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“[B]y framing the abortion dispute as essentially a clash of raw interests between strangers—a person and a nonperson—Justice Blackmun [1908–1999] embraces the narrative of expressive individualism: a universe of lonely atomized wills each seeking their own self-invented destinies, encountering other wills as transactional collaborators or adversaries to be overcome. For Blackmun, the interests of the fetus do not even rise to the interests of a person, but rather a sub-personal being whose interests must necessarily give way when they conflict with those of a bona fide person. This clash of interests bears little relation to the reality of human procreation and pregnancy, in which the dramatis personae include a woman and her biological offspring literally joined in body, one inside the other, utterly dependent on the other, with lives integrated and intertwined to a degree like no other human relationship. They are, biologically speaking, mother and child. They are not homeowner and burglar, host and parasite, or violinist and unwilling conjoined kidney donor. This is not a dispute over private property. Moreover, there is no ‘unplugging’ to undo this relationship—modern methods of abortion involve the direct killing and removal of the fetus through highly invasive and violent means. Blackmun’s narrative of conflict is simplistic, foreign, and forgetful of the body.” – O. Carter Snead, What It Means to Be Human: The Case for the Body in Public Bioethics (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020), 140.
“Those who are idle in the pursuit of righteousness count theological terminology as secondary” – Basil the Great, On the Holy Spirit, trans. David Anderson (Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1980), 1. 2, p. 16.
Webster offers a theology of patience: “But patience is a divine effect because it is a divine property: God is the source of patience because he is patient in himself. Divine patience allows creatures time to enact their lives; in the face of creaturely rejection, it does not terminate the creature but continues to grant to the creature further opportunities and possibilities. This divine patience is not suffering but long-suffering, longanimity: not passive waiting upon creaturely purpose but the enduring exercise of government. . . . Its exemplary force is known supremely in the life of Christ in which it is embodied and commended. Cyprian, for example, looks at the entire course of the incarnation from heavenly descent through passion to exaltation as divine-human illustration and pattern of the excellence of patience. ‘[H]e maintained the patience of his Father in the constancy of his endurance’; and so, ‘let us walk by the example of Christ” – John Webster, God without Measure: Working Papers in Christian Theology, Vol. 2, Virtue and Intellect (New York: T&T Clark, 2018), 179.
“There are fruits in God’s garden as well as in man’s which never ripen till they are bruised.” – Charles Spurgeon, “Beloved and Yet Afflicted.”
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