The Biblical Case in Full

A standalone treatise in the series On the Sanctity of Life, Abortifacient Contraception, and the Faithful Care of Christ’s Flock

Everything in this series rests on a single claim, and if that claim is false the whole falls with it: that the child conceived is a human being whom God has made, whom God defends, and whom we may not destroy. This treatise sets out the scriptural case for that claim in full, and it is meant to stand on its own. We have tried to make it not merely a chain of proof-texts but an argument a thoughtful believer can weigh, test, and, if it be of God, rest upon.

We ask one thing of the reader at the outset. Weigh the claim we are actually making, not the one it is easy to argue against. We do not argue that Scripture answers every question modern medicine can pose. We argue something narrower and, we think, unbreakable: that the being who exists from conception is a living human, that God attaches His protection to human life as such, and that no line drawn later than conception can be found in the Bible.

One preliminary word about the ground we choose to stand on, because it decides everything that follows. There are two claims a Christian might defend: that the unborn child is a person, and that he is a human being. These are not the same kind of claim, and we deliberately build on the second. “Human being” is a claim about nature that biology can confirm and that Scripture assumes throughout. “Person” is a claim about status that philosophy and law have defined and redefined at will. We will show, in section 4, why humanity is the surer and older ground. But we say at once that personhood, rightly understood, does not stand over humanity as a higher hurdle to clear. It flows from our humanity. And Scripture, as we shall see, never treats the child in the womb as a mere human organism that has not yet become a someone; it treats him as a someone already. The two claims meet, but the foundation is humanity, and we keep it there on purpose.

1. God is the author and giver of life

The Bible does not begin its account of any human being with that person’s achievements, faculties, or usefulness. It begins with God. He “formed my inward parts” and “knitted me together in my mother’s womb” (Psalm 139:13). His eyes “saw my unformed substance,” and in His book were written all the days “that were formed for me, when as yet there was none of them” (Psalm 139:16). Before the child is anything to us, he is already something to God: known, formed, and counted.

This is why the taking of innocent life is never, in Scripture, merely a wrong against a man. It is an offence against the God whose image the man bears and whose workmanship he is. The shedding of innocent blood is named among the things the LORD hates (Proverbs 6:16–17). It cries out to Him from the ground (Genesis 4:10). It pollutes the land in which it is shed, and no atonement can be made for the land except by the blood of the one who shed it (Numbers 35:33). These are not the terms Scripture uses for property or for tissue. They are the terms it reserves for the killing of persons made by God.

Children in particular are presented as God’s gift and not merely nature’s product. “The LORD gave her conception, and she bore a son” (Ruth 4:13). He opens the womb and He closes it (Genesis 29:31; 1 Samuel 1:5), so that Jacob could ask his wife, “Am I in the place of God, who has withheld from you the fruit of the womb?” (Genesis 30:2). “Children are a heritage from the LORD, the fruit of the womb a reward” (Psalm 127:3). Every conceived child is summoned into being by God — His gift and His handiwork before ever he is ours.

2. Scripture names the conceived child a someone, never a something

The decisive question is not sentiment but identity. What, or who, is present in the womb? Scripture answers with a consistency that is difficult to evade once it is seen: it speaks of the unborn, and even of the just-conceived, as persons — with pronouns, histories, names, and moral standing.

David traces his very self, and his guilt, to the moment of conception: “in sin did my mother conceive me” (Psalm 51:5). Guilt belongs to persons, not to tissue; David does not say sin attached to him at some later stage of development but that he, David, was there to be a sinner from conception. Job reaches back to “the night that said, ‘A man is conceived’” (Job 3:3) — not a potential man, but a man. Of Jacob it is said that even in the womb “he took his brother by the heel” (Hosea 12:3), an act with a name and an agent. And of our Lord, Luke records that He was named “before he was conceived in the womb” (Luke 2:21): the name preceded the conception, and the person named was the same person conceived.

God speaks of knowing persons before they are formed. “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” (Jeremiah 1:5). Mark the word order: God’s knowing of Jeremiah is placed not merely before birth but before forming. His knowledge reaches behind our very form: “Your eyes saw my unformed substance” (Psalm 139:16). He deals with two children as they struggle in one womb, “though they were not yet born and had done nothing either good or bad” (Romans 9:11; Genesis 25:23) — Paul’s whole doctrinal argument turning on the fact that these were two individuals, with an election between them, before either was born.

