The Witness of the Church

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

We are often told that what this series argues is a Roman Catholic peculiarity, or a novelty got up by a few enthusiasts. It is neither. It is what the church taught, across East and West, Catholic and Protestant, until about a hundred years ago. This treatise sets out that record so that it can stand on its own, and be checked.

Where the witness is unbroken we say so plainly. Where it is more complicated we show you the complication, because a case that has to be tidied is a case not worth making.

Three claims are on trial here, and we ask you to weigh them separately: that the conceived child may not be killed; that children within marriage are a blessing to be sought, and their begetting one of the ends for which marriage exists; and that drugs taken to prevent a child arriving belonged, for most of Christian history, in the same moral category as drugs taken to end a pregnancy. The first of these is the load-bearing claim, and it is the one on which the witness is strongest. We keep the three apart on purpose, because they are not equally strong, and honesty requires that the strongest not borrow credit from the weakest.

1. On abortion the church has never wavered

Here there is nothing to qualify. From the earliest document we possess outside the New Testament to the middle of the twentieth century, the church condemned abortion as murder, and did so without regard to the stage of the child’s development.

The Didache, written between roughly AD 70 and 120, places the prohibition in its opening summary of the way of life: “You shall not murder a child by abortion nor kill that which is born” (2:2).[1] It sits among the plain commands, not argued for, because nobody in the churches disputed it.

Athenagoras, writing to the Emperor Marcus Aurelius around AD 177, was answering the rumour that Christians murdered and ate infants. His defence was to state what Christians actually held: that “those women who use drugs to bring on abortion commit murder, and will have to give an account to God for the abortion,” because the child in the womb is a created being and an object of God’s care.[2] His argument only works because his readers knew this was the settled Christian position.

Tertullian, writing around AD 197, met the same charge the same way. Since murder is forbidden to Christians once and for all, we may not destroy even the child in the womb.

“To hinder a birth is merely a speedier man-killing; nor does it matter whether you take away a life that is born, or destroy one that is coming to the birth. That is a man which is going to be one; you have the fruit already in the seed.” — Tertullian, Apology, ch. 9 (c. AD 197)[3]

Basil of Caesarea, in AD 374, ruled that “the woman who purposely destroys her unborn child is guilty of murder,” and added the sentence that settles the whole modern argument about developmental stages: “with us there is no nice enquiry as to its being formed or unformed.” Women who administer drugs to cause abortion, he continued, and women who take poisons to destroy unborn children, are murderesses alike.[4]

Jerome, in AD 384, described women who “take potions, that they may insure barrenness, and thus murder human beings almost before their conception.”[5] His phrase deserves attention. He does not distinguish between preventing a life and ending one. He treats a drug taken at that point as homicide either way.

Chrysostom, preaching on Romans at Antioch around AD 391, went further than any of them and condemned both kinds of drug in one breath: those that induce abortion, and those that produce sterility. He asks why a man would “make the chamber of procreation a chamber for murder, and arm the woman that was given for childbearing unto slaughter.”[6] Whatever else is disputed about the fourth century, the pulpit of one of its greatest cities treated a sterilising drug and an abortifacient as one offence.

Calvin, commenting on the case law of Exodus 21, states the principle as clearly as any modern embryologist could wish.

“The foetus, though enclosed in the womb of its mother, is already a human being, and it is almost a monstrous crime to rob it of the life which it has not yet begun to enjoy.” — John Calvin, Harmony of the Law, on Exodus 21:22 (c. 1563)[7]

He then presses the point: if killing a man in his own house is worse than killing him in a field, because his house is his place of safety, how much more atrocious to destroy a child in the womb before he has come to the light.[7]

The Westminster divines wrote the same principle into their exposition of the sixth commandment. The Larger Catechism (1647) requires “all careful studies, and lawful endeavours, to preserve the life of ourselves and others,” and forbids “whatsoever else tends to the destruction of the life of any” (Q. 135 and 136).[8] Not the life of the born, or the strong, or the wanted. The life of any.

