How to Teach a Basic Pro-Life Apologetics Seminar [Scott]

I've been asked many times how to structure a basic pro-life training seminar for Christians. I suggest a time frame of two to three hours, with breaks. The goal is to equip Christians to engage friends with a winsome and persuasive defense of the pro-life view. I'll be teaching this same material to staff members at For Faith and Family tomorrow in Nashville. I've included links to better explain each point.

Title: Pro-Life 101--Making a Case for Life

Suggested Text: The Case for Life: Equipping Christians to Engage the Culture (Crossway, 2009)

Thesis: To be an effective pro-life apologist, you must meet 3 key objectives:

1) You must simplify the issue
2) You must make a persuasive case using science and philosophy
3) You must handle objections graciously and incisively

I. Effective pro-life apologists simplify the issue by focusing the debate on one question, What is the unobrn?

A. Example: Daddy can I kill this? (Koukl) That depends: What is it?
B. Debate w/ Nadine Strossen: “I agree, IF. If What?
C. Trot out a toddler for objections based on privacy, trusting women, poverty, etc.
D. Visuals: Use them to awaken moral intuitions, but use them wisely.


II. Effective pro-life apologists make a persuasive case for the lives of the unborn w/ science and philosophy.

A. Science: From the beginning, the unborn are distinct, living, and whole human beings.

1. Objections and replies:

a. Twining
b. Miscarriages
c. Women don’t grieve
d. Burning Research lab
e. Sperm and egg are alive.

2. More examples that demonstrate scientific support for the pro-life view:

a. Richard Stith: Construct versus develop
b. Maureen Condic: Corpses versus embryos

B. Philosophy: There is no essential difference between the embryo you once were and the adult you are today that would justify killing you at that earlier stage of development

1. SLED test
2. Objection: “The embryo is not self-aware”
3. Replies to objection:

a. Why is some development needed?
b. Newborns aren’t self-aware until several weeks after birth—may we kill them?
c. Can’t account for human equality

4. Natural rights versus positive (legal) ones
5. Human exceptionalism: Is it evil? (Michael Vick)
6. The “Religion” objection--Why it fails:

a. Non-believers can recognize humanity of unborn
b. What do you mean by “religious?”
c. The pro-life view is inherently religious, but no more so than alternative explanations
d. Just because a view is grounded in religion doesn’t mean it can only be defended that way
e. Why should anyone suppose religious views don’t count as real knowledge? The Declaration of Independence, Martin Luther King’s Letter from the Birmingham Jail, and Lincoln’s 2nd Inugural Address all have their roots in the Biblical concept of Imago Dei.

III. Effective pro-life apologists answer objections persuasively.

A. Columbo Tactic (Koukl)
B. The 3 Columbo questions:

1. What do you mean by that?
2. How did you come to that conclusion?
3. Have you considered the implications of your view?

C. Eight bad ways people argue about abortion:

1. They assume the unborn are not human:

a. Appeals to the dangers of back-alley abortions
b. Appeals to privacy, choice, and trusting women
c. Appeals to not forcing morality

2. They assert rather than argue:

a. Women have a right to choose
b. The unborn are not self-aware (hidden premise: Self-awareness is value-giving.)

3. They attack the person rather than the argument:

a. You have no right to oppose abortion unless you adopt.
b. You men can’t get pregnant, so shut up about abortion!

(Bottom line: Even if these assertions are true, they do nothing to refute the evidence that the unborn are fully human. Can the fetus be human even if I’m a man?)

4. They confuse moral claims with preference ones--relativism’s 3 fatal flaws:

a. Relativism self-destructs
b. Relativism can’t say why anything is right or wrong, including intolerance
c. Relativism can’t live with it’s own rule

5. They advance a radical bodily rights theory:

a. The alleged parallels are not parallel: Are we to assume that a mother has no more duty to her own child than she does a total stranger who is unnaturally hooked up to her?
b. The bodily rights view justifies killing newborns through neglect or abandonment

6. They twist Scripture:

a. Faulty argument from silence: Ask, "Are you saying that whatever the Bible doesn't condemn it condones?
b. There's a reason for the Bible's silence on abortion: The Hebrews of the OT and the Christians of the NT were not tempted to kill their unborn offspring.