Consider, further, one witness whose testimony a physician wrote down. Of John the Baptist the angel says he “will be filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb” (Luke 1:15) — not from birth, not from some threshold of development, but from the womb. And Luke shows the fulfilment: when Mary’s greeting reached Elizabeth, “the baby leaped in her womb,” and Elizabeth interprets it herself, “the baby in my womb leaped for joy” (Luke 1:41, 44). The verb is the one Scripture uses for persons rejoicing. More telling still is Luke’s vocabulary. The word he uses for the child in Elizabeth’s womb, brephos, is the very word he uses for the newborn Jesus lying in the manger (Luke 2:12) and for the little children brought to Jesus to be blessed (Luke 18:15). The physician among the evangelists draws no line at birth; his own word for “baby” refuses one, reaching back across the birth canal and forward past it without a change of term. Scripture knows no human being in the womb who is not already a someone.

3. On the objection that this is poetry

The most serious objection to this reading is that much of it is poetry, and that poetry cannot bear the weight of doctrine. We grant the premise in part, and press no line beyond its strength. Where we cite the Psalms and the speeches of Job we grant that the form is poetic. But poetry does not therefore speak falsely, and David’s inspired confession is no less true for being sung.

More to the point, much of the case is not poetry at all. Luke’s record is narrative, written by a physician who tells us he investigated everything carefully (Luke 1:3). Hosea recalls recorded history from Genesis. Paul’s argument from the twins not yet born is close doctrinal reasoning in an epistle (Romans 9:11). Genesis 9:6 is law, delivered in plain command. The poetry adorns and confirms what the history, the law, and the doctrine establish; it is not asked to carry the case alone. The burden lies with those who would draw a later line, and Scripture nowhere draws it for them.

4. Humanity, not personhood, is where God attaches His protection

We must be careful here, because the ground on which this is usually fought was chosen by the other side, and chosen badly. The modern debate asks when “personhood” begins, and offers a shifting list of qualifications — rationality, self-awareness, viability, independence, the capacity to suffer, being wanted. Every one of these has been proposed in earnest, and every one excludes somebody. That is not an accident of the debate; it is the function of the word “person,” which is philosophical and legal, defined and redefined by whoever holds the power to define it.

It is worth pausing on how old and how deadly that function is, and worth stating the history accurately rather than for effect. Great crimes have repeatedly been carried out by men who granted that their victims were human and then withdrew their protection anyway, and they did not always do it in the same way. Sometimes a class of human beings was denied the standing of citizens. Sometimes they were kept unequal before the law, or classed as less than fully human, or as not worth protecting. And in some cases they were denied the status of a person altogether and reduced in law to property — chattels to be owned, valued, and disposed of. The Nuremberg Laws did not assert that Jews were not human beings; they stripped them of standing and rights under the law. The defenders of the Atlantic slave trade did not usually deny that Africans were human; they treated them as goods, and refused them the protection a person is owed. Chief Justice Taney, in Dred Scott, did not rule that the man before him was not a man; he ruled that he was not a citizen within the meaning of the Constitution, “with no rights which the white man was bound to respect.” We do not equate these evils, each of which has its own weight and horror. We name them because the move beneath them is one move: concede the humanity, then make protection depend on some further, invisible qualification, then keep that qualification in the hand of the powerful. It is the abortion argument’s own logic, worn in older clothes.

Scripture stands on different ground, and refuses the whole device:

“Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed, for God made man in his own image.” — Genesis 9:6

The Hebrew is ha’adam: the man, the human being. God does not say whoever sheds the blood of the strong, the conscious, the viable, or the wanted. He says man, and gives as His entire reason that man bears His image. The protection therefore runs exactly as far as humanity runs, and not an inch less. No further qualification may be added by us — and every qualification men have added, they have added in order to justify killing somebody.

So the question is not “when does personhood begin,” for that question has no fixed answer and was never meant to have one. The question is whether the child conceived is a living human being. That question does have an answer, and it is not only Scripture’s. It is the plain finding of biology, given even by those with no religious motive to give it: when more than five thousand academic biologists were asked when a human’s life begins, the great majority affirmed that it begins at fertilisation, and they did so from a sample that described itself overwhelmingly as pro-choice and non-religious.[2] They were answering a question of fact, and it is the answer their discipline requires. If the child conceived is a living human being — and he is — then Genesis 9:6 covers him, and no philosopher’s definition can uncover him. Personhood, whatever it is, follows from that humanity; it does not sit in judgment over it.

