Tribute: Harold O J Brown & Life (Where I Began)

The full life of the man Harold O J Brown, who fell asleep in the Lord this past Sunday, July 8, 2007, included his efforts to raise awareness of the abortion holocaust among Christians, especially his fellow Evangelicals. (See S M Hutchens's earlier post.)

This is the Dr. Brown that I first encountered back in 1978, five years after Roe v. Wade. I was 26 then, and I met him conducting my first formal interview, published in a small newsletter. (In a sense, then, my "career" as a religious writer, journalist, editor began with Dr. Brown, on the campus of Trinity Evangelical Divinity School.) I titled the interview, "A Matter of Justice: The Abortion Issue."

In honor of the work and witness of Dr.  Brown, I post here some of our conversation. I began it by quoting from his book, Death Before Birth (Dec. 1977, Thomas Nelson):

Kushiner: You wrote, "For Christians to stand idly by while such killings go on, especially in a democratic society, where they have a voice in the government, is not tolerance; it is complicity. (p. 122)" What do you mean here by "complicity"?

Brown: Basically, I mean this: Since we are responsible for the government, then, if this government does something that is significantly wrong, and we have said nothing, we have tacitly agreed and endorsed what it is doing. That's complicity. Theoretically, we have a voice. If we do nothing, we are not merely enduring it, we are endorsing it.

And complicity means that we have "blood on our hands"?

Brown: Right. Of course, that depends, to some extent, on the consciousness of the people who are involved. In other words, the person who is just off somewhere not paying attention to what's going on is not culpable in the same sense that you or I might be, if we know what is going on. On the other hand, if he has reason to learn, and neglects the opportunity to learn, then he ultimately becomes culpable.

...what Romans 13 -- "let every soul be in obedience to the higher authorities"--requires of a Christian living in a democratic society is not that he merely obey the laws, but that he also contribute to making the laws. Now, I think many Christians feel that they are in, as it were, a kind of spiritual exile in their society and don't have responsibility for it. But they do.

It was a simple, straightforward interview. Harold O J Brown couldn't have been clearer about the need to defend unborn life, legally, and he spoke plainly about this for many years.

We were honored to publish two articles by Dr. Brown in Touchstone in 1999 and 2000, Breaking the Ties That Bind (On Gloablization and the Family) and Status Confessionis. May God rest his soul.

Comments

[Truth Unites... and Divides]

The Lord will bless Dr. Brown tremendously for his faithful servanthood.

The Status Confessionis article is a good one. Many noteworthy ideas are explicated. I like this one in particular:

"Theologians know that the doctrine of the Fall of Adam, occurring in real time and real space, offers a coherent solution to the problem of evil. But this solution, unless we take the Fall as mere myth, presupposed an Adam created in the image of God. Since the triumph of Darwinism, which postulated the upward progress of living beings according to principles of natural selection and the survival of the fittest, the Fall has become nothing but mythology for most sophisticated minds. If it survives at all, elsewhere than in our somewhat obsolescent religious circles, it survives as allegory, a myth that tells an instructive story, perhaps, but nothing more."

[Bill R]

"Status Confessionis" is extraordinarily eloquent. Such forceful and prophetic writing is rarely to be found outside the pages of "Touchstone."