Spurgeon, preaching on Psalm 139, saw the same truth in the womb itself: of the psalmist “yet unborn, he was under the control and guardianship of God,” hidden away “as a treasure until you should see fit to bring me to the light.”[9]

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, writing under the Third Reich, called the destruction of the embryo in the womb a violation of the right to live that God has given, and said that to ask whether we are dealing with a human being yet is merely to confuse the issue, since God intended to create a human being and that life has been deliberately taken. His verdict: “And that is nothing but murder.”[10]

Francis Schaeffer stated the consequence a generation later: once the death of human life in babies born and unborn is accepted, “the door is opened to the arbitrary taking of any human life.”[11]

Eleven witnesses across eighteen centuries, from Syria, Athens, North Africa, Cappadocia, Antioch, Geneva, London, Berlin and Pennsylvania. They do not agree with one another about baptism, church government, or the Lord’s Supper. They agree about this.

2. The church has always received children as a blessing to be sought

The second strand is not about killing at all. It is about what a Christian marriage is for, and what a Christian couple should want. It is set out at greater length in the treatise on Marriage, Children, and the Calling of Parents; we give the outline here so that the historical shape is visible in one place.

It begins with a command, not a preference. God’s first word to the first married couple was a blessing tied to fruitfulness: “Be fruitful and multiply” (Genesis 1:28). Every writer below is working from that verse.

Augustine grounded the good of marriage not in the passion of desire but in its honourable use, “appropriate to the propagation of children,” calling the orderly renewal of the human race “the good of wedlock.”[12]

Chrysostom assumed the same when he rebuked the wedding customs of his own city: “You are marrying your wife for the procreation of children and for moderation of life; what is the meaning of these drunken parties?”[13] The purpose was so uncontroversial that he could use it as the premise of a scolding.

Luther taught it as a matter of faith in God’s plain word.

“Now the ones who recognize the estate of marriage are those who firmly believe that God himself instituted it, brought husband and wife together, and ordained that they should beget children and care for them. For this they have God’s word, Genesis 1, and they can be certain that God does not lie.” — Martin Luther, The Estate of Marriage (1522)[14]

Calvin grounds it in the creation blessing itself. On Genesis 1:28 he writes that “Adam with his wife was formed for the production of offspring, in order that men might replenish the earth,” and that “we are fruitful or barren in respect of offspring, as God imparts his power to some and withholds it from others.”[15] Fruitfulness is not an accident of biology. It is a gift dispensed by God.

The Reformed confessions then state it as a matter of definition. The Westminster Confession (1646) says marriage was ordained “for the mutual help of husband and wife; for the increase of mankind with a legitimate issue, and of the Church with an holy seed; and for preventing of uncleanness” (24.2).[16] The Baptists took that clause over almost word for word in the Second London Confession of 1689 (25.2).[17] This is not a marginal opinion buried in the confessions. It is their definition of the institution, and it is the definition our own Presbyterian and Baptist forebears in these islands subscribed.

William Gouge, a member of the Westminster Assembly, lists among the principal ends of marriage “increasing the world with a legitimate brood,” alongside chastity and the binding together of the couple’s affections (Of Domesticall Duties, 1622).[18]

Richard Baxter, in A Christian Directory (1673), calls it “no small mercy to be the parents of a godly seed; and this is the end of the institution of marriage,” citing Malachi 2:15.[19] Asked in the same work whether the elderly and infertile may marry, Baxter answered yes without hesitation, because “there are other lawful ends of marriage, as mutual help and comfort.”[20] We should hold both halves of him. The tradition holds that children are a blessing to be sought; it does not hold that a marriage without them is no marriage.

Jonathan Edwards pressed the family’s purpose one step further: “Every Christian family ought to be as it were a little church, consecrated to Christ, and wholly influenced and governed by his rules,” with family education among “the chief means of grace.”[21] A household exists to raise worshippers, which presumes there are children in it to raise.

Cotton Mather, writing in 1710 a manual for a woman awaiting childbirth, opens not with encouragement but with a command: Paul’s word that “the Younger Women, Marry, bear Children” (1 Timothy 5:14). He then tells her it would be “a very blameable Indecency and Indiscretion” to be dissatisfied with her pregnancy, and “too Unnatural” to complain of a state into which “the Laws of Nature established by God” have brought her.[22]

Matthew Henry, on Rachel’s cry in Genesis 30, treats her childlessness as a real sorrow, and corrects her only for taking it to Jacob rather than to God, “forgetting that children are a heritage of the Lord.”[23] Barrenness is everywhere in Scripture and in the pastoral tradition a grief, never a goal.

