Childlessness in the West is starting to cause enough problems that even the mainstream media are starting to notice. There was an article in the BBC recently saying how the birthrate in the UK had dropped to new levels. In the ongoing discussions as to why and what could be done I was amazed at our blindness. Was it that we can’t see or just won’t see?
What’s the biggest cause of death worldwide? Scroll to the bottom of this page to see. Murdering our unborn at catastrophic levels is unsurprisingly a significant factor in the low birthrate. But this is our secular sacrament, and nothing shall touch it.
It’s not just the UK of course. In Canada you can kill your baby for any reason up to birth. Why stop there? Well, they didn’t, with the euphemistically phrased “Medical Aid in Dying” – a convenient way to dispose of those unproductive people. Something that will soon to come to our shores. It’s not much better in the States, where baby murder is now deemed to be an election winner.
I put it in stark terms because it is stark. No civilisation in history is so steeped in the blood of the innocent as our generation. And then we wonder, as it has multiple impacts in society, why could this be?
Unless we change – unless we repent – we will collapse our civilisation. And unless the Church starts speaking hard truth to our culture, and yes, being hated for doing so, we will be complicit in this destruction.
The Age To Come 
Here in Canada abortion on demand was pioneered by Henry Morgentaler, a Québec ‘gynaecologist’ and atheist Jew who found a ready market in a country where contraception, far from being part of health as in the UK, was if not illegal not actually legal. I discovered this in 1967 after my first baby, when my doctor quietly prescribed for me. Morgentaler tested Canadian law by doing many abortions, and got the law changed to no-law because there was demand and the post-Quiet Revolution in Québec was thoroughly sympathetic to it. He also made huge amounts of money. I feel bound to say that he could not have done what he did if in his society a powerful Church had not condemned the use of contraception even within marriage. Essentially we got wide-open abortion because contraception was “wicked”. We have abortion instead of contraception, and I believe the wickedness, and what amounts to a national scandal, is not wickedness that should be laid at the door of normal married couples.
In my very long ‘Dialogue with Hugh’, in my book Holy Homosex? written with J.I. Packer, the question arose as to why there was opposition to the idea of same-sex ‘unions’, but nobody was worked up about usury. “A telling comparison is with usury, condemned in about as many Biblical passages as homosexual behaviour. How is it that the same protesters seem content to live in an economy whose very basis is the earning of maximum rates of return on one’s invested wealth? Where are the energetic, emotional protests against banks and the stock market? I replied: I intend to split off some of my reply to this point into a new posting: See Shades of Marcion. Here I shall take up the matter of usury. The medieval church condemned usury in all its forms on the basis of “a few obscure texts”. The ban on taking money at usury was maintained for at least a millennium, in a Christian culture which had at least as well-thought-out and articulated a theology of the Just Wage, the Just Price, the Just War and so forth as ours. We have absolutely no monopoly on Christian consistency in this or any other sphere. The people would not soil their hands with it, leaving all money-lending (which developed societies have always used and needed) to Jewry (ironically enough). There was a tremendous amount of “emotional attention” paid to all such economic matters, very much less to personal and relational ones. The justification, or rationalisation, for our modern practice is a distinction between usury and interest (though that distinction seems to be to have broken down briefly in our economy in the early Eighties!). The “Are we talking about the same phenomenon?” argument really is relevant here. Usury in the Bible was indeed usurious, the rates being so crippling that personal slavery for debt was often the rapid result. And this was at times when inflation was so low that it took centuries for any to be discernible. The modern argument would be that that kind of lending is what is forbidden. For ourselves, isn’t the principle behind the prohibition that we may not enslave anyone in any way for our own profit? That is a far more far-reaching demand, it seems to me, than a disapproval of lending at interest. It may be doubted whether you, Hugh, or any of us, could move an inch in modern life without using our present financial system. We do it every time we shop, put money into the bank, or draw a salary or pension. A much better parallel might be contraception, with its strong personal and relational component. Until a few decades ago the whole Judaeo-Christian tradition condemned it: the problem had always been to keep the population up, and it was assumed that Scripture said the same. Meanwhile as TB of the ovaries vanished from the Western world, ethicists were forced to rethink the ban. It could be said, and still is said in one very significant Christian denomination, that the fact that there is nowadays not a peep out of anyone about its use in Christian marriage is simply a measure of how wickedly self-indulgent we all are. Except that God in His wisdom said nothing at all about it, but rather instructed married people to meet each other’s needs lest worse befall them. And yes, sundry methods, including intrauterine devices, were known to the ancient world. The Early Fathers, always required reading for Anglicans (they were what Hooker primarily meant by Tradition), were eloquent against contraception on the ostensible basis of two Old Testament texts. They were eloquent against same-sex relations on the explicit basis of the Leviticus and other texts. They were also eloquent against abortion, about which there are strictly speaking no texts at all: they said that it was murder, involving the destruction of a person made in the image of God; it was not far from their minds that it was nearly always fatal to the mother, who was in the same category. The need to keep the population up was not a minor consideration to them in any of these judgements; but they can be shown to have been unbiblical in only the first case. [Holy Homosex? pp. 59-61]
C.S. Lewis somewhere acknowledged decades ago that the traditional condemnation of contraception was a weighty consideration in his mind, but added that he was not prepared to say that it was always wrong. Lambeth allowed its use, just in time for me the earnest, indeed passionately dedicated, and seriously Christian, student who wondered whether she could afford to be married …
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A meaty reply indeed! It’s a measure of how far off base we are that the moral debates of last century are not even considered now.
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Here is a prayer written by Bishop Charlie Masters that we use every Sunday at St. Hilda’s during the prayers of the people:
A Prayer for LIFE
We praise you, Lord Jesus, because we know that you love life, that whereas the thief comes only to steal, kill and destroy, you have come that we might have life abundantly, and you were sent by the Father to live, die and rise again that believing in you we may not die but have everlasting life.
Grant, O Lord, to your people, especially our Diocese of the Anglican Network in Canada, that same love of life that we may pray fervently and labour to celebrate, honour and protect life.
We cry out for mercy and pray for all government officials and all those in medical care, that you, O Lord, may gloriously reverse the policies and practices that tragically not only permit but promote the termination of the life of the unborn and also promote medical assisted euthenasia.
May the Lord empower His Church to minister and support those who have thus been affected.
Through it all, dear Lord, while there is still time, give us grace to proclaim the good news of the gospel of life in Jesus to all.
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God has called us to be A Royal Priesthood…..
The whole economy of the ancient priesthood was to – Obtain Mercy.
The ministry of Jesus was to make a New and Living Way to – Obtain Mercy.
Through His blood sprinkled on the Mercy Seat He ever lives to make intercession for us.
Through our ministry of Priesthood we can obtain Mercy for Individuals Churches and Nations. Lift up the voice, cry aloud, spare not; ISA. 12:6 Cry out and shout, thou inhabitant of Zion: for great is the Holy One of Israel in the midst of thee.
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