Take for instance the heated debate over abortion. There is the tension between right to life of an unborn child and the right of a mother to choose what happens within her own body. Science has become so advanced that even the most ardent abortion rights advocates agree that life begins at conception. This means that abortion assumes it is right for the mother to kill or make life extinct for the yet to be born baby. How can it be right to kill or deny life?
In order to reconcile this tension between two ethics, you have to define human life as something separate from the human as a person. In other words, killing only applies if the human life is deemed a person. You might be wondering, what is the difference? How can a human have life and not be a person? Well, it depends on your "theory of person-hood."
Abortion rights advocates believe that human life assumes a biological existence, but human life is only a person when there is an ethical existence. In other words, unless a human life has the capacity and competency to direct their life to the good of society, it is only biologically human and not morally human. Therefore, if good decisions can only be answered by someone acting on behalf of the human, then the human is not a person. In this theory of person-hood, abortion is not killing because the unborn child is not a person. The same idea of person-hood can be made for the severe handicap, humans with mental disorders, cultural shame killing, ethnic cleansing, capital punishment and those deep into dementia. In a sense, constraining or eliminating those who are not persons when they represent some sort of menace to others is a form of justice.
You may think is "progressive thinking." It is not. Throughout human history the moral imperative to treat children, women, the handicap, slaves, old people, minorities, and such has been justified by this "theory of person-hood." In each case society deems that when human life has no ethical value or worth, then that life is not a person, and no longer subject to rights of self-determination. If the human is not a person, then they are more like property and must have someone making decisions on their behalf. Those choices have included controlling and even taking away their life (biological existence).
It was into a world such as this that Jesus entered. As you may expect, He turned traditional thinking upside down. When He was asked, "who is the greatest in the kingdom of Heaven?", He pointed to children as the answer. Jesus was making a statement to what value meant in God's economy. For the King of the universe to value humans that have no status and make no contribution to the world didn't make sense. How could human life be a person ONLY because they have a father who values them? This doesn't seem to fair to those who heard Jesus. How could humans not viewed with status be persons ONLY because they bring joy to the father? What is it about a father who never wills that their child perish?
From God's perspective, person-hood is not occupational (based on accomplishing tasks), but is relational. God's ethic is that all human life is sacred or of Divine importance. Human nature has for centuries assumed person-hood was outcome based, focusing on what human life pursues and produces. Kingdom nature assumes person-hood is source based, focusing on what human life receives and reflects.
To have God's "theory of person-hood", we must repent (change our thinking completely). A view of human person-hood that starts with the father's love for the human and not what the human life must do to be a person is not natural, but is life changing......
Excellent! It would also stand to reason that young children are not capable or competent to direct their lives to the good of society without the help of adults. Assuming such, there would be a vast gap between how we then would define a person. Certainly, that "capacity and competency" varies widely across the spectrum of humanity, but rarely before the age of 3.
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