Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60 Page 61 Page 62 Page 63 Page 64 Page 65 Page 66 Page 67 Page 68 Page 69 Page 70 Page 71 Page 72 Page 73 Page 74 Page 75 Page 76 Page 77 Page 78 Page 79 Page 80 Page 81 Page 82 Page 83 Page 8438 Plough Quarterly • Autumn 2016 of African-Americans were murdered in lynchings. Today, young black men are killed by police at far higher rates than young white men are. Capital punishment is a pro-life issue. How can killing a person guilty of killing another person ever serve to teach respect for the sanctity of human life? This list, of course, is far from complete. The point is, if we want to be biblically balanced in our politics, we cannot be one-issue voters. We must be pro-life and pro-poor, pro-family and pro-racial justice, pro-sexual integrity and pro-peace. In real-life politics, we will find few, if any, viable candidates who fully represent the completely pro-life agenda. So we must weigh the various candidates’ platforms (and likely actions) and then vote for the one closest to what the Bible teaches us God cares about. Sometimes, that means deciding for the candi- date likely to do the least harm. First-Century Pro-Lifers To many Christians, this way of thinking about the sanctity of life – despite its profound rooting in scripture – may feel unfamiliar. How valuable, then, that we have access to the bracing pro-life witness of the New Testament’s first readers: the early Christians. In my book, The Early Church on Killing, I collected every document and artifact I could find on the teaching and practice of the early church on killing up to AD 313, the year that Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire. The consistency of the early church’s pro- life convictions is astounding. Whether the issue is abortion, capital punishment, infanti- cide, or killing in war, every extant statement by Christian authors before Constantine says that Christians should never kill. The Chris- tian writer Lactantius, writing in the early fourth century during the severe empire-wide persecution of Emperor Diocletian, sums up this consensus by flatly forbidding believers to serve in the military or participate in capital punishment: “Killing a human being is always wrong because it is God’s will for man to be a sacred creature” (Divine Institutes, 6,20). In accordance with the early Christian conviction that every human life is sacred, eight different authors in eleven different writ- ings unanimously reject abortion. The blunt condemnation of the Didache is typical: “You shall not murder a child by abortion.” In most instances, the writers condemn abortion either because the unborn child has a soul from the moment of conception or because abortion is killing and Christians do not do that. Thus Tertullian condemns abortion because Chris- tians believe that all murder is wrong: “In our case, murder being once for all forbidden, we may not destroy even the fetus in the womb” (Apology, 9). By the same token, four different writers say that Christians must not participate in capital punishment. The Apostolic Tradition, a church order probably from the late second or early third century, explicitly teaches that if a promi- nent government official (one who “wears red”) authorized to order the death penalty asks to become a Christian, he must abandon his government position if he wants to become a candidate for baptism: “One who has the power of the sword or the head of a city and wears red, let him stop or be excluded.” The texts prohibiting killing in war are even more frequent. Up until the time of Con- stantine, there is not a single Christian writer In every age, the first, most important political act is to be the church.