“Children stand out among all our possessions with a pre-eminence which cannot be questioned. To have many children is the next blessing to much grace.” — C. H. Spurgeon, Treasury of David, on Psalm 127:3[24]

Andrew Murray opens his book on Christian parenthood with Genesis 1:28 and ties the bearing of children directly to inheriting the promise made to Abraham: “the fruit of our body is to be the heir of Your promise.”[25]

The point for our purposes is simple. A tradition that defines marriage partly by the increase of mankind, that calls children a heritage and barrenness a trial, and that tells a pregnant woman it would be unnatural to resent her condition, cannot be squared with treating fertility as a hazard to be neutralised for the whole of one’s childbearing years.

3. On contraception the witness is strong, but it is not evidence of the same kind

Here we must be more careful than pro-life literature usually is, and we would rather lose an argument than gain one dishonestly.

The historic Protestant case against contraception rests very largely on one passage: God’s judgement on Onan in Genesis 38. The Reformers and their heirs read that judgement as falling on the act of preventing conception, and they said so in the strongest terms available to them.

Calvin, on Genesis 38:10, calls the deliberate spilling of seed to avoid conception “horrible,” and doubly so when done on purpose. Onan, he says, thereby “tried to destroy a part of the human race” so far as it lay in his power, and a woman who by any means drives the seed from her womb commits what he can only call “an unforgivable crime.”[26]

Luther, lecturing on the same chapter in 1544, called Onan’s act “a most disgraceful sin,” worse than incest and adultery, precisely because “the order of nature established by God in procreation” was deliberately frustrated.[27]

Matthew Henry says such sins “dishonour the body and defile it,” are “very displeasing to God and evidences of vile affections.”[28] John Wesley writes in almost the same words in his Explanatory Notes on the same verse: sins that dishonour the body are “very displeasing to God, and the evidence of vile actions.”[29] We should say that Wesley drew heavily on Henry throughout his Old Testament notes, so these are two men in one tradition rather than two independent verdicts.

Jerome, twelve centuries earlier, had already condemned potions taken to ensure barrenness,[5] which shows the objection is not a Protestant invention.

Nor was this only a matter of commentary. In 1873 the United States Congress passed the Comstock Act, driven by a campaign led by a Congregationalist layman, which made it a federal offence to send through the post any “article or thing designed or intended for the prevention of conception or procuring of abortion,” or any advertisement telling a reader where such things might be obtained.[30] Whatever one thinks of Comstock, the statute shows what the Protestant conscience of the period took for granted: contraception and abortion belonged in the same sentence.

Now the honest qualifications, and there are two.

First, many careful readers today hold that Onan was judged for refusing his levirate duty to his brother rather than for the method he used, and the text gives that reading room. We do not think the Reformers can be dismissed as simply mistaken, but we do not need to settle it here.

Second, and more importantly, most of these writers were addressing methods that prevent a life from beginning, not methods that end one already begun. That is a different question from ours. The argument of this series does not rest on the Onan tradition. It rests on the post-fertilisation mechanism of certain contraceptives, and on the fact that a human being already exists when that mechanism operates.

The historic witness matters here for one reason. It shows that the modern Christian assumption — that this is a private matter of no theological weight on which the church has never had anything to say — is itself the novelty.

4. Where it broke, and who protested

The change is recent, it is datable, and it was contested at the time.

In 1920 the bishops of the Anglican Communion, assembled at Lambeth, issued “an emphatic warning against the use of unnatural means for the avoidance of conception, together with the grave dangers, physical, moral and religious, thereby incurred” (Resolution 68).[31] Ten years before the change, the very body that made the change was still condemning the thing.

In 1930 the same conference passed Resolution 15. It stated that where there is a clearly felt moral obligation to limit or avoid parenthood, “the primary and obvious method is complete abstinence,” but that where there is also “a morally sound reason for avoiding complete abstinence,” other methods may be used.[32] The resolution carried by 193 votes to 67.

With that vote the Church of England became the first major Christian body to permit contraception in any circumstances. Sixty-seven bishops voted against, and the resolution is hedged about with conditions that no one now observes. That is what a first breach looks like: narrow, reluctant, and quickly forgotten.

