How to be Wrong When You’re Right
Maybe you don’t use innocuous circumstances for one-upmanship,
but how do you act when faced with a hotly debated topic like abortion? Let’s
say you’re of the conviction that unborn children are distinct entities that
have been endowed
by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including the right to
life. Such a stance is, I believe, true to science, logic, and biblical
teaching. Nevertheless, it is a stance based on knowledge that must be used
rightly.
Truth was never designed to be a weapon of mass destruction,
but that’s how we often treat it. It’s too easy to turn a healthy exchange of
ideas into a death match. If our motives are wrong, we’ll use truth to kill
rather than convict, to put others in their place and
shame them into submission. We can be so focused on the rightness of our
cause that we’re ready and willing to sin against others in order to prove it.
Does the issue of abortion call
for outrage and grief and anger? Yes, it does. The taking of innocent life—no
matter how much Orwellian nomenclature is used—must be shown for what it truly
is.
There’s a big difference, though,
between genuine grief over sin and proving how tall we are by cutting everyone
else’s heads off. Christ, after all, didn’t parade His superiority in front of
us, even though He was completely in the right and we were in the wrong. We
were His enemies, and yet He came to die in our place. He loved the
unlovable—you and me.
Having received the amazing grace
of God, we are called now to pour that same grace onto others. If we are to
love our neighbor as ourselves, and if our neighbor includes anyone with whom we
come into contact (as the story of the good Samaritan shows us), what does that
mean for the abortion debate? It means that our neighbor is not just the unborn
child who doesn’t have a voice of his own. Our neighbor is also the pregnant
woman abandoned by her significant other. Our neighbor is that significant
other. Our neighbor is even the abortionist himself.
When it comes to any debatable
topic (whether it’s abortion, the gospel, or something else), if we enter the
fray self-righteously, our motives will likely be apparent in our words and
actions—even if we are in the right. People will be less likely to
hear our words if our actions are speaking more loudly.
In his book Charity and Its Fruits, Jonathan Edwards gives some helpful advice for how someone can avoid being wrong when he is right:
He may reprove his neighbor; but if he does, it will be with politeness
and without bitterness, which still shows the design to be only to exasperate.
It may be with strength of reason and argument and serious
expostulation, but without angry reflections or contemptuous language.
He may show a dislike of what is done, but it will not be with an appearance
of high resentment; but
as a man would reprove another that has fallen into sin against God,
rather than against him; and
as lamenting his calamity more than resenting his injury, and
as seeking his good rather than his hurt;
more to deliver him from the calamity into which he has fallen than to
be even with him for the injury he has brought on him.
Are we willing to harbor bitterness and hatred in our hearts
toward proponents of abortion? Are we willing to mix our passion with
contemptuousness? Are we willing to belittle our political opponents and shower
them with condescending spite? If so, then we are wrong—even if we are
absolutely right.