J.D. Vance’s Most Recent View on Abortion Is a Warning to the Church
Aug 30, 2024 by David Fowler
Last week I took on David French’s less than Christian view that he would vote for Kamala Harris to “save conservatism.” Today I take on J.D. Vance’s most recent explanation for why neither he nor Donald Trump would support a nationwide ban on abortion. I hope you will allow me to explain why his reason reflects a post-Modern legal mind that is sub-human, repudiates the image of God, and violates the two great commandments of Scriptures. Then I’ll offer a corrective I think they both need to consider.
A Short Description of the Post-Modern Lawyer
For context, a post-Modern lawyer is a person who has consciously or subconsciously (I hope Vance is among the latter) embraced the understanding of law espoused by noted 19th century atheistic jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Regarding law, Holmes wrote:
In other words, there is no real and objective substance undergirding law and informing what it should be. Law is just what, in the moment, is “understood to be convenient.”
How “Convenient” Is Determined According to the Post-Modern Lawyer
Not surprisingly, what is convenient to the post-Modern lawyer has nothing to do with God, the Bible, or even the people. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, quoting Holmes, law is what the “state says it is” and the “only authority is the state” (Erie RR. v. Tompkins, 1938).
The only aspect of law that Holmes and post-Modern lawyers like Vance want to retain from its development over centuries is the “form and machinery” upon which the state decides what is convenient (more on that momentarily). Law’s substance is, as noted, replaced with what’s convenient.
With that explanation we are ready to evaluate what Vance said about abortion.
What Vance Said This Week About Abortion
Here is a transcript of that portion of the video relevant to a national abortion ban:
Since Vance says Trump “is right,” I take him to mean he now believes abortion is strictly a state issue. And the reason: That is the only way to get out of a “non-stop federal conflict over this issue.”
Why J.D. Vance is a Post-Modern Lawyer
Like a post-Modern lawyer, Vance wants to adhere to a certain “form and machinery” of law—our system of dual sovereigns and federalism—and jettison consideration of the substance of the law enumerated in our Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, namely, what constitutes the kind of “life” that, as a matter of law and justice, would inform our understanding of the word “person.”
But Vance, a Yale law grad, should be smarter than even that. Surely, he has read the Fourteenth Amendment.
Section 5 of that Amendment gives Congress the power to prevent states from having unconstitutional laws that deny “life”—which can only be human life in the context—to “any person” without due process of law.
It also gives power to Congress to prevent states from having unconstitutional laws that don’t extend protection of human life to all human lives, born and unborn—equal protection of the law.
Surely Vance knows that the 14th Amendment undid the stated premise in the infamous Dred Scott decision that some human lives constitute a “subordinate and inferior class of beings.”
The Fourteenth Amendment charged Congress with making sure states don’t treat human beings that way again, which is precisely what Vance is okay with regarding unborn human beings!
I told you this form and machinery over substance that Vance seems to advocate for makes for a subhuman view of humanity. Now let me explain why it is contrary to the very premise of what Christianity is.
How This View Denies the Image of God and Violates the Two Great Commandments
The Bible is quite clear that the greatest glory pertaining to human beings is they are made in the image of God.
This should make the atheist and agnostic rejoice because, for all their protestations to the contrary, they know that for God to exist, He would be love and not hate.
And that is what the Bible says—God is love (1 John 4:8). God agrees with what they know He should be like!
What they don’t get, or, most likely weren’t told clearly and often enough—both of which were true for me most of my life—is that God’s eternal life is love because He is triune. The Trinity was mostly a truth proposition disconnected from the nature of the eternal life among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is love, pure and infinite.
Because of that, when God made man in His image, He endowed our human nature with a kind of love, albeit in creaturely form, corresponding to the kind of love that God is. He did so because He wanted those made in His image to share in the eternal life of love that is God to the greatest extent possible for a creature.
In doing so, God raised Adam and Eve to a dignity far surpassing that of mere creatures enslaved to a taskmaster, a dictatorial creator.
Applying This to the First and Second Commandments
The foregoing is why the first and greatest commandment found in both the Old and New Testaments is for us to love the Lord God with all our affections (heart), soul (psyche), mind (intellect), and strength.
The commandment is not so much telling us what to do as telling us that we are the kind of creatures that were meant to be loved by God and reflect that love back to God.
