Current Religious Thought: July 17, 1964

It is ironic that each major inventive breakthrough achieved by man is a source of ambivalence and frequently of anxiety to the human race in general, and to the Christian Church in particular. Very frequently the appearance of revolutionary products of human ingenuity finds the race unprepared to use them creatively. While we must recognize that God, in his sovereign pleasure, does permit man to make discoveries that almost overnight alter his way of living, yet in a certain sense man’s inventive genius all too frequently seems to outrun his moral resources.

It is partially true, of course, that necessity is the mother of invention, so that inventions answer to some growing problem that impinges upon the race. The menacing problem of population growth has therefore led to persistent research into the reduction of the human birthrate. Today it seems that medical science is approaching the point at which the control of human reproduction can be effected by means that “cut with the grain” of the human organism. The development and perfection of the oral contraceptive (popularly known as “the Pill”) is upon us. Whether we relish the fact or not, this discovery presents the Christian Church with a challenge at least as great as any that man’s inventive genius has placed upon her for centuries.

While mankind has in general been slow to recognize the problem of population growth, the world has not been caught totally unawares. While it took millennia for the population of the earth to reach the billion mark (by 1830), in 130 years since that time the inhabitants of the earth have trebled in number. Man’s reproductive energy is rapidly outrunning his ability to produce and distribute the food essential for human subsistence.

The crisis in population is due in part to the removal of population controls, particularly during the past century. Inventive genius has vastly decreased infant and maternal mortality, even in lands where medical service has developed slowly. Communicable diseases are rapidly being brought under control. Techniques of occupational safety and legal controls upon work hazards have united in the effort to prolong life.

Traditionally the Christian Church has been perplexed by the question of population growth. Her thrust into the non-Christian world in medical missions has been, to a large measure, responsible for the removal of many “death controls” and thus for a significant increase of population growth. At the same time, the question of artificial family limitation has given her concern, due in part to the fact that the availability of regulative techniques has wide implications for her entire philosophy of marriage.

The Church was faced with similar perplexities by inventions of a sweeping nature in the past. Vaccination against smallpox (which promised to control the Plague, regarded by some as a divine scourge upon especially wicked societies) was resisted as impious. The use of anesthesia, especially in confinement cases, was resisted upon the supposed grounds that it violated Genesis 3:16. More recently, well-meaning clergymen denounced horseless carriages and inveighed against television. The instructive thing is that usually such persons (among them many evangelicals), after a period of denunciation, came quietly to accept the new developments.

In general Protestants have reacted confusedly toward the appearance of means by which the begetting of children can be brought within a rational scheme of things. On one hand, some have adopted a defensive and radically negative stance. Others have given uncritical endorsement to such techniques, in some cases hailing them as a cure-all for human ills. The association of this acceptance with the social gospel has caused some evangelicals to react defensively and emotionally and to adopt postures that have later become an embarrassment to them.

Meanwhile human inventive genius seeks relentlessly for a way to control human conception that is esthetically acceptable and ethically unobjectionable. It seems that an increasing number of sensitive Christians, including many of frankly evangelical belief, feel that the oral contraceptive, when perfected so as to eliminate discomforting side effects, will answer these two requirements.

It is not now clear, however, that evangelical circles are really coming to grips with the question. One could wish that someone with this orientation might write an article as forthright as that by Peter A. Bertocci in the Christian Century (Feb. 26, 1964) entitled “Experimental Sex and the Pill.” Certainly an evangelical treatment of the subject would be far less permissive than that by Dr. Bertocci. At the same time, we would welcome a frank statement, from our perspective, of the biblical understanding of marriage which gives to the words, “the two shall be one flesh,” at least equal significance with the words, “be fruitful, and multiply, and replenish the earth.”

The oral contraceptive has appeared at a time when the human race is ill-prepared to use it constructively, a time marked by lack of personal moral restraint and an artificial emphasis upon sex as an end in itself. The brute fact is that the use of “the Pill” will inevitably include a great deal of abuse by undisciplined members of our society, single and married.

Granting this, what should be the attitude of the evangelical in the matter? At least three courses are open to him. He may adopt an ascetic and aseptic aloofness. He may maintain a negative and defensive posture, fortified by resort to such pathetic irrelevancies as the case of Onan. Or he may take a position of Christian realism, recognizing that nothing can be “uninvented” and that such a major breakthrough as this demands a better quality of living, a better type of men and women. Thus he may seek by every means at his disposal to bring those within his influence to live ethically, rather than merely by the mores and usages of his society.

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