5. The image of God is a nature we are, not a capacity we possess

Man alone bears the image of God (Genesis 1:27), and this is the ground of all human worth — not earned by strength or usefulness or by being wanted, but conferred by the Creator. Mark carefully to what that image is tied. Wherever Scripture speaks of the image of God in man, it is tied to our nature and to nothing else. Nowhere do we read that the image consists in a measure of intelligence, a depth of consciousness, a degree of development, or any capacity whatsoever. The qualification is never “man who can reason,” nor “man who can feel,” but simply man. Those capacities may flow from the image; they do not ground it.

And what was never grounded in a characteristic can never be lost with one. The child with Down’s syndrome, the man broken in mind or body, the child newly conceived and hidden from every eye but God’s — each bears the image whole and entire, for the image is not a trait we possess but a nature we are.

It passes to the child in the very act of begetting. As God made Adam in His likeness, so “Adam fathered a son in his own likeness, after his image” (Genesis 5:1, 3). Moses sets these side by side on purpose: as God to Adam, so Adam to Seth. The image is inherited, not achieved — given in our begetting, not attained by our developing. Nor did the fall strip it away. After sin had corrupted every faculty of man, God still grounded the guard upon human blood in that same image (Genesis 9:6), and James forbids us to curse men for the same reason, that they are made in the likeness of God (James 3:9). What sin could not destroy, no disability, deformity, or weakness can diminish.

6. Where Scripture draws the line — and the passages raised against it

Let those who would begin our humanity at some later mark — implantation, a heartbeat, viability, the first breath — show us that line from Scripture. It is not there. The only threshold Scripture knows is conception. Two texts are brought forward more often than any others against this, and both deserve a straight answer, because neither says what is claimed for it.

Exodus 21:22–25, the woman struck in a brawl, is cited to prove that the death of an unborn child warranted only a fine. Look at the Hebrew. The verb is yatsa, “to come out” — the ordinary word for a live birth. Hebrew has perfectly good words for miscarriage, shakol and nephel, and uses them elsewhere (Exodus 23:26; Job 3:16; Ecclesiastes 6:3). Moses did not use them here. What the text describes is a premature delivery: the children come out, and the question that follows is whether harm resulted. Note also that the text does not say “harm to the mother.” It says, without qualification, “if there is harm.” So the law reads: if the child is delivered early and both survive, a fine; if either dies, life for life. Far from proving the unborn worth less, this is the one place in the law where the unborn are named explicitly, and the penalty assigned for the child’s death is capital. Calvin read it exactly so, calling it “almost a monstrous crime” to rob the unborn child “of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy.”[1]

Numbers 5:11–31, the water of bitterness, is now widely cited as a divinely commanded abortion. It is not. The Hebrew says the woman’s “belly shall swell” and her “thigh shall fall away” (naphal yarek); the older English versions render it “thy belly to swell, and thy thigh to rot.” There is in the entire passage no word for child, no word for foetus, no word for pregnancy, and no word for miscarriage. Every one of those must be imported by the translator. And the passage states the opposite outcome plainly: if the woman is innocent, “she shall be free and shall conceive seed” (Numbers 5:28). The blessing set against the curse is the ability to conceive — which tells you what the curse is: not the loss of an existing child, but barrenness. The abortifacient reading is recent, depends on a translator’s supplement rather than the Hebrew, and the sufficient answer is to ask the person raising it to show you the word.

A related objection reaches back into church history and deserves a word here, since it is often produced as a trump card: did not the medieval church teach “delayed ensoulment,” that the soul enters only after forty days? It did entertain such speculation, but the objection mistakes what that tradition was and where it came from. It entered Christian thought not from the Hebrew but from a Greek rendering of Exodus 21 shaped by the embryology of Aristotle, and even while the speculation ran, the church’s practical verdict never moved: the destruction of the embryo was condemned at every stage (Basil: “with us there is no nice enquiry as to its being formed or unformed”). Whatever one thinks of the soul’s timetable, it is God’s secret, and it is beside the point.[3] Our ground is not the soul’s paperwork but the living human creature, made in the image of God. Humanity is the ground; it always was.