And, but for our sinfulness, this kind of love would be our nature. Therefore, it would be natural for us to know and delight in the love of God and to love God with all we are. And that helps explain the second of the two great commandments, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
Part of what that means, which I had not grasped, is that we are to consider our neighbor the same kind of creature or being we are. Moreover, I had not appreciated that God is giving us, in our neighbor, a reflection of the image of God, which we need because God, being pure Spirit, is not otherwise visible to us.[1]
Therefore, the second commandment is “like unto the first,” as Jesus put it, because we are loving God well when we love those who bear His image.
Picture the imagery this way. It is like the Son of God so loving God the Father (an example of the divine love in the Trinity) as to take on a human nature like that of Adam (before his transgression) in order to rescue his human neighbors from the deficiency (falling short) in their love of God and neighbor and also to begin restoring and eventually perfecting His kind of love in them.[2]
So, when one human being kills (murders) another human being—effectively using that other human being for some subjective, self-absorbed purpose—the killer denies to the other person the greatness of the image of God, makes them less than fully human (subhuman), and breaks both the first and the second commandment.
Hopefully, someone who knows Vance will help him think this through better if he wants to simultaneously represent Christ.
Conclusion
By the foregoing, I am not making any eternal judgment on whether Vance is a Christian any more than I did so last week regarding David French.
I am saying about Vance’s position what I tried to say last week about French’s: He is giving us a good picture of either the sorry state of the good news being preached in many churches or how poorly what is being preached and what is being professed are filtering down into our politics and public squares.
French says he wants to “save conservativism” for the sake of abortion, and Vance wants to save Trump from abortion so he can get elected to address “economic and immigration” concerns.
I think the focus of both men, as Christians, has gotten away from what Jesus said should be of the greatest concern to God’s people: pursuit of His “Kingdom” and “His righteousness” (Matthew 6:33).
When that pursuit state by state becomes national in its scope, I believe all the particular issues French and Vance care about will fall into place.
A Short Description of the Post-Modern Lawyer
For context, a post-Modern lawyer is a person who has consciously or subconsciously (I hope Vance is among the latter) embraced the understanding of law espoused by noted 19th century atheistic jurist, Oliver Wendell Holmes.
Regarding law, Holmes wrote:
The substance of the law at any given time pretty nearly corresponds, so far as it goes, with what is then understood to be convenient; but its form and machinery, and the degree to which it is able to work out desired results, depend very much upon its past.
In other words, there is no real and objective substance undergirding law and informing what it should be. Law is just what, in the moment, is “understood to be convenient.”
How “Convenient” Is Determined According to the Post-Modern Lawyer
Not surprisingly, what is convenient to the post-Modern lawyer has nothing to do with God, the Bible, or even the people. According to the U.S. Supreme Court, quoting Holmes, law is what the “state says it is” and the “only authority is the state” (Erie RR. v. Tompkins, 1938).
The only aspect of law that Holmes and post-Modern lawyers like Vance want to retain from its development over centuries is the “form and machinery” upon which the state decides what is convenient (more on that momentarily). Law’s substance is, as noted, replaced with what’s convenient.
With that explanation we are ready to evaluate what Vance said about abortion.
What Vance Said This Week About Abortion
Here is a transcript of that portion of the video relevant to a national abortion ban:
Donald Trump's view is that we want the individual states and their individual cultures and their unique political sensibilities to make these decisions because we don't want to have a non-stop federal conflict over this issue. The federal government ought to be focused on getting food prices down, getting housing prices down, issues, of course, where Kamala Harris has been a total disaster.
So I think Donald Trump is right. We want the federal government to focus on these big economic and immigration questions. Let the states figure out their own abortion policy.
Since Vance says Trump “is right,” I take him to mean he now believes abortion is strictly a state issue. And the reason: That is the only way to get out of a “non-stop federal conflict over this issue.”
Why J.D. Vance is a Post-Modern Lawyer
Like a post-Modern lawyer, Vance wants to adhere to a certain “form and machinery” of law—our system of dual sovereigns and federalism—and jettison consideration of the substance of the law enumerated in our Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment, namely, what constitutes the kind of “life” that, as a matter of law and justice, would inform our understanding of the word “person.”
But Vance, a Yale law grad, should be smarter than even that. Surely, he has read the Fourteenth Amendment.
Section 5 of that Amendment gives Congress the power to prevent states from having unconstitutional laws that deny “life”—which can only be human life in the context—to “any person” without due process of law.
It also gives power to Congress to prevent states from having unconstitutional laws that don’t extend protection of human life to all human lives, born and unborn—equal protection of the law.
