The recent General Assembly voted to give a mission award to the Religious Coalition for Reproductive Choice (RCRC), an interfaith coalition whose mission is to support abortion rights. One of their basic arguments is that religion and the pro-life position are not synonymous. A woman’s choice to abort her baby can be a religious and deeply spiritual decision.

Finding our own truth
As if to emphasize this point, the organization offers a brochure titled "Abortion: Finding Your Own Truth." In it they note that people have "different names for their spirituality. One name is God." Others, they say include "Greater Truth, Higher Power, Voice Within, Inner Light...." You find your voice of truth inside you and if "you step away from your truth you experience the pain of self betrayal." Following your inner sense of truth is not selfishness, the brochure counsels; rather, it is "an act of caring about yourself and others."

The road to finding our own truth
John Calvin agrees with the notion that each of us has a spirituality to which we look for guidance. He wrote in the Institutes that God has planted in each of us "a seed of religion" that makes believers—in some sense—of all of us. Ah, but, says Calvin, nurturing that seed is rare, and slipping into "superstition" is very easy for us humans. Rather than knowing God as he is and as he reveals himself to us, we have the tendency to "imagine him as [we] have fashioned him in [our] own presumption." This, Calvin would say, is the road to "finding your own truth." It is quite the opposite of discovering the Truth and of knowing God.

Challenging our own truth
There is no doubt that the "pro-choice" religious approach to abortion is a deeply spiritual approach. But it is not a Christian approach to finding the truth on abortion. To do that, we reformed people know that we have to search for the truth in God’s revelation of himself and his will. And then we have to be willing to submit to what we find there. And we have to be willing to allow that Word of God to challenge our own truth.

Facing the challenge of truth in our denomination, corporately and personally
In our denomination, this search for revealed truth in relation to abortion needs to be done at two levels. We currently have a policy on abortion that both affirms and denies what God’s Word says. That is how those who bear the name Christian find a way to retain the trappings of Christianity while finding new ways to interpret "the faith once delivered to the saints" as it applies to moral issues. Our denomination’s abortion policy is filled with assertions about what we believe. Each of those assertions ought to be tested against Scripture. Only in that way will we know if we have a policy faithful to our Lord. This is important not only to our own theological integrity but also because this policy is the church’s instructional voice to the flock of God. And our children are growing up in the instruction of that policy.

But on an even more serious level, each of our members—before they face a crisis pregnancy—needs to be encouraged to test his or her own beliefs about abortion with a search of the Scriptures.

The truth about abortion does not lie in a Religious Coalition’s "Inner Voice." It lies in the voice of God from the outside that has come to us in his Word and in the person of our Savior.