7. They confuse contingent evils with absolute evils. To be worse than abortion, how bad would an unjust war have to be?

8. They hide behind the hard cases

A short tribute... [Megan]

To the man who summed up the cohesiveness and beauty of the Christian worldview with: "I believe in Christianity as I believe the sun has risen; not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else."
To the man who stressed the importance of reason-tempered passions, and who challenged educators lest they create "Men Without Chests" and lead to the abolition of the very thing that sets human beings apart.
To the man who cut through the excess to so wonderfully discuss "Mere Christianity."
And someone who understood and beautifully expressed to the best of human ability "The Weight of Glory."
Thank you for sharing with us your God-given talent and wisdom.
Happy Birthday to C.S. Lewis, on whose shoulders I stand as I make a case for the truth of Christianity and human value in this world.

What We Read at Our Thanksgiving Table [Scott]

Note: Italics read by all present. The rest is read by me. The wording is not my own. Source is unknown.


Holy and righteous God, we confess that like Isaiah, we are a people of unclean lips. But it is not only unclean lips we possess. We are people with unclean hands and unclean hearts. We have broken your law times without number, and are guilty of pride, unbelief, self-centeredness and idolatry. Affect our hearts with the severity of our sin and the glory of your righteousness as we now acknowledge our sins in your holy presence.

We have had other gods before you.

We have worshipped and served the creature rather than the creator. We have sought satisfaction in this world’s pleasures rather than in You. We have loved to praise our own glory more than yours.

We have taken your name in vain.

We have prayed religious prayers to impress others. We have uttered your name countless times without reverence or love. We have listened to others use your name in vain without grieving.

We have murdered in our hearts.

We have often destroyed our neighbor with our tongues. We have been quick to uncharitably judge others. We have considered revenge when we were sinned against.

We have committed adultery with our eyes.

We have loved temptation rather than fighting it. We have lusted after unlawful and immoral pleasures. We have justified our lusts by using the world as our standard.

We have stolen what is not ours and coveted what belongs to others.

Our lives overflow with discontent, ungratefulness, and envy. We have complained in the midst of Your abundant provision. We have sought to exalt ourselves through owning more.

We have lied to you and to others.

We have told distorted truths, half-truths, and untruths. We have despised the truth to make ourselves look better. Even in our confession, we look for ways to hide our guilt. O God, we have sinned against your mercy times without number. We are ashamed to lift up our faces before you, for our iniquities have gone over our heads.

If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, O Lord, who could stand?

How shall we answer you? We lay our hands on our mouths. We have no answer to your righteous wrath and just judgment.

We have no answer. But God Himself has mercifully provided one for us. "All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and the Lord has laid on him the iniquity of us all.” (Is. 53:6)

“”God made Him who had no sin to be sin for us, so that in Him we might become the righteousness of God.” (I Cor. 5:21)

“Therefore, having been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ….You see, at just the right time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for the ungodly. Very rarely will anyone die for a good man, but God demonstrates his love for us in this: While we were yet sinners, Christ died for us. Since we have now been justified by his blood, how much more shall we be saved from God’s wrath through Him! (Romans 5: 1, 6-9 parapharased)

Mildred Jefferson [Bob]

From National Review's The Week:

When Mildred Jefferson graduated from Harvard Medical School in 1951 -- the first black woman to do so -- she took the Hippocratic Oath. Jefferson believed in it, and believed it prohibited the taking of life, so two decades later, when the AMA declared that physicians could ethically perform abortions, she became one of the founders of the National Right to Life Committee. She remained active in NRLC and other pro-life groups until her death on October 15, 2010.

A surgeon, she was renowned for her energy, her stirring oratory, and her tireless dedication to the cause. Perhaps her most concise explanation of why she felt so strongly came in a 2003 article:

"I am not willing to stand aside and allow this concept of expendable human lives to turn this great land of ours into just another exclusive reservation where only the perfect, the privileged and the planned have a right to live."

When she testified before Congress in 1981 about a pro-life bill sponsored by Jesse Helms and Henry Hyde, Jefferson was no less blunt:

"With the obstetrician and mother becoming the worst enemy of the child and the pediatrician becoming the assassin for the family, the state must be enabled to protect the life of the child, born and unborn."

RIP ...