Surely Vance knows that the 14th Amendment undid the stated premise in the infamous Dred Scott decision that some human lives constitute a “subordinate and inferior class of beings.”
The Fourteenth Amendment charged Congress with making sure states don’t treat human beings that way again, which is precisely what Vance is okay with regarding unborn human beings!
I told you this form and machinery over substance that Vance seems to advocate for makes for a subhuman view of humanity. Now let me explain why it is contrary to the very premise of what Christianity is.
How This View Denies the Image of God and Violates the Two Great Commandments
The Bible is quite clear that the greatest glory pertaining to human beings is they are made in the image of God.
This should make the atheist and agnostic rejoice because, for all their protestations to the contrary, they know that for God to exist, He would be love and not hate.
And that is what the Bible says—God is love (1 John 4:8). God agrees with what they know He should be like!
What they don’t get, or, most likely weren’t told clearly and often enough—both of which were true for me most of my life—is that God’s eternal life is love because He is triune. The Trinity was mostly a truth proposition disconnected from the nature of the eternal life among the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, which is love, pure and infinite.
Because of that, when God made man in His image, He endowed our human nature with a kind of love, albeit in creaturely form, corresponding to the kind of love that God is. He did so because He wanted those made in His image to share in the eternal life of love that is God to the greatest extent possible for a creature.
In doing so, God raised Adam and Eve to a dignity far surpassing that of mere creatures enslaved to a taskmaster, a dictatorial creator.
Applying This to the First and Second Commandments
The foregoing is why the first and greatest commandment found in both the Old and New Testaments is for us to love the Lord God with all our affections (heart), soul (psyche), mind (intellect), and strength.
The commandment is not so much telling us what to do as telling us that we are the kind of creatures that were meant to be loved by God and reflect that love back to God.
And, but for our sinfulness, this kind of love would be our nature. Therefore, it would be natural for us to know and delight in the love of God and to love God with all we are. And that helps explain the second of the two great commandments, “Love your neighbor as you love yourself.”
Part of what that means, which I had not grasped, is that we are to consider our neighbor the same kind of creature or being we are. Moreover, I had not appreciated that God is giving us, in our neighbor, a reflection of the image of God, which we need because God, being pure Spirit, is not otherwise visible to us.[1]
Therefore, the second commandment is “like unto the first,” as Jesus put it, because we are loving God well when we love those who bear His image.
Picture the imagery this way. It is like the Son of God so loving God the Father (an example of the divine love in the Trinity) as to take on a human nature like that of Adam (before his transgression) in order to rescue his human neighbors from the deficiency (falling short) in their love of God and neighbor and also to begin restoring and eventually perfecting His kind of love in them.[2]
So, when one human being kills (murders) another human being—effectively using that other human being for some subjective, self-absorbed purpose—the killer denies to the other person the greatness of the image of God, makes them less than fully human (subhuman), and breaks both the first and the second commandment.
Hopefully, someone who knows Vance will help him think this through better if he wants to simultaneously represent Christ.
Conclusion
By the foregoing, I am not making any eternal judgment on whether Vance is a Christian any more than I did so last week regarding David French.
I am saying about Vance’s position what I tried to say last week about French’s: He is giving us a good picture of either the sorry state of the good news being preached in many churches or how poorly what is being preached and what is being professed are filtering down into our politics and public squares.
French says he wants to “save conservativism” for the sake of abortion, and Vance wants to save Trump from abortion so he can get elected to address “economic and immigration” concerns.
I think the focus of both men, as Christians, has gotten away from what Jesus said should be of the greatest concern to God’s people: pursuit of His “Kingdom” and “His righteousness” (Matthew 6:33).
When that pursuit state by state becomes national in its scope, I believe all the particular issues French and Vance care about will fall into place.
"But seek first the kingdom of God and His righteousness, and all these things shall be added to you” (Mat 6:31-33 NKJV).
[1] Thinking in terms of God giving us a picture of Himself in our neighbor provides a deeper meaning to these words of Jesus beyond just a command to be nice to other people: “And the King will answer and say to them, ‘Assuredly, I say to you, inasmuch as you did it to one of the least of these My brethren, you did it to Me.’” (Mat 25:40 NKJV). Again, the “command” also serves to describe the kind of creatures we were intended to be.
[2] This is the incarnate Christ, having a human nature like that of the first Adam before his transgression, keeping both the first and second commandments for us because we were too poor and too dead in relation to God to keep either one.
