Saturday, May 2, 2009

Perry Robinson on Christology and Abortion

Here is an article by Perry Robinson presenting a christological argument against abortion. It's very interesting.
It is on the christological basis of recapitulation that infants are baptized, since not to baptize them until they reach the 'age of reason' or 'accountability' implies that communion between God and man is impossible at this stage of life. If this principle were pressed into the Incarnation itself, it would mean that Christ only became God subsequently to His conception. Likewise, the Church’s condemnation of abortion is rooted in the recapitulational principle, since this stage of human life was united indivisibly and unconfusedly with God the Word. It is therefore contradictory to maintain at one and the same time that infants cannot be baptized, and yet to argue against abortion on the basis of an abstract principle of the 'sanctity of life' divorced from its Christological basis."
One of the commenters makes a further salient observation:
[T]hat Mary was Theotokos implies that God was united to pre-natal humanity.
So we see (not for the first time) that dogma necessarily affects how we think about other things. Because the Truth is one just as God is one, there cannot be one truth of dogma and another for the baby-killing abortionist.

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