7. God defends the weak because they are weak

Someone will still say: but what is such a life? It has barely begun. It owns nothing, can do nothing, knows nothing. Surely so small a thing is a small loss. This is the exact reasoning Scripture forbids, and forbids with a threat:

“Do not rob the poor, because he is poor, or crush the afflicted at the gate, for the LORD will plead their cause and rob of life those who rob them.” — Proverbs 22:22–23

Mark that because. The very weakness that tempts us to take is the thing that rouses God to defend. And who is poorer than a child in the womb, who cannot lift a hand, raise a voice, or summon an advocate to the gate? “Precious is their blood in his sight” (Psalm 72:14). He counted it among the sins of the nations that they “ripped open pregnant women, that they might enlarge their border” (Amos 1:13).

And so we are not left as spectators. We are commanded to intervene: “Rescue those who are being taken away to death; hold back those who are stumbling to the slaughter” (Proverbs 24:11–12). “Open your mouth for the mute, for the rights of all who are destitute” (Proverbs 31:8–9). The defence of the weak is not an optional ministry for those so inclined; it is laid on the whole people of God.

8. God Himself came by way of conception

Here is the last word, and it is not an argument but a Person. God came to save us by way of conception, and was Himself a child in the womb. He did not begin as a cluster of cells that would later become Christ; at conception He was already a living human embryo, and Scripture calls that embryo the Lord. “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you; therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God” (Luke 1:35). He was not a potential Son of God awaiting some later threshold. He was the Son of God from the moment of His conception. When Mary came to Elizabeth — within days of that conception, while the Lord was at the earliest embryonic stage — the unborn John leaped, and Elizabeth cried out, “why is this granted to me that the mother of my Lord should come to me?” (Luke 1:43–44). Days old, and already addressed as “my Lord.” The Lord was in the womb, and He was there as an embryo.

To deny the humanity of the unborn, then, is not first an error concerning man but an error concerning Christ. Since that Lord “had to be made like his brothers in every respect” (Hebrews 2:17), and was one of us from His conception, so are we from ours. If there were a stage at which the embryo were not yet a human being, then there was a stage at which the eternal Son, having taken our nature, was present in Mary’s womb as something less than one of us — and the whole logic of the Incarnation forbids the thought. Christian doctrine cannot survive a window of pre-human embryonic existence, because Christ passed through every stage we pass through and was Himself at every one of them.

And see how the taking of that life is the gospel turned backward. At the cross the strong One laid down His life for the weak, who could give Him nothing (John 15:13; Philippians 2:6–8). Abortion — and any act that knowingly ends the life of the conceived — is the strong taking the life of the weak for the sake of their own comfort. The one is the shape of Christ’s love. The other is its undoing. And the same gospel that exposes the sin is the only sufficient answer to its guilt: there is cleansing in the blood of Christ for all who come, and no condemnation for those who are in Him (Romans 8:1; 1 John 1:7).

References

1. John Calvin, Commentaries on the Four Last Books of Moses (Harmony of the Law), Vol. 3, on Exodus 21:22 (c. 1563; trans. C. W. Bingham, 1852–55). https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom05.ii.ii.v.ii.html
2. Steven Andrew Jacobs, “Biologists’ Consensus on ‘When Life Begins’,” University of Chicago, SSRN working paper (2018). Of 5,577 biologists surveyed across 1,058 institutions, 96% affirmed that a human’s life begins at fertilisation, from a sample that was 85% pro-choice, 89% liberal, and 63% non-religious. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3211703
3. On the “delayed ensoulment” objection: for the early-church verdict see Basil of Caesarea, Letter 188, Canon 2 (c. AD 374), https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3202188.htm ; on the Greek (Septuagint) rendering of Exodus 21:22 and its divergence from the Hebrew, see the discussion in the standard commentaries on Exodus 21.

Scripture is quoted from the English Standard Version unless the sense of the Hebrew is under discussion, in which case the underlying Hebrew terms are given.

A note on this treatise. The exegetical arguments concerning Exodus 21:22 and Numbers 5:11–31 turn on the Hebrew text and can be checked by any reader with an interlinear Bible or a concordance; we have deliberately framed them so that the test is one the reader can run rather than a claim to be taken on trust. The biologists’ survey is cited for the factual claim that a new human organism begins at fertilisation, not for any moral conclusion, which the biologists were not asked to give. Where we have drawn on the Reformers, the quotations are traced to freely accessible primary editions. We would rather present a smaller case that holds under scrutiny than a larger one that does not.