This is not encouraging. There are many sincere conservatives and Christians who want to live virtuously, but where will people be taught the truth when men like Wolf and Fleming are gone? Watching other people discuss this same topic on other websites and in other publications has shown me how ignorant of our Christian traditions we really are.

Consider the case of education. Children should be taught, but whose business is it to see that they are taught? Everyone's or the parents. To take a coarser example, a married woman should be comforted by a male, but whose business is it to comfort her? Everyone's or her husband's? If a man is smacking his wife, I may be justified in intervening-if I know the couple and understand the situation, but am I obliged? Certainly not. Every station in life--those of husband, wife, parent, child, citizen--has its duties. There is certainly a higher Christian morality than simply doing the duties incumbent on one's station, but that morality hardly ever teaches us to invade someone else's sphere of duty.

The Christian Church has always taught that it is wrong to kill the innocent, including babies, including unborn babies. (It has also taught that contraception is evil. Should we shoot the dispenser of condoms?) Early Christians did not, however, interfere when pagans killed their born or unborn babies. They were content not to kill their own or to allow the infanticide to be practiced by their brothers and sisters. When the Empire became Christianized, it outlawed abortion, though practically speaking this meant little, and it was not until (if I recall correctly) the 7th century that abortion was made a capital crime. Under the Empire, by the way, abortion was legal, but a married woman who aborted her child without her husband's consent faced the death penalty.

Until Christians give up their busy-bodying and meddling and self-righteous posturing, they will never be in a position to do any good. How many pro-life mothers have taken time away from their own families to demonstrate against what anti-Christians will do simply because they are anti-Christian? Because an abortionist should be executed in a Christian society, does not mean that a citizen in a post-Christian society has the duty or right to carry out the sentence. Such free-lance actions are immoral and subversive. The killer of an abortionist deserves to be executed, unless, as Mr. Wolf sagely suggests, the dead baby is a close relative. There is much more that could be said, but the main point I wish to convey is that the right to life argument is not Christian but Liberal, and Christians who use Liberal weapons will see those weapons turned against themselves.

One who believes and lives out (to the best of his ability) the teachings of Scripture and the Lutheran Confessions. Such creatures are hard to find today.