiller's death, but also in all the sin of this world. It's the reason we ought to have perpetually penitent hearts and never hold ourselves above others. In that sense I suppose Schaeffer doesn't go far enough.

Schaeffer, however, purports in his essay to apologize for his part in teaching that violence to stop abortion is a proper Christian response. There seems---to me, at least---to be less penitence in his words, than yet another round of score-settling with his long list of enemies, tinged with a not so subtle effort to sell his books.

But the world is what it is, and perhaps it's too much to expect Frankie Schaeffer to finally grow up and stop trading on his father's name to make a buck. We can congratulate him, at least, on acknowledging that insofar as he advocated violence to stop abortion, he is indeed culpable in George Tiller's murder. But we can also tell him---those of us who hew to the proper Christian teaching on this subject---to speak for himself. This is especially the case now that he advocates in favor of abortion rights while still claiming allegiance to the Christian Church. Most Christians I know believe that poisoning or dismembering an infant in the womb is a sin, just as we believe that unlawful violence is a sin. It's a shame that Schaeffer has set aside one wicked belief only to embrace another.