One correction to our own case, which we would rather make ourselves. A peer-reviewed study in the Journal of Ecclesiastical History (2023) records that the New York East Conference of the Methodist Episcopal Church had sanctioned birth control before Lambeth, the only ecclesiastical body in Europe or North America to do so first.[33] Lambeth 1930 was the moment the dam broke, not quite the first crack in it. The substance stands: no Christian communion of any size permitted contraception before 1930, and it was the Church of England’s reversal that opened the door for the rest.

The following March the Federal Council of Churches in America followed. Its Committee on Marriage and the Home approved “the careful and restrained use of contraceptives by married people” by 22 votes of 28, while conceding the risk of “serious evils.” It made the front page of the New York Times.[34]

And it was resisted. The Presbyterian wrote in April 1931 that the Council’s “recent pronouncement on birth control should be enough reason, if there were no other, to withdraw from support of that body.”[35] Bishop Warren A. Chandler of the Methodist Episcopal Church, South, said publicly that the deliverance “has no authorization from any churches representing it,” that “it certainly does not represent the Methodist Church,” and that he doubted it represented any other Protestant church.[36]

Within a generation the objections had faded and one communion after another let the old consent go. But it did go. It was not quietly laid down by a church that had thought better of it. It was voted through against substantial opposition, in living memory, and the arguments of the losing side were never answered. They were simply outlived.

5. Why the wall was unmanned

It is worth asking why the resistance, so fierce in 1930 and 1931, faded so completely within a generation. The answer lies partly outside this subject altogether, in a larger retreat that was overtaking the evangelical church in exactly these decades. The same years that produced the Lambeth reversal produced what historians have called “the Great Reversal”: the swing of a once socially and politically engaged evangelicalism toward a privatised faith that treated public and personal ethics as no longer the pulpit’s business (this is set out in the treatise, Why This Sounds Foreign to Christian Ears). The watchmen were already climbing down from the walls for other reasons. When the question of birth and life came to this particular gate, there was less and less of a confident public conscience left to defend it. The silence that now feels normal is not the considered verdict of a church that weighed the matter; it is the downstream result of a wider abdication.

What this treatise does and does not prove

Not one of these men knew about the post-fertilisation mechanism of modern hormonal contraceptives or intrauterine devices. It would be dishonest to conscript them as though they had.

What they establish is narrower, and more useful. The framework this series argues from is not a novelty and not a sectarian import. That the conceived child is a human being under the protection of the sixth commandment; that children within marriage are a gift and one of the ends of marriage itself; that a drug taken to stop a child arriving was, for most of Christian history, a matter for the pastor and not merely for the chemist: all of this was ordinary Christian teaching within the memory of families still living.

The burden of proof does not lie with us. It lies with 1930.

