NT Wright and the Sensitive Topic

In Which I Take Apart the Clip That Is Making the Rounds

File: Juliaan de Vriendt - Suffer the Little Children come to Me.jpg - Wikimedia Commons

I seriously want to weigh in on the Fuller thing which is so quickly slipping into the mists of internet time, but I can’t possibly pass up the moment that is upon us now, in which noted biblical scholar and Anglican bishop, NT Wright, talking to Michael Bird who is also a scholar, though one who has said increasingly weird and strange things about God and the Bible, together fall into a complete muddle of biblical and theological contradictions on the subject of abortion.

The whole thing is on YouTube, the first ten of about 30 minutes, if you want to give it a listen for context and such like:

The three-minute clip going around on X, put together by Protestia, pretty well covers the substance. It is to Protestia that we owe an enormous debt of gratitude for transcribing the bally thing, because I myself wasn’t up for it.

Let’s labor through this wreck of a doctrinal Hesperus, because why not? It’s Tuesday and the sun is shining. The peonies are about to bloom. We don’t want to wander about in the garden, crushing snails and ripping out overgrown weeds. We don’t want to putter around in a world of sweetness and light. No, we want to continually grind on about one of the easiest moral considerations in the whole course of human history. Should a woman do her child in before it is born? The answer, on every level, should be a cheerful and unapologetic “no.” To do the child in before it is born cuts against reason, decency, intuition, human feeling, divine judgment, and, most of all, love. And the fact that so many people find the “question” “difficult” just shows you how far Western society has slid into the gutter of historically notorious civilizational failure.

Let’s do our best to work through what His Grace, the Right Reverend Doctor Wright, or, as everyone is calling him online, “NT Wrong,” has to say on the subject. After declaring it to be very “difficult,” he explains why:

There are many, many cases where it is about the mother’s health versus the health of the child or whatever. And particularly that, as you cited, in cases of rape or in cases of incest, there may be a very, very strong argument for saying this ought never to have happened. And with sorrow, because we do not want to do this in principle, but with sorrow and a bit of shame, the best thing to do is as soon as possible to terminate this pregnancy.

Now, I’ve seen the debates, I’ve read books about the debates as to at what point it’s okay or at what point it becomes not okay. And I know that in my own country, people have pushed for the legislation to be allowed to say right up to the moment before the woman is ready to give birth, that if they decide for whatever reason on an abortion, then that’s okay. And that I find not only wrong but repulsive.

Protestia very kindly left out the contemptuous dig about “Americans” being exceedingly preoccupied by this issue. Wright didn’t elaborate upon his feelings as to why it is bad that Americans have been hotted up about this for forty or fifty years, but I don’t want to gloss over the contempt. I think it is pretty interesting that the person sending in the question to the podcast “Ask NT Wright Anything” was from Germany, and Wright himself admits that the UK has a movement to allow late-term abortion, which he finds “repulsive.”

Which is to say, at least we over here on this side of the Atlantic passionately and often angrily debated the moral travesty of abortion for four decades and then managed to make a tiny step in the other direction with the overturning of Roe and pushing everything back to the states, while over there, apparently, some are hoping to make the murder the unborn days or hours before they are born the law of the land and there doesn’t seem much of anything to do about it because those who should have been most concerned—clerics in God’s Holy Church—don’t want to be seen doing anything so vulgar as culture warring.

Imagine, Gentle Reader, if the whole church in every place around the world just spoke out that useful word, “No.” Imagine all the people—some people would call me a dreamer—but imagine all the people…living. Imagine all the living people if Christians of every kind and in every place had said a hard no to the death of human people before they are born. Elon Musk would have no cause trying to convince random women to have his strangely numbered children in order to repopulate the planet.

Of course, I don’t mean to blame Christians. I’m not blaming them. I think what I’m sad about is how few Christians there have been over the last century in the hierarchies of some of the West’s oldest Ecclesiastical Efforts. What a tragedy. Anyway, we carry on:

At the same time, there may be certain exceptions of which severe deformity might be one, of which certainly incest and rape would be others, and in those cases I would say ‘the sooner the better’ because at a certain point -and I am not medically qualified to say at what point I would draw a line- then this is a viable human being that should then be cherished.

What a terrible muddle. Let’s try to tease apart this tangled ball of logical threads. So, for Wright, it would be a good idea to do in a child who will have some “deformity.” The example he gave was of a relative who had had Rubella, which could have caused a “deformity.” This “deformity” was unspecified and lightly passed over in favor of the “mental health” of the mother and the father.

What on earth is Wright suggesting? Was it so stressful to even consider having a child not completely up to his or her mental or physical snuff, who might suffer in some way through his or her life, that to protect themselves from mental anguish they would just do away with the child, at the advice of someone Wright calls a very “Christian” GP? When I’m suffering, thank heaven, my family does not suggest that I just end it all. Can you even imagine? Of course, we can, because in many countries, including the UK, there is a push to do just that. You get rid of people because they are “suffering” or, rather, they feel they might suffer. They have depression, or a bad diagnosis, and they don’t have the social, spiritual, moral, and intellectual support to cope. And then the state health care system comes along and, to save money, hints to them that they might as well end it all. And so—and I don’t need to provide links because this is well documented in many places—even young people are giving up and just dying on purpose.

