Presbyterians Pro-Life NEWS
Winter 2004

Sure, there is a certain morality built into natural law. If a child falls into a well, the whole neighborhood will rush to rescue him. But his mother could have legally aborted him, had she chosen, before he was ever born. That’s morality with a kink in it.

Morality can’t be equated with pragmatism, with what works, either, because we have no agreed definition of that "what." If you want to be famous and rich these days, commit a horrendous crime and then write a book about it. That "works" very well and brings lots of rewards, but is that morality?

Certainly morality doesn’t come from following our conscience. As one of my professors used to say, "Sure, follow your conscience. Burn the witches." Conscience gets skewed by the sin that infects us all and falls victim to our selfishness and pride and blindness.

And of course the same can be said about our self-constructed morality. There is lots of talk these days about the fact that we are "moral agents," able to fashion our own right and wrong, able to choose between good and bad actions. That’s often been the argument for giving women the unobstructed right to choose abortion. And so each individual is a law unto herself, and there is no agreed-upon Good to knit us all together into community, and what is moral is entirely relative.

No, the good, the moral, the true must come from beyond us, from One who is untainted by our sinfulness and skewered consciences and kinked reasoning–from the One who made us, who knows what we are and what we are supposed to be, from the One who has a Good planned beyond all human action and who is constantly working to bring about that Good. Morality must come from God, the Creator and Guide of human life.

We may think that God’s definitions for us of what is right and what is wrong are given us only in the form of law. "You shall not kill. You shall not commit adultery. You shall not covet your neighbor’s wife." "A male shall not lie with a male as with a female." And of course the law is helpful. As Paul writes, "if it had not been for the law, I should have not known sin" (Rom. 7:7). The law tells us there is a morality beyond our relativism.

But finally morality stems from living day by day with the God of law and grace, from delighting in his presence and reveling in his love, from tasting his goodness and finding that there pour from his hand gifts so wondrous, so vitalizing, so transforming that life becomes the adventure of growing up into his goodness.

We find such a God only through the Holy Scriptures, through his revelation of himself to Israel and in his Son Jesus Christ. We can’t discover him elsewhere–not in our earthbound experiences, not in our consciences, not in our consciousness raising, not in the world around us—all distorted by sin. But he reveals himself, by the work of his Spirit, through his Word, written and made flesh and proclaimed. And from that Word morality is born, and we know what is Good. "O Israel, O church, taste and see that the Lord is good!"

• Elizabeth Achtemeier, beloved friend of PPL, died on October 25, 2002 in Richmond, VA. Dr. Achtemeier was adjunct professor of Bible and Homiletics at Union Theological Seminary in Richmond, VA. This column first appeared in the PPL News in our Spring, 1996 issue. It is reprinted here by permission of her family.