Part 12: The Death of a Child
-
God’s Idea of Personhood.
Who you are as a “person” is infinitely important to God. God shaped you from creation in a unique matching of genes contributed by two other totally unique persons. God’s love of variety is seen in no more complex and interesting way than in the creation and formation of human personality.
But the real value of your “personhood” is not in who you are now, but in who you will become. Further, you must stop seeing the value of your “personhood” in only temporal terms based on your present existence as an earth-bound personality. The “you” who exists now is not the “you” who will exist later. Yet, there is a direct link between the “you” of now and the “you” of then. It is that link or bridge that gives both pre-natal and post-natal life its sacred quality.
The bridge is this: our present limited personality is the raw, unrefined material God uses to implant his God-Life in us. The feature most distinguishing Christianity from other world or religious views is this: we are not who we appear to be in these human bodies. We are spiritual children of an unseen God. Our bodies and our earthly personalities, as reflected in these physical bodies, are both transitory and transitional. Most intriguing about Christianity is that these transitional bodies carry the God-Spirit in community, and each personality is like a living cell in a living body, and that together, this wonderful orchestration of personalities form the Person of God again incarnate on earth. These are profound and difficult concepts but they are the cornerstones of our faith.
The Christian focus then not who we are, but who we are becoming. Further, the Christian focus is not on becoming something in this world, just to please the standards of this world, and then to die, but to become someone of eternal significance in the eternal plan of God. By God’s design, and because we are created in His image, our personalities can be healthy only by being in “right relationship” with God and one another. Our “person” status is inextricably dependent on our relationship with God and our relationships with other people. These relationships provide the life opportunities and lessons we need to move to the next level of our “personality” growth: eternal life with God.
So, we think we are “persons” for this world, and its purposes, but as we “step across the line” to receive a radically new life through Faith in the Promises and Person of Jesus, we discover something different happening in us: we are not just improving our old personalities, we are developing a radically new and different personality. This different personality is one meant to operate at a level completely beyond the concerns and rewards of this world. We sense we are moving toward a completely different world. This new world requires radically different personalities. These new personalities will be equipped to love, work, and live at levels unimaginable to our present experience.
Christians do not see the body as separate from the spiritual, or even in conflict with the spiritual. The body is not the source of sin that impedes a sinless spirit. Both body and spirit are stricken. But it is also true that both our body and our soul continue to bear the original imprint of the living God who created us. The body has a critical and irreducible part in our redemption and restoration as spiritual beings. Specifically, our new life in Christ takes place within and through our bodies. Even our sanctification occurs through our bodies as we surrender our physical passions to the control of the Holy Spirit. Our bodies are not just metaphorically the temples of the Holy Spirit. They are literally the sacred vehicles of our Christ identity as it grows in fullness and perfection on this earth.
God has deemed (and redeemed) these broken and dying bodies and these distorted and limited personalities to be worthy as the raw material from which our God natures are formed. God takes the old, and from it, makes something truly new, as only He can do. For this reason, the human body, the human mind, the human heart, and the human spirit are sacred. When we dishonor our bodies by sin, whether by overwork, overeating, starvation diets, fornication, addictions, violence and abortion, we offend the very image of our Creator, and defile the dwelling place of the Holy Spirit. For this reason, abortion is an abomination before God, and grieves Him deeply.
Pre-natal life then carries the God imprint. It follows that because God is inherently in relationship by His triune and creative nature, pre-natal life also exists in relationship. Initially, pre-natal life is foremost in relationship to its mother, and the relationship is primarily biological. With each month of pregnancy, the relationship assumes new areas of awareness and connection, particularly on the part of the mother whose mind and emotions connect to the developing human life within her.
We often think only of the mother supporting the development of the fetus, and fail to see that the fetus also supports the development of the mother. From the beginning, changes in personality occur all around the new biological human life that has come into the world. As the fetus grows, is born, and matures, the child’s relationships shape not only the child, but also the “persons” in relationship with the child. This “shaping” is part of God’s larger plan for the use of earth-based personality to create an entirely new God-centered personality. For this reason, abortion is grievously wrong because it destroys not only the fetal human life, but also all the other personal relationships that would have been opportunities for transformation had he or she lived.