In the case of a child before it’s born, you couldn’t know. You can only shellack your own lived experience over that of someone else, which really isn’t your right to do.

I do just have to pause here and offer the prescient reminder that every person who has ever lived and will ever live will suffer in some way or, in the words of Dr. Wright, “whatever.” To live is to suffer. We are subject to death because of sin. We sin because we are sinners. Sin is that thing where you are supposed to do something or not do something, and you do it or don’t do it anyway. And the reason you do it or don’t do it is because you want to be God. You were supposed to worship God, but instead you decided to worship yourself. And this is very bad. It is even very difficult. But God has never been content to let his creatures march to their deaths, and so, in time and space, he intervened. He offered himself as a perfect sacrifice on the cross to do away with sin.

Suffering, of course, is awful, but when you are bound to Christ, your pain and anguish are suffused with meaning. The suffering of the Lord Christ spills over redemptively into your own. You are bound up with him and understand what he endured in ways you couldn’t have if you had never suffered. The cross comes more sharply into focus. You feel grateful for what God was willing to endure to restore you to health, wellness, and a good self-care routine.

Thus, for a bishop in God’s Holy Church to let himself off the hook with a breezy, “I’m not an expert,” and this is so very hard, is really appalling. Of all people, he should be able to speak to the value of each life, not only in general, but particularly. A child born with some kind of deformity, a woman abused and violated, the hideous broken trust of the family through sexual sin—in the Christian world, there is an everlasting hope, a redemption for each of these people. All this sin is caught up by Christ on the cross. But no, Area Church Cleric can’t be bothered to say any of this aloud. He’s going to take the cheap way out. We carry on:

So the whole debate about the woman’s rights, it’s very difficult, it’s very hard for a man to talk about this. And indeed one of the problems has been, particularly in the Roman Catholic Church, when women, particularly say a girl who’s been raped or who’s had incest committed on her, then discovering that unmarried men from the Catholic hierarchy are telling her what she can and can’t do…As people now say, the optics of that are pretty bad. That’s part of the same system of male bullying, which we have to avoid like the plague.

Oh, for heaven’s sake. What a completely awful thing to say. Did Dr. Wright mention the word “shame” a little bit ago? Would that he had felt even a modicum of it as he uttered these words on screen to be viewed by hundreds of thousands of people.

Follow me closely here—it is the job of the church hierarchy to inform all people, no matter the circumstance in which they find themselves, of the Law of God. A cleric who would look at a young woman contemplating ending a life that God has made, that is not hers to take, who would tell her that, because he is a man, he can’t talk about it, that cleric has badly gone astray. My goodness. To call a priest who warns someone off of committing murder a “bully” is so, I mean, I’m having a hard time finding the word I desire. Fatuous at the very least. Going on:

However, having said that, I do think that that sense of respect for God’s creation in all its rich variety is the primary starting point, even if we then have to say with sorrow and a certain sense of this is the least worst option in this situation that there may be some cases of exceptions. That’s about as far as I can get at the moment. And as I say, I’m very much aware of just how sensitive this topic is politically, sociologically, as well as ethically.

So, I am on the board of a pro-life center in my town. And every other month, I go and sit in a small room with some other Christians of various kinds, and we stare at the numbers and the money and offer some small advice and try to think how to advance the work of encouraging women to consider life—both theirs and the men they’re attached to and the children they may be carrying. And it’s kind of an uphill climb, because, quite recently, there came to be a pill that a woman can swallow and that will be that. She can throw all caution to the wind in the night hours, and, waking up, anxious and regretful, think, oh shoot, and go to a vending machine on her college campus and get that pill and take it without ever talking to the boy, her mom, a doctor, her priest, or even her roommate. And the existence of that pill, among other factors, is making the work of pro-life centers around the country have to consider what they are doing and how they will go on doing it.

But here’s the thing: it’s not a difficult ethical issue. When a man and a woman have sex with each other and the egg and the sperm meet, a new human being comes into the world. That’s how it works. It can’t be seen with the human eye, but it has always been visible to the Divine One. Before the foundation of the world, says God through the Psalmist, I knit you together in your mother’s womb. I made you fearfully and wonderfully. There is no darkness in the cosmos that hides your existence from me. There is nowhere you can go to escape me, says God. You were made, says God, in the very first inkling of creation, in my image.

But then a New Testament scholar, nay, a bishop, comes along and can’t work out the ethics of the thing. Instead of going into the highways and byways to rescue people from the gathering cultural gloom—women, children, men, all of them—he says that it’s too sensitive a topic upon which to speak definitively.

And that, my dears, is why God is spewing the Church of England out of his mouth. May God have mercy on NT Wright and Michael Bird. They’re going to need it.