Late-term Abortion [Elizabeth]

Check out this article in The Washington Post about the new late-term abortion clinics planned in D.C. and Iowa.

Important Pro-Life Training Links [Scott]

My advanced pro-life apologetics course for M.A. students (at Biola University) is now on YouTube. The 8 sessions are featured there. Take your pick. The extended notes for the seminar are here.

Bob Perry of the LTI speaking team will be featured on the nationally syndicated "Bible Answer Man" program tomorrow. Listen here.

Rich Poupard of the LTI speaking team was featured on the "Bible Answer Man" program last Thursday discussing Self-Esteem from a Scalpel. Powerful stuff. (Rich is interviewed begining at the 21 minute mark.)

Meanwhile, LTI staffers Jay Watts and Megan Almon continue providing worldview training to students in the Atlanta area.

If you haven't considered supporting our efforts to equip pro-lifers, please do! You can make a real difference by going here.

SK

Real tests aren't taken in classrooms [Megan]

The tests were passed into trembling hands on Monday (Nov. 1) as the Christian worldview students Jay and I teach on a weekly basis took their first look at one of two exams they take in the course of the semester. This exam was drawn from the first four chapters of Kenneth Samples' book, A World of Difference, which lay out the components that make up this thing we call a "worldview."
The students needn't have trembled. Though they have found the material challenging, they were more than adequately familiar with what we expected from them. We wanted them familiar with the terms, terms like "fallacy," "law of non-contradiction," "epistemology and ontology," "ad hominem," and others. In no way did we expect them to be able to explain these in full, but as we move forward in laying out the Christian worldview, then comparing it to others, we wanted the students to have a framework in place to work with. When I or Jay say(s), "theology," we expect them to automatically think, "study of God." For now, that's enough.
Their intimidation is suitable in a way, however. Though they don't need to feel it to such a degree as far as our expectations go for the class, anyone who begins to study our infinite Sovereign should feel a certain amount of reverent intimidation. Let's face it — given our limited capacities and finite natures, a little mystery is to be expected. On those grounds, I for one am encouraged that our students seem to recognize that.
Furthermore, the kind of thinking the students are doing in this class is new to many of them, and therefore challenging. To make decisions in the course of a given day is one matter; to understand the logical processes by which those decisions are made is something else entirely. In some ways, it is a backwards type of learning, but a type of learning more of us need to undertake.
As toddlers begin communicating in sentences, they take for granted the structure and components of the sentences they're using, which is probably why school-age language arts classes are frustrating to some. But there is something enriching about learning subjects and predicates, nouns and adjectives, verbs and adverbs that makes young students who grasp those concepts better communicators. The best writers out there use the rules of sentence-making to their advantages, and we the readers enjoy the fruits of their mastery.
Likewise, as our students have learned, everyone has a worldview — everyone sees reality in a certain way. Most people take their respective worldview for granted. They continue navigating life with no knowledge of the components of their worldview, and unable to ascertain reasonably whether their worldview corresponds with reality (aside from the occasional experience that forces a shift in ideas, as when someone who believes humans can sprout wings and fly jumps from a wall only to meet gravity face to face). But as our students have begun to understand the components, the working categories by which they can actually think about their worldview and its reasonableness, they — like writers who masterfully use sentences to express ideas — become able to use their worldview as a tool by which they navigate life. An intact Christian worldview makes sense of the world. As C.S. Lewis said of the Christian worldview, "I believe in Christianity as I believe the Sun has risen, not only because I see it but because by it I see everything else."
As far as the test goes, the grades were overall a success. Several students received "A"s, with others trailing closely. In the remaining months we have with these students, it is our hope that they are able to pass the tests that matter. Living life as a thinking believer. Not shaken to the core when their ideas are challenged, but meeting that challenge face-to-face with reasoning skills and pointed questions. Not afraid to speak truth when lies are raised against the knowledge of God. Courageous — and firmly grounded — enough to stand for victims in the face of injustice, especially when it comes to their unborn neighbors. Turning toward God, whose Holy Spirit, our Comforter, comes "with power" in the midst of suffering. Raising up strong leaders to come after them until Christ returns.
As they receive their graded tests next week, I hope they give their grades a passing glance, and chalk up their success as one small victory in the bigger picture.