If God does not want abortion to happen, why does He permit it? The same question can be asked about any evil, and the traditional answer is that God allows it because He wishes to safeguard human freedom. However, pro-life activists sometimes wish they had a better answer. What to make of God’s justice, they wonder, in a world in which millions of abortions are procured every year? If God doesn’t act, they conclude, it must be because He wants us to do so.

They have a point: surely it is not enough to be against abortion personally, while aiding and abetting it professionally, the example set by most of our politicians. We must act on our personal commitments. But how active do we have to be? Enough to land us in jail? Or is it sufficient to make our opposition known in ways that do not get us into trouble with the law? We might get more insight into this question if we thought a little more about God’s will.

Christian theology has traditionally taught that God has two wills. His first or antecedent will aims only at what is good. Creation is a pure expression of this will. God meant to establish and encourage life. To Adam and Eve He gave a way of living in which life and universal community could go on forever. However they chose badly.

What was God then to do? He could destroy them, but then creation would have been for nothing. He could force them to obey Him, but then He would have only the mechanical worship of puppets or machines. So God respects their free choice and humbly undertakes to win creation back to Him in a way that respects human freedom.

That humble choice is an expression of God’s second or consequent will: as a consequence of His determination to respect human freedom, God is prepared to tolerate even some things which, in themselves, He despises. He suffers unspeakably wicked actions not for their own sake, but in order that His free human creation may see the error of its ways and turn again to Him. He allows us to stray into a far country, there to feed on the husks of our sin that would not even nourish pigs. But if we make so much as a feeble effort to turn back to Him, He runs to meet us like the waiting father for his prodigal son. It is because of His consequent will that God stays His hand even against abortionists, giving them chance after chance to turn to Him.

A few do turn to God, but not many. Does this mean that God has failed? Theology does not think so. It has always taught that God’s antecedent and consequent wills add up to one perfect will. We believe by faith that God will retrieve more good by tolerating evil than would have existed if He had destroyed creation after Adam’s sin. And if we are asked for evidence for this belief, we can point to the perfect human life of Jesus. He would never have lived if God had destroyed everything after Adam. That is why an old Roman Catholic hymn refers to Adam’s sin as a “happy” one, a felix culpa, for it brought our Saviour into the world and we think that a world without Him would have been poorer, even if in it there had been no sin.

Some might accuse this theological solution of the problem of evil of being callous in the extreme. It is fine to say that God tolerates present evil for the sake of a redemptive good, but what about the millions of babies that are sacrificed in the process, the multi-millions that will never be allowed to laugh or love or even live, while we wait for the good things God may or may not have in store. A silent holocaust is going on and the theologian seems to be telling us to sin the more that grace may abound.

It is hard to reply to this forceful objection, and I am not confident that I can satisfy someone who is persuaded that immediate action of some kind must be taken. The moral evil of abortion is apparent, and I would not deny that God may call some of us to put our own comfort and safety on the line to oppose it. The saintly Linda Gibbons, whom many of us have been honoured to know, surely received such a call. But yet I also believe that God does not summon us all to take that stand, and the reason may be connected with the old doctrine of God’s perfect will.

The friends of abortion like to pretend that there is no moral problem with what they do because what they call the “fetus” is merely tissue, which a woman can cut out of her body without guilt. We don’t need theology to know that this is false. Biology is enough. But theology may help us see where the evil really lies. It lies not in what is done to the unborn child, but what is done by the willing abortion patient and her abortionist. Their offence is primarily against God, whose gift of life they spurn, and they damage primarily themselves and secondarily the social fabric.

Such a theological point may elicit howls of protest even in many Christian circles. “We call it murder when an old man or woman is violently deprived of what may be only a few weeks or months of life,” some indignant activist might say. “How, then, can it be anything less than an unspeakable crime against the unborn to deprive them of life before they even get started?”

In human terms this point is unanswerable. But is it still possible that God looks at it differently?

The American preacher M.S. Rice provides a beautiful illustration of what God’s point of view may be like. He recalls a day in which he performed two funerals. In the morning he buried a man of 83 who by hard work had raised himself to a place of honour and dignity in his town. He had been successful in business, pious in his life, and fortunate in his wife and children. He came to the end of his days loved by his friends and family, respected by all, accompanied on his journey to God by the prayers and praises of his community. In short, he lived the life most of us would wish to live.

That same day in the afternoon, Rice went to another house of sorrow. He had to find words to comfort parents whose infant child had lived only a few days and then painfully died, without gaining any appreciation of the world into which it had been born or the parents who had brought it here with such high hopes or the joys of a life it would never know.

“Mr. Rice,” said the grieving father to the minister, “What is the use of having lived at all?”

It was a heartfelt inquiry of the kind that puts our own life in question, making our usual excuses for living seem awfully insubstantial. But as sometimes happens in such situations, a light flashed into the darkness of that question, a light which, Rice says, did not come from his own mind.

“You are an engineer,” he said spontaneously to the father, “and have learned a little calculus. You know therefore that when placed next to infinity any finite number is the equal of any other. It seems strange at first, but is mathematically certain. The infinite member of the equation being incomparably great, whatever we compare with it has the same significance. Now let us do a little human calculus with your baby. Take him, or your 30 year old self, or the old man I buried this morning and lay up against you all the immortality for which each of you was born. The result is the same. The real greatness of a human life is not how long it shall live on this earth, but the fact that it is an immortal life, destined to live forever with God.”

In his sudden illumination, the pastor had seen a truth that can easily be forgotten. It is not our earthly lives but God’s gift of immortality that defines our worth. That eternal life cannot be affected by the decisions of abortionists or their patients. We adults, struggling through the middle of life’s way, may harm ourselves if we spurn the lives God entrusts to us. But we are not permitted to destroy them.

God’s perfect will is for us to struggle against evil wherever we find it in an attempt to win back those who are attracted to the dark logic of death. But the babies they kill belong to Him no less than do the lives of aged saints. The battleground in the abortion clinics is for the hearts of their inmates, who have been deceived by abortion’s seductive simplicity. This is why many of us may be called to oppose abortion with prayer, example, and works of love rather than with direct action. God’s perfect will is never thwarted. The aborted lambs have all been found by the divine shepherd and are safely in the fold. But He still is seeking His sheep who are lost in abortion’s wilderness.

Graeme Hunter teaches philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He is a member of the board of directors of Action Life (Ottawa).