References

1. The Didache 2:2 (c. AD 70–120), Roberts–Donaldson translation. https://earlychristianwritings.com/text/didache-roberts.html ; also https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0714.htm
2. Athenagoras, A Plea for the Christians, ch. 35 (c. AD 177), Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 2. https://ccel.org/ccel/athenagoras/plea_for_christians/anf02.v.ii.xxxv.html
3. Tertullian, Apology, ch. 9 (c. AD 197), Ante-Nicene Fathers, Vol. 3. https://ccel.org/ccel/tertullian/apology/anf03.iv.iii.ix.html ; also https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0301.htm
4. Basil of Caesarea, Letter 188 (First Canonical Letter), Canon 2 (c. AD 374), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 8. https://newadvent.org/fathers/3202188.htm
5. Jerome, Letter 22, “To Eustochium,” §13 (AD 384), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 6. https://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf206.v.XXII.html ; also https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/3001022.htm
6. John Chrysostom, Homily 24 on Romans (c. AD 391), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 11; reproduced at https://www.churchfathers.org/abortion
7. John Calvin, 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
8. Westminster Larger Catechism (1647), Q. 135–136. https://ccel.org/ccel/creeds/westminster-larger-cat.html
9. C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, on Psalm 139:13. https://www.gracegems.org/Spurgeon/139.htm
10. Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Ethics (English trans., Macmillan, 1965), pp. 175–176.
11. Francis A. Schaeffer, A Christian Manifesto (1981). https://www.sermonindex.net/pdf-text/pdf/f/francis-schaeffer—a-christian-manifesto-part-2.pdf
12. Augustine, On Marriage and Concupiscence, Book I, ch. 57 (c. AD 419–420), Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series I, Vol. 5. https://ccel.org/ccel/schaff/npnf105/npnf105.x.iii.lvii.html
13. John Chrysostom, Homily 21 on Ephesians (c. AD 391), trans. Roth & Anderson, On Marriage and Family Life (St Vladimir’s Seminary Press); older translation at https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/230121.htm
14. Martin Luther, The Estate of Marriage (1522), trans. W. I. Brandt. https://pages.uoregon.edu/dluebke/Reformations441/LutherMarriage.htm
15. John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, Vol. 1, on Genesis 1:28 (1554; trans. John King, 1847). https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/calvin_john/Gen/Gen01.cfm
16. Westminster Confession of Faith (1646), ch. 24.2. https://opc.org/wcf.html
17. Second London Baptist Confession (1689), ch. 25.2. https://www.the1689confession.com/1689/chapter-25
18. William Gouge, Of Domesticall Duties (1622), Treatise II. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/eebo/A68107.0001.001 ; modernised text at https://www.monergism.com/thethreshold/sdg/gouge/Domestical%20Duties%20-%20William%20Gouge.pdf
19. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1673), Part II, “Directions About Marriage.” https://www.gutenberg.org/files/43800/43800-h/43800-h.htm
20. Richard Baxter, A Christian Directory (1673), Part II, question on the marriage of the aged. Same source as ref. 19.
21. Jonathan Edwards, A Farewell Sermon (preached 1750; published 1751). https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34632/34632-h/34632-h.htm
22. Cotton Mather, Elizabeth in Her Holy Retirement (Boston, 1710). https://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/text/text-idx?cc=evans;c=evans;idno=n01226.0001.001;node=N01226.0001.001:3;seq=32;view=text;rgn=div1
23. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Genesis 30:1–2 (1706–1710). https://ccel.org/ccel/henry/mhc1.Gen.xxx.html
24. C. H. Spurgeon, The Treasury of David, on Psalm 127:3. https://www.blueletterbible.org/Comm/spurgeon_charles/tod/ps127.cfm
25. Andrew Murray, The Children for Christ (1887), “First Day.” https://www.biblestudytools.com/classics/murray-children-christ/
26. John Calvin, Commentary on Genesis, Vol. 2, on Genesis 38:10 (1554; trans. John King, 1847–50). https://ccel.org/ccel/calvin/calcom02/calcom02.xvi.i.html
27. Martin Luther, Lectures on Genesis (delivered 1544), Luther’s Works, Vol. 7 (Concordia, 1965), pp. 20–21.
28. Matthew Henry, Commentary on the Whole Bible, on Genesis 38:9. https://www.biblestudytools.com/commentaries/matthew-henry-complete/genesis/38.html
29. John Wesley, Explanatory Notes Upon the Old Testament, on Genesis 38:9 (1765). https://www.studylight.org/commentaries/eng/wen/genesis-38.html
30. The Comstock Act (1873), statutory text. https://teachinglegalhistory.unl.edu/s/oer/item/1715
31. Lambeth Conference 1920, Resolution 68.
32. Lambeth Conference 1930, Resolution 15; vote 193–67. https://embryo.asu.edu/pages/seventh-lambeth-conference-resolutions-9-20-1930
33. Andrew Moeller, “Eugenics and the Approval of Birth Control at the 1930 Lambeth Conference,” Journal of Ecclesiastical History (Cambridge University Press, 2023), n. 12. https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-ecclesiastical-history/article/eugenics-and-the-approval-of-birth-control-at-the-1930-lambeth-conference
34. Federal Council of Churches, Committee on Marriage and the Home, statement of March 1931; reported New York Times, 21 March 1931.
35. The Presbyterian, 2 April 1931; reproduced at https://www.ewtn.com/catholicism/library/position-of-the-church-on-artificial-contraception-9635
36. Bishop Warren A. Chandler, public statement of 13 April 1931; reproduced at the source in ref. 35.

Note on sources. Every quotation in this treatise has been traced to a freely accessible primary text or, where a modern translation is under copyright (refs 10, 11, 13, 27), to multiple independent sources reproducing it identically, with the primary edition cited. Several quotations that circulate widely in pro-life literature have been removed because we could not verify them; in particular, we do not attribute to Luther any statement on abortion that we could not source, and we have kept his verified words to the subjects on which they are secure. We ask the same standard of anyone who disputes what remains.